Florida Republican congressman Mike Waltz will not alter an ad criticizing China that NBC refused to run during its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Waltz's ad highlights the Chinese Communist Party's ongoing "atrocities" against Uyghur Muslims and labels the Beijing Olympics the "Genocide Games." It also calls out major U.S. companies for sponsoring the event, accusing the likes of Visa and Coca-Cola of being "drunk on Chinese dollars" and "entangled with communist dictators." But NBC refused to run the spot without significant changes, citing its "long-standing advertising guidelines."
Still, Waltz is not backing down. His office contends that the ad does not violate NBC's guidelines, and the Republican has no plans to alter it.
"These corporations that want to preach social justice here at home—they want to boycott baseball in Georgia but then completely turn a blind eye when it comes to the millions of Muslims in concentration camps and slave labor," Waltz said during a Monday Fox News appearance. "It's hypocrisy that we're going to call out."
Waltz's spat with NBC comes after the network's top talent peddled Chinese propaganda during the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
When Chinese leaders selected a Uyghur athlete to light the Olympic torch, for example, Today Show coanchor Savannah Guthrie called the move "an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of that group genocide." Just hours later, the Uyghur athlete in question, 20-year-old cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, violated International Olympic Committee rules by avoiding international journalists after she finished 43rd in her event.
In addition to Guthrie's remark, NBC commentators noted that the Chinese government "emphatically denies" all "accusations" of "a systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs."
"They say that accusations of genocide are the lie of the century," the network said during the opening ceremonies.
NBC has suffered a ratings disaster during this year's games. Just 16 million people watched Friday's opening ceremony, a record low. Just four years ago, 28.3 million people watched the event during the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.