If you asked NBA bigwigs if they’d have done business with the Nazis, as some WWII-era corporations did, they’d no doubt self-righteously posture while issuing a denial. Yet they’re doing business with and are pandering to the Nazi regime of our day, Beijing’s fascist Chinese. Nonetheless, licking foreign jackboots hasn’t stopped them from kicking their own country, say critics — as they serve mammon and the Middle Kingdom.
Little known and worse still, though, is that the National Basketball Association isn’t alone: China exerts influence over a broad spectrum of American companies, over what we see in our movies, and what youth are taught in many of our schools.
As for the NBA, Fox News host Tucker Carlson introduced the topic on his show’s Tuesday edition, calling our age one of “woke capital.” “You see it in every movie, every commercial, and every press release from the diversity division of your local HR department,” he elaborated. “The message is always the same. Companies aren’t just soulless profit-seekers; they are more than that.”
“They have values. They have principles. They care,” Carlson continued. “They care probably more than you do.”
But, he asked, is this real or just “a cynical pose”?
Carlson then stated:
Consider this: Last Friday, Daryl Morey, he is the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, sent what seemed like a noncontroversial tweet. He wrote this: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” That’s it.
Now China, as you may have seen on television, is now trying to crush Hong Kong and it’s not hard to pick a side. China, it is rarely noted (but it is true), is a racist ethnostate that bans dissent and murders its political opponents. You’d think every American would stand with Hong Kong without even thinking about it. But not the NBA.
The NBA is on China’s side. So Morey was forced to delete his tweet. He may, in fact, lose his job over this. The NBA issued a statement making it clear that under no circumstance do they support Hong Kong or human freedom.
The NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, proceeded to bloviate about the “consequences” of “freedom of expression.” Even worse, however, was Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors. While he never hesitates to vocally push hard-left social policy such as anti-gun laws and was praised for speaking “truth to power,” with China he tucked tail. Kerr called the Hong Kong situation a “really bizarre international story” and said he didn’t “know what to make of it.” “I am not going to comment further,” said he.
“In other words, Steve Kerr is a phony,” concluded Carlson. “He is brave when the crowds applaud, but when money is at stake, he shuts up and obeys like the cowardly little corporate stooge that he is” (video below).
It should be emphasized that China represents everything our Left purports to hate. The Beijing regime claims lineage with history’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Tse-tung, killer of approximately 60 million. The Left calls Trump and other conservatives “sexist” and “misogynistic” for not supporting prenatal infanticide and taxpayer-funded contraception. In China, cultural norms and government policy have led to female infanticide of a magnitude that has created a sex-ratio imbalance.
Liberals also complain about President Trump’s illegal-alien detainment facilities — which Barack Obama used, too — calling them “concentration camps,” and they slammed Trump’s temporary immigration restrictions as anti-Muslim bigotry. Yet China has recently forced one million Muslim Uighurs into what are actually concentration camps to purge them of Islamic ideas. In fact, Beijing’s ambition to dominate the world is apparently motivated, in part, by its conviction that it oversees a superior culture and race.
Not that the NBA cares about any of that. It has other priorities: China has almost as many basketball players as the United States has people: 300 million. The league’s Chinese social-media following is 200 million, dwarfing its American Facebook/Twitter following of 28 million.
Then, FS1 Speak for Yourself host Jason Whitlock points out that “the shoe companies … run American basketball” — and themselves “are dependent on the China market.” He says that the NBA is a global business more than an American one and that China likely has more influence over it than the United States does (video below). Beijing is the NBA’s billion-dollar baby.
Yet Whitlock understates the case. Regarding influence over our corporations, which do help shape our culture, China has a distinct advantage: despotism. We can’t threaten a business with expulsion from our market for expressing unwelcome political speech (though leftists try with Chick-fil-A) or refusing to share its technology with the government. But China can and does do that and more, knowing that, as Mao Tse-tung put it, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” (and sometimes an economic gun). The result?
These corporations feel free to slam America for having a speck in her eye while pandering to China and ignoring her Great Wall-size ocular beam.
Of course, they don’t always pander — sometimes they cower. Video-game company Activision Blizzard recently banned a top player for supporting the Hong Kong protesters, and hotel company Marriott fired one of its employees last year for “‘liking’ a tweet that recognized Taiwan as a country,” reports Carlson.
American schools and universities will accept Beijing’s money and then put its propaganda in the classroom via “Confucius Institutes,” and Hollywood actually alters our movie content in deference to China. The film censorship is so flagrant, in fact, “that the show ‘South Park’ produced an entire episode mocking it,” Carlson tells us.
Oh, you guessed it: The Chinese then immediately banned South Park.
Yet it’s fine with American pseudo-elites if our land’s fortunes go south as long as they can build their fortunes. Thus, far from “exporting American freedoms to China,” Carlson laments, “our ruling class instead imported Chinese authoritarianism here.”
All this should make us wonder, too: If the man combating China, President Trump, really were as despotic as leftists claim, would they respect him as much as they do President Xi?
Photo: AP Images
