By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
November 30, 2021
Nike’s latest TV ad is another slick
paean to individual empowerment and the ability to prevail despite the
naysayers.
Centered around Memphis Grizzlies star Ja
Morant, the commercial features various people doubting that Morant can keep up
his stellar play, to which someone always cheekily replies, “Says who?”
Yes, Nike believes anything is possible —
so long as it doesn’t involve doing anything to cross one of the world’s most
hideously repressive regimes.
The grotesque hypocrisy of the Nike-NBA
industrial complex and its biggest star, LeBron James, has been underlined
in recent weeks by Boston Celtics player Enes Kanter, who has been on a one-man
crusade against the Chinese Communist Party and those too cowardly or greedy to
call it out.
James — the owner of four NBA championship
rings who has appeared in a jaw-dropping ten NBA finals — has views on all
sorts of public controversies and doesn’t hesitate to air them so long as they
are comfortably within the fashionable woke consensus.
On China, though, he’s mute. So are his
employers. They all portray themselves as champions of social justice and of
courage and striving, but their commitment to these causes and values stops at
the water’s edge — and at their bottom line.
A couple of years ago, when the Houston
Rockets general manager got thrown under the bus by the NBA for tweeting in
support of pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong, King James pronounced him
“not educated on the situation.”
The Lakers forward affirmed a right to
free speech — thanks, GOAT! — but said we have to be careful what we say. “So
many people,” he warned, “could have been harmed, not only financially but
physically, emotionally, spiritually.”
Never has so much harm been attributed to
a small message of public support for plucky idealists about to be steamrolled
by a totalitarian government.
During the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, by the
way, King James mocked Rittenhouse’s tears on the stand, doubting they were
real — apparently because he’s an expert on what constitutes genuine signs of
post-traumatic stress.
If Rittenhouse had control over whether a
vast market would be open to James and the corporations he’s affiliated with,
the Lakers star surely would have stayed silent.
When Kanter tweeted, “Money over Morals
for the ‘King,’” and wore sneakers portraying James bowing down to get crowned
by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for a Celtics–Lakers game, James brushed it off.
He accused Kanter of “trying to use my name to create an opportunity for
himself.”
Actually, Kanter’s activism, calling out
his league and a massively influential corporation, is what everyone says they
value — a lonely, unwelcome campaign against well-heeled interests too
compromised to defy a powerful entity perpetrating rank injustices.
After Nike got blowback in China for a
relatively anodyne statement expressing concern about forced labor in Xinjiang
— the center of the regime’s repression of the Uyghurs — the company’s CEO said
that Nike is “a brand of China and for China.”
Nike lobbied Congress to weaken an
anti-forced-labor bill, lest a measure aimed at crimping a vast human-rights
abuse discomfit the corporate giant too greatly.
“Says who?” the new Nike ad asks. Clearly,
the Chinese regime.
“You can’t stop us,” intoned a viral ad
last year. Well, actually you can, provided you are an
authoritarian bully with an enormous consumer base.
“Just do it” went the most iconic Nike ad.
No, on second thought, better to “Just don’t” if it might anger a government
that disappeared a star athlete for the offense of accusing an official of sexual
assault and that is preparing to invade a neighboring country.
If China were to take Taiwan, would the
NBA, Nike, or LeBron James do anything more than offer vague expressions of
concern and piffle about how the situation is complicated?
We certainly know what Enes Kanter would
say. Which is why he rightly deserves a Nike ad celebrating his go-it-alone
truth-telling, and why, of course, he’ll never get one.
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