During Monday afternoon’s coverage of President Trump’s second inauguration, the co-anchors of the coverage, PBS News Hour hosts Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, were disturbed on ex-President Biden’s behalf by the prominent seating of corporate tech chieftains, and repeated Biden’s hypocritical warning about a rising Trumpian “oligarchy."
They turned to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who's written a book on Big Tech:
Geoff Bennett: You represent the Bay Area, which is the back yard of Silicon Valley. When you see the heads of Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, Elon Musk of course, having really front-row seats to this inauguration, in many ways trying to get in and stay in Donald Trump's good graces, how does that strike you?
Khanna offered a rather mild response, which dissatisfied the liberal hosts.
Khanna: Well, Musk is a separate case because he was all-in on the campaign. But for many of the others, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, they did the same thing when Trump won the first time, Tim Cook was in the Oval Office. I think the reality is they’re looking out for their own business interests, in Bill Gates’s case for his own philanthropic interests. And they do this whoever’s in power.
So the moral leadership is going to have to come from the grassroots of the country, from the Democratic Party. I don't think we can be looking to business leaders to be doing anything other than maximizing their own shareholder profits.
That answer wasn't sufficient for PBS anchor Amna Nawaz, who followed up with Khanna, pressing him to endorse Biden's farewell address:
Nawaz: That level of influence these leaders seem to now have though, with the incoming president, I mean they were sitting in front of his Cabinet nominees at that inauguration ceremony. What does that say to you, does that worry you? And is this what President Biden was talking about when he warned about this rising tech oligarchy?
Speaking of oligarchy -- then-President Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom upon activist left-wing billionaire George Soros, and Trump’s Democratic opponent Kamala Harris was endorsed by dozens of rich business executives, including liberal billionaire Marc Cuban. No “oligarchy” there?
PBS also continues to ignore the fact that the Biden Administration spent four years working hand in glove with that same “tech oligarchy” when it was doing the administration's censorious bidding on issues like COVID, gender ideology, and most notoriously, the Hunter Biden laptop exposing Biden family corruption.
