RUSH: Let me tell you this little Apple story. This is about the iPhone X. There’s a young woman out there by the name of Brooke Amelia Peterson, and she loved making… She’s in her twenties, I think, maybe close to 30. I can’t tell. It’s difficult to know. But she’s certainly 21, 22, and under 30. She lives in Southern California. Her dad works for Apple in Cupertino. He works at Apple headquarters. It turns out he’s an RF engineer on the iPhone X — radio frequency, does work on the wireless aspects of the iPhone X.
He is an engineer, and she makes YouTube videos, and prior to the YouTube video in question, she had 300 followers. I mean, nobody knew who she was. But, folks, she is as… What I’m saying next here is important to understand, the outrage that followed here. She is, in the eyes of multiculturalists, Satanic. She is white. She is blonde. She is bubbly. She’s enjoying her life. She made a video of how, when she’s depressed, she goes shopping — and the video showed her at the highest-end department stores looking at the most expensive clothes and the most expensive accessories.
And she is loving every minute of it. She’s just in her… Do not misunderstand anything here in my tone. I’m not being critical at all. I’m describing. I’m painting the picture for you. She came up to Cupertino to see her family. They had a family outing, and she and her mother went shopping, and she records it all on video. It’s cleverly edited; it’s got some upbeat music to it. She narrates and has herself on camera describing things, and she’s just bubbly and effervescent and appears as happy as anybody could be.
And when I watched this, when I watched the whole thing — which I haven’t fully yet described — I started getting a gnawing feeling in my gut that this woman was gonna get destroyed when people saw her YouTube video. I thought they were gonna rip this woman to shreds simply because, in our multicultural-dominated political left, she epitomizes what they hate. She’s just happy, she’s enjoying life, she’s unafraid to show that she has the ability to go shopping at the highest-end stores and buy the most expensive stuff. With no guilt, as though everybody does it, as though, “This is what everybody does when they get depressed. They go shopping.”
I had a sinking feeling watching this that this woman was going to get beat up, that she was gonna get savaged. And she did. Here’s the rest of it. After she and her mother and whoever finished with their shopping spree at some highfalutin mall, probably — what would it have been, Santa Clara, San Jose, somewhere in there — they went to see Dad, the Apple engineer at Cupertino. And they had lunch with Dad in the Apple cafeteria, which is called Caffe Macs, M-A-C-S — and it’s a fabulous company perk.
Caffe Macs is a wonderfully large restaurant. The entire Apple workforce eats there, and the executives and everybody else troops through there. Dad joined them for lunch, and Dad showed her his iPhone X. She grabbed the iPhone X and started demoing it on her video. She demoed how you now get to the home page without a “home” button. She demonstrated some of the gestures that you now use. She loved it. She said, “Look at this screen. Is this not huge?” She was having the greatest time.
A four-minute video and about 45 or 50 seconds of it is the iPhone X and at Caffe Macs, and her dad is shown using it to pay for lunch with Apple Pay, and there are a couple of apparently trade secrets that were on this phone that if you knew what to look for, you could see in the video. So she posts the video. It went viral because of her iPhone X demo. So now instead of 300 some odd viewers, she’s got 300,000 and counting — and all kinds of hate. Exactly as I feared, they were hating on this young woman. They were just… It was just vicious, and it was all because…
Well, not all. But a lot of it was, “How dare she be so insensitive to brag about having the money to go shopping when people are sittin’ around homeless shelters and basically stuffing dirt in their mouths? Does this woman have no shame? Is she so insensitive? Does she not know how most people live?” She should not have portrayed her life as fulfilled and fun and enjoyable. I knew it was gonna happen. I knew it! I just knew it. But because of her little 45- or 50-second demo of the iPhone X, it went viral, and her father got fired. Apple fired her father because there were all kinds of Apple policies violated.
Number one: Nobody videos anything in Caffe Macs. Number two: He had an employee-sanctioned version of the iPhone X. This video took place a couple of weeks or maybe a month ago. It was after Apple’s keynote where they had themselves demoed the phone. It was after all kinds of other iPhone X videos are out there. But this one was made possible by an Apple engineer giving it to his daughter to use during lunch. She demoed the thing. It is said that some specific QR codes were available to see on this phone if you knew what to look for.
Basically, if you were Samsung or an Apple competitor, there’s some things on this — code names — for upcoming products on a page in the Notes app, for example. I didn’t see any of that when I watched it. Anyway, she then did another video in tears describing how a wonderful family day, filled with so much fun and fulfillment and enjoyment, had led to her father — who was a good man — being fired. She said (summarized), “Apple had no choice. Policies were violated.
“You don’t do video in Caffe Macs and employees are not supposed to make public demos of the product when they’re testing it and using it,” and the consensus is that Apple really had no choice. They couldn’t make an exception here because these were major, major, major rules that were violated. In her subsequent blog, Brooke Amelia Peterson says, “Look, we don’t blame Apple. My dad’s fine with it. He’s a good man.” But, she said, “At Apple, it doesn’t matter how good a person you are. It just matters if you break the rules.” She says, “I’m gonna continue to buy Apple products. My dad will be okay. He’s fine.” But she was just choking back tears through the entire secondary video.
She kept talking about all the hate that she had received, and she was clearly totally shocked by all the hate. She had never encountered it. She only had 300 viewers for her vlog, her little videos that she put up. She ran into this hate. She had never seen any sign of it, never seen any evidence of it, and it just destroyed her. So most of the tech blogs think Apple had no choice. There’s a couple of them that think it was heartless and cold for Apple to fire the guy and they ought to hire him back.
There are major rules violated here, whether you agree with them or not, they were violated. Even though Apple had its other videos of the iPhone X out there. But the point of this to me was when I saw this I knew what she was gonna get. It breaks my heart, by the way. Don’t misunderstand. Here’s a young girl who is just happy, gonna have a family day with her mom, gonna go shopping, she’s gonna go to the mall and she’s gonna show some things she’s thinking about buying. She got destroyed for it.
She got destroyed for being white, for being blonde, for being rich, that made her insensitive, that made her uncaring, all of these things. And then she got her share of hate from people for exposing Apple secrets and all kinds of stuff. It was a rude, rude awakening. But the main reason for me telling you the story is what it was that engendered the hate. I mean, folks, if you’re sensitive to our culture today as determined by people who create media narratives, then you knew this young woman had stepped in it totally unaware, totally unknowing.
In her mind all she was doing was sharing her happy day with people. And that is what got her all the hate. She was having a happy day. You add to it that she’s white and blonde. I don’t know whether her dad’s gonna be hired back or not. Don’t know. But 20 years ago — well, I don’t know, 25, 10, I don’t know how many years ago, a video like this or a home movie like this, everybody would have thought it was great.
Everybody would have been happy for her, having a good time with her mom, family getting together. Today, sharing something like that makes you a target and a focus of genuine dangerous rage and anger. It’s where we are.