Nancy Pelosi goes bonkers. "Go back to China," she tells peace activists.
Pelosi has refused to meet with Code Pink for sixteen years.
When I was a young activist protesting the war in Vietnam it was not unusual to be heckled.
“Get a job,” or “Go back to Russia” I would often hear.
They were stupid slurs.
It didn’t matter that I came from a working class family or that I myself had held a job since I was 15 years old.
As for “going back to Russia,” my birthplace was the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion.
Don’t be fooled by the name. I didn’t live in any mansion. Strawberry Mansion was, and remains, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philly.
And my mansion was just a row house on Natrona Street.
So, as if emerging from some kind of time warp, there was former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi waving her hand dismissively at Code Pink activists and telling them to ‘‘go back to China.”
It was pure Red-baiting shit. She would have made Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn proud.
Code Pink is made up of women peace activists who are among those in this country opposed to U.S. military support for Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank.
Code Pink members have been trying to meet for years with Pelosi, unsuccessfully.
What does that have to do with China?
Maybe Pelosi got the China thing from a hit piece that the NY Times ran last year.
Or maybe Pelosi is just bonkers about China.
A 2022 visit to Taiwan, intended to provoke China, only served to worsen relations between the United States and China.
In a New Yorker interview at the time with Shelley Rigger, a professor of political science at Davidson College and the author of the books “Why Taiwan Matters” and “The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China’s Economic Rise,” Professor Rigger explained:
Initially, Pelosi’s goal was almost certainly to do a little cheerleading for Taiwan, show that the U.S. cares about it, that we’re paying attention, and that it’s an important friend and partner—that kind of thing. But, once it became this test of wills between Pelosi and her team and Xi Jinping and his team, whether or not it was good for Taiwan fell away, and it strictly became something that people in the U.S. and China were talking about, saying we had to do this because we cannot back down. And I think that’s very unfortunate. It does not benefit Taiwan, probably does harm to Taiwan’s security, and it has insured that U.S.-China relations, which were already pretty bad, are worse than they were before.
What a piece of work Pelosi is.