Posted on 10/23/2019 6:03:49 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
The NBA was understandably excited to start its season and get away from the China controversy that had embroiled the league over the past couple weeks.
However, even more controversy ensued on Tuesday night and on into Wednesday as video surfaced showing LeBron James walking off the court and screaming while the national anthem played.
James faced a firestorm of criticism after saying that Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey “wasn’t educated” on the China-Hong-Kong issue, before he sent a message of support to pro-democracy protesters earlier this month.
While backpedaling, James said that he is not a politician, and said that not “every issue should be everyone’s problem.”
Since that time, James has said he will no longer talk about the NBA-China rift. The Lakers star forward also did not have any comment about his disrespect towards the flag on Tuesday night.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
His negative behavior may have a connection that we didn’t know about!
Is this an age old follow the money answer?
Why the ‘Woke’ Corporations Back China
Posted by Daniel Greenfield
Think there’s a contradiction between ‘woke’ corporate titans like Apple and Disney silencing anyone opposed to China’s crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong?
It’s not hypocrisy, it’s synergy.
The same forces that made the major brands scattered around your kitchen, living room and garage broadcast their support for gun control, gay marriage and illegal immigration are fueling their support for the People’s Republic of China pulling another Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong.
The lefties in Beijing and Berkeley used the same set of ideological tools to force companies to toe the party line. They roped off access to an appealing customer base, the population of mainland China, urban millennials with huge amounts of disposable income, in exchange for ideological compliance.
Communist China is one entangled oligarchy which mingles political party and company. Sound familiar?
The CEO of Nike sits on the board of Disney. The CEO of Disney until recently sat on the board of Apple. The CEO of Apple sits on the board of Nike. Good thing we have a “free market economy” isn’t it?
Disney, Apple and all the rest have no problem understanding their Chinese Communist counterparts.
ESPN smears democracy protesters in Hong Kong for the same reason that it celebrated Colin Kaepernick. There’s a fundamental contradiction in principles between supporting a Communist police state and denouncing American police officers, but a perfect synergy of political expediency.
Disney, ESPN’s parent company, has embraced identity politics from the top down, even as its head honcho, Bob Iger, remains whiter than vanilla ice cream, not because it really believes in this stuff. The Chinese Communist Party believes in One China. Its American counterparts believe in A Thousand Genders. Lefty power in China is built on unity and solidarity. Lefty power in America is built on divisive minority coalitions. But it’s only a difference if you focus on the means rather than the ends.
And the Mouse didn’t eat the entire entertainment industry by being unable to see the endgame. Avengers Endgame brought in $612 million in China. That’s the real endgame that it cares about.
In America and China, a lefty political elite controls the culture. Chinese and American lefties interlock cultural, economic and political power. Disney, once seen as a square family friendly studio, can rule the box offices in America and China because it advances the cultural goals of their political elites.
American corporations went ‘woke’ because their ideal customer base, wealthy millennials, were reprogrammed by academia. Getting access to young people with lots of money required ritual virtue signaling, first by cultural industries, which didn’t need much encouraging to function as gatekeepers, censors and reeducators, and then by all the other industries which bowed to the culture.
If Disney didn’t advance the party line, its comic book movies would be ridiculed, dismissed and denounced, and its cartoon remakes would be accused of racism in America. And in China, where the loci of political control are even simpler, they would never be released in the country’s movies theaters.
China’s Commies control the entire economy. America’s lefties control the cultural economy. And our few real exports to China are either agricultural or cultural. And soybean farmers aren’t tweeting about Hong Kong. The ‘wokest’ parts of our economy, entertainment and tech, are that way because they depend on the cultural sanction of the same political movement that killed millions in China.
If you’re going to sell thousand-dollar phones made by slave labor in some dusty factory town where the air is poison, you need the sanction of the Communist Party of China and the culture industry of California. And if you’re going to dump your cultural garbage in American and Chinese movie theaters, both owned by the same Chinese corporations, you’ll need to run the stuff by cultural censors.
Chinese censors are concerned about portraying their leaders as powerful and discouraging insurrection. American censors want to push their identity politics. That’s how you end up with ESPN cheering Colin and booing Hong Kong protesters. Chinese and American commies both get what they want and ESPN gets a foothold in the Chinese market and among the Ivy League’s wealthy woke grads.
The Hong Kong protesters won’t be too happy, but how many Avengers movies do they watch? How many iPhones can they buy? How many copies of Battlefield do they play? That’s the real question.
The ‘enemies of the people’ in Hong Kong are free market Christians who don’t want a police state controlling their lives. Funny coincidence, those are also the ‘enemies of the people’ in America.
Giant multinational monopolies don’t like free markets. They encourage competition.
The last thing the NBA, Disney, Apple, Nike and the rest of the ‘megas’ want is competition. What they want is a walled garden tended by a kindly Zen-Communist tyrant who will give them a virgin territory in exchange for a huge slice of the pie to be shared with local political partners. And, of course, slavish devotion to the tyranny of whatever it is the locals believe in, dialectical materialism, the transcendence of gender, which is a small price to pay by people who don’t have any principles or believe in anything.
It doesn’t really matter if this walled garden is in China or California. Either way, the ideal outcome is a totalitarian leftist state and the enemies are Christians who believe in a free market economy.
Can you think of anything a soulless ‘woke’ monopoly would hate and fear more than religious believers who also believe in personal freedom? That’s why Disney, Apple and the ChiComs are on the same page.
Apple, Disney and all the rest are about brands. A brand is a form of identity.
Brands don’t make good products. Instead they churn out overpriced junk and use advertising to fuse consumer loyalty to their brand. And that brand, a sports team, an Apple logo, becomes part of the identity of the people who are brainwashed into identifying with it even to their own detriment.
That’s why ad agencies have gone gaga for identity politics. And why every other ad you see is virtue signaling so hard that it would make Mao roll his eyes. They’re all in the manufactured identity business.
Identity politics manufactures identities and then convinces its dupes that their lives are hopeless and incomplete until they also implement open borders, gun control, and a ban on fossil fuels.
Sound familiar? Buy into the revolution now. Organizers are standing by to take your call.
That’s also why religious believers are the enemy. They don’t make ideal consumers.
People who have a form of meaning in their lives that isn’t for sale on Black Friday aren’t good consumers. Lefties with thirty genders and a hole the size of Cleveland where meaning should be, are.
So are Communist drones in a society drifting away from Communism while suppressing religion.
That’s why California and Communist China are the capitals of ‘Capitamunism’. And why free market Christians are the enemies in both of the capitals where identity politics are their own religion.
In China, it’s nationalism. In America, it’s anti-nationalism. But those are just different identities. And advertising is in the business of monetizing identities. The militant Chinese nationalist vocally insisting that everything in Asia belongs to Beijing and the furious Black Lives Matter activist demanding that we build Wakanda in Oklahoma are two sides of the same coin and ESPN will market to both of them.
And if a few protesters in Hong Kong or police officers in Dallas get shot, that’s also the same coin.
What really matters is the next game, the next movie, the next phone and the next crackdown. What matters is that you can buy governments, shut down protests and suppress the truth. What matters is that more people, in China and America, are realizing that what they want isn’t a sale: it’s freedom.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2019/10/why-woke-corporations-back-china.html
Mr. James, this is what they do when you disagree with the Communist regime in China.
“The Communist Party’s campaign to eradicate the iconic Christian symbol from China’s landscape continued in full force this past week, with authorities demolishing a dozen church crosses and beating protesters bloody...”
“A Million People Are Jailed at China’s Gulags. I Managed to Escape. Here’s What Really Goes on”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3788404/posts
I know it’s hard to see in front of the orange circle you are holding in your hands, but do try.
Does anyone know what the pay scale for professional basketball players is in China? Do they even allow professional basketball in China?
LeBron. Is that French?
Every day he looks like he wants more and more to look like some quasi Malcolm X.
Anyone that watches the NBA is a dumbass.
Been that way since the Bird/Magic era.
Stopped watching at that point as it wasn’t really basketball anymore.
Carry the ball. Double Dribble. No Zone. Fake fouls.
Then the money. money. money.
No discipline on or off the court.
I’ll still watch college ball on occasion, but give me a good HS ball game rivalry with a fairly even match any day of the week.
To be honest, this occurred as the last three words of the anthem were being sung, it’s not like he was taking a knee or doing this early. I see plenty of athletes cut off the last few seconds of the anthem in many sports.
James off the Court is a POSSIBLE HS graduate. On the court he just lost to the Clippers minus there best player. He should continue to keep his pie hole shut because the Lakers are not getting anywhere near a Championship anytime soon. Hopefully Lakers fans will have a short leash on this Team and in particular this idiot this year.
Unsurprisingly, Fox news is playing CYA clean up for LeBiscuit tonight:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/lebron-james-disrespecting-national-anthem-china
FU commie suck up bastard. GTFO of this country.
Kind of funny - a lot of these professional athletes remind me of the actors in the old 1950s 'gladiator' movies. They were hired for their physical attributes, NOT their intelligence, or even their ability to communicate (remember the subtitles? ;^). If I actually WANTED advice on geopolitical or cultural issues, I don't believe I would ask someone with a phys-ed degree...
;^)
I wonder if Abe Lincoln,if he had to decide what to do with repatriated slaves again, would keep them here knowing what America would become especially standing on the hallow ground of Gettysburg.
Freepers.
I engaged a man tonight who was dumber than many.
He said Trump was controversial.
I said he was trying to save us from tyranny.
He said I want to drink more beer.
So, I turned to the left.
And, I found a union worker who loved Trump.
We talked about why we supported Trump.
Right hand guy played close attention. Schooled.
Two more Trump voters locked in.
Watching the video it did not seem that outrageous. It looked like he was getting ready to play during the final notes.
I think some folks are looking to be offended.
Just curious...did you watch the video?
They get paid a lot. And they are very good.
The people that play in China are not the government. LeBron could probably get paid 2 to 3 times what he is making here; if that is where you were going.
China has many cities larger than most NBA cities.
You didn’t watch the video.
He started walking with three beats in the anthem and he shouted “Let’s Go.” Not exactly “storming off the court.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.