Following Houston Rockets’ Daryl Morey’s now-deleted tweet criticizing China’s repression in Hong Kong, the NBA has entered full-on submit-to-Xi-Jinping mode. Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is leading the charge in kissing Xi’s ring, but other owners have joined him. China, they say, is just misunderstood. Hong Kong, they say, is a complex issue.
Let them keep talking. Because at this moment, you’re being helped to understand whom to ignore hereafter. In apparently demanding supportive public statements, China has just outed its useful idiots within the NBA.
Rather than respond as the NBA owners would have wished, with some forgiveness for Morey, communist China has reacted with its most natural impulse: even more authoritarianism. CCTV Sports and Tencent media, which dominate China’s NBA coverage, will no longer show preseason games being held on Chinese soil. China has also banned transmission of South Park, which hilariously rebuked Chinese oppression in its last episode.
Note the defining distinction here. This is the Chinese government choosing to prevent its citizens from watching basketball, as punishment for a basketball figure criticizing Chinese government repression. They’re kind of proving the point, aren’t they? This is not a choice by Chinese citizens to boycott the NBA or South Park because they are upset. China’s regime believes — perhaps even knows — that it can’t trust its citizens to make the choice it prefers.
Joe Tsai says Morey has “grossly misunderstood” Xi Jinping. But Tsai’s own Chinese masters have proven just how wrong he really is. Morey was right. Tsai, Steve Kerr, Tilman Fertitta are idiots. Let them reap the whirlwind of their pathetic submission.
