Jeff Bezos should stop trying to be America’s conscience

As news broke last week of the Ninth Circuit’s finding against President Trump’s travel ban, all the usual suspects crowed at the president’s defeat. But perhaps no entity’s glee was more usual, or more suspect, than Amazon’s in-house counsel, David Zapolsky.

“Proud of @AGOWA, the Amazon legal team that helped on the case, and amici — who all made today’s 9th Circuit ruling possible,” Zapolsky tweeted. “Congrats and kudos to the @WGOWA Bob Ferguson and SG Noah Purcell for their tremendous work in representing the citizens of WA and USA.” 

{mosads}Granted, a charitable observer might argue that such tweets are simple corporate bandwagon liberalism, but that charitable observer would be terribly wrong. Zapolsky’s tweets should be read not merely as cheering from the sidelines or claiming small amounts of credit, but rather as the words of a dedicated original fighter against the president’s proposal. Prior to these two tweets, Zapolsky had already trumpeted Amazon’s status as one of two “witnesses in [the] original suit.” In other words, the online retailer has been part of the Resistance™ to Trump’s ban from the start.

Naturally, this fact raises the question of why Amazon should so fervently work against the travel ban. Are we to truly believe that Amazon hires disproportionately from the seven countries that the president’s ban targets rather than from, say, Pakistan, India, China, or any of a number of other countries that are exempt? If so, do those employees make a habit of flying home particularly often? Does Amazon have prized corporate assets within those countries whose custodians are frequently required to travel to the United States? In short, is any business interest of Amazon’s seriously threatened by the ban?

Well, as it happens, Amazon’s complaint provides the answer regarding employees: apparently, 49 Amazon employees hail from the seven affected countries. This might sound potentially problematic for a small business, but considering that Amazon employs 268,900 people, this actually means that 0.018% Amazon employees are affected, hardly a company-shattering burden.

As to corporate assets, if they do exist, they are surely less afflicted by this ban than by U.S. sanctions against Iran, which Amazon is on record as having violated, and which they have not sued to void. In other words, no, no serious damage has been done to the company by the travel ban.

Of course, to even ask these questions is likely to play dumb in some measure. To anyone with even a cursory understanding of Silicon Valley (or, in this case, Puget Sound), the reason for Amazon’s behavior should be depressingly clear: the company is not out to protect itself, but rather to enforce its naïve corporate ideology on the rest of us in the name of a social justice.

After all, Amazon isn’t just out to make money like some company run by mortals. It’s out to “change the world,” in the parlance of Mike Judge in his excellent send-up of Valley self-importance. Why else would Bezos be willing to not only fight a ban that does nothing to his company, but also to buy out the cratering Washington Post, only to turn it into an anti-Trump blog?

There are just a few problems: firstly, much as the hapless idealists of Silicon Valley wish they could code their own worldview into a conscience for America, the fact remains that none of them (except perhaps Peter Thiel) has shown any interest in understanding actual Americans, or in engaging with the existing politics of the people they aspire to rule. Rather, as lawsuits like Amazon’s exemplify, they seem to want to simply reach into America’s source code (ie its law) and use it to brute force the rest of America to accept the sociopolitical aspects of San Francisco. This is, needless to say, counter to how America’s system of government and especially its legal system is supposed to work.

Secondly, and more importantly, transforming private companies – i.e. profit-seeking enterprises – into the muscle for one’s own conscience is absolutely wrongheaded. No private company can act as a conscience for a country, since it is in their nature to be ruled by their own interests, which are by necessity peculiar to them and not universally applicable to a citizenry. Bezos’ usage of the Washington Post as a blog is at least partially defensible, since papers are often opinionated entities by nature. But how is it possible to extract a coherent moral position from a company that screams bloody murder over a ban on Iranian travelers, but turns around and supplies goods to Iran’s murderous regime with no questions asked? Short of endorsing a dangerous and quasi-treasonous third worldism, which would be worse for Amazon than any Trump administration policy, no such moral position is tenable.

Thus Amazon, and Bezos with it, are setting themselves up to be treated as a case study for everything bad that corporate moral preening can do to a company’s brand. At this point, the best they can hope for is that the beatdown their legal arrogance is likely to endure will be delivered free of shipping charges, though it seems safe to say that it will be arriving far sooner than they would like.

Mytheos Holt (@MytheosHolt) is a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty. He has worked as a speechwriter for Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and as a writer for publications including the Federalist.

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