Tech was complicit with China’s surveillance state. “Hollywood’s actors, producers, and directors pride themselves on celebrating freedom and the human spirit,” he scoffed. “And every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood’s ideals of social justice, but Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights.”17 Barr came remarkably close to pronouncing a divorce between his ideal of America and actually existing American capitalism.
