On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) argued that the cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo used for electric vehicles should be treated the same way as blood diamonds were before, and the only difference between blood diamonds and cobalt mined by child slave labor in the DRC is that the cobalt is backed by a political agenda.
Van Orden stated, “[W]e’ve got 21st-century slavery that is being financed by the United States government by giving people tax rebates to buy electric vehicles. … This can be stopped by changing a couple policies and making sure that we are not buying cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo as long as they’re using children to mine it.”
He added, “Well, let me remind everybody of the blood diamond movement. When Sierra Leone was in a civil war, they were using children to mine diamonds and they were banned throughout the world and everyone was on board with that. … Now, the difference is this: A diamond is a luxury commercial item and it has no type of agenda behind it other than a luxury item. The problem with cobalt is, is that there’s an ideological bent by the Democrat[ic] Party to push the Green New Deal forward and they’re willing to do that at the expense of having children working in the conditions of slavery. So, if we just redid the blood diamond policy, we will not accept cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more importantly, we’re going to start slow-rolling this arbitrary date of 2030, of having all vehicles produced in the United States of America being electric vehicles. It’s an unrealistic goal that I swear the Biden administration just threw a dart at a calendar and said, 2030’s it.”
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