House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked the nation this week when she advised members of the U.S. Olympic team to tread lightly when visiting c...
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shocked the nation this week when she advised members of the U.S. Olympic team to tread lightly when visiting communist China for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games.
Her comments were so appalling, she’s getting flak from the far-left.
On Thursday, while Pelosi made it clear that she believes the U.S. must confront China’s egregious human rights abuses and criticized the International Olympic Committee for giving Beijing the chance to host the Games, she also said athletes should “not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government.”
These comments, despite being accompanied by the acknowledgment that the U.S. has an “urgent moral duty to shine a bright light” on the communist regime’s abuses, nonetheless attracted criticism, including from former Democratic presidential candidate and celebrated racial grievance peddler Al Sharpton.
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, Sharpton outlined his respectful disagreement with Pelosi, arguing that it is incumbent upon American athletes to make it clear that they do not condone the brutality with which China treats its citizens.
“I respectfully disagree with the speaker here — and I usually am supportive of her — because you cannot normalize what they’re doing in China,” he said. “To go there and act like all is well is to normalize some very brutal behavior.”
“We need to let China know, ‘You live in a world that human rights is non-negotiable.’”
It’s pleasantly surprising to find myself saying this, but amen, Rev. Sharpton. Little louder for the China apologists in the back.
Polarized as we are in the U.S. right now, if there’s anything we should be able to agree on, it’s that the Chinese communist regime is despicable, and it’s heartening to see such a high-profile progressive publicly disagree with Pelosi and make an excellent point while doing so.
It is a sore mistake on the part of the world’s major powers to treat China as a legitimate diplomatic partner. There has never been a bigger, more advanced, more influential dictatorship in the whole of human history than communist China.
It is certainly up to each individual athlete whether they want to incur its wrath while competing in Beijing. As Pelosi herself acknowledged, that the Olympics are happening there at all is a slap in the face to the victims of the Chinese regime, and athletes certainly face no small risk if they choose to speak out.
But by publicly advising members of Team USA not to make the Chinese Communist Party angry, “normalizing” its brutality is exactly what she is doing — virtue-signaling about “shining a bright light” on Beijing’s human rights atrocities notwithstanding.
And I’m skeptical that Pelosi is sincere in her rebuke of the CCP. This is the woman who assigned a congressman accused of sleeping with a Chinese spy to the Homeland Security Committee and who allegedly blocked an investigation into the Wuhan lab suspected by many to have been the origin of the coronavirus.
For all her criticism of Beijing, the message Pelosi has sent to Olympic athletes ultimately plays right into the CCP’s hand.
Let’s hope there are many more like Sharpton within the Democratic establishment who are willing to call her out.
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