6 NEWS Controversy of the week
China and U.S. businesses: The big sellout
Does freedom “matter more than greed?” asked the New
York Post in an editorial. Clearly not to the National
Basketball Association, which this week continued its
shameful efforts to mollify the Chinese government after
Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey tweeted
(then deleted) his support for pro-democracy protesters
in Hong Kong. The latest supplicant is superstar LeBron
James. An outspoken social activist here at home who
once called President Trump a “bum,” King James
thinks it was wrong and “dangerous” for the
“misinformed” Morey to anger China, whose
500 million NBA fans put billions in the pock-
ets of the league, its players, and Nike, whose sneakers James has
endorsed. So this week James called on league officials and play-
ers to “be careful what we tweet, what we say, and what we do”
about a ruthless authoritarian regime that surveils and represses its
own people, harvests organs from political prisoners, and holds a
million Muslim Uighurs in “re-education” camps. Meanwhile, at
exhibition games in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., security
guards confiscated “Free Hong Kong” signs and escorted pro-
testing fans from the building, lest China be offended. These are
American cities, last we checked.
It’s not just the NBA, said John Daniel Davidson in TheFederalist
.com. Hollywood studios now routinely scrub films of storylines
and images that China finds offensive. U.S. airlines and hotel
chains edit their maps to avoid describing Taiwan as a separate
country. ESPN even ordered its reporters not to criticize China
while covering the Morey story. If these craven corporations will
self-censor even on U.S. soil to appease China’s autocratic rulers,
then Americans “owe them nothing but contempt.”
It may be too late, said Derek Thompson in TheAtlantic.com.
Our two economies are so entangled at this point that the
U.S. severing ties with China over its human rights abuses
would “cause economic devastation to millions of work-
ers,” not just in the U.S. and China but also around the
world. Are Americans willing to give up their iPhones,
TikTok, and a vast array of inexpensive consumer goods to
punish China over its human rights violations?This wasn’t supposed to happen, said Tobias
Hoonhout in NationalReview.com. For
decades, U.S. corporations, and presidents
of both parties, assured us that the Chinese
people, through a process of “economic osmosis,” would come to
share American values like democracy and free speech. “In fact,
the opposite has occurred.” U.S. companies are now jettisoning
American values in order to chase profits in China’s massive mar-
ket of 1.3 billion people. How naïve we were, said Farhad Manjoo
in The New York Times. Rather than surrender to our culture and
our free speech, China’s government has used the internet and
digital technology to build “the most technologically sophisticated
repression machine the world has ever seen.” Worse, China is now
exporting those “digital shackles to authoritarians the world over,”
posing an existential threat to global freedom and democracy.Still, China may have done us a favor with its heavy-handed bully-
ing of the NBA, said Ross Douthat, also in the Times. Americans
may not be nearing a totalitarian state where “wrong” views get
you sent to re-education camps, but the intrusive surveillance made
possible by tech giants is seriously eroding our privacy. At the same
time, “woke” Twitter mobs on the Left and authoritarians on the
Right are pursuing “radical ambitions” of silencing their ideologi-
cal opponents. It sometimes takes an external threat like China “to
remind us of who we are, and who we do not want to be.”Only in America
QA 12-year-old Kansas girl
has been charged with a
felony after making a “finger
gun” hand gesture at four
classmates. The middle
schooler was handcuffed by
police, and now faces up to
a year in a juvenile detention
facility. “I could see maybe a
good round of counseling,”
said the girl’s mother, Vanessa
McCaron. “But handcuffs?”
QA University of Washing-
ton professor is calling out
Spongebob Squarepants for
“racist, violent colonial practic-
es.” Professor Holly Barker ar-
gues that the cartoon sponge,
who lives in the fictional un-
dersea town of Bikini Bottom,
symbolically perpetuates “the
violent and racist expulsion of
Indigenous peoples” from the
real-world Bikini Atoll, once
used by the U.S. for nuclear
testing, and thus “desensitizes
viewers to the violence of set-
tler colonialism.”Trump ousts fourth
Homeland Security chief
Kevin McAleenan has re-
signed after just six months
as acting Homeland Security
secretary, the White House
said last week, days after
McAleenan discussed losing
control of the department to
more-partisan hard-liners in
the Trump administration.
McAleenan oversaw some of
Trump’s border crackdowns
but frequently clashed with
immigration officials and
Trump himself. “What I don’t
have control over is the tone,
the message, the public face,
and approach of the depart-
ment,” McAleenan told The
Washington Post earlier this
month. The White House has
floated Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-
liner known for spearheading
the administration’s sharp
restrictions on legal immigra-
tion, as a replacement. But
Cuccinelli could face a difficult
road to Senate confirmation.Dark tourism,after Ukraine began tours of the control room
of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, where engineers made the fateful
decision to turn off the plant’s cooling system in 1986. Tourists
must wear protective clothing and can only spend five minutes in
the still highly radioactive room.
Last laughs,after mourners at an Irishman’s funeral were
startled by the sound of knocking and the voice of the deceased
bellowing “Let me out! It’s f---ing dark in here!” as his coffin was
lowered into the grave. Horror turned to mirth when they realized
that Shay Bradley had recorded the prank plea before he died.
Dark horses,with reports that billionaire former New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg might jump into the Democratic presi-
dential race if Joe Biden falls far behind Elizabeth Warren.Blasphemy,with the launch of the “Biblical MSCHF x INRI Air
Max 97 Custom,” a $1,425 pair of white Nike sneakers tricked
out with Bible inscriptions, steel crucifixes on the laces, and soles
filled with “holy water” from the River Jordan.
Narcissism,after a German bank robber who had just been sen-
tenced to a decade in jail delivered a rambling, 20-hour statement to
the court. Michael Jauernik, 71, bragged that he was “more intel-
ligent and clever than any employee of the criminal police agency.”
Georgia,which had its first sighting of the nightmarish northern
snakehead, an invasive fish that can breathe air and wriggle on land
from lake to lake. “Kill it immediately,” Georgia’s Department of
Natural Resources advised residents. “DO NOT RELEASE IT.”Good week for:
Bad week for:
GettyJames: ‘Be careful what we tweet.’