President Joe Biden has opted for a “diplomatic” boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but not a full boycott that would affect the athletes. Yet he backed a boycott of Atlanta by Major League Baseball, which withdrew the All-Star Game.
On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said:
The Biden administration will not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games given the PRC’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.
The athletes on Team USA have our full support. We will be behind them 100 percent as we cheer them on from home. We will not be contributing to the fanfare of the Games.
U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these Games as business as usual in the face of the PRC’s egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang. And we simply can’t do that.
Biden is also not supporting a boycott of companies sponsoring the Beijing Olympics.
In April, President Biden supported Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest at a voting reform law more liberal than laws in his home state of Delaware — a law that Democrats claimed was a threat to democracy but which actually increased the number of early voting days and provided for mail-in ballot drop boxes, while tightening voter ID requirements to deter fraud and ensure transparency.
Psaki noted, in an exchange with a reporter, that while Biden did not support a general economic boycott of Georgia, he supported the decision to withdraw the All-Star Game as a statement of protest against the alleged suppression of voting rights.
Q Thanks, Jen. On the issue of voting rights, the President said that he would support Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Now a similar bill has passed the state senate in Texas. So does the President believe that Texas businesses should move out of the state or boycott the state if this bill is signed into law?
MS. PSAKI: Well, first, he was — he didn’t call for businesses to boycott; businesses have made that decision themselves, of course.
He also was di- — not dictating that Major League Baseball move their game out of Georgia. He was conveying that if that was a decision that was made, that he would certainly support that. And that’s true in the context of the remarks he made in that interview.
Many corporations joined the Atlanta boycott, leading Mark Hemingway of RealClearInvestigations to note the difference in Biden’s positions on Atlanta and Beijing:
The All-Star Game was moved out of Atlanta, a city with a significant black population, and relocated to Denver, one of the whitest cities in America. The Atlanta Braves went on to win the World Series.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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