LeBron James, Trump’s mendacious hypocrisy, and the China question

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey set off a firestorm when he tweeted that he stood in support of the Hong Kong protesters. When interviewed and asked his opinion on Morey’s tweet, LeBron James made the objective point with which most agree: There are consequences, both moral and monetary, when you speak without a complete knowledge of a situation. However, many others wanted him to support the Hong Kong resistance, including Vice President Mike Pence and the oddly silent number President Trump. Both have engaged in mendacious hypocrisy when one understands that Trump called for the electric chair “lynching” of the Central Park Five teenagers before and after the boys were exonerated by DNA and a confession by the real “perp.” Trump’s full-page electric-chair clarion was published in what he calls the fake-news liberal mouthpiece, The New York Times. Kind of funny, isn’t it?

If freedom were the central issue, then why did the Trump team require the restrictions on free speech of the black Benedict College students during Trump’s speech on federal prison reform? Only a dozen or fewer of these students were permitted to attend the speech while others were required to be sequestered in their dorm rooms or leave the campus. The “imprisoned” dorm students shouted out their dorm windows to Trump to “free the guys, free the girls.” Sounds like Hong Kong to me. The semantics of the word “freedom” are contextual, whether it is used in China or at Benedict in South Carolina. I say China because Hong Kong is a part of China and is no longer a separate British colony.

LeBron’s problem is that one cannot singularly explain the 200-year history of British colonialism and the rise of free-market capitalism in a sound bite. Most would agree that the protesters in Hong Kong want independence from the Chinese legal system. Why? Because it is an extreme law-and-order system of punishment which, ironically, most of those protesters, like Trump GOP supporters, prefer. In America, such a punitive system of law is already applied to African Americans and other racial minorities. The protesters merely feel more comfortable having a native Hong Kong judge handing down incarceration decisions versus a Chinese jurist doing likewise. In fact, my quasi-conservative history professor colleague, Mark Avanigian, sardonically noted the Hong Kong protesters are not concerned with the incarceration of the poor and dispossessed on mainland China itself.

The GOP is the party of law and order. The Clinton criminal justice reform legislation that many argued led to mass incarceration was voted against by the majority of the GOP congressional representatives for being too lenient while the congressional black caucus advised President Clinton and fully supported the legislation. Everyone should know that Trump’s self-touted and fake “first step” criminal-justice reform only affect blacks incarcerated in federal prisons, not in state prisons, where 90 percent of blacks are incarcerated. State prisons house 1.5 million prisoners while federal prisons house less than 200,000. And to our knowledge, only three “Kardashian prisoners” thus far have been released.

The Hong Kong protesters just want their own homegrown slice of law and order. Wake up, protesters; you are no longer a free-market colony of the West. The protesters, by and large, do not know or care how many people are incarcerated in Hong Kong in violation of human rights. This point gets lost. Hong Kong’s legal system, like in the United States and all democracies of the West, is class-based. Therefore, poor and second-class citizens go to jail because they are not “crazy rich Asians.”

Money is behind it all. Trump’s “Let’s make a trade deal” is an attempt to increase American corporate profits today within a free-trade paradigm. In contrast, China is thinking about the Opium Wars and the imperialistic “Open Door” policy that led to China being a nation of quasi-drug addicts and losing its national sovereignty via the economic rape by multiple Western “white” nations. Colonial Hong Kong was a prime example of this economic sexual assault. For China, a trade imbalance that favors them is mere “payback,” and for Trump or Pence to say anything on this subject is self-serving, reflecting the mendacious hypocrisy of No. 45’s White House years.

This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 8:00 AM with the headline "LeBron James, Trump’s mendacious hypocrisy, and the China question."