Kudos to Shaq O’Neal
as American people we do a lot of business in China and they know and understand our values and we understand their values. And one of our best values here in America is free speech. We’re allowed to say what we want to say and we are allowed to speak up about injustices and that’s just how it goes. And if people don’t understand that, that’s something that they have to deal with.
... Daryl Morey was right. Whenever you see something wrong going on anywhere in the world, you should have the right to say, ‘That’s not right.’ And that’s what he did... When it comes to business, sometimes you have to tiptoe around things, but again, they understand our values. … We have the right to speak, especially with social media. We’re going to say whatever we want to say, when we want to say it.
As several others have observed
We understand China’s values and look the other way at them, why can’t they do the same for us? If LeBron and Adam Silver can shrug off mass internment of religious minorities in concentration camps and collect the $ billions in TV revenue China NBA viewers provide then the Chinese ethnostate bullies might reasonably be expected to shrug off one tweet by a team executive in support of Hong Kong.
No one can literally fill Shaq’s Nikes. And LeBron is woefully inadequate even in a figurative state.