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Anti-Trumpism Isn’t a Moral Compass
Just two weeks ago the political journalist class was left aghast at claims in John Bolton’s book about statements the President made to China about concentration camps they’ve been building,
NEW Bolton book excerpt in WSJ: In June 2019, Xi "explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. … Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do." https://t.co/7cuIvX1D97
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) June 17, 2020
If true, this means Bolton would have sat on this information and chose, instead of taking it to Congress, to use it to sell books. It seems unlikely members of the Chinese government would admit in an official setting that they are indeed building concentration camps and we have yet to see any proof it actually happened.
In a sane world, the political press would be asking Bolton why he never acted on these statements instead of uncritically regurgitating them later for profit. In a sane world, we would use this moment to realize there is so much more we could be doing for human rights and take positive steps towards pressuring our government to do even more,
The Chinese government is imposing a slow-motion genocide on #Uyghurs, & I condemn these gross abuses of their human rights. I urge @POTUS to implement the provisions of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, including sanctions for these atrocities.https://t.co/UpE5nEsndz
— Senator Jerry Moran (@JerryMoran) June 29, 2020
Disturbingly, we’ve seen anti-Trump individuals and organizations using the issue of Bolton’s claims about Chinese human rights violations simply as a political football and fundraising tool against Trump, and that’s the extent of the outrage they can muster. They can only marshal outrage at Trump, not at China’s well-documented abuses:
Hundreds of Uyghur women lined up for forced IUDs, fathers jailed according to # of children, women sterilized in detention camps w injections & pills against their will, all while the govt promotes Han ppl to have more babies. "It's genocide, full stop."https://t.co/VICAxVmmOU
— Alice Su (@aliceysu) June 29, 2020
Using human rights violations as a cudgel in an election and forgetting about them moments later is particularly ghoulish behavior from people who have set their moral compass by Trump, and Trump alone.
Recently Professor Robert P. George in Princeton shared a thought experiment he often plays with his students:
1/ I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2020
How would they have behaved? A good indication is the behavior of other woke scolds in the NBA:
Adam Silver on the NBA's relationship with China – says he feels it has improved. "…they have a different view how things have been done, how things should be done. And hopefully, we can find mutual respect for each other." pic.twitter.com/Dc9RFaboqN
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) June 30, 2020
It turns out, setting your moral compass against Trump and Trump alone has a way of rendering one utterly lost.
Published in General
It’s also worth noting that for the people aghast about Trump, the push back in the situation involving the Uyghurs has all the moral outrage pointed at Trump, and not at Xi and the Chinese government (i.e. — Instapundit linked to this Axios story about Customs finding $800,000 in Chinese human hair products that may have been ‘harvested’ from Uyghur concentration camp prisoners. It’s a moral outrage, but it’s a Trump-free moral outrage, so odds are pretty good this is going to be a one-day story).
Given the Biden-China connections, if wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe wins in November but the Democrats don’t take the Senate, the intellectual elites who’ve obsessed about the Bolton story would go back next year to the Tom Friedman (and Woody Allen) position during the Obama years, of wistfully dreaming of an America more like China, where the president could just act like a totalitarian dictator and get things done. They might eve throw in a kind word for establishing concentration camps in certain parts of the country.
“Money talks, B****t walks.”
Show me one Democrat that can hold a decent, informed, and complex view about central planning or centralized power. You can’t.
I was talking to a democrat on Twitter this morning. It’s pretty clear I need to read A Conflict Of Visions by Thomas Sowell. The last Democrats that are realistic about what government can do, lost power decades ago. It’s all pie in the sky BS and electioneering for some idealized and unrealistic objectives.
Love the title! Speaking truth to
powerignorance! All of you washed-up Bul****ers, take note!And with regard to China, Obama bowed to the world, including China. He never challenged them on anything, unlike President Trump’s policy of opposing the status quo with China.
There is zero probability that Trump said that.
Bolton really has lost his mind. It appears his editors and publisher have also.
There is one national pundit, who will remain nameless, who is obsessed with Trump’s rhetoric on China. To be more precise, it’s his lack of rhetoric on the Uighurs and Hong Kong that bothers him the most.
Will someone please explain to me the allure of having POTUS standing in the Rose Garden and “condemning in the strongest possible terms” without tangible results? Four decades of selling our jobs for cheaper consumer goods and selling our debts to the Communists have essentially neutered any president’s power to actually do anything short of starting WWIII. And yet they pine for both. It’s surreal.
The Bolton story is literally hearsay. Bolton is paraphrasing what two other people heard in high-level private diplomatic meetings. What probably happened is Xi tried to sell Trump on the CCP’s propaganda that they aren’t really building concentration camps, and Trump made noises of polite approval.
There’s a debate right now among elites I call “cold war shopping.” Should America start another Cold War with Russia, or China? On the one hand China is objectively a greater threat to us then Russia. But on the other hand the U.S. has just had another Russian Red Scare. In the last Cold War we aligned with China against the Soviet Union, and there’s a certain logic that if we become enemies of China, we should align with Russia. But that’s hard to do when there’s so much anti-Russia hysteria.
Two both of these posts: Yes! The chances that anyone high up in the Chinese government said the words “concentration camps” or even implied that they were concentration camps is basically close to nil.
To be sure, I believe Xinjiang and probably elsewhere are homes to concentration camps and that what China is doing is wrong.
Trump was probably told that Uighurs are sometimes backwards, often violent, separatists and China is trying to do everything they can to educate them and reintegrate them into society. “They are getting schools and soccer courts! It’s the most efficient way! We do similar things to ethnic Han in the countryside.” I had a Chinese roommate for two years and I didn’t know about the Uighurs and I was basically told a similar line. (“My roommate was Chinese, I’m an expert”– people that aren’t me.) I mean, this stuff is practiced. They aren’t going to admit wrong.
I’m more shocked at the elites in the media who immediately believed that Xi would just come out and admit that China was building a concentration camp. Not a euphemism, but an actual concentration camp. It just didn’t happen and wouldn’t happen.
The sellout to China began with Bill Clinton and Loral.
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/05/22/china.money/
And Republicans have accused Clinton of jeopardizing national security by granting the waiver to please a high-dollar Democratic donor.
A spokesman told CNN the committee does not expect the papers to include a pivotal document from the Defense Department, purportedly linking a possibly illegal transfer of technology with a cooperative investigation among China and two American defense contractors, Loral Space and Communications and Hughes Electronics.
Rep. Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.) hinted the documents may not be as exculpatory as the White House indicated. “Let me just say that some of the documents do raise troubling questions that will have to be pursued,” Gilman said. “They make clear that the president was informed that Loral may have contributed technology to China’s ballistic missile program before he decided to grant Loral a waiver on February 18th of this year to permit them to export yet another satellite to China.”
The rest followed.
EJ, if Trump denounces in the strongest possible terms, it doesn’t count. It only counts if it is a Democrat denouncing in the strongest possible terms.
The real absurdity is that the Democrats are accusing Trump of not being tough enough on China.
It certainly doesn’t sound like something Trump would say – at all.
The problem with setting your political compass by Trump. Is that he’s highly variable, he’s no Polaris – his issue positions are neither left or right. They’re populist/pragmatic. In a political system divided into a left right spectrum he breaks the mold. IF you set your compass in mere opposition to Trump you’ll drive your political fortunes into the rocks.
It you set your compass to first principles either in the constitution or even the bible and support Trump or not when he aligned with your compass, you can stay true to yourself. And hopefully get policies that you do support.
This is the folly of the democrats. Congress had the opportunity in 2017 to make deals. Trump loves the image of the wheeler-dealer compromise guy. Congressional democrats could have twisted him around their fingers – just for a little love, and minor compromises on a few of Trump’s policies. Instead they declared Jihad, and killed any opportunity for any kind of compromise.
Sorry. I thought they were into “red lines.”
I don’t think he is quite that flexible but agree they could have gotten a lot of cultural stuff but they seem to have gone insane. It may be that there is deep and extensive corruption they are hiding, and not just one party.
They never watched Team America World Police. They are Hans
BlixBrix.