A few years back, some American sportsmen made a big deal about pushing their politics — basically BLM — during events and interviews and things.
On the right, this was quite widely seen as unpleasant. For example, “Lion of the Blogosphere” wrote two years ago on his blog:
The average NFL player is paid $1.9 million/year to entertain prole whites who love the American flag, and part of the show is that they are supposed act patriotic when the National Anthem is playing.
If I inflicted my political opinions on my employer’s customers I’d be fired, and I get paid a lot less than $1.9 million/year.
https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/boycottnfl-part-2/
I happen to have picked @LionBlogosphere — I follow a whole lot of weirdos on twitter, but he is much closer to a mainstream American Conservative.
Anyway, not that it’s really any of my business, I agree with him entirely; I think that’s a totally reasonable position for him to take. And, while the whole issue has dragged on, not 100% resolved, his side has at any rate not definitively lost. I think it has come out slightly ahead, and the leagues and teams have mostly taken the view that their players should not insult their spectators.
But now, of course, we have the China thing. NBA basketball is huge in China, and there’s some kind of protest movement in Hong Kong that I don’t know much about, and some basketball people made sympathetic noises about the HK protesters, and the Chinese government was very upset.
I’m trying hard to remain ignorant of the Hong Kong thing. A new extradition law was brought in, or something, and that’s maybe against what the Chinese government had previously promised in terms of HK’s autonomy, and there have been protests going on for a month or three, which have been getting the whole unquestioning popular support in the West that I hate so much. So my reflex view is on the side of the CPC, but of course they may really be doing something bad for all I know.
Either way, right or wrong, the Chinese government are not going to be friendly to foreigners who take sides against them. They are not going to allow them a public platform in their country, any more than they allow their enemies within the country a public platform. And if you are a basketball team that’s going to do tours and broadcast games in China, the Chinese government is your customer. And, as @LionBlogosphere said, “If I inflicted my political opinions on my employer’s customers I’d be fired”.
So I think we’re all agreed.
Except, of course, that @LionBlogosphere today retweeted Ted Cruz saying,
It is outrageous that the Chinese Communist Party is using its economic power to suppress the speech of Americans inside the United States:
https://www.tedcruz.org/news/the-hill-ocasio-cortez-ted-cruz-join-colleagues-blasting-nba-for-outrageous-response-to-china/
Again, I’m not especially objecting to Lion, I just follow him and not, say, Ted Cruz, who in September 2016 said
Here’s a peaceful protest: never buy another shoe, shirt, or jersey of rich spoiled athletes who dishonor our flag. https://t.co/GrGPYX8HCh
If you are putting economic pressure on sports teams, and you expect them to respond, well, so can their other customers, and maybe it’s reasonable for the teams and leagues to respond to that too.
Surely, you can draw a distinction between #BLM and “Free Hong Kong”. The teams in question are all American, and you can demand of them a loyalty to America while they have no equivalent duty of loyalty to China. But they would no doubt claim they were being loyal to America by seeking to change it in the way they sought — the real objection is they were offending their customers. Another distinction is that it wasn’t the US government putting pressure on the teams to censor themselves, but the Chinese government is doing so. Well, the relationship between citizens and government is different in China than it is in the US. International sport has long depended on not bringing one country’s politics into another. Most Americans probably think that China should be a democracy with free speech. But it isn’t. If Ted Cruz thinks that means the NBA shouldn’t do business with China, that’s a coherent position. But if he doesn’t think that, then obviously the NBA will take steps to make their product marketable there, if there is commercial reason to. And if he thinks that this is a matter of the principle of free speech, which should outweigh that commercial reason — then why did he think the opposite in 2016?
Now, you can point to a contradiction between the relative willingness of the entertainment industry to allow opposition to the US government, and their very rapid arse-covering with respect to the Chinese government. That reflects both their own political biases, and the relative power of the US and Chinese governments over their ability to do business. But if the other side is contradicting itself, it doesn’t help to contradict yourself, even worse, in the opposite direction. Ted Cruz was right in 2016, he (and @LionBlogosphere) could very justifiably spend these weeks banging on about the inconsistency in sportsmen demanding the right to insult symbols of the American nation while being careful to avoid insulting the Chinese nation. Instead they just destroy their own previous arguments.
Finally, the 2016 argument was the more important of the two. By flipping now, they are putting themselves in the wrong for next time. You said that political protests at sporting events was a matter of free speech.