Miami mayor and 2024 Republican presidential contender Francis Suarez, who questioned what a Uyghur is Tuesday, was previously backed by a donor who once dismissed the plight of Uyghurs.
Tech billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya, who donated $250,000 to Suarez’s reelection campaign in 2021, according to the Miami Herald, said in 2022 that “nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs.” Suarez appeared stumped Tuesday when radio host Hugh Hewitt asked him about his foreign policy stance on China and its treatment of the Uyghurs. (RELATED: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez Files To Run For President In 2024)
“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked.
“Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China,” Suarez said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday. “They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used. That’s on me.”
“We don’t have a donor by that name,” a spokesperson for Suarez’s campaign added in the statement to the DCNF.
Palihapitiya’s previous donation was part of Suarez’s effort to “woo Silicon Valley to reboot in South Florida,” the Miami Herald reported at the time.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay. You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line,” Palihapitiya told the “All-In” podcast in 2022.
The Chinese government has placed Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority largely located in the Xinjiang province of China, into internment camps, where they torture them through physical and sexual abuse, according to a United Nations Human Rights Committee report. There’s also evidence that China has been committing genocide against the Uyghurs, but the Chinese government denies the allegations.
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Suarez announced his bid for president June 15.
“I’m going to run for president. I’m going to run for your children and mine,” Suarez said in his campaign announcement video. “It’s time we give them the future they deserve. It’s time to take things into our own hands. It’s time to get things started.”
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