Clay Travis wondered whether the hidden hand of Disney, ESPN’s parent company, might have been behind this segment. Disney values its access to China’s market verrrrrry highly, after all. Would anyone put it past them to air Chinese propaganda on the Uyghur genocide in their U.S. programming in order to curry favor?

But that’s not what’s going on in the clip below. For one thing, a premeditated whitewash of Chinese human rights abuses wouldn’t begin the way this segment does, with a mention of the G-word. But beyond that, we saw recently that for a certain sort of left-wing bien pensant, whataboutism that equates China’s persecution of minorities with injustices in the U.S. is a badge of supreme wokeness. What starker way is there to signal how much you despise red states’ efforts to tighten voting requirements than to draw a moral equivalence to the horrors in Xinjiang?

Any progressive rando can lazily parrot the line that reducing early voting from three weeks to two is “the new Jim Crow.” Those who really care are willing to compare it to actual concentration camps.

Maybe that’s the new endpoint on the spectrum of American wokeness. There’s woke, then there’s extremely woke, then ludicrously woke, and finally anti-anti-genocide.

Congrats to J.A. Adande on having achieved that exalted degree of social enlightenment, and to his co-panelists on declining to challenge him over it. Who can blame them? Interrupting to complain that mass internment on the basis of religion isn’t morally the same as asking for proof of ID prior to voting would have earned them a reprimand about being insensitive to the hardships minorities in America face. Sometimes a commitment to social justice means biting your tongue when someone around you undertakes to hand-wave away genocide.

I wonder if Adande will issue the same sort of half-assed, obviously insincere quasi-apology that Chamath Palihapitiya did after he caught flak for admitting that he doesn’t care what happens to the Uyghurs. I’m guessing not. Palihapitiya did that because he has big money riding on ensuring there’s no public backlash to his businesses. All Adande stands to lose from his moral equivalence is potentially no longer getting to appear on ESPN’s inane carousel o’ takes. And he probably won’t even lose that. It’s not like being soft on China is a liability at Disney.

.@jadande talks about reconciling watching the Beijing Winter Olympics amid China's human rights crisis pic.twitter.com/mqkOygjBXV

— Around The Horn (@AroundtheHorn) February 4, 2022