President Biden flew to Wisconsin to conduct a CNN-televised town hall before a crowd of a mere 50 people in downtown Milwaukee's landmark Pabst Theatre.  The Pabst, as it is known, is the fourth-oldest continuously operating theater in America, an opulent auditorium seating 1,300 that has hosted performances by the likes of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Laurence Olivier.  The grandeur of the setting was not exactly matched by the rhetoric that followed.

Asked by Anderson Cooper to comment on the plight of the Uyghurs, Biden at first mouthed a cliché — albeit something positive — before trailing off:

We must speak up for human rights.  It's who we are.  We can't — my comment to him was — and I know him well, and he knows me well.  We're — a two-hour conversation.

When Cooper asked him if he had actually spoken to Xi about the Uyghurs, Biden started spouting CCP talking points before dissolving into an incoherent word salad.  Watch:

BREAKING: Joe Biden spreads direct CCP talking points when asked about Xi Jinping’s genocide of the Uyghurs pic.twitter.com/WQrpcVpJQg

— Underground Truckroad Poso ЁЯЪЫ (@JackPosobiec) February 17, 2021

Official transcript:

I talked about this, too.  And that's not so much refugee, but I talked about — I said — look, you know, Chinese leaders — if you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been — the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven't been unified at home.  So the central — to vastly overstate it — the central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China.  And he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that.

I point out to him: No American President can be sustained as a President if he doesn't reflect the values of the United States.  And so the idea I'm not going to speak out against what he's doing in Hong Kong, what he's doing with the Uyghurs in western mountains of China and Taiwan, trying to end the One China policy by making it forceful — I said — and by the — he said he — he gets it.  Culturally, there are different norms that each country and they — their leaders — are expected to follow. 

Photo credit: Twitter video screen grab.