Miami Mayor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez, who questioned what Uyghurs are on Tuesday, was backed by donors who once brushed off the plight of the Uighurs.
Tech billionaire Chamas Palihapitiya, who donated $250,000 to Suarez’s 2021 re-election campaign, said: according to He told the Miami Herald that in 2022, “nobody cares what’s going on with the Uighurs.” Suarez looked baffled Tuesday when radio host Hugh Hewitt asked him about his foreign policy stance toward China and treatment of Uyghurs. (Related: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez Petitions to Run for President in 2024)
“What are Uyghurs?” Suarez asked.
“Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uighurs in China,” Suarez said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday. “They are enslaved because of their beliefs. China has a sad history of human rights, and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize it. It’s my fault.”
A Suarez campaign spokesperson added in a statement to the DCNF that “there is no donor by that name.”
Parihapitiya’s last donation was part of Suarez’s effort to “convince Silicon Valley to reboot it in South Florida,” the Miami Herald reported at the time.
“Nobody cares what’s going on with the Uighurs, it’s okay. You bring it up because you care, and I think it’s great that you care.” The rest of us don’t care I’m telling you a very harsh and ugly truth Of all the things I care about yes it’s below my standards ,” Palihapitiya said on the 2022 podcast All In.
According to a report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the Chinese government places Uyghurs, a Muslim minority who reside primarily in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in concentration camps and torture them through physical and sexual abuse. .There is also evidence that China is committing crimes Genocide It denies the allegations against the Uyghurs.
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Suarez announced his candidacy for president on June 15.
“I’m going to run for president. I’m going to run for your children and my children,” Suarez said in an announcement video for the election campaign. “Now is the time for us to give them the future they deserve. It’s time to take things into our own hands. It’s time to start things.”
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