The National Basketball Association’s season is back. Nearly all of its players are kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. But not all of them.
Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic stood, while everyone else took a knee. He also did not wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.
After the game, Isaac faced a hostile press populated by reporters who played gotcha games with him. Note the wording of the first question to Isaac.
Reporter to Isaac: “So you didn’t kneel during the anthem, but you also didn’t wear a Black Lives Matter shirt? Uh, do you believe that black lives matter?”
Isaac, who is black, handled the ridiculously biased question gracefully.
“Absolutely. I believe that black lives matter. A lot went into my decision,” Isaac responded. “And part of is, my first thought, is that kneeling while wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt don’t go hand in hand with supporting black lives.” Rejecting the easy virtue signal of wearing a shirt and taking a knee, which would keep reporters from asking him biased questions, Isaac noted that he finds true support from a higher source.
“My life has been supported through the Gospel, Jesus Christ,” Isaac said, “and that everyone is made in the image of God and that we all fall short of God’s glory and that each and every one of us, each and every day, do things that we shouldn’t do. And say things that we shouldn’t say.”
“We hate and dislike people that we shouldn’t hate and dislike,” he added. “Sometimes it gets to a point where we point fingers about whose evil is worse. And sometimes it comes out as whose evil is most visible. So I felt like I just wanted to take a stand on, I felt like we all make mistakes but the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that there’s grace for us. That Jesus came and died for our sins and that if we all would come to an understanding of that and understand that God wants to have a relationship with us, that we can get past skin color, we can get past all the things in our world that are messed up, jacked up. I think we need to look around. Racism isn’t the only thing that plagues our society, that plagues our nation, that plagues our world.”
Isaac reiterated that we can and should get past skin color, and he believed kneeling and wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt does not deliver the message he wants to deliver.
The reporter failed to understand his message and followed up with another biased question, which Isaac again handled with grace.
The 22-year-old power forward can expect to take criticism for standing and for not wearing the officially approved shirt, but he seems ready and able to handle it.
The National Basketball Association has no moral leg to stand on. Not after ESPN exposed its long-standing and horrific relationship with communist China. According to the ESPN report, the NBA has knowingly operated basketball training schools for kids where instructors abuse those kids.
American coaches at three NBA training academies in China told league officials their Chinese partners were physically abusing young players and failing to provide schooling, even though commissioner Adam Silver had said that education would be central to the program, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the complaints.
The NBA ran into myriad problems by opening one of the academies in Xinjiang, a police state in western China where more than a million Uighur Muslims are now held in barbed-wire camps. American coaches were frequently harassed and surveilled in Xinjiang, the sources said. One American coach was detained three times without cause; he and others were unable to obtain housing because of their status as foreigners.
A former league employee compared the atmosphere when he worked in Xinjiang to “World War II Germany.”
Both are racist police states with designs on subjugating the world to their totalitarian ideology. Both ran concentration camps as well.
According to the ESPN report, the NBA ignored its own coaches’ complaints about working in China, and the treatment of the kids in its camps. One coach described the system as “a sweat camp for athletes.”
But the NBA and its leaders such as San Antonio Spurs coach Greg Popovich routinely virtue signal against America — because it believes that’s what its customer base wants — and covers up abuses in China — because it knows that’s what the regime in Beijing demands.
This explosive story comes on the heels of news that the NBA’s online store censored messages its customers were allowed to put on the backs of jerseys they ordered and paid for. Until exposure by bloggers, the NBA store would not allow pro-Hong Kong or anti-China messaging. But at the same time, it allowed “Defund the Police” and other divisive messages.
And we shouldn’t give ESPN too much credit for the nuke its website report dropped on the NBA last week. Outkick the Coverage reports that only one ESPN show has even discussed this important story so far. Just one.
That’s not much for a network that virtue-signals just about all day every day when it could just stick to reporting about sports. The network has seen its ratings decline steeply as it has become ever more woke.
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