Cultural Genocide: Good for the Nike Sole
Are your shoes keeping thousands of China’s Uyghurs locked away in factories, working like slaves? What about your cell phone or laptop? Based on the reports flying out of Xinjiang, a lot of Americans are walking around in high-tops stitched together by some of the most oppressed people on earth. And thanks to China’s quiet partnership with Nike, Apple, Gap, Samsung, Sketchers, and others, nobody ever knew.
Are your shoes keeping thousands of China’s Uyghurs locked away in factories, working like slaves? What about your cell phone or laptop? Based on the reports flying out of Xinjiang, a lot of Americans are walking around in high-tops stitched together by some of the most oppressed people on earth. And thanks to China’s quiet partnership with Nike, Apple, Gap, Samsung, Sketchers, and others, nobody ever knew.
America’s big brands did a good job of keeping their role in China’s atrocities a secret — but they don’t have that luxury now. The reports are thorough, and according to one of the foremost experts in the field, Adrian Zenz, they’re credible. On Thursday’s “Washington Watch,” the man who’s spent years pouring over documents to prove the Uyghur concentration camps existed, solemnly shook his head. The West’s corporate involvement in the Uyghur’s crisis, he acknowledged, is “consistent with my own research findings.”
When the Australian Strategic Policy Institute dug deeper into satellite images and Chinese documents, there was suddenly no denying it. What media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and others had been claiming for months was there in black and white. As many as 80,000 Uyghurs have been shipped out of their prisons in Xinjiang, “bought and sold” into factories where they’re forced to make Nike or other U.S. products. By this point, Adrian, who helped blow the lid off the internment camp scandal, had already found “some very strong connections between forced labor in the region of Xinjiang where the Uyghurs natively live and many other parts of China.”
“A lot of the economic development in the region,” Zenz explained, “is taking place through a collaboration program of 19 eastern Chinese cities and provinces who pour billions of dollars into Xinjiang and get labor out of it for their own factories.” Although other ethnic minorities are targeted, the Uyghurs are taking the brunt of it. While the Chinese regime is painting them as “graduates” of their reeducation camps, the reality is, their new assignment is just another prison. “Oftentimes several hundred of them at a time are sent onto trains and that can be across Xinjiang… But oftentimes it is also across China to work in other factories, in other parts of the country. And those factories are oftentimes involved in the supply chains of Western companies.”
To put it bluntly, he said, “it’s a very smart way to make a lot of money off a strategy of cultural genocide.” And the point is not only persecution, but family destruction. “Where they are going, they cannot freely practice their culture or religion. That’s a very important aspect [of this],” Adrian explains. “Communities are being torn apart. [Families] are being split apart.”
And what is the international community’s response? To look the other way. “And it’s [been] easy to look away,” Adrian admitted. “It’s a remote place. It’s hard to get there. It’s hard to get good video and photos. And China has been investing very heavily in a counter-propaganda strategy in other countries, making sure that they stay silent.” But now, he agrees, no one can say they don’t know. For brands as big as Nike and Apple, “The excuse is gone now. My research and the new research that has come out delivers a really strong blow to… western companies. Everybody [needs] to take a hard look at their supply chains.” And if they don’t, there will be consequences.
Originally published here.
Apology Excepted: Schumer’s Sorry-Not Sorry
He’d planned on defending Chuck Schumer. The day before, John Kass’s editor at the Chicago Tribune asked his longtime columnist if he was going to take the senator’s side. “Yeah,” Kass replied. “That was my intent.” After all, he said, “We all say stupid things we regret.” But, as John and the rest of the country were about to find out, the New York senator didn’t regret it. Not really.
In the mainstream media, where the usual default is to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt, Schumer’s rant outside the court was an uncomfortable moment, to say the least. There were some reporters, in the early hours of the controversy, who gave into the temptation to compare Schumer’s threats against Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to things the president has said. But to most people — including John Kass — there’s no comparison. “Trump never said [the justices] wouldn’t ‘know what hit them,’” he argued.
That’s why, when Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) first heard the news reports, he didn’t believe them. “I thought, ‘This can’t be right.’ So I looked at the comments. I looked at the video, and it was extraordinary.” As for his comments being taken the wrong way? Give me a break, Hawley argued. “Listen… [Senator Schumer’s] not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. His later non-apology, where he said, ‘Well, my comments were misinterpreted.’ They weren’t misinterpreted. He meant to threaten these two justices. He went there to do it.” Now, look, Hawley went on, “If you don’t like an opinion of the court, that’s fine. Feel free to say so. If you don’t think a justice is good at his or her job, that’s fine. But to threaten the justices, that’s beyond the pale.”
At the end of the day, Hawley said, “I’m not interested in his apologies that he clearly doesn’t believe in and really didn’t own up to. I’m interested in him learning the lesson that this is threatening justices, threatening our rule of law that should be out of bounds in American politics. And the Senate ought to put down a clear marker on this. And that’s why I introduced this resolution [to formally censure Schumer].” So far, 14 senators agree with the idea. Like Hawley, they think this is exactly the kind of dangerous rhetoric Congress needs to end.
“Listen, you can have disagreements. I disagree with Supreme Court decisions all the time,” Hawley acknowledged, “and I worked at that court. I’ve litigated it at court. I’m a member of the bar of that court. So you’re not going to get any grief from me for criticizing Supreme Court opinion. But it’s different to do what he did and… to call out and personally threaten justices.” And the thing that really gets under his skin — and so many others’ — is the hypocrisy.
“[Democrats] are very happy to go… point the finger at Republicans or the president. Any time [Donald Trump] makes a remark that Schumer doesn’t like, any time the president says something critical, Schumer accuses him of… inciting hatred. But then what? Schumer himself actually goes to the Supreme Court, a separate co-equal branch of government, calls out justices by name, and threatens them. Then he says, ‘Oh, well… that’s your problem. You shouldn’t have taken it that way.’ He should take some responsibility here. And [that’s] why the Senate needs to send a message.”
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, party leaders must be losing their collective minds. Whatever high ground the Democrats might have had pointing the finger at the president just crumbled beneath their feet. With so much at stake this year, including the U.S. Senate, Schumer’s tirade doesn’t exactly help the Left’s cause. On the contrary, they give Trump the upper hand on one of the strongest arrows in his quiver: the courts. “Of everything Democrats lost to Donald Trump in 2016,” the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reminds everyone, “the forfeiture of the judicial branch still grates the most…” But attacking it, she warns, “is about as politically wise as impeachment.”
“Mr. Trump will make sure his court successes are at the center of his re-election campaign. He will again highlight the stakes, especially for the Supreme Court. And here are Democrats making his case more powerful by promising not only to put an end to Trump picks, but to undo his court victories to date. Talk about a Republican turnout motivator.”
All the president has to do from now until November, Hawley agrees, is point to Schumer. Obviously, these are horrible comments from anyone, “[But] this is a guy who wants to run the Senate, for heaven’s sake! And… with a number of Senate seats on the ballot this year, [people] need to realize what the stakes are.”
Originally published here.
Murder, She Drank: The RU-486 Killers
Jeffrey Smith didn’t want to be a father. When his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, he told her to abort. Ending the pregnancy would be easy, he texted her. “You just have to take a pill.” When she refused, he got angry and hatched a plan. While he was over at her house one night, he waited until she was in the bathroom and dropped a pill into her water bottle. Before she took another drink, she noticed the residue and called police. Days later, a Wisconsin crime lab confirmed it: the drug was RU-486, a chemical abortion pill.
When police arrested Jeff on charges of attempted murder, he pled “not guilty.” That will be a lot harder to do now that the woman who’s been selling the illegal drugs has been caught. Turns out, he got the drugs from a New York City woman, Ursula Wing, who was using her online jewelry store as a front for an illegal prescription drug ring. Abortion pills were one of her biggest sellers. She’d buy packs from India and sold them in kits for $85. Customers, an assistant district attorney explained, paid by credit card “and the purchases were recorded as jewelry…”
In searches of Smith’s house, police found empty pill packets and internet searches that all trace back to Wing — who’s been charged with conspiracy. Unlike Jeff, she pled guilty.
It’s a horrible story, but one that ought to shed a giant spotlight on some of the problems with chemical abortion. For starters, these drugs are dangerous — which is one of the reasons they’re highly regulated by the FDA. Taking them without a doctor’s supervision (or even with a doctor’s supervision) usually has serious consequences. Women will vomit, cramp, bleed heavily, sometimes even lose consciousness. It’s a far cry from the “simple, safe, natural, private, process” abortion groups promise. And making matters worse, these women are all alone.
Moms like Tammi Morris have absolutely gut-wrenching stories about the pain and grief they experienced from these drugs. “It was nothing like they had told me,” she testified. After several hours, “the pain and urge to push were so intense” that she sat on the toilet. “I pushed un[til] I felt something come out, and I heard a sound. I looked down and screamed. It was not just a blob of tissue. I had given birth to what looked like a fully-formed, intact 14-week-old fetus covered in blood.” Then, “I scooped my baby out of the toilet. I sat on the floor and held him and cried. I cannot remember what I did with my baby afterwards… In what other circumstance would the health care industry encourage and support an untrained patient to self-administer a medical procedure that could result in fatal blood loss, with no means to have professional medical intervention available?”
But there are also horrors like Darshana Patel’s. She wanted her baby — and miscarried when her boyfriend stirred abortion drugs into her smoothie. Like Jeff, he ordered mifepristone from an illegal source online. The FDA has managed to crack down on some websites, based in places like India, but there’s a lot more Congress needs to do to make sure these pills aren’t bought and sold illegally. Just imagine the harm rapists or sex traffickers could do if these drugs were available over the counter like so many radical activists are demanding. It’s a scary thought — but then, so is the entire chemical abortion push. These pills are the abortion industry’s next big venture, and based on FRC’s research, Americans should be very, very concerned.
For more on “The Next Abortion Battleground," check out Patrina Mosley’s issue analysis.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
