Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Two major media companies, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, made ...
Two major media companies, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, made decisions to capitulate to the man they fear will be elected president before a single vote has been counted.
They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts: In their pocketbooks.
Bezos sees himself as particularly vulnerable to the wrath of Donald Trump. Before he left office in 2021, Trump appointed a puppet to run the United States Postal Service (USPS): Louis DeJoy, a long-time Republican fund-raiser and major Trump contributor who was appointed as one of three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee shortly after Trump took office in 2017.
The USPS prioritizes package delivery for Amazon and sets the price it pays for the service. Trump has threatened Bezos with jacking up his Amazon delivery prices before, in 2018. The postmaster general was then Megan Brennan, appointed during the Obama administration, who resisted Trump’s demand to raise delivery prices, but such resistance is unlikely to happen if Trump is elected and DeJoy is there to carry out his wishes.
Similarly, an important contract for provisioning cloud solutions to federal departments was scraped away from Amazon and awarded to Microsoft - not on a technical basis, but solely because Bezos’ newspaper criticized Trump, and Trump wanted a way to retaliate.
This is the way it happens. An autocrat like Donald Trump, with his history of impulsive decisions and threats against perceived enemies, has two billionaires cowering in fear, and he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Fascism is not an all-at-once transformation. We’ve already had our brownshirt day, on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA army stormed the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags and assaulting police officers and attempting to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, all of it, we now know, with Trump cheering them on from the White House.
Fascism uses symbols – MAGA this time, swastika last time – to rally followers, and then it feeds them fear and lies and the demonization of minorities and others perceived as not like us.
I don’t even know that you can name the period of fascism we’re in right now. Giving it a name doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is happening right in front of our eyes, and little if nothing is being done about it, other than fascism finally being called out by political leaders such as Kamala Harris and other Democrats, and some news organizations have at last crossed the Rubicon of using the “F” word of fascism and the “H” word of Hitler in the same sentences with Donald Trump.
https://www.nationalmemo.com/jeff-bezos-trump
They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts: In their pocketbooks.
Bezos sees himself as particularly vulnerable to the wrath of Donald Trump. Before he left office in 2021, Trump appointed a puppet to run the United States Postal Service (USPS): Louis DeJoy, a long-time Republican fund-raiser and major Trump contributor who was appointed as one of three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee shortly after Trump took office in 2017.
The USPS prioritizes package delivery for Amazon and sets the price it pays for the service. Trump has threatened Bezos with jacking up his Amazon delivery prices before, in 2018. The postmaster general was then Megan Brennan, appointed during the Obama administration, who resisted Trump’s demand to raise delivery prices, but such resistance is unlikely to happen if Trump is elected and DeJoy is there to carry out his wishes.
Similarly, an important contract for provisioning cloud solutions to federal departments was scraped away from Amazon and awarded to Microsoft - not on a technical basis, but solely because Bezos’ newspaper criticized Trump, and Trump wanted a way to retaliate.
This is the way it happens. An autocrat like Donald Trump, with his history of impulsive decisions and threats against perceived enemies, has two billionaires cowering in fear, and he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Fascism is not an all-at-once transformation. We’ve already had our brownshirt day, on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA army stormed the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags and assaulting police officers and attempting to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, all of it, we now know, with Trump cheering them on from the White House.
Fascism uses symbols – MAGA this time, swastika last time – to rally followers, and then it feeds them fear and lies and the demonization of minorities and others perceived as not like us.
I don’t even know that you can name the period of fascism we’re in right now. Giving it a name doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is happening right in front of our eyes, and little if nothing is being done about it, other than fascism finally being called out by political leaders such as Kamala Harris and other Democrats, and some news organizations have at last crossed the Rubicon of using the “F” word of fascism and the “H” word of Hitler in the same sentences with Donald Trump.
https://www.nationalmemo.com/jeff-bezos-trump