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GOP Xenophobia: Tom Cotton Wants to Prohibit Teaching Chinese Exchange Students Science

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Leave it to the GOP to go full nativist xenophobic with respect to this disease and the fact that it appears to have arisen out of China. Today, Senator Tom Cotton, one of the Trumpiest of the GOP senators went further than any GOP politician so far. Cotton proposed that we not allow Chinese university or graduate students to come to the United States to study science.

“If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare & the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing” — Sen. Tom Cotton proposes restricting Chinese students from studying science & tech at US universities.

That is stunningly condescending. Cotton proposes to tell an entire nation’s people “what they need to learn from America, “they don’t need to learn quantum computing,” as if the Chinese don’t do their own STEM research quite well, indeed in some ways better than us. Someone needs to teach Tom Cotton that Shakespeare wasn’t American. Moreover, this nation has gained tremendously from students who came from foreign lands to study science and chose to stay rather than return home.

Cotton’s comments went over as you might have imagined:

Yes, we understand why they’re doing it. We just wish that we had moved beyond this tactic already.

Not in the Republican mind. In the Republican mind, only one of those could be true, and it must be China which is to be punished, not our dear leader.

Always seems to be.

Despite Cotton saying stupid and xenophobic things, Cotton is not at all dumb. He is far too smart for his own good. Think about all the things wrong with Trump, but with 10x the brain power, and that would be Tom Cotton.

We should continue to expect more anti-China language from now until we have turned a corner on this disease, because Republicans will do anything to get the pressure off Trump. But as we’ve reported previously, Trump must be careful. He has to worry about the trade agreement with China that he’s trying to protect. Moreover, Trump owes the bank of China tens of millions of dollars, due two years from now, and Trump would likely prefer to do “favors” for China to get out of some of the harsher terms of the loan rather than play hardball.

But, we can expect the rest of the GOP to point the finger right at China, and China alone. They want us to forget Trump’s missteps.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter

 

Jason Miciak
meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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