The world’s best athletes are already skiing their way down China’s Genting Snow Park, but the slipperiest slope is that they’re there at all. Two days away from the official kick-off to the 2022 Beijing Games, the international uproar is deafening. While hockey and curling get underway in China’s state-of-the-art facilities, millions of innocent people are locked away in cells, waiting for their next beating, their next rape, or final breath. A six-hour plane ride away from the greatest sports spectacle of the last two years, the host is hiding the biggest torture network of the modern age. And the International Olympic Committee knew it.

The IOC has been the target of a lot of outrage lately. After barely voting to let Beijing host the Games (44-40), the committee has excused the decision ever since. To the 243 groups who’ve decried China’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs (and its unilateral crackdown on speech, faith, and freedom), the IOC merely shrugged, declaring themselves “strictly politically neutral at all times.” But, as a globe full of activists have argued, this isn’t about politics — it’s about crimes against humanity.

Funny, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said. The IOC didn’t brush off concerns when South Africa was racially divided. “This pretense of neutrality,” he pointed out, “… is oddly ironic given the decades-long hard-line stand the IOC took against South Africa’s apartheid policies.” Years later, not only are they dismissing the human rights abuses taking place behind barbed wire, they’re giving Beijing a place in history as the first city to host the Summer and Winter Games.“ It’s unconscionable, the Florida congressman fumed.

Fortunately, plenty of Democrats agree with him — including Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.), who’s been emphatically opposed to America’s participation in these Games. Together, she and Waltz think it’s time to exact a pound of flesh from the world’s genocide enablers. Although it’s not likely to affect this year’s Olympics, the duo just introduced a bill that would strip the IOC of its tax-exempt status, blowing a major hole in the committee’s bank account. As Waltz pointed out, NBC’s 10-year contract with the IOC alone is worth $7.7 billion dollars, so the fallout would be enormous. It’s clear, Wexton insisted that the IOC is "an accomplice to the abuses of the (Chinese Communist Party), that they are not a charitable organization, that they are not deserving of tax-exempt status, and taxpayer dollars should not be subsidizing their actions.”

As the Games ramp up, Waltz worries about the U.S. team, who will be under incredible pressure not to speak up about any abuses they see or hear. Late last month, an official with the Beijing Organizing Committee warned that “any behavior or speech against the ‘Olympic spirit,’ especially against Chinese laws and regulations, ‘are subject to certain punishment.’” And no one has any clue what that “punishment” would be. “I would not put it past them (Chinese officials) at all to put our athletes in prison… And frankly the [Biden] administration, who has rightly called for a diplomatic boycott but not a full [boycott], should share some responsibility.”

In the meantime, Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) is hoping to use these next three weeks to expose some of the regime’s evils, launching the hashtag #BeijingBehavingBadly to help highlight the horrors taking place right in the Olympic Park’s backyard. “We’re rooting hard for our athletes,” he said, but “it’s important for them to know what they are walking into as they compete. As the world watches the Olympics in Beijing, the actions of the Chinese Communist Party cannot go unchecked.” The goal, Young explained on “Washington Watch,” is highlighting China’s “gross human rights violations or censoring of the internet, their abuses of journalists and their ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. These are the sorts of things that you’re unlikely to hear on NBC. You need to hear from your U.S. senator.”

Of course, the background music to China’s Olympic charade is Russia, which has a history of using the Games as cover to attack and invade. Adolf Hitler perfected that maneuver in the 1936 Games, which he used as a springboard for his conquest against Europe, Waltz reminds people. “We have to remember that Russia invaded Georgia back in 2008 during the Beijing Summer Olympics. He invaded Ukraine the first time right after the Sochi Olympics [in 2014]. So dictators love the Olympics.” And two of them — Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping — will be standing side by side sending a very symbolic message “that there’s a new sheriff in town, and it’s not the United States.”

And while the invasion of Ukraine is a daunting possibility, at the end of the day, China is a much greater threat to the United States than Russia. Russia has the intent, but they don’t really have the capacity. China has both. It’s a raw power that millions of Christians, Uyghurs, and Hong Kongers know all too well. As the cloud of suffering hangs heavy in the Beijing air, they have one hope: that these Games will push the world — and its people — to fight harder.

Originally published here.

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China: More Than Meets the Spy

Whenever the U.S. goes head-to-head with China at the Olympics, there’s always an intense competitiveness between the two sports superpowers. But that rivalry extends to a lot more than the Games, as FBI Director Christopher Wray spelled out in terrifying detail. China is determined to win where it matters — in global supremacy — and they’ll infiltrate any American institution to do it. In most cases, he warns, they already have.

It was a jaw-dropping interview, but an important one heading into three weeks of around-the-clock Olympic coverage. China, Wray makes it clear on NBC’s Nightly News, isn’t the benevolent host the regime is making themselves out to be. When they aren’t throwing entire people groups behind bars or snuffing out democratic protests, the communists are waging a secret war against the United States — and using cutting-edge espionage to do it. The scale of Chinese spying in the U.S., he admitted, “blew me away.”

Wray came to the top post at the FBI in 2017, and since then, he’s spent a good portion of his job trying to stop the Chinese from stealing American technology. “I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily,” he told reporter Pete Williams. But “we are opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation about every 12 hours. We probably have over 2,000 of those investigations.” There is no country, he went on, “that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does. I’m referring not to the Chinese people, not to people of Chinese descent or heritage. What we’re talking about here is the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”

It was a shocking admission to most people — but not former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Two years ago, at a meeting of America’s governors, he looked everyone right in the eye and said it was time to wake up to the fact that the Chinese were hiding in the shadows of every American institution. And no one, he said evenly, knows it’s happening.

“These aren’t hypotheticals,” Pompeo insisted at the time. “We’ve allowed this to continue without a deep awareness from the American people.” And what is “this,” exactly? According to top State Department officials, we’re talking about a massive network of Chinese communists fanned out across the country with one goal: penetrate U.S. security, education, and financial systems — then, create chaos. “It’s happening in your state,” he argued, “with consequences for our foreign policy, for the citizens who reside in your states, and indeed for each of you… The Chinese Government has been methodical in the way it’s analyzed our system… It’s assessed our vulnerabilities, and it’s decided to exploit our freedoms to gain advantage over us at the federal level, the state level, and the local level.”

They’re usually Chinese diplomats running point on the operations. Men and women, serving here in the United States, who are quietly “leading and executing programs that present a risk to American businesses, to Americans’ privacy, and to Americans’…security.” And the worst thing about it, he said, is it’s not “on people’s radar screens.” “It’s one thing to pressure the secretary of state of the United States of America.” It’s quite another “to go after a high school principal,” he pointed out. “It shows depth. It shows systematization. It shows intent.”

For the communist empire, the long game is paying off. The Chinese have quietly built a foothold with local school boards, high school administrators, and county officials that’s giving them a powerful voice they should never have. There are almost 60 Confucius Institutes on U.S. college and university campuses and 500 “Confucius Classrooms” in K-12 schools. It’s a disturbing trend, Politico’s magazine frets. “At a time when universities are as willing as ever to shield their charges from controversial viewpoints, some nonetheless welcome foreign, communist propaganda — if the price is right.”

Then, of course, there’s the growing problem of Big Tech’s China sympathizers, which author Peter Schweizer brings to light in painstaking detail. CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg have literally rolled out the red carpet for the communists, giving them access to research and technology that could even compromise the U.S. military.

In the rare instances where Facebook, Google, and Microsoft aren’t helping the regime, they have plenty of internal experts to rely on. “The scale of their hacking program and the amount of personal and corporate data their hackers have stolen is greater than every other country combined,” Wray explained. “China may be the first country to combine that kind of authoritarian ambition with cutting-edge technical capability. It’s like the surveillance nightmare of East Germany combined with the tech of Silicon Valley.”

Like most threats facing America, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have the will — or the skill — to confront China. Let’s hope he finds both soon, or else, as former Congressman Mike Rogers worries, “we will cede our sovereignty and our future, and that of our children, to Beijing — and that’s something that isn’t worth any price.”

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.