China’s Elite Capture: LeBron James Edition

Watch this interview on Rumble.

Peter Schweizer has been making the rounds across multiple talk shows promoting his NY Times #1 Bestseller, “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.” The bombshells that have been dropping for the last month have been nothing short of earthshattering as he details the Chinese Communist Party practice of “elite capture.” We’ve covered many of the revelations on The Liberty Daily, including:

• Peter Schweizer: Harry Reid ‘Enriched Himself and His Family,‘ Used ‘Fear‘ to ‘Control and Persuade‘
• Bidens Reaped $31M in Chinese Communist Business Dealings
• ‘The Biden Family May Be Compromised‘
• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Other Wall Street Leaders Partner With Chinese Coal, Military Enterprises
• NYT‘s ‘Turn‘ on Biden Family ‘an Important Development‘
• Joe Biden Was a ‘Beneficiary‘ of Hunter‘s Deals With China
• Schweizer Hits Another Home Run on Biden-China Corruption
• Peter Schweizer’s New Book Exposes 20 ‘Red-Handed’ Republicans Who Allegedly Sold out to China
• Schweizer: Pelosi‘s ‘Strong Financial Ties in China‘ Keeping Her from Investigating COVID Origins

With so many bombshells already dropped from the book, I went into my interview with him on the latest episode of The Midnight Sentinel expecting to rehash what was already covered. I was wrong. He had more bombshells to drop, to the point that I had a hard time isolating one to post for this particular story.

I chose his revelations about LeBron James for two reasons. First, the concept of “elite capture” that Schweizer details in his book is generally associated with political leaders, but Schweizer revealed that some non-political leaders were also under the Chinese Communist Party’s control. The second reason is that I hate LeBron James. That made the selection easier.

Schweizer spent a year-and-a-half with over a dozen staffers researching this book and diving into the many tentacles the Chinese Communist Party has in the United States. I figured if anyone had put together the information about LeBron, it would be Schweizer, so I decided to ask specifically about him. I was not disappointed. Here’s Schweizer’s response:

“Yeah, I think the evidence is overwhelming and convincing. A lot of people obviously are familiar with, you know, in 2019 when the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted something out supporting the freedom protesters in Hong Kong that were being brutally suppressed. The NBA came down hard on him.

“LeBron James, you know, said that he was ignorant as to what was going on, and I think a lot of people were stunned by that. And of course the reason the NBA is doing this is the market for basketball is larger in China than it is to the United States. But for LeBron James, what’s interesting is that’s not the first time he’s taken this pro-CCP Chinese Communist Party position.

“He has a long history of doing this. And so the reason is, you know, he obviously has a massive deal with Nike. Nike sells a lot of products in China. But a lot of people don’t know that LeBron James also has ties to Chinese state media. He has film products that he is distributing in China. He does that with the Chinese media companies.

“He has special shoe lines that are released only in China for the Chinese elite. They’re not available in the United States. He has other shoe lines that are first provided for the elite in China, before they come to the United States. And the net effect is that he refuses to say anything remotely critical of Beijing.

“If you go as far back as 2007, 2008, he had been in a league just a few years. You might remember there was a crisis in Africa involving Darfur, which was a South Sudan. And you had a situation where a government that was backed by the Chinese government — they were their main backers — was killing black Christians in the south of Sudan.

“It was absolutely brutal. The estimates were 200,000 to 300,000 black Christians were massacred by that government. Well, there was a petition drive launched in the NBA to call out the Chinese government for supporting that massacre and it was a petition passed around. LeBron James refused to sign that petition.

“He was with the Cleveland Cavaliers at the time. There was only one other player who wouldn’t sign it. That was sort of a back bench player who had a shoe contract with a Chinese sneaker company. But LeBron James did not want to have any part of it. So you have to ask yourselves when it comes to LeBron James’ activism, how serious is he about Black Lives Matter because these black lives did not seem to matter to him.

“And I would argue it’s because the Chinese government and Chinese entities are where he gets his check stamps and he does not want to do anything to disrupt that. And he’s not going to do anything to disrupt that. And so you have somebody who extensively is very outspoken, very candid on all kinds of social issues, but he won’t address these issues because these issues would actually cost him something, and he’s not gonna, you know, have any costs borne for his activism, especially when it comes to things related to China.”

Some may say it’s no big deal, that he’s just a greedy NBA player. But he is a role-model to many, and if he’s echoing CCP talking points, we know his adoring fans may be doing the same. We need LESS communism in America, not more.

Watch this interview on Rumble. Pick up a copy of Peter Schweizer’s book, “Red-Handed.”