(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Chamath Palihapitiya, a financial capitalist and NBA team co-owner, said on his podcast last weekend that “nobody cares” about the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of Uyghurs, Fox News reported.
“Let’s be honest: nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, OK?,” said Palihapitiya, who donated more than a million dollars to Democrats in 2020 and more than $250,000 to President Joe Biden‘s campaign.
“You bring it up because you care, and I think that it’s nice that you care,” Palihapitiya told co-host Jason Calacanis. “The rest of us don’t care. “Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line.”
His comments start at about the 30-minute mark in episode 63 of the All-In podcast.
In the same podcast, Palihapitiya, a Sri Lankan-born refugee who moved to the United States and became a billionaire, said that United States is not morally superior to the Chinese Communist Party.
Palihapitiya, the founder and CEO of Social Capital, is worth $1.2 billion.
Owner of the @warriors? says he doesn’t care about the Uyghurs.
The conversation goes downhill from there.@chamath…
– questions whether a genocide is actually happening
– says the CCP isn’t a dictatorship
– says the US is no better than the CCP pic.twitter.com/qAwi7hUPvo— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) January 17, 2022
Palihapitiya claims that we cannot address natural rights violations in China because it is impossible to know whether torture, rape, and forced sterilization of Uyghurs in a few instances is worse than systemic racism in the United States.
“If 10 Uyghurs were raped or forced sterilized versus ten million black men falsely incarcerated, which one is worse?” Palihapitiya asked.
“This is not the way to do the calculus,” Calacanis said. “You could do it on an individual basis. You can look at an individual inside of a prison being tortured and an individual living in the United States.
“Every single person who is inside of that torture chamber, being raped, being sterilized, would say I would absolutely love to come to America,” he said.
Leaving aside the logical error in this question, Palihapitiya’s numbers do not hold up: the United States incarcerates about 6 million people in total, and false incarcerations constitute a fraction of that number.
Plus, nobody claims that the Uyghur genocide amounts to 10 people being tortured.
