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Maher explodes on John Cena, LeBron James, other athletes putting ‘totalitarian police state’ China over US

February 19, 2022 | | Print Article

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On the latest episode of his HBO program, liberal comedian Bill Maher excoriated American athletes who’ve sold out to the Chinese Communist Party for money and been pretending that the CCP isn’t a tyrannical regime that eagerly crushes freedom.

He specifically zeroed in on Olympic skier Eileen Gu, basketball player LeBron James, and professional wrestler John Cena.

“Is that cool now, to choose to represent a totalitarian police state over America?” he asked in exasperation of Gu’s decision to represent China in the Olympics despite having been born in the United States.

“The Olympics pretends to only be about sports but of course, the games have always been a bit of a proxy war for which country has the best system. And by choosing Team China, Eileen Gu became a living symbol of China’s triumph over the West, which wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought China had triumphed over us in the ways that really matter. But they haven’t.”

Regarding James, he skewered the athlete for providing cover for the CCP’s brutal treatment of Hong Kong, saying, “Democracy and freedom are being crushed there and China doesn’t want anyone to talk about it, and because so much money is involved, no one does.”

“Two years ago, when the general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted ‘fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong,’ he was forced to apologize. In America, we’re supposed to root for democratic government, not apologize for it,” Maher continued.

“But the NBA has a television deal with China worth a billion-and-a-half dollars. So LeBron James said Morey needed to be ‘educated on the situation,’ the situation being, ‘I’ve got some shoes to sell.'”

Listen to the whole segment below:

“‘Kowtow’ is a Chinese word but boy, Americans have gotten good at it. For years Google proudly refused to kowtow to Chinese censors, adopting the slogan ‘don’t be evil,’ but the Chinese market proved so lucrative that, well, OK, a little evil,” the comedian continued.

“That’s the deal China offers American companies and celebrities: We’ll give you access to our billion-plus consumers as long as you shut up about the whole police-state-genocide thing.”

Maher then zeroed in on Cena.

“John Cena took that deal. Well, c’mon. China accounts for 34 percent of the global box office and he’s a movie star now so, like the Uyghurs, last year, he learned he needed to get some re-education,” he said.

“You see, John referred to Taiwan as a country as if it were a separate country from China, which it is! But what China would like to do to Taiwan what it did to Tibet and what it’s now doing to Hong Kong. When a country can make your big muscly Macho Man action star grovel in their language, you know you’re somebody’s b—-.”

Part of the problem, Maher noted, is that these athletes think that the United States’ own litany of supposed issues make it so that Americans aren’t entitled to criticize brutal regimes like China. They couldn’t be more wrong, he argued.

“Now, we do have human rights issues right here at home, we do, but we’re still at least, for another three years, a democracy based on freedom. And they are an authoritarian surveillance state based on ‘How would you like to disappear for a few months?'” he said.

The “three years” part was in reference to former President Donald Trump most likely running for reelection in 2024. Far-leftists like him are convinced that if Trump wins reelection and takes office in early 2025, America is doomed.

“We do still throw too many black people in jail, but perspective matters. China has basically jailed an entire ethnic minority, the Uyghurs, a situation that both the Trump and Biden administrations have called a genocide. America is not close to that. And it’s a cynical dodge to pretend China’s sins should be overlooked because we all do it. No,” he said.

To be clear, the disparity in incarceration rates isn’t indicative of racism and discrimination, as Maher seemed to be suggesting. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has repeatedly documented this fact:

Concluding his remarks, the comedian noted that the second problem is “wokeness,” such as the “wokeness” that says it’s “racist” to criticize sellouts like Gu, let alone even the CCP itself.

“Some of Gu’s defenders say it’s racist to ask if she’s still an American citizen and she herself won’t say. Why is that racist? Why was it racist to think that COVID might have originated from a lab leak as opposed to from eating bats — besides the fact that the idea that COVID came from eating gross weird food seems way more racist and the idea that it came from a high-tech lab?” he said.

“Besides that, the definition of ‘woke’ was supposed to be being alert to injustice in society,” Maher added. “But because the ‘woke’ now see race first and everything else never, fear of being accused of racism has given a free pass on human rights abuses to China and any other places that are perceived as non-white.”

Vivek Saxena
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