Thread by @bansisharma

1. Modern Progressivism Has No Clothes

My favorite NY Times columnist (yes, I have one) Bari Weiss has thrown insightful light on pretensions of modern progressivism in an article titled, "The World’s Wokest Sports League Bows to China."

2. Let's recap what happened. Friday evening, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, put out a tweet expressing support for Hong Kong’s democracy movement: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” He has since deleted that tweet and apologized.

3. You might assume that the wokest professional sports league — NBA is after all a business that pulled its all-star game out of Charlotte, N.C., in 2017 because of that state’s anti-transgender bathroom bill — would see human rights as core virtues. But you would be wrong.

4. The Morey tweet, though promptly deleted, went viral in China, where outrage from sponsors and fans was fast and furious. But the swiftness with which the N.B.A. bent its knee to Chinese sensitivities was truly breathtaking.

5. Perhaps the fact as many as 500 million Chinese watched at least one N.B.A. game last season and the N.B.A.’s business operations there are valued at more than $4 billion had something to do with it.

6. The owner of the Houston Rockets, Tilman Fertitta, didn’t hesitate to throw his general manager under the bus: “Listen … Daryl Morey does not speak for the Houston Rockets," he said.

7. By Monday, the current Rockets star James Harden offered a full-throated apology on behalf of his boss: “We apologize. You know, we love China. We love playing there.”

8. The N.B.A.’s official Chinese apology, put out on the social media site Sina Weibo (China’s version of Twitter), was something to behold: “We are extremely disappointed in the inappropriate comment by the general manager of the Houston Rockets,” it said.

9. The Nets are owned by Joe Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba — the company whose technology has been used by the Chinese government to surveil its citizens.

10. The question is how an American league that prides itself on promoting progressive values squares those values with allowing an apologist for authoritarianism to own one of its teams.

11. Why is a league run by a commissioner who criticized Trump’s Muslim travel ban for going “against the fundamental values of what makes for a great N.B.A.” also running a training camp for young players in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, amid camps of a far different kind?

12. Woke politics often seems to train collective attention down on our navels rather than out at the world. Is the issue of gender-neutral bathrooms really as morally urgent as a country that is, as Pete Buttigieg put it, “using technology for the perfection of dictatorship?”

13. This is a worldview that encourages companies to take cost-free stands on the progressive cause of the moment and do absolutely nothing to uphold fundamental progressive values when doing so requires more sacrifice than the time it takes to write up a news release.

14. A worldview that fails to force companies like the N.B.A., Apple, Google and Disney to account for the fact that they are serving as handmaidens to totalitarians is not one worth taking seriously.

15. The longstanding conventional wisdom on China — that engagement and investment by America in China would inevitably lead to the country’s political liberalization — has simply not proven true. Alas, just the opposite has happened.

16. China has become more repressive the more it has engaged with the West. Meantime, that economic engagement has led major Western businesses and institutions to keep quiet on a major moral issue of this century. The truth is all too often, Beijing is calling the shots.

17. Real political wisdom on this score lies with the creators of “South Park,” who, having offended China with an episode this week, dunked on the N.B.A.’s cravenness.

This is solid gold from the creators of "South Park."

18. And say what you will, no President in the last 50+ years has had the guts or the wits to seriously try to confront China on their nefarious ways in which they transact business across borders, like President Trump is doing now. He must be supported wholeheartedly.

The End