New York Times Column Strains to Find Nefarious Reason Conservatives Oppose Chinese Totalitarianism
Tyler O'Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / September 01, 2023
Chinese President Xi Jinping, wearing a suit, walks in front of Chinese soldiers
An op-ed column in The New York Times suggested that Republicans are concerned about the threat of China due to racist and theocratic tendencies. Here's why he's wrong. Pictured: Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune walks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People on July 18 in Beijing. (Photo: Ng Han Guan/Getty Images)
COMMENTARY BY
Tyler O'Neil
Tyler O'Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal and the author of "Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center."
The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has oppressed its own people, putting millions of Muslim Uyghurs in slave labor camps, suppressing forms of Christianity outside the state church, and twisting the screws on Hong Kong and Tibet. It has rattled its sabers in the Pacific, stolen U.S. intellectual property with impunity, sent a spy balloon over America, and coordinated the release of a deadly virus across the globe while locking its own people down in a failed COVID-zero policy. It has infiltrated the U.S. with its Confucius Institutes and even set up illegal police stations on U.S. soil.
Yet, when the esteemed Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, takes to The New York Times in an opinion column Thursday to analyze why Republicans might be concerned about the red dragon rising above the Middle Kingdom, he can’t just acknowledge its blatant threat. No, he has to find a nefarious reason why conservatives are more concerned than liberals, and he goes for the old canard.
It can’t be that the Communist Party actually poses a menace to the Chinese people, along with people across the globe. No, Republicans must be concerned because China represents a threat to racism and theocracy.
Beinart writes that “Republicans are united in focusing on China” in a move he characterizes as “Asia First.”
He then cites a few words from former President Donald Trump as “mounting evidence that prominent figures on the American right see that danger in racial terms.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/09/01/new-york-times-column-strains-find-nefarious-reason-conservatives-oppose-chinese-totalitarianism/
