Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) on Tuesday couldn’t say if he planned to use his 2024 presidential campaign to talk about China’s human rights abuses against its Uyghur population because he didn’t even know about it.
“Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?” conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Suarez during an interview.
“The what?” asked Suarez.
“The Uyghurs,” said Hewitt.
“What’s a Uyghur?” replied Suarez.
Hewitt pivoted to a question about immigration policy, but not before chiding Suarez for needing “to get smart” about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, the minority ethnic group in China that has been targeted for practicing Islam. The Chinese government has detained more than a million members of this and other Muslim groups, putting them into “reeducation centers” and subjecting them to forced labor, torture, rape and sterilization.
Suarez didn’t do himself any favors later in the interview, when he joked about the “homework” he needs to do to learn about the atrocities against the Uyghurs.
“I’ll look at what a — what was it, what did you call it, a Weeble?” he said, laughing, referring to the egg-shaped children’s roly-poly toys popular in the 1970s.
“The Uyghurs,” said Hewitt. “You really need to know about the Uyghurs, mayor. You’ve got to talk about it every day, OK?”
“I will search ‘Uyghurs,’” said Suarez. “I’m a good learner. I’m a fast learner.”
Mario Tama via Getty Images
Hewitt shouldn’t get too much credit for asking the Miami mayor a foreign policy question. He regularly fawns over his more high-profile Republican guests, particularly former President Donald Trump, and peppers them with softball questions.
Hewitt memorably stumped Trump in 2015 with a question about the leaders of major terrorist groups, which led to Trump lashing out at Hewitt as “a third-rate radio announcer.” The radio host responded by…
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