On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki (which is a generous title) announced that the Biden administration would not send any diplomats to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing due to the well — documented human rights violations President Xi’s regime has committed.
In a statement, Psaki said:
The athletes on Team USA have our full support. We will be behind them 100 percent as we cheer them on from home. We will not be contributing to the fanfare of the Games.
U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these Games as business as usual in the face of the PRC’s egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang. And we simply can’t do that.
This is at least a step in the right direction, although supporting athletes’ participation significantly weakens the sincerity of the message. But it also brings to mind another instance where sports and social justice intertwined and Biden took a much more radical approach.
In April, the President applauded the MLB for moving the All-Star game from Atlanta, GA to Denver, CO. The MLB made the decision in protest to Georgia passing voting reform laws that were deemed racist since it was widely believed it restricted the ability of people of color to vote (a foolish assumption).
“He (Biden) said earlier this week that if the decision was made by Major League Baseball to move the All-Star game, he would certainly support that decision - and now that MLB has made that choice, he certainly does,” the White House said in a statement in April.
The Heritage Action group debunked the myths the Democrats circulated about voting law SB202, showing that the law “increased the number of early voting days and provided for mail-in ballot drop boxes, while tightening voter ID requirements to deter fraud and ensure transparency.”
So as it turned out, the protest against the voting laws issue in Georgia was a sham and an unnecessary move by the MLB, yet Biden was all-in on supporting it. But when the time comes to stand up to China, especially after top-secret documents show that President Xi Jinping planned the genocide of the Uyghurs, Biden only does the bare minimum to stand against that authoritarian regime.
While Biden might be a favorite amongst today’s contingent of social justice warriors, he has yet to consistently prove that he has the backbone to do anything that could lead to meaningful, real change.
