(NewsNation) — Somehow, American CEOs have forgotten they’re Americans.

Exhibit one would be Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook, who now set de facto foreign policy. They don’t control products but information — or lack thereof.

To be clear, this isn’t about companies protecting wokeness or Disney characters or Pepsi and Black Lives Matter. Fine, do what you want. But the freedoms of America come with responsibilities, including not doing the bidding of our enemies.

Consider Cook. Apple is now an extension of Chinese strong man President Xi Jinping. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

As Rob Lockwood pointed out on Twitter, Cook censored for Putin, he censors and surveils for Xi, and he tried to undermine a slave labor crackdown in China by the U.S. government.

Yet Cook operates with impunity. America doesn’t have loyalty codes like China or other authoritarian regimes. Up until now, American companies largely did what was best for America.

Now, the CEO of America’s most valuable company works for China. Cook puts China’s interest ahead of American national security and nobody cares, including the White House.

For the first time in history, massive protests now challenge the Chinese regime. Unlike Tiananmen Square, protesters haven taken to the streets across the country. They destroy COVID-19 barricades and testing centers that serve as symbols of three years worth of lockdowns, and they chant something that can get you shot and your family imprisoned: Down with the Chinese Communist Party, down with Xi Jinping.

University students now hold up blank pieces of paper that symbolize all the things they can’t say. It also makes it much harder for the Chinese surveillance state to track what’s being said. China pioneered the technology and uses Apple to enforce it.

Now, Chinese police grab people’s phones on the street to check for connection to the protests. Too bad there isn’t a company that advertises based on privacy. You know, a company that made phones that could protect people from government spies. A company that championed freedom of ideas.

Imagine a company founded by Steve Jobs, who advertised the original Macintosh computer as a way to stand up to the likes of Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Back then American companies believed in American values in the quaint times of the 1980s.

Now, Tim Cook believes in, well, who knows?

My mother always taught me actions speak louder than words. Cook and Apple caved to the Chinese a while ago and gave them access to user data and the like. In 2021, an impressive New York Times investigation pointed out all the ways Apple caved to the communists.

Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of China. Now, it has to answer to the Chinese government. It included a satellite picture of a huge server farm built in China to comply with Chinese censorship laws. It included deleting or censoring thousands of apps from the app store that could be used for news or to organize protests.

Let that set in. In other words, Cook created an Apple subsidiary of the Chinese communist party. This is the same Tim Cook who said Apple couldn’t help the FBI when they needed access to the San Bernadino terrorist’s phone in 2015.

That’s Tim Cook saying, “Chinese Communist Party, sure we will help you enslave an entire population, sure we will help you crush pro-democracy protests, sure we will censor anything bad about you.”

But when it comes to America, the country he calls home, well then, we can’t help you. And it’s worse.

In the weeks before the protests, Apple reportedly turned off a feature used by protesters to bypass the Chinese firewalls and allow iPhones to communicate directly. It’s called AirDrop, and Apple put out an update specifically for Chinese based phones turning off much of the functionality, and refuses calls by pro-democracy groups to turn it back on.

Tim Cook literally cares about Apple’s partnership with the communist regime more than he does the lives of pro-democracy protesters. You can argue its a business decision, but its also a foreign policy decision.

It’s hard to get Republicans and Democrats to agree these days, but they agree about China.

Xi Jinping and his cronies pose the greatest risk to the American way of life. China wants America’s role in the world. China wants to make us subservient, and Apple can’t wait to help them.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.