Adam Silver’s political stances mean nothing after he grovels to China.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is so woke, he once outlawed the word “owner” for being racially insensitive. He canceled an NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte, North Carolina, to protest that state’s anti-transgender-bathroom legislation.
He has encouraged his coaches to rail against President Trump’s immigration policies and his players to promote Black Lives Matter.
He has instituted a gender quota for referees, declared progressive code words “diversity” and “inclusion” as “core principles” and danced on a float at New York’s Gay Pride Parade.
He’s too woke for regular handshakes, instead deploying a dap-like multi-grip combo with air hug, which looks decidedly awkward coming from a dorky, gangly, bald, bespectacled, 57-year-old white lawyer from Rye. At least he tries.
Silver is proud of using his position to push social-justice politics. “I think in this day and age, you really do have to stand for something,” he told CNN last year. “To take a position on important things that are happening in society.”
But all Silver’s posturing looks empty now that he has raced over to Beijing to grovel behind closed doors.
The time for “standing for something” was last weekend, after Houston Rockets basketball boss
Daryl Morey exercised his free speech with a tweet supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”
But in the face of China’s belligerent reaction to the tweet, the NBA cravenly capitulated. It damned Morey’s “regrettable” sentiments that had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China.”
It wheeled out Morey to recant. It deputized Rockets star James Harden to deliver a pathetic ode to the Communist dictatorship: “We love China. We love playing there . . . We love everything they’re about.”
By Tuesday night, husband-and-wife Philadelphia 76ers fans were reportedly thrown out of a preseason game against a Chinese team because he was yelling, “Free Hong Kong.”
Message received loud and clear.
But America’s most politically correct sport can’t suddenly pretend to be apolitical and morally neutral when it comes to standing up for actual human rights in Hong Kong.
The NBA’s kowtowing to China’s bullying is proof, if you ever needed it, that woke capitalism is a sick con job. It is the opposite of “standing for something.”
Silver made a political decision to play preseason games in China, in the middle of the crisis in Hong Kong. Greedy to cash in on a multibillion-dollar market, he turned a blind eye as China celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule by shooting a teenager in the chest.
Vile, self-righteous, China Suck Up Scum
