After the White House announced on Tuesday that a senior administration official will head the U.S. delegation to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Ted Cruz is pledging to boycott the Games.
“There is no better example of a politically correct socialist dictatorship than the Chinese regime,” Cruz said Thursday, calling the general consensus that Americans shouldn’t boycott the Games in 2022 “an utterly ridiculous notion.”
Cruz also ridiculed China’s human rights record, noting that its leaders “do not live under a dictatorship but do live under a government where they can get away with killing Christians at will.” And he referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “communist slanderer.”
The White House on Tuesday announced that a U.S. Olympic Committee executive board member, Edwin Moses, would lead the delegation to Beijing. Moses, who attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, played for the U.S. basketball team and coached the team from 1971 to 1979. The U.S. is one of several nations — along with Canada, Australia, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — that are boycotting the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, after several athletes raised concern over North Korea’s possible participation in the Games.
Cruz said that most American athletes are, in fact, nice people and they shouldn’t be “jacked up by leftist consuls trying to kick their commie a$$.”
“I want to encourage all American athletes to roll up their sleeves and kick their commie a$$ by going on their trip and by investing in China,” Cruz said, adding that the Americans in the delegation would “learn what happened” with previous Games.