Tom Cotton sounds the alarm on China — is anybody listening?

Three years after suggesting it is possible the
COVID-19 virus
may have originated from a lab leak in Wuhan,
China
, a claim dismissed at the time by media as “fringe” and even “racist,” Sen.
Tom Cotton
(R-AR) sat for an interview this week entirely focused on the U.S. relationship with the country. He shared his frustration with the Biden administration’s refusal to acknowledge the scale of the China threat militarily, as well as the deadly impact that China’s Communist Party has on everyone’s life.

Washington Examiner: Your reaction at the time to the media’s meltdown over your suggestion that the virus may have originated from Chinese communist labs in Wuhan?

DEMOCRATS KEEP FALLING FOR CHINA’S CLIMATE BOONDOGGLE

Tom Cotton: I was surprised at the time. I still remain a little surprised at how hysterical the liberal media’s reaction was. I observed this probably late January, early February, well before President Trump suggested a 15-day pause to stop the spread in mid-March. And to me, it was just common sense. I can tell you, as I’ve said all along, I’m on the Intelligence Committee, but there’s nothing from the intelligence world that told me this at the time. It was just common sense, and the facts in front of your face and following the inherent logic of events. I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in I think April or May of 2020 that reiterated it. It just laid out the case, that I don’t have all the facts in front of mind. Said there’s no direct evidence, and there probably never will be direct evidence because Chinese communists have destroyed all the evidence and killed the animals and the samples, and probably disappeared anyone who was working on this stuff in the lab.

But all of the circumstantial evidence — and I mean, every single bit of it — pointed to the lab, not to the food market in Wuhan, which didn’t have bats and was in a city where bats are not present. And there’s a Lancet study — I remember reading this during the Trump impeachment trial in January of 2020 … in, I think, late January — that tracked the first 42 cases. The majority of those had no contact with the food market, I think. Again, you can pull that up as well. The point being that virus went into the food market. It didn’t come out of the food market, which you can imagine. What is it, a mile away from the lab? So somebody gets infected in the lab, and they stop off and buy some squid soup or something on the way home.

So to me, all along, just common sense and the facts in front of your face. At a minimum suggestion, we should be asking the question and see where the evidence takes us. I just think that, as is so often the case, if Tom Cotton or Donald Trump or someone like that says these things or is for it or says it, then the liberal media must be against it, whatever it is. Same way, three months later, it was using federal troops to restore order in cities, as has happened repeatedly during history. If Tom Cotton is for it, then it must be bad, and we must oppose it. And I think that was some of the very early examples of how the response to the virus became highly politicized.

Likewise, again, I don’t fault Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or Brian Kemp or anyone else for taking precautionary steps in late February and early March. Part of the reason they took them is because China was concealing what they knew about this virus. Just imagine if China had opened up from the very beginning when they first had people getting COVID-like symptoms in November of 2019. Maybe we would’ve understood by the time it got to our shores that it was really only a serious risk to people who were elderly or medically infirm to begin with. Didn’t know that.

But so, I don’t fault anybody for the steps they took in February or March. In some cases, I was recommending those steps as a precautionary matter, but I also don’t fault people like Brian Kemp for opening Georgia back up. Remember, he did that at the end of April, I think. I think it was Trump had recommended 15 days the end of March and then recommended another 30 days. And Kemp went four days early, and the media was just in hysterical overdrive, as if they were proposing that we’d drown all kittens at high noon.

But again, just an example of the reactions to Gov. Kemp taking a step that at that point, I thought, was pretty reasonable. It’s just another example of what we’re talking about. If Brian Kemp is for it, we must be against it, whatever it is. You still see it in Washington — I mean, you’ve come to Washington every now and then. People are still wearing masks, walking around on the sidewalk in the middle of the day by themselves!

Washington Examiner: Can you explain from your vantage point the Biden administration’s posture towards China?

Cotton: I believe that their instinct [is] to coddle and appease and kowtow to China at every turn. You saw this some with the balloon last month — Biden administration officials running off to speculate on background in the media that, “Oh, maybe it wasn’t intended to go to Alaska and the continental United States. Maybe it just got blown off course by the wind.” It was like, “Well, that’s one hell of a wind to blow it from Guam all the way up to northern Alaska.” But it’s the natural instincts of so many in the administration and Democrats and Congress and liberals in the media. For that matter, a lot of people are making money off China to always try to excuse and apologize for China, figure out a sympathetic explanation or turn the other cheek, or what have you. And you still see that today — just the desire not to rock the boat.

Washington Examiner: Let’s spread this conversation out about China, looking at the companies looking the other way when buying cotton from slave labor camps in Xinjiang, and the free-flowing fentanyl coming from China and across the borders. It appears those very real concerns fall on deaf ears in Washington.

Cotton: So for some, I think they’re ensconced in affluent enclaves. They’re insulated largely from the wholehearted decisions that they’ve made when it comes to criminal justice policy. They don’t have to live in southeast Washington. They live in Bethesda and Chevy Chase. They don’t have to live in downtown New York. They commute out to Greenwich, and they wrongly think that this is someone else’s problem, that, “Oh, this is only going to happen to poor folks in Arkansas and Ohio and Pennsylvania,” when in reality, I can’t tell you how many people I know who have been touched by it.

This crisis touches everyone, no matter how rich or poor, famous or obscure, white, black, Hispanic, man or woman. You have family at school with a few kids, and one of the kids is older and just makes one small bad mistake. Doesn’t even think that he’s taking something serious, and it’s laced with fentanyl. Or he brings it home, and his third grade brother and their friends having a sleepover get into it. It is a crisis unlike any past drug epidemic we’ve faced, just because it’s so deadly and a growing presence — near-ubiquity — of drugs on our streets or drugs that are sold in social media companies, that are being passed off as simple pills. Pills that some people might otherwise have prescriptions for. So, it really can touch anyone. …

And unfortunately, I’ve seen that so many times over and over again in my work on this issue over the years. And the scale is just astonishing. As I frequently say to audiences, like I said this last week. Someone asked me what we should do about the fentanyl coming in from Mexico because, at this point, it’s almost all Mexican-originated.

And I said, “You know what? Rather than let me tell you what I think we should do, let me just ask you what you think we should do. Let me frame it like this. We’ve lost over a hundred thousand Americans to fentanyl every year for the last several years. It’s almost twice what we lost in Vietnam. Every year, year after year after year, it’s almost what we’ve lost in every war combined since the Second World War. That’s the scale of this crisis. And all this all comes from Mexico.

So let me ask you: If al Qaeda or ISIS set up shop in Juarez or Tijuana or Monterrey, and they were killing more than a hundred thousand Americans every year, year after year after year, what would you do? What would you expect your government to do on behalf of our nation? And whatever that is, whatever it is you should you think we would do to ISIS and al Qaeda, those circumstances, I suggest that’s what we should do to these cartels.”

Washington Examiner: Is there any bipartisan political will at all in the Senate or in Congress as a whole to do something?

Cotton: Yes. But as a whole, Democrats are unwilling to take tough steps to crack down on fentanyl abuse. I’ll just give you one example. I’ve got a bill that would permanently schedule all fentanyl analogs under the Controlled Substance Act. That’s the main federal drug control law. The main way people are charged with, imprisoned for drug trafficking. Fentanyl [is] scheduled. Its analogs are under emergency orders temporarily scheduled. And those have been extended by periodic acts of Congress. Usually, it’s extending bills.

So rather than go through this rigmarole and create this uncertainty, I’ve introduced legislation that would just permanently schedule all these things. That way, we don’t have to worry about Congress always keeping its act together. We don’t have to worry about justice policy at the Department of Justice. The Democrats say they support that. They never allowed it to go forward, though, either in committee or in the Senate, because they want something in return. If we’re going to pass a bill that increases penalties on fentanyl analogs, “Well, you got to give us something in return that softens penalties elsewhere that goes easier on crime in some other way.” So unless they can offset it with something that is soft on crime, they’re not going to pass something they perceive as tough on crime. …

Washington Examiner: And American companies still taking cotton from that region from slave labor camps?

Cotton: Today, it is pretty well known where slave labor cotton is coming from; I know that a lot of people want to make a buck in China, but for goodness’ sake, I mean, making it off of slave labor from people who have been disappeared and interned and are going through reeducation camps? You’d think there’s at least some decency underlining these business executives.

Washington Examiner: Anything I’m not asking of you about China that you think is important?

Cotton: I can go on and on about military competition and security threats. However, I think it’s important to focus on how much China affects our immediate day-to-day lives here in America. Our relationship with China has created what I call a China lobby, a massive China lobby in defense of China. You can go back and look at the news reports at the time, but I think it was late 2019, early 2020, right before the pandemic, China’s chief trade negotiator was going into the White House to meet with President Trump about concluding his so-called phase one trade deal.

And I think he met that morning or maybe the previous day across the park at the Hay Adams with senior executives of all the major Wall Street financial institutions, basically asking them to go to lobby on China’s behalf. I don’t know if they did or not, but they did just interrupt talking about the China lobby. My former governor asked me repeatedly early in the Trump era to meet with the Chinese consul general from Houston in Arkansas, and I declined. I said, “I’m perfectly capable of meeting with their ambassador or meeting with him in Washington, but when I’m home from legislative session, I want to spend my time meeting with Arkansans, not these people.”

And he asked, again, like I said, he asked repeatedly, and then finally said, “Well, meeting in Washington doesn’t really hit their protocol, and Houston is the consulate that manages investment into Arkansas. And that’s why I want you to be there.” I was like, “Well, then, of course I’m not going to do that.” Because obviously, what was happening is the Chinese consul general is probably going to imply threats of withdrawing investment from Arkansas if I didn’t pipe down about China. Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that. And most of those promises anyway were just ephemeral. And in fact, one of their big so-called investments, they never really put any money behind. It was always speculative, and it never went forward.

I’ll just give you another example. I know someone who went to a boarding school in the Midwest, and back in those days, it is a day-trip boarding school. Somewhere three to five hours away where you can send your kids. You can still drive and see them, though, for a big event, or they can drive home for a long weekend if they’re 16 or over, that sort of thing, as opposed to one of the New England boarding schools where you send them off and don’t see them until Christmas, and so it’s almost entirely populated by just ordinary kids from the surrounding four, five states.

Fast-forward 25 years for the reunion, a sizable number of the current student population are Chinese nationals. Not Chinese Americans, Chinese nationals. Well, first off, you don’t get to come to America and go to boarding school unless you’re somehow connected to the Chinese Communist Party or the People’s Liberation Army. So as you see with colleges, students pay up at college a lot everywhere. All those Chinese nationals, I will assure you, are paying full-freight tuition. They did not get financial aid because their parents are working class or poor. They didn’t get anything paid off because they’re good at hockey or they’re good at football. Full-freight tuition-paying students, who probably in no small occurrence help the budget of that school. Well, what does that do — not just to the headmaster and board of that school, but to the local mayor and city council and the county executive and the County Board of Directors and the Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Committee? What do they do when they talk to their congressman? There’s probably a pretty good chance that they ask them to cool it on the China talk.

It has already happened [in] every state all around the country. I mean, look at, why were Chinese spies hanging around with Eric Swalwell back when he was a local politician? They’re out there, trying to cultivate rising politicians. So when they get to Washington, they’ve already got a relationship with them. And oftentimes, it’s just unwitting.

I’m not saying that the China lobby is full of big communists. Oftentimes, it’s unwitting, and you get people invested in smooth, tranquil China relations, and they become a de facto lobbyist for you.

Now again, I don’t really have much of a problem if someone’s directly lobbying for something that they perceive in their interests, even if I disagree with them — if a manufacturer from Arkansas has or is wholly dependent on inputs from China, and as was the case on occasion, they came and urged me to help them get exemptions from Trump’s tariffs. Not to say that I agree with them or I will do that, but I understand that because it’s directly in their interest. But I do have a problem with big multinationals or banks or what have you who are deeply invested in China, and they come in and lobby us not on what’s in their interest, but on basically being a lobbyist and lawyer on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s one thing that you tell me you want to trade in China, but you’re coming in and tell me to pipe down about Hong Kong, pipe down about slave labor? I mean, give me a break. I mean, it is like a foreign policy analog of what happens with these politically correct left-wing CEOs in America.

Take Delta, for instance. If Delta wants to lobby the Georgia legislature about a tax break for jet fuel, that’s fine. I mean, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I don’t have a problem with that. If they want to come to Washington and complain that they’re not getting enough slots under the Open Sky Treaty in Europe and the Middle East, that’s fine. Their government is here to represent them and make sure they get fair treatment under that treaty.

But don’t come out and tell the Georgia legislature what to do about election law, though. That’s not your lane. You have nothing to say about that. Doesn’t affect your interest, and you have tons of employees who disagree with what you say.

But this is how the China lobby works. It’s an analog to that situation. You build up these dependencies among certain constituencies in America, and then you turn into the lobbyists, not just for their specific interests and relationship with China, but for China in general. Like, “Hey, we’ve got the specific interests, but we want you to not rock the boat on all these other issues related to China because we don’t want to imperil that specific interest.”

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