The Chinese Communist Party wants Mike Pompeo to put a sock in it. On Tuesday, the Washington-based Hudson Institute received a letter urging the termination of the production of videos critical of the regime featuring the erstwhile secretary of state. The videos “made groundless accusations against the Communist Party of China,” the Chinese embassy wrote in an indignant missive that Pompeo shared on Twitter.
It looks like the splenetic totalitarians in Beijing won’t tolerate even the slightest hint of opposition to their rule, even when it comes from overseas. But the petulant mandarins can’t silence the stiff-necked Kansan. About the possibility of his backing down, Pompeo said that it “ain’t gonna happen.”
The Hudson Institute isn’t bending the knee to the apparatchiks either. John Walters, the think tank’s president, responded to the letter, saying, “the genocidal CPP is the oppressor of the Chinese people & an enemy of free people around the globe. The Chinese people know this & the American people know it. As a wise man once said, ‘facts are stubborn things.’ No one at Hudson is intimidated by this.”
This is a welcome sign. While a solid bipartisan consensus has formed around confronting our chief geopolitical adversary, too many of our nation’s top brass still yielded to the will of the PRC. Even some prominent conservatives have begun to sound a strangely conciliatory tone. It’s high time politicians and thought leaders gave the ChiComms the boot.