Amid Uncertainty and Upheaval, LeBron Shows Us What an American Should Be

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Guardian UK

14 October 20

Watching LeBron motivate his teammates beyond their limits makes him the best on the court, but it’s his commitment to the disillusioned and disenfranchised that truly sets him apart

inning an NBA championship is nothing new for the Los Angeles Lakers. They have been in the finals a record 31 times since winning the title on their first trip in 1950, and they tied the Boston Celtics with 17 championships after seeing off the Miami Heat on Sunday night. But those are just statistics for superfans to rattle off over steaming pizza or a trivia question on a soggy napkin in a sports bar. Championship playoffs are much more than naked numbers – each has its own unique personality, its own significance to the players and fans, and its own impact on American culture. The game is never “just a game”. For those who think sports are merely mindless entertainment somehow separate from the Sturm und Drang of the world around, you haven’t been paying attention lately. Sports have always been a mirror of national values reflecting all the same struggles and turmoil. This year’s championship series is especially meaningful because, although it took place during one of the most politically and socially chaotic and world-bending times in recent history, in many ways, it was an expression of the finest qualities of America – both on and off the court.

On the court, the Lakers came out of the gate like a thundering juggernaut, relentlessly pummeling the Heat for two games into what many people thought was a defeated heap of expensive athletic shoes. But many people were wrong, and the series went to six games. The NBA finals were much more dramatic than we expected, which is due to the gutsy determination and professionalism of the dedicated players who gave it their all, despite playing under the most restrictive and challenging circumstances in the history of the sport.

That the finals took place at all is a complex blending of capitalism and ingenuity – two things America excels at. The NBA, like all professional sports leagues, needed to make money. But unlike the other leagues, they MacGyvered a safe and responsible way that protected their players, the staff and fans: they housed everyone involved with the teams and the games in a virtual bubble at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for the several months it would take to complete the season, the playoffs and the finals. On 19 August, the NBA revealed that after testing all 341 basketball players, none were positive for the Covid-19 virus. Yet ,during the first week of the Major League Baseball season, a total of 29 players tested positive. By 21 August, one-third of the teams in baseball had postponed games, likely because of players who didn’t follow safety protocols. The NFL suffered setbacks as well when 23 players and personnel from the Titans and several players from other teams tested positive, causing games to be postponed.

What’s especially impressive about the NBA is that the bubble proved to be more socially responsible than the US president, who in his maskless wonderland facilitated the infections of many who attended a White House ceremony. They also proved to be more patriotic in that they followed government/CDC guidelines, unlike the president. Finally, they proved that residing in a bubble doesn’t mean you live in isolation from your duty to your country or community. They displayed ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the floor of the court and they postponed several games, not because of infections, but because the police shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man, in the back seven times.

Though many NBA players throughout the season were vocal about their support for equality, the finals brought the focus on one man as the symbol of the merging of athletics and ethics: LeBron James. To be a symbol, one must excel at their sport. Watching LeBron’s chiseled Mount Rushmore face of determination as he displayed a dazzling blend of agility, grace, power and surgical skill that clearly amped up his teammates to push themselves harder and higher showed he deserves every accolade he gets. But his unwavering willingness to continue to convince the disillusioned and disenfranchised why they need to vote, makes him the embodiment of this NBA championship triumph.

Naturally, the NBA’s expression of social responsibility made it a target for conservatives who wanted it to fail. On 1 September, Trump tweeted: “People are tired of watching the highly political @NBA. … Basketball ratings are WAY down, and they won’t be coming back. I hope football and baseball are watching and learning because the same thing will be happening to them. Stand tall for our Country and our Flag!!!”

Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, echoed the sentiment by tweeting that the NBA ratings are low because of the politicizing of the league and that he hadn’t watched a single game of the finals for the first time in years. He ended with the hashtag “GoWokeGoBroke”. That really says everything you need to know about the character – or lack thereof – of both men: Never speak out against injustice if it costs you money. These are the sentiments of people born to collaborate with the enemy. To his credit, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban called Cruz out in his own tweet: “A US Senator with 3 @NBA teams in his state, employing thousands of people and he is rooting for their businesses to do poorly.”

It’s bad enough that Trump and Cruz show such a lack of moral leadership that equates ethics with popularity (think which side they’d have been on when slavery, women not voting and killing witches were all popular), but they also are just wrong about weak ratings being a result of rejecting the message. Because of the pandemic, many sports are competing against each other on TV for the first time ever, and it’s affecting all their ratings. The Stanley Cup final, Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, Indy 500 and golf’s US Open have all had ratings declines in the double digits. They also seem totally unaware that as many as 26 million Americans – about one in every 15 – protested against the police killing of George Floyd over the summer. How’s that for popularity, Mr President?

The NBA finals are always about the two best teams battling it out in astounding feats of athleticism and grit. But this year that has called on all of us to endure so much, the finals were also about two teams that want to stand for something more than being the best team, they want to be the best examples. This year LeBron James exemplified what a modern athlete should be, the Lakers exemplified what a team should be, and the NBA exemplified what a professional sports league should be: fiercely dedicated to their sport and passionately committed to their community.

The game is never “just a game”.

Kidnapping Plans, Nooses and the Boogaloo Militia

By Greg Palast and Zach D. Roberts, Greg Palast's Website

14 October 20

ote: Zach D. Roberts is either the most courageous member of the Palast Investigations team or the craziest, or both. For the past two years, photojournalist Roberts has been investigating the ultra-Right, traveling–sometimes openly, sometimes under cover–with the Proud Boys and other wannabe storm troopers. It was Roberts who took those horrific photos of neo-Nazis beating a Black school teacher, DeAndre Harris, nearly to death. Filming the perpetrators while a gun was pointed at him, Zach’s photos put five neo-Nazis behind bars.

How can Trump steal 2020? Violence is part of the recipe, Roberts reports… But, there’s another part. As detailed in our new one-minute film PSA, the massive, illegal purge of voters of color, barely reported in the network news, can result in 1.8 million voters blocked at the polling station, as happened in 2016. To prevent another Jim Crow outcome, the Palast Fund has created a website, SaveMyVote2020.org, where voters in Michigan and other states can look up to see if they have been, or are about to be, purged from the voter rolls.

Please: if you know someone in Michigan, make sure they look up to see if they are on the purge list. If so, there’s a link to re-register; it’s not too late.

We had to create the list for Michigan because the prior Administration of the state used Kris Kobach’s racially poisonous Crosscheck list—"aggressively" as these GOP officials told me.

But now that the Democrats have taken control of all statewide offices, why hasn’t Michigan’s new Attorney General returned 152,807 wrongly purged voters to the rolls? In Georgia and Wisconsin, our work has received support and thanks from Stacey Abrams and Mandela Barnes, Lt. Governor of Wisconsin. I can’t help but notice that both these officials are African-American. By contrast, the Democratic Party of Michigan, as I said in the chapter Michigan Mishagass of my book How Trump Stole 2020 , has ignored the GOP attacks on Black, Arabic and Hispanic voters. Why? Fear of a Black Party that would scare away whites? Ignorance? I just don’t know.

I bring up this uncomfortable fact because, in my decades of work on vote suppression, I’ve found that racist attacks on voters are often instigated by Boogaloo bigots and partisan pols like Kris Kobach. But, to be blunt, Jim Crow anti-voter tactics are only sustained by the silent complicity of white politicians who should know better.

Nine months ago, I sat across the table sharing a pizza and a beer with a man who almost certainly was armed.

I asked him, “How do you think tomorrow is going to go?”

He replied, “Either nothing’s going to happen or we’re going to lynch the Governor.”

I awkwardly chuckled, the man across the table did not join me in the laugh. A couple of minutes later he excused himself, grabbing his keys that were sitting on the table which was attached to a U.S. ARMY lanyard.

The next morning, the militiaman, Boogaloo Boys, Proud Boys and thousands of others descended on Virginia’s capital for a rally against the governor’s proposed gun ownership restrictions. No lynching. Not yet.

I thought of that conversation when I heard the news about the thwarted plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan riled by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s ‘lockdown’ of the state to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

If you know anything about militias, you probably know about the Michigan militia. But the media portrayed them as a benign curiosity. Back in 1995, the Chicago Tribune described its founder, Norm Olson, as merely “feisty”. This was just two months after one of their associates,Timothy McVeigh, working with members of the militia, murdered 168 men, women, and children at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The vast threat of the militia movement wasn’t taken seriously then (they were feisty, not dangerous, remember?), and its potential for violence and unrest hasn’t been taken seriously until (hopefully at least) now.

Today, the arrests of the six men facing federal charges around a conspiracy to commit kidnapping of the Governor of Michigan should come as no surprise. Just last month, a Dallas field office FBI internal report, obtained by Ken Klippenstein of The Nation, discussed the threat of “Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities, Increasing Domestic Violent Extremist Threat in the FBI Dallas Area of Responsibility.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray earlier this year noted that the greatest domestic threat to America are these right-wing gangs. However, Wray’s attempt to protect us from these gangsters is frustrated in part by Donald Trump’s restructuring of the Department of Homeland Security’s domestic terror operations and by a far too friendly relationship between these groups and law enforcement.

Now we are dealing with a militia movement that is emboldened by the President’s rhetoric to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and accelerated by disinformation on the internet. No better example of that was seen in Gettysburg over the July 4th holiday where hundreds of militia members and other ‘concerned citizens’ descended on the historic town carrying enough firearms to restart the Civil War.
Which may have been their point.

The men connected to the conspiracy to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, blow up a bridge and potentially murder law enforcement are not quite the militia of Commander Norm Olson’s days. While they train in the woods, wear tactical gear and give themselves fake military rankings, they’re closer to the ‘Boogaloo Movement.’

The Boogaloo Movement is anarchist in philosophy—true anarchists dreaming of a stateless society, an extreme libertarian community of “preppers” —prepared for civil war. Which is why they are armed to the teeth and training with whatever established groups they can.

The Boogaloos take their name from the cult film “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.” The movie (not a good one) has nothing to do with a civil war but like so much of our current internet meme culture has evolved from an inside joke to a racist meme to violence in the streets.

Boogaloo Boys are not fascist-leaning like the Proud Boys or the Patriot Front groups. But, in the confusing Venn diagram of far-right extremist movements, will often work together at the same events.

They have no official hierarchy. People who might call themselves Boogaloo in Cleveland, Ohio, could easily disagree with everything that some “Boog” in Lansing, Michigan might believe. Like most groups led by an internet meme, it’s an ever-moving target. Some even attended a Black Lives Matter rally to protect protesters from police! Yet, in the next town, they were seen protecting a Hobby Lobby.

The arrested members of the Wolverine Watchmen, the would-be kidnappers, also adopted Q-Anon and “Three Percenter” memes about child-trafficking. The Watchmen also defended Kyle Rittenhouse who was arrested for killing two progressive protesters in Wisconsin.

One of the accused, Pete Musico, is a fan of both Infowars and prominent Proud Boy, Joey Biggs.

Much like how the Michigan Militia distanced themselves from Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City Bombing but were vital to his plot to murder Federal employees, there’s no doubt that the groups that these Wolverines followed will deny any connection to the plot.

This keeps Bill Fulton, a researcher on domestic terrorism, up at night. The author of The Blood of Patriots, told me, “They’ve always worked together. You’ve always had that, the Venn diagram becomes a circle when it comes to the sovereigns [citizens] and the militias and the hate groups and some of these, more radical evangelical groups, they share massive amounts of membership.”

The question now is, how do these troops read their “Commander’s” signal to, “Stand back and stand by”?

Stand by…for what?