OPINION:
John Kerry is a terrible person.
On Wednesday, President Biden’s Special Climate Envoy and President Obama’s former secretary of State and Democratic nominee for president testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
At that hearing, he was asked about the unappetizing nature of our interactions with the Chinese Communist Party. He managed to disgrace himself and the Biden administration.
First, he was asked by Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking member on the committee about the use of slave labor in China to make and sell solar panels used by much of the rest of the world, including, unfortunately, the United States. Mr. McCaul, who leads the China Task Force in the House, simply asked: “How can you assure us, this quest that we’re on [clean energy] that slave labor coming out of China where genocide is taking place as we speak, is never a part of the climate solution in the United States?”
Mr. Kerry, an experienced diplomat and denizen of Washington for his entire adult life, didn’t flinch at all. He said: “It (slavery) is a problem. Xinjiang province not only produces some of the solar panels that we believe are being, in some cases produced in forced labor by Uyghurs. Nothing can be traded and I’ve made that very clear. President Biden has made it very clear. Climate is existential for everybody on the planet.”
Not everybody. We would be willing to bet that those in bondage or being tortured by their genocidal communist Chinese enslavers might have a slightly different view of the existential nature of the threat posed by climate change.
The truly ugly part was still to come. When Rep. Christopher Smith, New Jersey Republican, followed up on that line of questioning, Special Envoy and marketer of existential threats Kerry said he has not raised the issue of slave labor with China’s climate change envoy.
The former secretary of State said simply and terribly: “That’s not my lane. My lane is very specifically is to try and get the Chinese to move [on] what we need to do with respect to climate itself.”
So, slavery, murder, torture, genocide, religious suppression, destruction of democracy in Hong Kong, international hooliganism, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, and all the other wonderful gifts the world has received recently from the Middle Kingdom are not in John Kerry’s “lane.” He — and by extension the man he works for — are indifferent to all that. They want a climate deal because their donors demand one.
The Chinese communist regime is of course a much more existential threat to the people of the world than climate change. But there’s no money in saying or thinking that. So, people like John Kerry make sure to stay in their lane and not notice the monstrosities that are occurring on their watch.
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