If you were told that a man had said to a magazine interviewer, “Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing,” you might assume the man was a racist. That was certainly the impression New Statesman Deputy Editor George Eaton intended to create when he blared that quote on Twitter under the description “Roger Scruton on the Chinese.”

Except that the famous British philosopher, whom Eaton interviewed for the April 12 issue of his magazine, wasn’t talking about the Chinese people. He was talking about their Communist government. Anyone who bothered to click through to the full interview would find a longer version of the quotation, which makes that clear in the preceding sentence: “They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done.”