Sam Brownback Calls on Corporations to Pull Dollars Out of Olympics

Sam Brownback, former U.S. Senator, Kansas Governor, and U.S. Ambassador for international religious freedom, appeared on Breitbart News Saturday and called on woke corporations like Coca-Cola and AirBnb to pull their advertising dollars out of the Beijing Winter Olympics amid China’s numerous human rights violations.

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Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle opened the show noting that Friday, December 10, was the United Nation’s annual Human Rights Day. He asked the former Ambassador to lay out China’s human rights abuses against the Uighur Muslim population.

“What they started against the Tibetan Buddhists, they perfected against the Uighur Muslims. and they got a million of them in concentration camps,” Brownback said. “They have a high tech police state for everybody else. And they’re persecuting them and trying to really drive their faith out.”

“They’ve done that, as I say against the Buddhists, they’re doing it now also against house church Christians, destroying the churches locking people up. They go against human rights lawyers, they are at war with faith, all faiths.”

Brownback warned that China wants its religious freedom violations replicated by other authoritarian regimes worldwide. “80 percent of the world lives in a religiously restricted, heavily restricted atmosphere. And China’s leading the way on how to do it,” he said.

Brownback explained that the Uighur Muslim population in China is under constant surveillance that impacts their day-to-day lives in what he calls a “war on faith.”

“If they don’t like what you’re doing, they give you a low social credit score so you can’t travel. You can’t get into the apartment complexes or the schools that you want to get into, can’t name your child Muhammad, you can’t fast during Ramadan. It’s really basically to try to drive the faith out of the people. And that’s why I call it a war on faith.”

Brownback is optimistic in this war on faith because “ultimately, a person’s soul will win out.”

Boyle then mentioned President Joe Biden’s lackluster “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Winter Olympics and asked Brownback what the United States should do to send a message to the Chinese Communist Party.

“What a number of us called for this week was an advertiser’s boycott of the Olympics. Hold the Western companies’ advertising dollars,” he said.

“Coca Cola, Airbnb pull your dollars if the Chinese Communist Party won’t announce a date for the closing of these concentration camps, then pull your advertising dollars so that kind of the Chinese Communists are not enriched by the Olympics.”

“And then I hope our athletes will be as brave as [Enes] Kanter Freedom is, and will walk in the Olympic Stadium with pictures of people that are being held because they’re religious dissidents or Hong Kong activists.”

Brownback suggested that it should be the American athletes who turn the Olympic Games “into an embarrassment for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Boyle mentioned the woke chief executives of top companies and asked Brownback if now is the time for the American people to consider a boycott of certain companies. Notably, Boyle called out Coca-Cola for advertising in China despite attempting to punish Georgia for passing election integrity laws.

“It is absolutely ludicrous, that you would stand up on the All Star game in Georgia to move it to Denver, and then not stand up to the Chinese that are conducting a genocide at this very time,” said Brownback.

“I mean, really just have two seconds of thought about what you’re doing and the inconsistency of that. So I would hope Americans would put pressure on these companies that are advertising in these Olympics, and it’s not too late,” he continued.

“What’s so special about China that you can’t stand up to China?” he asked. “Yes, it’s a big market. But it says your money speaks louder than your human rights and the dignity of these individuals that have been locked up simply for peacefully practicing their faith.”

Brownback then talked about the troubles that Christians and Catholics currently face in China.

“They face some of the worst persecution that they’ve seen since the Cultural Revolution under Mao and this time, it’s, it’s both physical and it’s high tech ,so their churches get destroyed, their pastors get locked up,” he said. “But then also the people get surveillance on them with this pervasive nature of cameras, artificial intelligence systems, limiting people on social credit scores.”

Brownback warned that things could worsen once China finalizes its move to digital currency. “And once they get control of the currency, then they can shut off all the resources, all the money that you have, they can, by a flip of a switch because they don’t like you or what you stand for ,what you practice, they can shut it off.”

The conversation switched gears from China to Afghanistan after Boyle brought up reported human rights violations that have occurred since Biden’s disastrous withdrawal of American troops from the country.

“You’re going to see a genocide of religious minorities in Afghanistan. This will include Shia Muslims, but it’ll be Christians and it’ll be Bahais,” he said. “And anybody that doesn’t hone to the line of the Taliban or ISIS, on their view of Islam, many Muslims, they’re just they’re slaughtering them. They’re starving them to death.”

Brownback said Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was “one of the most disgraceful things our country has done in the last several decades.”

“We left our people there on the battlefield and pulled out. And these are people that had worked with us and helped us and we left them, and we’re still trying to get people,” he said.

To end the interview, Boyle asked Brownback what he thought about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision last month to remove Nigeria from a religious freedom watchlist.

Brownback criticized the bureaucracy for being afraid to stand up to the militant Islamic terrorist sect of Northern Nigeria that is trying to build the “next caliphate.” He also faulted the administration for being dishonest about the conflict and not recognizing it is rooted in a faith-based conflict.

“If you’re a militant Islamic fundamentalist, religion has everything to do with it,” he said. “And we do no service by denying that and just say, ‘no, climate change or it is farmer-herder conflicts’ and it is not. At its heart, this is a religious division.”

“And you got to call evil by its own name, and you got to speak about it. So that people know what you’re fighting for. We’re fighting for religious freedom, for people’s rights to be able to do with their own soul what they see fit,” he continued. “And you get killed for that in Nigeria, and we should stand up to these radical Nigerian groups and push the Nigerian government for justice and protection for all people in their country.”

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.