Caring About Genocide in China Isn’t a ‘Luxury Belief’

Especially for a billionaire who is able to do more than most

Earlier this week, Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire venture capitalist and part owner of the Golden State Warriors, ignited controversy with blunt comments about the Uyghur genocide on his podcast, All-In. If you want to hear all the comments in context, you can watch them here. I’ve cued the video to the moment when the relevant conversation starts.

If you don’t want to click, here’s the exchange that triggered the most outrage:

Palihapitiya: Nobody cares about it. Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care and I think—

Co-host Jason Calacani: What do you mean, nobody cares?

Palihapitiya: The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard—

Calacani: You’re saying you [undecipherable] don’t care?

Palihapitiya: I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay? Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line, okay? Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line.

Twitter users spliced the interview into videos focusing on that section, but I’ve seen enough mistaken-outrage cycles to know that there might be more, that the section could somehow be misleading. So I watched it all, and the context doesn’t really help.

The most charitable possible explanation for his remarks is that he was describing a hard reality—that most folks (including him) simply don’t care about atrocities abroad and that he’s far more concerned about injustice here at home. Here’s another key exchange:

Palihapitiya: And I think a lot of people believe that, and I’m sorry if that’s a hard truth to hear, but every time I say that I care about the Uyghurs, I’m really just lying if I don’t really care. And so I’d rather not lie to you, and tell you the truth—it’s not a priority for me.

Calacani: And my response to that is I think it’s a sad state of affairs when human rights as a concept globally, you know, falls beneath tactical and strategic issues that we have to have.

Palihapitiya: That’s another luxury belief! That’s another luxury belief!

Calacani: I don’t believe believing in the human declaration of human rights that Eleanor Roosevelt is—

Palihapitiya: It’s a luxury belief!

Calacani: I don’t think it’s a luxury belief to believe that all humans should have a basic set of human rights.

Palihapitiya: I think it’s a luxury belief, and the reason I think it’s a luxury belief is we don’t do enough domestically to actually express that view in real tangible ways. So, until we actually clean up our own house, the idea that we step outside of our borders with, you know, with us sort of, like, morally virtue-signaling about somebody else’s human-rights track record is deplorable.

While the first segment is outrageous, the second segment is interesting, and by “interesting” I don’t mean that I agree. But his comments about luxury beliefs are worth unpacking in some detail. (My Atlantic colleague Conor Friedersdorf also weighed in with a characteristically thoughtful piece.)

If you’re not familiar with the term, it was coined by Rob Henderson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, and it refers to “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.”

An example of a luxury belief would be supporting a movement to defund the police when you live in a privately guarded, gated community. You’ve ensured your own security, yet you advocate a position that would diminish security in less-privileged neighborhoods.

A number of educational reforms—including eliminating gifted-and-talented programs and standardized testing—are also often luxury beliefs. Wealthy, connected advocates have no trouble securing a top-tier education for their kids while ending the testing or other opportunities that middle-class and working-class kids of all races have used for years as a means to achieve their educational dreams.

I see luxury beliefs in play in Palihapitiya’s comments, but not in the way he suggests. He’s the one guilty of the harmful stand.

Palihapitiya is a serious investor in an NBA team, and the NBA has billions of dollars at stake in China. And the NBA is just one of many large, wealthy American corporations that do an immense amount of business in the People’s Republic. For these individuals and corporations, the consequences of their beliefs and actions are inflicted on the suffering Uyghurs, abandoned by the very people and companies who can directly impose a cost on China for its monstrous crimes.

Thanks in part to massive, continued American investment, China gets to enjoy the fruits of both prosperity and oppression. It can deliver economic progress and cultural vitality to its citizens at the same time that it wields a free, brutal hand to crush actual and even potential political or religious dissent.

Make no mistake, China’s crimes are monstrous. China has inflicted mass detention, torture, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and reeducation that is resulting in, among other things, a catastrophic decline in the Uyghur birth rate. An entire ethnicity and culture is dying a slow death. Yet still American corporations invest billions in the Chinese economy.

If the toll is on the Uyghurs, where is the status? It comes from the attack on American injustices. Make no mistake, I’m no apologist for American injustice, but righteous activism against America’s flaws while your business interests reap the benefits of investment with a nation that is likely the world’s worst abuser of human rights is the very definition of a luxury belief. Palihapitiya and his corporate partners are attaining and retaining status here at home while enabling ghastly abuses abroad.

America is an imperfect nation, but there is no moral equivalence between China and the United States. Nothing remotely like the Uyghur genocide is happening on these shores. And it is appalling to see corporations like Palihapitiya’s NBA, Disney, and others not just refuse to take the actions that say they’ve heard the words “never again” but affirmatively yield to Chinese pressures and demands.

When genocides are distant, it’s hard for ordinary folks to know how to care. If I’m selling cars in Nashville or teaching biology in Tallahassee, what can I do? You can grieve the lives lost. You can use your voice to join the millions of others who demand that our government and multinational corporations impose consequences for China’s crimes. But it’s hard to feel like you have a direct impact.

Not so for Palihapitiya. He’s a billionaire investor in a company that is presently engaged in one of the world’s most prominent business relationships with the People’s Republic. He has real skin in this game. He can make a stand where his voice can matter, in a company that matters. China should understand that it cannot commit crimes against humanity while also reaping the considerable rewards of mass-scale cultural and economic exchange with the United States.

After his remarks exploded across the internet (and the Warriors explicitly distanced themselves from his words), Palihapitiya issued a statement. “In re-listening to this week’s podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy,” he wrote. “I acknowledge that entirely. As a refugee, my family fled a country with its own set of human rights issues so this is something that is very much a part of my lived experience. To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.”

Yes, they do matter, and when one has invested millions in a league that does billions of dollars of business in China, perhaps empathy should lead to action. Otherwise even this new statement does nothing but express Palihapitiya’s own “luxury beliefs.”

Is Trump on a path to prosecution?

I’ve been busy today! I’ve also got a piece up on The Atlantic homepage analyzing the meaning behind Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s request for a special grand jury to investigate Donald Trump’s potential “criminal disruption” of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. I urge you to read the entire thing, but here’s a preview:

Yesterday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sent a letter to the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court requesting to empanel a special grand jury “for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.”

The request was triggered by the reluctance of key witnesses, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to cooperate without being subpoenaed to testify. The special-purpose grand jury wouldn’t have the power to bring indictments, but it “may make recommendations concerning criminal prosecution as it shall see fit.”

With this letter, Willis brought back to the fore the actions surrounding the 2020 election contest by former President Donald Trump that are most suspect under both state and federal criminal law. The district attorney seeks a special grand jury with good reason, as Trump appears to have crossed the line into outright illegality, and that behavior merits a serious and thorough criminal investigation.

Since last winter, the public has focused much of its attention on the violent right-wing terror attack on the Capitol on January 6. And this is understandable. But the truth is that the most compelling evidence of Trump’s criminality lies in his actions before that day. And nowhere is his misconduct more clearly documented than in the state of Georgia.

Click through for the legal analysis. I don’t know if Trump will be indicted, but the very existence of the continued investigation is a victory for the rule of law. It’s a tangible way of demonstrating that Trump is no king, and even county attorneys possess the tools to probe the actions of a person who was once the most powerful man in the world.