Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Refuses To Address AmazonSmile’s Reliance On Discredited Southern Poverty Law Center

Amazon’s board of directors pushed investors at today’s annual shareholder meeting to reject a Free Enterprise Project (FEP) proposal that sought to end the company’s practice of viewpoint discrimination against conservative and Christian organizations within the AmazonSmile charitable giving program.

The shareholder resolution specifically called into question Amazon’s reliance on the widely-discredited left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as the gatekeeper for AmazonSmile charitable recipients.

“Amazon consistently brags about its commitment to ‘diversity and inclusion,’ but I don’t think its board of directors knows what that means. By relying on the SPLC to decide which charities are eligible to receive donations through AmazonSmile, the company is expressing public and open hostility toward conservative and religious organizations,” said Justin Danhof, Esq., General Counsel and FEP Director at the National Center for Public Policy Research, who submitted the proposal. “That’s viewpoint discrimination and it’s abhorrent.”

In the proposal, Danhof noted:

We are also concerned that the Company’s failure to respect diverse social, political, and religious viewpoints in the Smile program is symptomatic of a tendency to discriminate against such views more broadly. For example, although Amazon’s policies state “we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable,” it has recently begun removing books based on customer objections. And, while Amazon publicly affirms its commitment to different perspectives, it officially opposed a shareholder proposal to gauge progress in ideological diversity on the Board of Directors in its 2019 proxy materials.

The shareholders should be aware of the extent to which discrimination against social, political, or religious views by Amazon in its partnerships, content policies, and options for customer-selected charitable donations may jeopardize Amazon’s current market-dominance and may negatively affect important social dynamics beyond Amazon’s immediate business impact.

In presenting the proposal, Danhof stated:

Amazon allows the SPLC to pick and choose which charities are eligible for the Smile program. Why? The extreme leftists at the SPLC use this power to exclude groups that it disagrees with ideologically, while it, in turn, reaps tremendous windfall from the Smile program. This is wildly hypocritical and calls into question Amazon’s poor governance controls.

During the meeting, Danhof and other conservative shareholders repeatedly questioned Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as to why the company engages in such blatant viewpoint discrimination. Bezos refused to address their questions.

“If Bezos can defend Amazon’s outright bigotry, then we invite him to do so,” said Danhof. “It’s pathetic that one of the most powerful men in the world can’t answer a simple question. Yet it is also telling that Bezos seems to have zero defense for this deplorable behavior.”

Conservative Americans and people of faith can also sign a petition protesting Amazon’s collusion with the SPLC.

• The Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the liberty movement’s only full-service shareholder and activism group that’s effective in pushing corporate America to the right;
• Project 21, the liberty movement’s only public relations agency for black conservatives and libertarians that has already created over 40,000 media opportunities;
• The Environment and Enterprise Institute (EEI), which counters misinformation being spread by the environmental left.