Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz accused President Joe Biden’s environmental czar John Kerry of being “the customer of the year for Chinese concentration camps” after the senator spoke out against human rights abuses in China.
“John Kerry is the customer of the year for Chinese concentration camps,” Cruz tweeted.
John Kerry is the customer of the year for Chinese concentration camps. pic.twitter.com/v3Nf5BJQXh
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 8, 2021
The Twitter post also included a video of his interview on Wednesday on Fox News’ “The Faulkner Focus.”
“Joe Biden has shown weakness to China,” Cruz said.
“I introduced an amendment on the floor of the Senate to prohibit the Biden administration from importing any goods, and in particular electric vehicles or solar panels, made with slave labor in concentration camps in China. Every single Democrat except Joe Manchin voted against that,” he added.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Act, first introduced by Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in January, faced resistance from Democrats. In an October statement, Rubio said:
For weeks, rumors have swirled in Washington about President Joe Biden’s climate czar John Kerry and his opposition to taking concrete action against the Chinese Communist Party’s use of slave labor. Now, we may have an answer about his reluctance to take action: according to a new report, Kerry and his wife have at least $1 million invested in a Chinese investment group called Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P.
That fact alone raises serious questions as to whether Kerry can negotiate in good faith with Beijing on climate change, but it gets worse. According to the report, Hillhouse is a “top shareholder” in a Chinese technology company called YITU Technology, which was blacklisted by the Trump administration in 2019 for being complicit in the surveillance, detention, and repression of Uyghurs and others. In other words, Kerry appears to be profiting from slave labor.
Now it makes sense why he is actively working against my Uyghur Forced Labor Act, which would make it impossible for products made with slave labor in Xinjiang, China to be imported into the United States.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, Cruz said in an email, “John Kerry is the customer of the year for Chinese concentration camps, and he ought to be ashamed, Biden ought to be ashamed. We are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to fund the concentration camps where over a million Uyghurs are in prison.”
The statement also said regarding China:
“I think China is the single greatest geopolitical threat facing the United States for the next century. I think we need strength and clarity to stand up to China, to for call them out for their murder, for their torture, for concentration camps, for their lying, for their theft of intellectual property, for their espionage, for their military aggression, and your right for their responsibility, their culpability for COVID-19.
“It originated—I believe the evidence is compelling that it originated in the Wuhan lab, a Chinese government lab. They covered up the outbreak, and they are responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the trillions of dollars of damage caused by COVID. We need to have the strength to stand up, to them to call them out, to hold them responsible. Also, critically, to de-link our supply chain so we’re not dependent upon them for critical minerals, for medical pharmaceuticals, for essential elements.
“I’ve introduced over a dozen different pieces of legislation taking on China. Where are the Democrats? The Democrats are beholden to the big money interests in their party that need Chinese markets to stay in business.”
The Daily Wire also reported in November that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told CBS News that he does not support a full boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing because it would punish U.S. athletes who have trained for years to be able to compete in the games and because the U.S. needs to “kick their commie a**es.”
“I think it’s a mistake to have a full boycott of the Olympics. You know, Jimmy Carter tried that in the 1970s. All it did was punish a generation of athletes. We’ve got young men and young women, Americans, who spent their whole lives practicing for this moment,” Cruz told “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
“I don’t want to punish those young athletes. What we ought to do — I do agree with the notion of a so-called diplomatic boycott — which means we don’t send high-ranking cabinet officials over there,” he added.