“Woke” Sports: Senator Challenges NBA Head Adam Silver About Deals With China

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

On the eve of the National Basketball Association’s All-Star game, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) requested answers from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver regarding the sports conglomerate’s relations with Communist China. Many critics have scorched Silver and NBA team owners and players for putting profit above principle in their craven dealings with the mass-murdering dictatorship in Beijing, while the organization has, at the same time, shamelessly engaged in politically correct virtue-signaling by supporting seemingly every anti-American “social justice” cause du jour.

However, when it comes to Adam Silver, it goes deeper than the mere pursuit of “the almighty dollar” or cowardice before the Chinese Communist Party and the social-justice mob. He gives every indication of being a committed one-worlder and is using the NBA brand to promote the pro-communist, globalist agenda.

Silver is a member of the premier globalist organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and is a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the foremost funders of subversion — political, economic, cultural, and moral — for the past century, not only in this country but around the world. He is also a veteran attendee and speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF), the globalist billionaires’ club that is pushing the panic button on the COVID “pandemic” and global warming to stampede the entire world population into the WEF’s centrally-planned “Great Reset.”

There’s more, as we will show below. But, in short, the wonderful game of basketball has been hijacked to promote a New World Disorder, and Adam Silver is one of the principal hijackers.

In a March 4 letter to Silver, Senator Blackburn first congratulated the commissioner on a successful beginning to the NBA’s 75th season and the upcoming All-Star Game on Sunday, March 7, in Atlanta. Then she got down to the real business of her missive. “I write in regards to the NBA’s new agreement with state-controlled China Central Television (CCTV) following a broadcasting ban during the 2019-20 season,” she said. “Recent media reporting highlighted that this weekend’s All-Star Game will commence the full-time return of CCTV airing NBA games.”

CCTV, of course, is a state-owned and fully controlled propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party CCP), which is why clear-eyed observers accurately refer to CCTV as Communist Central TV. The NBA, recall, was punished by Beijing in 2019 with a year-long broadcasting ban for the supposedly terrible offense of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey. What did Morey do that was so egregious in the eyes of the CCP overlords? He had the unmitigated gall to tweet seven unforgivable words: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

Social-justice Warriors (SJWs) or Socialist-injustice Wimps (SIWs)?
The horror of it! Swearing that this offense to its “national sovereignty and social stability” demanded justice, the CCP called on the NBA to fire Morey for verbally supporting Hong Kong’s heroic resistance to CCP totalitarianism. NBA superstar LeBron James infamously sided with the communist regime, demanding that Adam Silver punish Morey for the tweet. Instead, Silver defended (sort of, kind of) Morey’s right to free expression, while also trying to placate China, a multi-billion dollar revenue source for the NBA — which goes a long way toward explaining the NBA’s groveling before “Dear Leader” Xi Jinping.

“While investigations into the origin of COVID-19 continue in Wuhan, the NBA seems solely focused on mending its relationship with CCTV even though it’s clear Communist China will distort, censor or terminate any CCTV broadcast that is seen as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” Senator Blackburn wrote. “Multiple sources report that China hoarded protective equipment, destroyed test samples, silenced doctors and lied about the risk of human-to-human transmission.”

She then took aim at the NBA’s “goodwill” payoff to China of $1 million in PPEs and medical supplies:

On October 9, 2020 (almost a year to the exact day of Morey’s tweet), the NBA stated that the return to CCTV was a result of the continuous goodwill expressed by the NBA toward China’s communist government. It is safe to assume that “goodwill” included the $1 million in medical supplies the NBA sent to the CCP. China dominates PPE production worldwide, so it is deeply troubling that the NBA would send this aid, especially after witnessing the lack of transparency shown by the CCP throughout the entire pandemic and their continued grave human rights violations.

Senator Blackburn pointed out that 17 of the Chinese companies producing PPEs have been identified as using slave labor, mostly comprised of Muslim Uyghurs, against whom the Chinese government is committing genocide, according to human rights groups, the Canadian Parliament, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and various media organizations.

Where are LeBron James and his fellow NBA social-justice warrior millionaires in all of this? They, who are easily triggered into virtue signaling over every politically correct grievance, and who are quick to condemn American society as systemically racist, don’t seem to be moved at all by the fact that their business partners are committing genocide, the ultimate expression of racism. They who accuse white Americans today for the slavery practiced by a minority of white Americans generations ago apparently feel no empathy for those slaves suffering under China’s slavemasters today. Is it because Uyghur Lives Don’t Matter? Or is it that NBA wokeness has a price tag.

Senator Blackburn asked Silver if the NBA’s renewed lucrative relations with CCTV have come at the expense of accepting demands by Beijing for self-censorship of NBA players and management, “especially in regards to speaking on topics related to Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Xinjiang region.”

She also asked: “What role did NBA China’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Ma play in these negotiations? Given that Mr. Ma’s father Ma Guoli is a top executive for CCTV Sports, what involvement has the senior Mr. Ma played in these negotiations?”

Dodging Their Own Human-rights Issues

This is not the first time Senator Blackburn has crossed swords with the NBA over its cozy relationship with the mass-murdering communist dictatorship. Last June she sent a letter to Commissioner Silver requesting, among other concerns, that he address the issue of the NBA’s training academies for teen athletes in China, which have been hit with damning reports of shocking physical and mental abuse.

She asked Silver to provide answers to questions concerning the NBA’s financial arrangements with CCTV and its relationship with the China’s technology/e-commerce/investment conglomerate Alibaba. She also noted reports that the NBA continues to operate a training center in Xinjiang, “one of the world’s worst humanitarian zones.” Blackburn asked: “What steps is the NBA taking to shutter this location?”

Senator Blackburn was more than a little miffed that Silver did not respond to her letter himself, assigning that task to his underling, Mark Tatum. “It is inconceivable and disrespectful for Commissioner Silver to sidestep an issue that requires real leadership,” Blackburn said in a statement to Sports Illustrated. “The reply from Deputy Commissioner and Chief Operating Officer Mark Tatum lacks the appropriate concern and responsibility that should accompany congressional correspondence. These technical answers do not address the larger questions about whether there is a conflict between their financial decisions and professed values.”

The Silver-Rockefeller-NBA-China Connection
It is unlikely that Senator Blackburn will get a satisfactory response from Silver. As noted above, the commissioner is deeply plugged into the Deep State elitists who are hell-bent on driving all humanity into their Total State of Orwellian surveillance and control. Besides his previously mentioned bonafides with the CFR, WEF, and Rockefeller Foundation, Silver has also joined the billionaire super elite — Gates, Musk, Murdoch, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Sandberg, Buffett, et al. — at the annual exclusive Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. In addition, Commissioner Silver has been given the star treatment in virtually all of the left-stream establishment media. He was groomed for his current high-profile gig his entire career, first as an attorney in the elite New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore (Paul Cravath was one of the CFR founders a century ago and CS&M has remained a top CFR recruiting ground), then as understudy to “visionary” NBA chief David Stern (CFR), who hand-picked Silver as his successor.

One measure of Silver’s elite status is his television interview on The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations, the Bloomberg/PBS program that showcases the who’s who of world movers and shakers. Who is David Rubenstein? Well, he is “The Chairman of the Establishment,” a title that was previously bestowed on Wall Street kingpin David Rockefeller — and before him, John J. McCloy. Like Rockefeller and McCloy before him, Rubenstein is chairman of the CFR, as well as being a member of the David Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission. (It was mega-banker Rockefeller who famously opened the door to China — for the NBA and others — with his 1973 trip to Beijing and his subsequent praise for communist butcher Mao Tse-tung.) Rubenstein also is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most politically connected investment firms. (He also sits on the boards of directors of Harvard, Duke, Johns Hopkins universities, the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center, and the Smithsonian Institution). As noted, Rubenstein’s show is carried by Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg is a member of both the CFR and Trilateral Commission) and PBS (which includes a dozen CFR members among its executives and pundits, as well as dozens of leftist “progressives”). In other words, Rubenstein is very Deep State. And he is not lavishly promoting the NBA commissioner solely because of Silver’s storied “marketing genius.”

Silver is being celebrated by the “woke” media because he is one of the top corporate players directing the huge influence of professional sports in the direction of advancing the globalist agenda on many fronts: Communist China, cancel culture, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ “rights,” COVID “pandemic” panic, gun control, defunding the police, taking a knee during our national anthem, and more.

Professional sports have become not only a dangerous diversion to keep sports enthusiasts occupied while their liberty is being stolen, but they have also become so saturated with brainwashing propaganda that billions of spectators worldwide are being prepped and psychologically transformed to accept a global Orwellian dictatorship as “the new normal.”