The administration’s response to the Covid-lockdown protests has been disheartening.
The administration’s response to the Covid-lockdown protests has been disheartening.
I s there anything more infuriating than the Biden administration’s public rhetoric — or, rather, its lack of meaningful rhetoric — in response to the Chinese people’s valorous protests against the monstrous communist regime that enslaves them? Jimmy Quinn has a post on the latest drivel to come out of the White House.
I found yesterday’s commentary by the administration’s national-security spokesman, retired rear admiral John Kirby, especially disheartening. He avoided any criticism, much less condemnation, of Xi Jinping’s regime, mouthing instead the Biden line that everyone should have the right of peaceful protest — which, of course, the Chinese are denied because of lethal repression by the regime. The White House, Kirby insisted, won’t speak for the protesters because they are speaking for themselves. Translation: The Biden administration does not want to be perceived as sympathetic to truth-telling about the Xi regime’s atrocities.
Kirby is a very smart and able guy. Unlike many administration lightweights who convey that they are in over their heads, he knows exactly what he is saying. He is well aware that his appeasing message is crushing to people who are risking their lives. Those people know that Xi’s regime despises America, yet sees that America is too cowed to speak up for them. They are not expecting a U.S. military invasion. They just crave the kind of encouragement that, in 1981, President Reagan gave to Poles who defiantly revolted against the Soviets and their puppet regime in Warsaw. The Chinese protesters just expect a self-proclaimed beacon of freedom to act like a beacon, not a power failure.
At the risk of belaboring what I’ve been saying for a couple of years, the Biden family scandal — the millions of dollars that agents of the Chinese government (among other agents of corrupt and hostile regimes) poured into the family coffers during the Obama and Trump years — cannot be disaggregated from Biden administration policy positions on China. Let’s say the Trump family, or, to take the Trump lightning rod out of the equation, the family of any Republican president had been receiving millions of dollars from China and then went mum as China brutally repressed its people, even as it structures its budget and governance to prepare every day for war against the United States. Let’s say the family of a Republican president had partnered with Chinese financial heavyweights (after a member of the family rode to Beijing on Air Force 2 with the Republican then–vice president) on a multi-billion-dollar investment venture that resulted (among other things) in China’s acquisition of technology with military applications, as well as coveted natural resources (in this instance, a $3.8 billion cobalt mine in Africa). Let’s say the Republican president’s family took in $6 million during one year from what turned out to be a Chinese intelligence operation that was under investigation by the Justice Department (and don’t even get me started on how $1 million of that was to provide legal representation for one of the Chinese spies — i.e., to help a patent arm of the Chinese regime try to figure out why U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies were snooping around).
If there were such a Republican president, the story of his purchase by America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe and what it could portend for U.S. national security would be the only story in American media. It would be an obsession on Capitol Hill. The only thing we’d be hearing, day in and day out, is how the Republican president had cashed in big time on his political influence, heedless of how doing so empowered and emboldened America’s enemies — and how the resulting display of weakness made it more likely that China would act on Xi’s driving ambition to invade and annex Taiwan (timed, perhaps, to rally the communist regime’s nationalists against rebellious protesters).
Indeed, if there were such a Republican president, there would not be the slightest hesitancy to brand him “purchased by China.” But in our reality, the president purchased by China is a Democrat, so the media-Democrat complex and its abettors in the bureaucracy would prefer that we not discuss it. No prob, right?