After over a month of deliberation, the Biden administration announced last week that they had settled on a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. The decision not to send an official delegation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, was in response to the “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”
This is a relatively toothless and inoffensive form of protest, but it is welcome that the Biden administration at least acknowledges China’s human rights abuses. What was more concerning was the administration’s response when asked if they would push American companies to pull advertisements from the games.
“What individual companies do is entirely up to them. We’re not going to pressure them one way or another,” commerce secretary Gina Raimondo said. “So if a company decides — as many companies have — that they want to make a statement against human rights abuses, then that would be great. But we’re not going to be pushing anyone to make that decision.”
This is laughable considering the Biden administration has no problem using the bully pulpit and straight-up government coercion to pressure American companies into doing what it wants domestically.
Last spring, Biden called it “reassuring” that corporations spoke out against Georgia’s new voting law and said he “strongly support[ed]” MLB players who opted out of the annual All-Star game. He then bypassed the ability of private companies to decide whether to introduce a vaccine mandate for their employees, issuing an OSHA regulation that applied to all businesses with more than 100 people on staff. Chief of staff Ron Klain even admitted that this was a “workaround” so that the White House could avoid constitutional limitations on such mandates on private business. Biden is meanwhile trying to strong-arm Big Tech into censoring “Covid misinformation” with the looming threat of harsher regulations if they do not comply.
There is room for the government to step in against the worst impulses of profit-obsessed business; for example, it is reasonable to tell so-called “American” companies that they should not purchase Olympic ad space from a regime that steals intellectual property, routinely threatens our national security, is responsible for covering up the origins of a pandemic, and commits numerous human rights abuses. It is quite telling that Biden will not make this simple ask as he gleefully uses the weight of corporations to crush his political foes here at home.
Biden sometimes even skips the corporate middleman and directly intimidates the American people. Attorney general Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI against parents who protest at school board meetings, buying into the National School Board Association’s claim that they may be classified as “domestic terrorists” and creating “threat tags” to track them. The administration is suing Texas for passing a voting law and a partial abortion ban, as well as Georgia for its aforementioned election security bill.
The Biden administration doesn’t seem to believe the American people have the right to self-governance. Of course it doesn’t believe Raimondo’s faux-libertarian claim that what companies do is “entirely up to them.” The truth is that Biden and his lackeys possess far more malice toward their own countrymen than the United States’s biggest geopolitical foe. This is why they are perfectly happy to bring the full weight of government and big business down on American citizens while offering up merely performative rebukes of the Red Dragon.
