As recently as a year or so ago, the agitprop wing of the American right must have felt that it’d nicely buttoned up the culture war on sports celebrities protesting racist police violence. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick continued to be blackballed by league owners for kneeling during the national anthem prior to games; athletes in other professional leagues who mounted similar protests found themselves likewise overlooked and stymied by the moneyed purveyors of mass sport.
 
But the NBA had always been a bit of an outlier in the right-wing cancel culture epidemic overtaking the boardrooms and skyboxes of professional sports. The league has the sports world’s greatest contingent of Black players, and Commissioner Adam Silver has allowed players greater leeway in political self-expression than his counterparts in the NFL or MLB or the NHL. So as nationwide protests took off in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis cops in May, the NBA allowed players to don jerseys with a series of protest messages and had the words Black Lives Matter painted courtside in the Orlando, Florida, “bubble” where league play has been confined during the Covid-19 crisis.
 
These were small symbolic feints, in the greater scheme of things, but as TNR contributor John Wilmes notes, they’ve been puffed out of all proportion by a right-wing media complex starved of its usual culture-war fare during pandemic lockdown conditions. The merchants of grievance on the Trumpian right, “like the rest of us, are living in a cultural desert as nonessential celebrity appearances, press events, award shows, and the like are all on pause and no longer churning out reliable sound bites,” Wilmes writes. “With so much of the entertainment industry on hold, there just aren’t as many easy marks at which to take aim.”
 
So presto: Right-wing pundits have eagerly drafted NBA players and league brass into duty as culture-war cannon fodder as many of their usual targets have gone quiet. That means, to begin with, that the league’s extensive marketing interests in China—which came to unflattering light when a senior league executive was forced to walk back a wan social media statement of support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong—are now a sign of faithless cosmopolitan economic cunning, from which all other manner of sins against the white nationalist American ethnostate can be safely adduced. Consider this fusillade from the pages of National Review, an outlet that claims highbrow standing in today’s all-out guignol of Trumpian media grievance, in Wilmes’s words:

Not content with the clean shot at the NBA’s hypocrisies … National Review’s writers strain to shoehorn in other complaints in an effort to loosely connect the acts of Black American celebrities to the human rights abuses of the Chinese Communist Party. So before [National Review writer Cameron] Hilditch’s brief is complete, he works in a rant about the “the sheer hypocrisy of taking a ‘moral stand’ against gender-specific restrooms”—reflected in the NBA’s decision to relocate the 2017 All-Star game from North Carolina because of that state’s transgender bathroom laws—but “not against cultural genocide.” Elsewhere, Victor Davis Hanson assails the league’s “woke talk about BLM, the ‘Jews,’ eugenics, Farrakhan, and the usual totems of ‘resistance,’” along with its athletes’ “selective agendas.” In another instance, Zachary Evans forced National Review to publish three tweets’ worth of grievances about his inability to get a customized “Free Hong Kong” jersey. As inconveniences go, it’s a slight one and predictable given the league’s well-established bootlicking. But the larger hypocrisy is, of course, the fact that were the NBA to cut ties with China tomorrow, these writers would find another way to carp about the league’s social justice pretensions. 

Indeed, this same kitchen-sink Kulturkampf strategy is on resplendent display once you toggle over to the online fever swamp known as Breitbart News. There, the pandemic-straitened condition of league revenues is minted into Exhibit A for the folly of wokeness among the moneyed sporting elite. “To Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston, it’s an article of faith that the league’s ratings problems are due to an ‘intrusion of … political activism’ in the form of ‘an avalanche of sloganeering on signs, stadium floors and fields, and on player jersey backs’ and players making ‘one woke proclamation after another’ on social media,” Wilmes writes. “The ne plus ultra of this synthesized culture war is probably the new T-shirt slogan that right-wing sports media personality Clay Travis is marketing to his followers: ‘Get Woke, Go Broke.’”

Never mind that these approved talking points baldly contradict each other: On the one hand, the NBA is held to be so cravenly devoted to marketing dollars that it derogates the cause of democratic reform in Hong Kong; on the other, it’s so beholden to militant woke messaging that it consigns its own TV ratings—the only viable revenue stream left in the ongoing Covid lockdown—to oblivion. The only point of such talk is to keep the air buzzing with the refrains of white grievance, for white grievance’s sake, internal consistency and analytical coherence be damned.
 
And now, of course, the stakes in the NBA culture war have ratcheted higher, with league players going on a wildcat strike over the murder of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As TNR staff writer Nick Martin notes, league players have taken this action not out of a posture of self-congratulatory wokeness but out of visceral frustration rooted in their own experience of police abuse. While past player labor actions have revolved chiefly around revenue-sharing and contracts, this one is an expression of solidarity, born out of a painful litany of abuse. “Anyone who claims to be surprised by the strike has not been paying attention to how closely the issue of police brutality has actively affected Black NBA players and executives,” Martin writes:

Bucks guard Sterling Brown is currently in the middle of suing the city of Milwaukee after he was shoved and tasered by an officer outside a Walgreens, who subsequently stood on his ankle and knelt on his neck. Toronto Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri—arguably the best G.M. in the game—was just vindicated by video last week regarding an incident from the 2019 NBA Finals in which an Alameda County cop working the championship’s final game blocked Ujiri from celebrating on the floor with his players, shoved him with two hands, and told him to “back the fuck up.” The Alameda County police department then publicly claimed that Ujiri punched the cop (he didn’t) as the officer involved tried to sue Ujiri and collected $150,000 in disability from the supposed trauma caused by the incident. (Said cop is now being sued by Ujiri.) Rockets forward Thabo Sefolosha had his leg broken by police in New York after he was wrongly arrested in 2015, forcing him to miss time in the league and take the officers to court.

The wildcat strike proved short lived, with an announcement that the players would resume the suspended playoff games at a date yet to be named. In the meantime, though, we can count on the same corps of shameless pundits on the right who rushed to demonize Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protests to malign the NBA with all manner of McCarthyite invective. After all, even though the league’s own revenue picture will be hobbled by Covid, one key dictum continues to drive the conduct of high-paranoiac loyalty inquisitions on the white nationalist right: Culture war is, always and forever, good for business.

—Chris Lehmann, editor