Cotton calls on Biden to boycott Beijing Winter Olympics

The following is a recent speech by Senator Tom Cotton:

Good morning. In less than three months, the Winter Olympics will begin in Beijing. According to media reports, the Biden administration is prepared to announce a diplomatic boycott. This is the least, the absolute bare minimum, that any civilized nation would do for these genocide Olympics.

I’m here today to call on the Biden administration to mount a complete and total boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. No athletes. No administration officials. No corporate sponsors. I call for this boycott on two separate grounds.

First, to protect the safety and the security of our athletes. Five months ago, five months ago, I wrote to the Biden administration to ask them what their plan was to protect our athletes in communist China. They delayed their answer, they recently sent me an answer – only through restricted channels, even though there was nothing classified in their answer – and the sum total of their response to my letter was they have no plan. They have no plan to protect our athletes, and their coaches, and their staff from the very real and very concrete dangers that I outlined last June.

First, ubiquitous surveillance. The surveillance of our athletes in their dorm rooms, in their bathrooms, in their practice facilities, their cell phones, other electronic devices. Second, DNA harvesting. The Chinese Communist Party wants to corner the market and lead the world on genetic data testing and harvesting to advance their life science technology research in many fields. They may even use COVID- 19 tests as a way to harvest DNA from our world- class athletes. Third, from simple hostage taking. We’ve seen with the recent case of the Huawei settlement, that the Chinese Communist Party is more than willing to take hostages of Westerners to advance their own diplomatic or economic goals. Again, the Biden administration has laid out no plan how to protect our athletes from the Chinese Communists.

And second, we should boycott these games because of China’s crimes against the United States and the civilized world, and its own people. China runs a totalitarian slave state in which they keep hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of religious and ethnic minorities in gulags subjecting them to slave labor. Subjecting ethnic women to mass rape and sterilization as a form of ethnic cleansing. They harvest organs from dissidents and ethnic and religious minorities. They’ve also cracked down on Hong Kong, denying Hong Kongers their autonomy that was guaranteed under China’s international obligations, to say noth

ing of the fact that China unleashed a plague on the world that has killed millions of people and has disrupted the lives of every American.

For these reasons, the safety and security of our own athletes in China’s crimes against the world, we should launch a complete and total boycott of China’s genocide Olympics. I regret that this will prevent about 300 of America’s world class athletes from competing in the Olympics. I sympathize with them; however, they have been failed by this administration who months ago, months ago, could have worked with our allies to develop a plan to conduct these games in another country. They’ve been failed by the leaders in the international Olympic movement who should have never awarded these games to a communist tyranny.

So, today I call on the Biden administration to boycott the Chinese Winter Olympics.