A bunch of comedians took rather generous paychecks from the Saudi state to do a gig in the capital to an audience of elites — which, to hear the Washington Post (and virtually every self-styled progressive media outlet) tell it, was the moral crime of the century.
“Laughter can’t launder what Saudi Arabia has done,” the moral preeners of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post editorial board lament.
Via The Washington Post (emphasis added):
Fifty comedians walk into a repressive Gulf kingdom. That sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But there is little funny about some of the best-known Western comics trekking to Saudi Arabia, collecting large paychecks and agreeing to censor themselves at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which runs through Thursday.
The event in the Saudi capital is supposed to be another example of how the kingdom has become more open and tolerant under its modernizing monarch, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. Really, it’s just the latest in a string of attempts to divert attention from his country’s atrocious human rights record by hosting showy international events. It’s also a fresh reminder of how many people will pick a payday over principles…
While the comedians are yukking it up onstage, human rights groups report that dozens of Saudi journalists, dissidents, women’s rights activists and peaceful critics remain imprisoned on bogus charges.
The “we don’t legitimize the Saudis” line is kind of a weird flex, when you consider that every American president since the literal blood-soaked birth of the Saudi regime — which the West midwifed and nurtured, incidentally —has gone to the peninsula to cavort with the royal family, even their precious Joe Biden for the “fist bump heard around the world.”
President Biden fist bumps Saudi crown prince MBS pic.twitter.com/qiFeun6ed2
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) July 15, 2022
Somehow, I don’t recall breathless editorials from the likes of the Washington Post about the Leader of the Free World™ socializing with the regime with the “atrocious human rights record.”
Once you get into the business of policing who gets to take what money from whom, or who has blood on their hands and how much, things inevitably get dicey.
The most zealous lectures almost invariably come from those with the most dirt under their fingernails.
Also, let’s pump the brakes on the moral indignation, Washington Post.
Related: After Years of Covering For Fauci, Washington Post Acknowledges Beagle Torture
This is the same newspaper that ran an editorial in July 2021 calling for the banning of the unvaccinated from grocery stores based on pseudoscience for the benefit of the government and the pharmaceutical industry’s wildly unconstitutional designs to turn America into a biomedical totalitarian state.
Via The Washington Post, July 19, 2021:
It’s time to get serious about coronavirus vaccinations. Stop pleading and start mandating.
For the past six months, President Biden, joined by every public health authority in the land, has been begging Americans to get vaccinated. The “pretty, please” approach isn’t working…
There is vaccine hesitancy among many different sectors of the population, including reckless youths, granola liberals who believe in alternative medicines and African Americans who distrust the health-care system. Some are still persuadable, but many are not...
This is madness. Stop making reasonable appeals to those who will not listen to reason. (According to an Economist/YouGov poll, a majority of those who refuse to get vaccinated say vaccines are being used by the government to implant microchips.) It’s a waste of time. Start mandating that anyone who wants to travel on an airplane, train or bus, attend a concert or movie, eat at a restaurant, shop at a store, work in an office or visit any other indoor space show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test.
And what about all of these (nominally, but in reality transnational) American businesses that look the other way while China turns ethnic oppression into a hard science?
Lebron James gets to write literal pro-CCP propaganda in state newspapers because the NBA generates billions of dollars of revenue in the country, and no one bats an eye.
Via Washington Free Beacon (emphasis added):
NBA superstar LeBron James, fresh off a tour to China to promote sneakers as part of his $1 billion Nike endorsement deal, touted basketball as a "bridge" between the East and West in an unprecedented essay published by the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily…
The essay marks a public relations coup for the CCP, which spends millions of dollars a year on propaganda to promote so-called people-to-people exchange between China and Western nations.
People’s Daily, the largest newspaper in China, serves as a clearinghouse for such propaganda. It plays a central role, for example, in the CCP's campaign to deny Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang, publishing pieces like, "'Xinjiang genocide' claim biggest lie of the century." People's Daily also owns a Chinese app that the CCP used to disseminate propaganda videos criticizing former secretary of state Mike Pompeo after the Trump administration first declared that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang in 2021…
The essay comes as James and other NBA stars seek to peddle their wares in the lucrative Chinese market after years of sour relations between the NBA and the Chinese government.
Hollywood routinely censors its mass media productions so as not to offend its CCP bankrollers — yet crickets.
These are, again, billions of dollars in revenue on the line in decades-long, ongoing relationships between gigantic American corporations and one of the most repressive regimes on the planet — juxtaposed with a maximum of $1.6 million in reported one-time payouts to a few comedians by the Saudi royal family to be entertained for an evening.
So what are we even talking about here?
Is there no sense of proportionality or context?
