CLAY: We have got the Winter Olympics officially underway early this morning — I’m sure some of you had it on — and I want to play a couple of clips here. First of all, Nancy Pelosi yesterday encouraged every American athlete to effectively “shut up and dribble” while they are in China and not stand up against the genocide, not stand up against the lack of basic human rights, not stand up against any of the atrocities currently being committed by the Chinese government.

Here was our speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

PELOSI: I would say to our athletes, “You’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless. I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there. I respect that. But I also worry about what the Chinese government might do to their reputations, to their families.

Nancy Pelosi tells American athletes not to speak out on any Chinese genocide or human rights issues while they are at the Olympics. Maybe she can be the next NBA commissioner too? pic.twitter.com/oyTY74VPhJ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 4, 2022

CLAY: Buck, here’s the question that I think is worthy of debate here. What in the world could China do — given all of the eyes of the world upon the Olympics — if an American athlete in some way attempted to draw attention to China’s human rights abuses. First of all, I think the cowardice is not what America stands for, and if you’re gonna argue as Nancy Pelosi and many others have, “Oh, we need athletes to use their platform!

“We need them to not shut up and dribble.” Most of the time when they are speaking out, American athletes are, in America, they get rewarded for it. Colin Kaepernick went and made far more money off the field than he ever would have on the field. Every American athlete who has embraced left-wing talking points has been rewarded by American corporations for ripping American institutions and issues.

What it really takes — what true bravery would require — is speaking truth when you have a risk involved. That’s courage, and I don’t think China would be willing to do anything. You’d probably get kicked out of the country, but for an American official like Nancy Pelosi to be encouraging Americans to say nothing about what is going on in China.

To me, this is one of the biggest failures of my life in terms of the intersection of sports and politics, that we own showed up in China in the first place given the lies that they’ve spread about covid and given the fact that I think they created covid in a lab and allowed it to spread throughout the entire world.

BUCK: There are a lot of very uncomfortable realities that we are all going to have to face about China sooner or later, and sooner will definitely be better than later because of what the implications will be. And one of them, Clay, is that you have the second most powerful country in the world — let’s be honest about this — that is essentially a Mafia state.

It’s run by roughly a thousand members, give or take, of the Chinese Communist Party. They have all the power, make all decisions. And of course, at the very the top, Xi Jinping, who’s effectively a dictator. But he has an entourage, if you will, of CCP officials who just do whatever they want. There is no constitution. There’s no rights.

And they have nuclear weapons, over a billion people, and they’re the second most powerful country in the world right now. And this is — in many ways — a challenge that I think will be even more difficult than what we’ve faced with the Soviets because at least with the Soviets while they were very aggressive and it was an evil empire, you didn’t have the elites in this country on the take.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You had elites were aligned ideologically with communism and you go back and can even see Walter Duranty denying the Holodomor, denying famine across the Soviet saying, “Oh, things are going great there,” right? I believe he got a Pulitzer, by the way — a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times back in the day. And you have people that were ideologically invested in communism.

But today you have the most powerful elites in this country making a lot of money off of China in one way or another. Find me the biggest investment bank, find me the biggest companies, and I’ll show you enormous business interests in China — and particularly on the media and entertainment side, right? We see this in sports; we see this with how you can’t even be an American NBA coach who is the gentleman who spoke out, Clay, for Houston Rockets?

CLAY: General manager Daryl Morey said he supported freedom in Hong Kong and the entire world came undone and the NBA basically, the entire league shut up and dribbled and said, “Sorry, Chairman Xi, that we were in any way disrespectful of you. We apologize,” effectively.

BUCK: Yeah. I mean, during the Cold War Americans knew that we had a problem. Now, there were elites who as I said were ideologically involved and there were penetrations of the U.S. government. You can go read about the Venona Project. There’s detailed intercepts about how much communism was infiltrating this country.

But, Clay, if you were a professional athlete — if you were a red-blooded American of any substance and profile in America — you could speak out against the Soviet Union and not suffer consequences! No one was worried your business was going to be attacked or go under, and so I think as we see this with China, they covered up, the released one way or the other…

I think Fauci is now trying to say “zoonotic” again because there’s be going to be the desperate rewriting of history by the whole Fauci apparatus. But we see what’s going on. We have to say, “So China can engage in concentration camp policies and even genocide against the Uyghur minority, can be a totalitarianism, can essentially consume freedom — can just chew it up and spit it out in Hong Kong.”

If you go back in recent history even with the Great Famine under Mao, tens of millions of people were killed by the Chinese government who were Chinese! Never been any reckoning with this. This is a regime that is evil. They released a virus on the world that killed millions of people, whether intentionally, unintentionally. I think it was unintentional, but I think the research was very intentional into that virus.

CLAY: And, by the way, may have been done with our tax dollars which is why Fauci really needs to answer legitimate questions and why we need to a red tide in 2022 to actually hold him accountable.

BUCK: Nancy Pelosi is going out there and telling our athletes, “Shut up, bend the knee, go out there on your ice skates and smile,” and you just wonder why. Pelosi’s such a coward. Think about this. She’s like 80 years old. She’s third in line for the presidency. Have some chutzpah! Have some something!

CLAY: And look, I am so insanely disappointed ’cause I started saying a couple of years ago… As soon as covid happened, Buck, on my sports show I said, “We cannot go to Beijing and bow down and do the Winter Olympics.” And my suggestion was, “Hey, Park City is phenomenal, right? We had the Winter Olympics there before. Why don’t we have our own Winter Olympics in the United States?

Xi: (speaking Chinese)

GUTHRIE: (music) That was quite provocative. It’s a statement from the Chinese President Xi Jinping to choose an athlete from the Uyghur minority. It is an in-your-face response to those Western nations — including the U.S. — who have called Chinese treatment of that group genocide and diplomatically boycotted these games. There will be much discussion about this!

CLAY: Hey, it is a genocide. It hasn’t been “called” a genocide, okay? This is significant because what Savannah is doing there on NBC is an embarassment. She is taking the Chinese line. If you listen to exactly what she was saying on American television, she said it has been “called” a genocide. It has not been called a genocide. It is a genocide, and she is saying, “Oh, look, there’s this Uyghur minority who is part of the Chinese opening ceremonies!

“This is a response to allegations it’s being called genocide.” No, no, no, no, no. This was China trying to get propaganda out into the world, and they did it. Buck, I tweeted this out about an hour ago on Twitter. You can go in and see exactly what is occurring here. Chinese bots are active on social media. You know this; I know this.

China unleashed covid from a lab, lies about it to the rest of the world, and now the entire globe shows up for the Winter Olympics in Beijing. This is one of the greatest acts of cowardice in my life. Pathetic on all accounts. The entire world should be ashamed.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 4, 2022

Immediately in the comments, Buck? A ton of Chinese bots attacking my opinion on the Olympics. It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful.

BUCK: This is how they do things over there, folks. I mean, when I went to… Have you been to China?

CLAY: I’ve never been. No.

BUCK: I was in… You could imagine —

CLAY: Probably can’t get in anytime soon.

BUCK: As a former CIA officer and fringe media personality, it took quite a while for me to get a visa. They were asking for a lot of documentation and proof about what I was going to do there and just like so many other people I’m told to go in their essentially sterile, they’ll call it, meaning you don’t bring any digital anything about you. You cannot bring your phone. Don’t even bring a Kindle. I said, “Really? They’re gonna…?”

“Oh, yes. If it can upload and download and has electrons flowing through it, they will try things,” and the fact that this has been able to happen… I mean, understand, everybody: The elites in this country, the bipartisan consensus sketching back for about 30 years, as dumb as this sounds, has been saying, “If we just let China get wealthier, it will become more free.

“If we just let them engage in our markets and we do everything we have to bring to China,” and bringing them out of poverty has been a remarkable success, actually. But they haven’t gotten more free, Clay. The people in charge are just rich now and really powerful in China. So it didn’t work out the way they were told it would.

CLAY: Our policy failed.

BUCK: Yep.

CLAY: And now we are bending the knee. Even the Speaker of the House is telling our own athletes: Don’t draw attention. Savannah Guthrie embarrassingly on NBC pretending that it’s just a made-up genocide effectively. It’s a shameful embarrassment that this is where our country is. It feels, Buck, to me a lot like 1936, the Olympics that we had in Nazi Germany.