Perhaps no one has been more vindicated this week than Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, who offered NBA players some free advice a while ago to which they probably should have adhered.
“Shut up and dribble,” she said, for which she was excoriated by the leftist media.
Instead of heeding her advice, the NBA opened its mouth, and put its collective size 15 Nike shoe in its mouth.
Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr, a known critic of President Donald J. Trump and “woke” social justice stalwart found himself caught in the melee of deciding whether democracy in Hong Kong was a good thing, or whether, for the sake of the NBA, which does a tremendous amount of business in China, should take a non-committal stance on the issue to please the Communist Chinese regime in Beijing.
Kerr chose a third option, which wasn’t even on the table previously. He decided to deflect away from the China question and flip the script, bashing America for what he views as social injustices, and comparing them to China’s well-documented Human Rights abuses, essentially pouring gasoline on the fire. More on that in a second.
When asked if he’s ever discussed human rights in China, Kerr answered in the negative.
“It has not come up, in terms of people asking me about it, people discussing it,” he said. “Nor has [America’s] record of human rights abuses come up either – you know, things that our country needs to look at and resolve – that hasn’t come up either.”
Kerr continued, comparing America’s sparse mass shootings, which account for less than one percent of gun deaths in America each year, to the Chinese human rights situation.
Here’s the Kerr clip:
What exactly are those human rights abuses? Well for starters, there’s the Uighur Muslims, sometimes spelled Uyghur, one million of whom have been detained in Chinese “reeducation” concentration camps in the Xinjiang Province. We don’t do “re-education camps” for citizens here in America, a fact which is apparently lost on Kerr. We also don’t do child or slave labor in America, like the Communist Chinese do.
In fact, that’s sort of the crux of this whole social justice kerfuffle.
Adidas and Nike are huge NBA sponsors. Their shoes and apparel are largely made in Chinese sweatshops, and China is a huge market and revenue generator for the NBA. So when some NBA owners started discussing democracy in Hong Kong, the NBA’s Chinese overlords objected, and the league was essentially told to zip it. Fox Sports 1’s Jason Whitlock brilliantly broke down that dynamic in an interview with Tucker Carlson, on which we reported Thursday.
By the way, as sports reporter Clay Travis reported, Kerr has taken sides in the Hong Kong debate, which he denied in his press conference just before putting the United States on the same moral plane as China.
“While [Steve Kerr] now claims he has no opinion on Hong Kong’s dispute with China because it’s too complex to pick a side, last month he retweeted support for the protesters,” Travis pointed out.
So, not only did Kerr choose to throw America under the bus, he lied when he played dumb on the issue of Hong Kong’s freedom. It’s obviously something he has considered.
What the whole scandal boils down to is this: The NBA is known as the “woke” professional sports league. Its players and coaches take a side on nearly every political issue they can. They tried to do the same by supporting democracy in Hong Kong, but the league told them to shut up in order to protect its business interests. And now that they have something tangible to lose, (revenue), the Steve Kerr’s of the world aren’t as brave as they once pretended to be.
- Democrat Candidates Rake In Cash From Big Tech - November 20, 2019
- Banks Are Now Openly Shutting Down Accounts Of Cryptocurrency Players - November 20, 2019
- Good Guy With Gun Thwarts Shooting At Oklahoma Walmart - November 18, 2019