We Are All Realists Now
Updated at 10:23 a.m. ET on February 17, 2022.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs,” Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire part owner of the Golden State Warriors, said last month on a podcast. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line.” Supply chains are above this venture capitalist’s line, but any concern for human rights abroad is a “luxury belief.” In a statement, the Warriors tried to disown Palihapitiya, who then tried to disown himself, with the transparently false self-criticism that public figures issue when their views get them in trouble. “In re-listening to this week’s podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy,” he said, betraying that his main concern was for his own image. “To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.”
Of course, Palihapitiya was telling the truth the first time. He doesn’t care about the Uyghurs. Nor does Golden State, which didn’t mention them in the team’s statement. Nor does the NBA, which avoids and even suppresses criticism of China because of the billions of dollars that the league makes from Chinese contracts. Nor do most NBA players, whose silence is bought by lucrative endorsement deals with companies doing business in China, including ones whose sportswear is made with cotton produced by Uyghur slave labor. Tucker Carlson likes to attack NBA stars such as LeBron James for speaking out about racial injustice in America while avoiding any mention of mass rape and torture in Xinjiang province. But Carlson doesn’t care about human rights, either, or he would stop mouthing Russian propaganda while the country’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, prepares to invade its democratic neighbor, Ukraine.
[Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]
Ted Cruz and Mike Pompeo hammer China for its mistreatment of Uyghurs, but they also supported Trump-administration policies that kept desperate, that industrial backdrop of concrete cooling towers behind the freestyle-ski events—I’m still watching.
