Mark Cuban, Ted Cruz spar over BLM, coronavirus and China

The issue of the NBA and China first created a politically charged discussion in October after Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey posted, then deleted, a tweet that supported protesters in Hong Kong. Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James, who criticized Morey after returning from a league-sponsored trip to China, garnered accusations of hypocrisy at the time for having outspoken views on social injustice in the United States while appearing to downplay, as some saw it, human rights abuses in the NBA’s most important foreign market.

More recently, ESPN’s top NBA reporter, Adrian Wojnarowski, was suspended after emailing a profanity to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R), after the latter criticized the league for allowing messages promoting issues of social justice, including BLM, on its jerseys this summer but not allowing messages supportive of law enforcement or critical of China’s Communist Party.

Cruz’s back-and-forth with Cuban began after the Mavs owner sent a dismissive tweet Sunday evening to a Dallas-area radio host who said he would be “OUT” on the team’s return to play unless Cuban helped avert player protests during the anthem. Cuban followed that up with another tweet in which he claimed the “National Anthem Police in this country are out of control.”

Cruz then shared an image of Cuban’s first tweet while telling his followers, “Really??!? NBA is telling everyone who stands for the flag, who honors our cops and our veterans, to ‘piss off’? In Texas, no less? Good luck with that.”

Cruz also took issue with Cuban’s second tweet, but the fact that he used an image in his initial criticism, rather than retweeting, tagging or replying directly to Cuban earned the scorn of the Mavs owner.

“Have some balls for once,” Cuban tweeted Monday morning, tagging Cruz’s handle. Speak to me. It’s my tweet.”

Cruz responded by sarcastically declaring that tweeting out his disbelief over Cuban’s anthem stance “to the world” was indeed “meant somehow to keep it a secret,” because Cuban is “very scary.”

“I’m a Rockets fan, but more than happy to cheer on the Mavericks (great team this year),” Cruz tweeted at Cuban. “It’s sad to see you telling so many Texans to ‘piss off.’”

It is unclear why Cruz twice suggested that Cuban had actually used the phrase “piss off,” when that was not the case, at least not in the tweets Cuban sent Sunday evening.

Cuban, who said in 2017 that he was “considering” a run for president, was sharply critical of Cruz the year before, while the latter was still among a field of hopefuls for the Republican Party nomination.

“I think he is Joe McCarthy reincarnate,” Cuban said then of Cruz. Calling Cruz “obstructionist,” Cuban added, “I just keep on waiting for him to say something to the effect [of], ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of some party?’ ”

On Monday, Cruz parroted Cuban’s testicular verbiage while tweeting that he would “wait” for his sparring partner to “tell us what you think about China.”

When an hour went by with no response, Cruz asked if Cuban would say “Free Hong Kong” or allow his players to put that on their jerseys. He also challenged Cuban to condemn what he described as the Chinese Communist Party’s detention of Uighurs in “concentration camps,” and taunted Cuban as having nothing to say on China except praise for “Chairman Mao.”

Approximately an hour after that, Cuban replied by tweeting, “I can say Black Lives Matter. I can say there is systemic racism in this country. I can say there is a Pandemic that you have done little to end.”

Cuban also pointed to a 2019 video which showed him suggesting ways he might use American stock exchanges to create “leverage” against China, as opposed to Trump’s Twitter-oriented efforts to ramp up a trade war. In addition, Cuban cited a 2017 documentary he co-produced, “The China Hustle,” that focuses on alleged securities fraud involving Chinese companies and U.S. investment firms.

Cuban then asked Cruz why the latter takes “such pride in standing up to and speaking truth to the Chinese” but has “no ability to stand up to and speak the truth to [Trump].”

As some observers of the exchange noted, Trump was accused in a book last month by former national security adviser John Bolton of not only failing to condemn Chinese President Xi Jinping for the detention camps but of actively encouraging his counterpart to continue what Trump saw as, in the words of Bolton, “exactly the right thing to do.”

With Bolton’s claims making headlines, Trump signed a measure, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, that reportedly drew an unhappy response from Beijing. Cruz, along with three other U.S. officials, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was sanctioned by China last week for his condemnation of human rights abuses in the Xin­jiang region, where Uighurs make up the largest ethnic group.

Cruz ignored the question about his treatment of Trump but did address some of Cuban’s other assertions, tweeting, “I agree Black Lives Matter. I agree there is a pandemic & we have taken extraordinary steps to defeat it.”

“Where did that pandemic originate?” Cruz continued. “Why did Communist China COVER UP the Wuhan outbreak & arrest whistle-blowers? And why are you terrified to say ONE WORD about China?”

At that point, it apparently was Cuban’s turn to ignore a pointed question. He did, however, take note of chatter online among some conservative voices urging their followers to boycott Cuban’s companies, which include investments he has made via the hit TV show, “Shark Tank.”

Cuban leaned into the effort to punish him financially by tweeting a link to his personal website, where he said boycott-minded activists could find the most authoritative list of his companies.

Meanwhile, Cruz was busy expanding his adversaries for the day from an NBA team owner to “the lunatic left.”

“Given the assault on America from the violent mobs, from the America-hating crazy left,” Cruz was shown saying in a video he retweeted Monday evening, “now’s the time when we need to come together and stand as one.”

And that’s more or less where Cruz and Cuban left things Monday.

Read more:

Source:WP