Remember all those claims that Donald Trump was going to put Muslims in concentration camps and force them to pick the cotton to make Ku Klux Klan robes and MAGA hats? Yeah… that was actually China. The despicable communist regime in Beijing has now put more than a million Uighur Muslims in slave labor camps. Many of the most “woke” celebrities in America are walking around complaining about racism in the US, while wearing single-use cotton jerseys created by Muslim slaves in China.
You’ve no doubt seen the drone video footage that emerged from 2018 in Xinjiang. Thousands and thousands of ethnic minority Uighurs were on their knees, blindfolded, heads shaved and hands zip-tied behind their backs before being loaded on trains and hauled off to someplace. China’s ambassador tried to pawn this off to the BBC as a “prisoner transfer” of some sort.
Democrats are now furious and refusing to work with Republicans in Congress. Globalism and “free trade” are evil. Period. You cannot trade with nations that literally hate you. Evil nations will always try to game the system so that it benefits their evil nation over American workers. If you are going to trade with evil nations, you are financing evil.
Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), Marco Rubio (D-FL) and others are attempting to pass new legislation that requires US companies to prove – beyond any shadow of a doubt – that their Made in China products were not made by Uighur slave labor. Democrats are absolutely refusing to compromise in any way on legislation that would discourage China from its human slave factories. This is not a small issue.
Human rights organizations have now determined that Adidas, Nike, Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, Nara and H&M clothing lines are all being made with slave labor in Communist China. 20% of all cotton goods on the planet are now made by slaves picking cotton. When NBA star LeBron James lectures the rest of us about “social justice,” “systemic racism,” or how our First Amendment freedoms don’t give us the right to ever criticize China, he’s wearing a jersey stitched together by a human slave in China. He must feel super-woke and self-righteous.
Access to America’s middle-class consumers as a trade market has historically been a carrot-and-stick for the rest of the world. Every Republican president from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan understood this historically. If a nation improves its behavior and embraces American ideals in its laws (and stops putting people in slave labor camps), then that nation can have access to sell products to Joe and Jane America on Main Street.
If a nation is terrible and abuses its own citizens and actively hates America, then that nation gets NO TRADE ACCESS. This strategy has been remarkably effective in making the world a better place (See: the former USSR).
No one has illustrated this concept more brilliantly than President Trump’s amazing Director of Trade and Manufacturing Director Peter Navarro. We’ll use just one terrible s***hole country as an example: Brunei.
Brunei is just about the worst nation on earth. The Chinese Communist Party has trouble keeping up with the Sultan of Brunei when it comes evil super-villain status. Whereas China enslaves its own ethnic minorities from within its own borders, the Sultan of Brunei goes abroad for his nation’s slaves. Slavers sneak across the border into neighboring countries, and pirates kidnap people off of ships on the ocean in Southeast Asia.
Thanks to the policies of free-wheeling free traders George W. Bush and Barack Obama, America developed a trade imbalance with the Sultan of Brunei to the tune of $600 million annually. America was buying $600 million more in slave-produced goods from Brunei than Brunei was purchasing from America.
The trade imbalance with Brunei this year under Peter Navarro’s leadership? Negative $15.7 million. The Sultan of Brunei is now going broke, thanks to Navarro enforcing Trump’s “America First” trade policy. Brunei will either have to clean up its act, or America will no longer purchase anything made by the Sultan’s slaves.
That’s the exact same approach that America should be taking toward Communist China. But for some odd reason, the party of Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t want to punish China for its slave labor camps. Hmmm…
