On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) said House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) advice that American athletes competing at the 2022 Winter Olympics should avoid upsetting China “is the definition of the weakness that is taking place in the West right now.” And that “we’re Americans. We don’t go and turn tail and run and hide in a corner and start crying when somebody threatens us. We own it, we look them in the eye, and we give them a size ten in the backside.”

Mast said, “Speaker Pelosi is right and she’s wrong at the same time. She’s right in saying there might be Chinese threats that take place if you speak out against the Communist Party there. But we’re Americans. We don’t go and turn tail and run and hide in a corner and start crying when somebody threatens us. We own it, we look them in the eye, and we give them a size ten in the backside. If our athletes want to represent America and democratic values, then that’s exactly what they should do on the world stage, and say, listen, China, we’re going to stand up against what it is that you’re doing as a Communist country. We’re not going to stand for your hacking, your IP theft, your slave labor, and everything else that you do as a Communist country.”

He later added that Pelosi didn’t tell China not to harm any American athletes “Because she is the definition of the weakness that is taking place in the West right now. You go back to the last segment and you think about what’s happening with cyberhacking, cyber terrorism, and other things. That’s the same way that Pelosi is looking at those kind of issues. Hey, we don’t want to incur the wrath of the Chinese, instead of looking at it as an absolute and saying, listen, if you hack one of our companies or one of our government agencies or anything else and you used a satellite to do that, we’re going to knock that satellite out of the sky. If you used this piece of infrastructure to do it, we’re going to make sure that that piece of infrastructure is terminated. They don’t have the ability to stand strong in the face of China. She’s doing the same thing with policy that she’s doing with the Olympics.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett