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NBA, Stop Being Beijing’s Enforcers

Actual American citizens booted from NBA game in Philly for pro-Hong Kong signs

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Un-freaking-believable. In Philadelphia, the birthplace of American freedom! This is the United States of America, not the Communist Party of China’s b*tch. Every single NBA fan should go to every single game wearing shirts or carrying signs defending Hong Kong. What a disgrace these craven American businessmen are.

I am traveling today, readers, so approving comments will be hit and miss till the afternoon (I’m headed to suburban Chicago for the Touchstone conference). I’m continuing to make my way through German journalist Kai Strittmatter’s mind-blowing book We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China’s Surveillance State. If you’re anything like me, you knew that things were overbearing in China, but you had only scant idea of how intense and thorough things are there. We can’t do much about how Beijing runs its own country, but we can certainly refuse to let them dictate what Americans — a free people — can and cannot say.

The NBA’s cowardice is particularly galling, because league management has been so woke about NBA players supporting left-wing social causes in the United States. But when it comes to supporting the basic liberties of a people — Hong Kongers — against a tyrannical surveillance state, these American businessmen collapse. As someone said on Twitter this morning, what will the NBA do if players at these exhibition games against Chinese teams start kneeling at the playing of the Chinese National Anthem?

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