Whats A Uyghur?: GOP Presidential Candidate Unaware Of Tortured Ethnic Group In China

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.”

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 defending his question and then praising Trump for giving “excellent” answers to his other questions, calling the then-presidential candidate “the best interview in America” and saying he hoped he’d come back on his show.

In the last few years, Hewitt has hosted interviews with Trump almost entirely to lavish him with praise , telling the former president in 2021 how much everyone loves him and asking him questions like whether it’s true that he saved Christmas.

Joe Walsh, a former GOP congressman and former radio host for Salem Radio Network, the same Christian-based network that hosts Hewitt’s show, said it was “completely” understood at the network that saying negative things about Trump could get you fired.

“I was one of Salem’s rising stars,” Walsh said. “I was very critical of Trump. Even though I voted for him in 2016, every time I criticized him on the radio, I’d get a talking-to.”

Walsh, whose show was canceled in 2019 when he announced a presidential bid, said he expected to lose his show anyway because he regularly criticized Trump, and Salem executives had made it clear that all of their syndicated hosts “had to line up” in support of him.

“So guys like Hugh Hewitt,” he added, “they fell right in line, baby.”