[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Who's the ass-***?

Which one of you decided to go and start badmouthing the Chinese government?

Who here thought they had permission to say anything critical of Chinese politics?

Well, it is true, sir. The Chinese seem to exploit their own people with forced labor.

Shut the f*** up, you're here to flex and not take your f***ing p***!

That is an enraged, Mickey Mouse screaming at the various Disney-owned characters that they are not to question the Chinese government in any way.

As Disney is doing many dollars' worth of business, they're that's from South Park's recent episode, Timely, Hilarious, and Powerful.

Yeah, the general manager of the Houston Rockets the other day with a pretty tepid support of Hong Kong in a tweet.

It's kind of a mild-hay.

Here's on you, Hong Kong, we're on your side. That's about it. I mean, it was not a full-throated, you know, criticism of China or anything like that, but that was still too much.

Well, you know, it is, if you understand what's going on, it's a pretty good criticism of China, but it would have gone away and nobody would have noticed or talked about it.

But China was deeply offended that anybody in the NBA who is currently begging them to do business in their communist land, they're horrified that anybody would dare criticize them.

China reacted by canceling a couple of broadcasts and pulling Houston Rockets gears out of store all stores all across the country. They did that like overnight.

Yep. Which is amazing.

So the NBA responded by making a truly disappointing statement about we didn't mean to offend anybody, we're sorry, valuable partners blah, blah, blah.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the NBA has at least a billion dollars at stake in China, which is quite a bit right, right.

And then there was a backlash against that statement that was swift and hurricane-like in the United States as it appeared that the NBA was siding with the communist Chinese against an American who said, yeah, I kind of like freedom.

Well, Adam Silver came out this morning with a much more clear statement saying essentially the NBA is not going to police freedom of expression among our players, our employees, etc.

We have a different system than y'all do in China, we don't police that stuff. Essentially. And it's, you know, it's pretty good.

It certainly does not in any way come anywhere close to criticizing China for the way they run their shop. And he makes the point that, hey, different belief systems, isn't it wonderful that we're working together? Come on, come on, let us do business there.

And I just also wonder if he doesn't feel like, look, we sent the message to our players, coaches, management, everybody message sent, you can't do that.

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