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LeBron v. Jokic Racism
How we punish Black people and ignore the same behavior from white folks
Remember when right-wingers went into a frenzy because President Obama saluted Marines while holding a cup of coffee?
That was September 2014. The condemnations were swift and angry.
Sean Hannity, “shocked,” asked on air: “Would President Bush ever do that?” Karl Rove answered with a rant for the ages: “We’ve got a chai-swillin’, golf-playin’, basketball trash-talkin’, lead from behind, I’ve got no strategy, Osama bin Laden is dead/GM is alive, a community organizing commander-in-chief. How disrespectful was that?”
Over at RedState, the salute became “a useful metaphor for his entire administration: sloppy, ill-thought-out, inappropriate, callous, selfish, and disrespectful.”
You’d think he had done something truly terrible, like leading the U.S. into a war that cut off world trade and gas supply or something with no game plan on how to end it.
Fast forward to 2026.
We have a president who saluted a brutal communist North Korean general at the 2018 Singapore summit. He needed his wife to nudge him into putting his hand over his heart for the anthem at the 2017 White House Easter Egg Roll. He’s a civilian with no military service, yet…
