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National Basketball Association (NBA) veteran and first team all-woke American LeBron James just can’t get it right. After a turbulent two weeks for the NBA, during which it embarrassingly groveled to and kissed the feet of the communist Chinese regime, James decided to skip the end of the National Anthem before the Los Angeles Lakers’ opening game Tuesday, opting instead to run the length of the court and yell “Let’s go” while the Anthem singer was still singing.

Daily Caller posted the video to its Twitter account:

You can see that while the rest of his teammates stand and face the flag, the typical routine before sports games, James decided to break ranks before the Anthem finished.

Idiotically, the NBA, which was at the center of the controversy surrounding China before its players got involved, posted the video to its official Twitter account, where it was subsequently shared by Daily Caller.

The league censored Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who posted his support for the protestors fighting for democracy in Hong Kong on his Twitter account. The NBA does a huge amount of business in China.

Fair enough, except the NBA is known as the “woke” professional sports league. Its players are known for speaking out on social issues, and particularly for bashing President Donald J. Trump. They’re part of the camp of people who will tell you that Trump is a dictator (but won’t explain how) but when they had the chance to stand up against an actual dictator known for committing human rights violations on a mass scale, they chose to protect their paychecks instead. Being brave or “woke” is easy when it doesn’t cost you anything.

James responded to the criticism when prompted by a reporter. He said Morey was “not educated about the situation” in Hong Kong, and then blasted the First Amendment.

“We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negatives that come with that too,” James said.

To recap, the guy with a high school education lecturing about “education” while bashing the very right he’s used to promote his social justice nonsense.

Fox Sports 1 reporter Jason Whitlock wasn’t buying it. He joined Tucker Carlson of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to break down the NBA’s hypocrisy.

“These basketball players, LeBron James, James Harden actually apologized on behalf of [Houston Rockets General Manager] Daryl Morey to the Chinese government,” he said. “We are apologizing to a communist government and then we have athletes here and coaches like Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich that rail against our government. We’re the bad guys in the minds of these NBA players and coaches and their little parade of being so woke.”

He then explained the business side of things, explaining that “you really have to understand the shoe companies, Nike, Adidas, they run American basketball from the high school level all the way to the pros and the shoe companies are dependent on the China market and that’s where all of this is coming from.”

Nike is infamous for operating sweatshops in China, where workers are paid little to nothing for an inhumane amount of hours each day to sew shoes together, among other hard labor.

Former NBA player and current NBA analyst Shaquille O’Neal wasn’t buying either.

“One of our best values here in America is free speech,” O’Neal said. “We’re allowed to say what we wanna say and we’re allowed to speak up about injustices, and that’s just how it goes, and if people don’t understand that, that’s just something that they have to deal with.”

He called the situation “unfortunate,” praised Morey for standing up for democracy, and then took a veiled shot at players like James, saying “you’ve got people speaking when they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“We’re going to say whatever we want to say, when we want to say it,” O’Neal finished.