With less than one month before the Winter Olympics in Beijing get underway, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) is demanding answers from U.S. companies who are sponsoring the Games at the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party — both financially and by lending credibility and legitimacy to the genocidal regime.
In an exclusive Fox News interview on Thursday, Rodgers spoke about her letter and what's at stake for American companies — and foreign companies that profit from American consumers — when they turn a blind eye to CCP atrocities.
What will it take for U.S. companies—and companies that rely on American consumers—to stand up to the CCP?
— CathyMcMorrisRodgers (@cathymcmorris) January 13, 2022
If it isn’t human rights abuses, silencing & disappearing citizens, surveillance, slave labor, genocide—what is their redline?
Or is it only about their bottom line? pic.twitter.com/KMyO8bmlxW
"We are appealing to these American companies, to companies that depend upon American consumers, to defend human rights," Rodgers said. "In this letter we ask the question: Where is the red line? If it's not human rights, if it's not slave labor, silencing and disappearing citizens, genocide — where's that red line? Or is it really about their bottom line? We're calling upon them to defend human values and our integrity and to take action to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party," she added.
"At the same time, many of these companies stood up, for example, in the United States against a state election law in the state of Georgia," noted Rodgers. "They were compelled to stand up and say that that election law in Georgia shouldn't be in place — and even pull out of Georgia, pull out of Atlanta for example — and yet they're staying silent on China," Rodgers emphasized of the woke corporations' hypocrisy.
Among the companies listed as "Worldwide Olympic Partners" on the Beijing Games' website are Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Intel, and Visa.
Airbnb was a signatory to a woke letter that vaguely declared support for "democracy," but was a response to election integrity measures implemented in Georgia and considered in other states. The letter read, in part, "We should all feel a responsibility to defend the right to vote and to oppose any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot." Yet when Chinese citizens and religious minorities are subjected to at best an utter lack of God-given freedoms and at worst outright genocide, Airbnb has no problem being a leading sponsor of the Beijing Olympics.
Atlanta-based Coca-Cola took it upon itself to issue an oppositional statement after Georgia's voting law passed. "We want to be crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed in the outcome of the Georgia voting legislation," it stated. "We all have a duty to protect everyone’s right to vote, and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the U.S." Like Airbnb, Coca-Cola apparently sees no issue with CCP evils, but blasted out a statement over a Georgia law to minimize cheating in the state's elections.
Procter & Gamble also issued a bland but thinly veiled statement against election integrity measures under the guise of emphasizing the importance of the right to vote, something Georgia's law only makes more sacrosanct by limiting opportunities for fraud that minimizes that right.
Even for companies who didn't rush to their PR flacks to virtue signal their opposition to election security measures, their support and validation of China and its ruling communist party during the Beijing Olympics is aiding and abetting their schemes. It all comes down to money, and the massive consumer economy within China, at least among those who aren't in slave labor or internment camps. It's the same motivation that made the NBA and Nike bow to CCP pressure, and it seems to be the same motivation for these companies to enjoy marketing their goods and services in front of Chinese consumers.
"At what point are they going to defend human rights?" Rodgers asked of Olympic sponsors. "At what point are they going to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party?"
It's not just Rodgers looking for answers about these companies' hypocrisy, either. Human Rights Watch, not known as a conservative outfit, previously sent letters to Beijing Olympics' sponsors questioning the human rights risk of their involvement. In addition to the top sponsors, HRW also asked NBC, the official broadcast partner of the Beijing Games, about its role in the games given licensing the games to NBC amounts to some 40 percent of the International Olympic Committee's total income from the 2022 Winter Games.