During a CBS News interview on Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said that he is against a full boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China, because it would hurt American athletes that have been training for the competition and that the United States needs to go to China to “kick their commie a**es.”
“I’ve been leaning in hard saying we ought to move the Olympics out of China, that’s what we should have done,” Cruz told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. “The IOC refused to do that. I think it’s a mistake to have a full boycott of the Olympics. You know, Jimmy Carter tried that in the 1970s. All it did was punish a generation of athletes. We’ve got young men and young women, Americans, who spent their whole lives practicing for this moment. I don’t want to punish those young athletes. What we ought to do — I do agree with the notion of a so-called diplomatic boycott — which means we don’t send high ranking cabinet officials over there.”
“But I also think it’s important we do two things at the Olympics in China,” Cruz continued. “Number one, that we actually show the courage the Women’s Tennis Association is showing to call out the murder, the genocide, the torture, the lies, the complicity in COVID-19 of the Chinese communist government, to speak the truth. And then number two, I really hope our young men and women that they go over there and kick their commie a**es. We need to win in the Olympics.”
Cruz’s comments come amid growing calls to boycott the Olympics in Beijing over China’s genocide of Uighur Muslims and China’s growing aggression towards the independent country of Taiwan.
