Transcription
It was Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who once said, "We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them." And that is effectively how the National Basketball Association is run under Commissioner Adam Silver. I know it sounds like they have nothing in common. And it sounds ridiculous, but once you learn some of the core tenets of fascism, you'll never be able to see the two the same again.
The first throughline that you see in basically every fascist regime is that of the infallible leader, the leader who does not make mistakes. They are perfect. And you see this with Adam Silver. He does anything to not make himself look bad. He defends. He deflects. He uses straw men to get himself out of a hole. Maybe the best example of this for the NBA is when they asked Adam Silver about the rising cost of streaming games for fans. He said, "Well, you can just watch highlights. It's not actually that big of a deal. There's a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. I mean, this is very much a highlights-based [music] um uh sport." Rather than admit there's any blemish on the league, that yeah, actually games are too expensive for fans, he just says, "No, [music] it's your fault that you can't afford to watch games."
Another prime example is when Charles Barkley pushed him on national TV about the league's supposed domestic violence issues, and he just downplayed it. "We put in place a new program for how we deal with uh [music] first of all accusations of domestic violence that we have, you know, state-of-the-art uh counseling professionals dealing with our players, but of course, and if a guy, you know, does cross the line, the consequences are enormous." He was like, "Yeah, we get it. That's serious, but we don't really have an issue." Even though given his track record, you can see he very much does not take it seriously. There's an image to protect here. It is that he is the arbiter of truth, that any decision he makes is the right one. And you see this in a lot of fascist regimes.
The second tenet of fascism that you see in the NBA is that obsession with national decline, that everything is failing and you need one man to step in and stop-gap the whole thing. And the most pertinent example of this is all this talk about NBA ratings and their decline. We hear this nonstop from media entities closely aligned with the league, and they want you to be in fear that the league is failing, that the league will not make it through the night, and how you need to leave it up to them and Adam Silver to save the whole thing. That is why they're always tinkering with things. That is why they're always changing things. A great example of this is the All-Star game. I think All-Star games for all intents and purposes have just hit their shelf life. No one really cares, and you really can't do a lot to fix that. But that doesn't stop Adam Silver from trying. That doesn't stop Adam Silver from changing the format every two years so he can say, "Look at all these things I'm doing to try to save the league." I don't think many fans really care about the All-Star game at this point. And they would much rather see the league and Silver try to fix actual problems in the game, like game flow in the fourth quarter, like all the fouls. We would much rather see that resolved than USA versus the world. But yet that's what we get.
The league is in a really strong position. The roof is not falling. There's extremely popular players from top to bottom. You have the old guard, the LeBron, the Steph, the KD. You have the middle guard, the Giannis, and even the Jayson Tatums. And then we have the new guard, Anthony Edwards, and SGA. There's stars everywhere. The 15th men now are probably better than rotation guys 30 years ago. It's an elite watch nightly, and reports of its fall have been exaggerated greatly. But that's exactly what fascist regimes do. They enrage people and they band people together around a common enemy so that they can fight that common enemy and show that they are the good guys.
The third main throughline between fascism and the NBA is just a general disdain for human rights. The NBA has a pretty bad domestic violence issue, but that's not the problem they're worried about. They're worried about getting Miles Bridges and Kevin Porter Jr. back on the court as fast as possible. So, they get slaps on the wrist, and then a guy like Bobby Portis will get a longer suspension for probably taking the wrong pain medication. There's hundreds of NBA players who haven't beaten up their girlfriend, but the league doesn't stick out its neck for those guys. It will instead say that Miles Bridges and Kevin Porter Jr. did their time. But we see what's going on.
I also think of when the NBA moved the All-Star game out of Charlotte because of North Carolina's proposed bathroom bill. Here they were standing up for the little guy. And then just a couple years later, they would capitulate and totally fold and give in. They just said, "It doesn't matter anymore." They said, "Charlotte, here's your All-Star game. We'll make some money. It doesn't matter to us at this point." And you see this thing with fascist regimes where if you try to stick up for human rights in any way, you're basically thrown to the curb. And the whole idea is to show that you cannot advance socially so that other people don't see a success story and then try to challenge the status quo.
A fourth major throughline you see between fascism and the NBA is a control of mass media and an undermining of the objective truth. And I keep coming back to this admission from Adam Silver himself where he said he's fine if you don't watch the games. "The world's changed. It's not just automatically in the place you thought it would be." He's fine if you don't see what's happening with your own eyes. Because then if you see what's happening with your own eyes, you can come up with your own conclusions. If you just watch the highlights and the clips like he says you can do and still get the same experience from, then you're only going to see half the truth. And that half is the half of the truth that they want you to see. You're only going to see certain players pushed onto your feed. You're only going to see certain players' highlights. You're never going to see that player's lowlights because there's some players and some teams that the NBA understands they can make more money from if they push to the front and to the center.
It's also why the NBA has gone out of their way to sort of limit any basketball discourse that they are not directly involved with. And they do this by shutting down stat websites. They do this by shutting down clipping websites. These are things that would help a curious fan to learn about the game or maybe even help a content creator learn about the game and then disseminate that to another larger audience. There is a very real attempt to control the media and to control the narrative and an attempt to undermine the objective truth so that they can substitute their own to protect their bottom line.
A [music] fifth tenet of fascism that you also see in the NBA is an identification of common enemy and scapegoats. I see this very much with the Jonte Porter situation. Jonte Porter made a terrible mistake. [music] He made an awful decision. But his worst decision, his biggest mistake was threatening the bottom dollar of the league's partners. And this is not to say that Jonte Porter shouldn't have been punished. He absolutely should have been. But he needed to be made an example out of because he threatened the league's partners. He threatened FanDuel. He threatened DraftKings. He threatened BetMGM. And those are huge league partners. What happens to Jonte Porter? He's banished to Siberia. They want to divert your attention to this common enemy and make him a scapegoat so that you don't see that they are partnered with every single sports book. So that you don't see that the NBA is profiting off of this disease that is sports betting. If you were ever thinking about sports betting and the NBA or the NFL and how they're intertwined, well, now all you think about is these players that [music] were threatening the league.
The sixth major tenet of fascism that you see in the NBA is labor power is being suppressed. And this is maybe the most literalized one. There is literally a salary cap that limits how much money one person can earn. Like where else do you see that in the workplace? And I know people will be like, "Well, LeBron James, Steph Curry, they make 50, 60 million." Well, guess what? A guy like LeBron James is worth more than $50 million to the Lakers. A guy like SGA is worth more than a supermax contract to Oklahoma City and to the Thunder. This is a thing that's been studied, and that's what the facts say. That is the objective truth. And some segment of Americans would be like, "Why are you going to bat for a guy who makes $50 million a year?" Because he's not being paid what he's worth. I will do that any day of the week because while he does all the hard work, a random rich white guy who just sits in a room somewhere collects most of the money in the billions, not millions. There's this idea of scarcity that is sold to you that if you're not playing in the NBA, which you are so lucky to be playing in, [music] you would have no other job opportunities. You would have no other way of making money. So you should be lucky to get whatever scraps you're getting, which in this case is millions of dollars, but still scraps compared to what the owners are making. But this sort of leverage kind of breaks down when you think about it for more than three seconds because the owners want to make as much money as possible. And usually this is done by having the best players on the court and having the best team. So some nitpicking over salary negotiations will not really be a reason why a guy is not in the league. Because like Mark Zuckerberg said in The Social Network, "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." "If guys are supposed to be in the NBA, they're going to be in the NBA." The salary cap is just the most simple example of being anti-labor. And it's the sort of thing you see in fascist regimes where they try to tell you, "Hey, you should be lucky. You should be grateful. You should be thanking us for the opportunity to just earn some money."
The seventh core tenet of fascism that you also see in the NBA is what I'm going to call a disdain for intellectuals. And what this really means is anyone who really dares to question why things are the way they are. And someone I think of here is a guy like Jaylen Brown. Because Jaylen Brown was probably due next up for Team USA after some injuries in training camp. And what happened? He questioned why things were the way they were because the NBA, Team USA, and Nike are all very closely intertwined. And Jaylen Brown was questioning Nike over some questionable labor practices. And even one mere tweet was enough to get a guy like Derrick White, who objectively is a worse basketball player than Jaylen Brown, onto the Team USA roster over Jaylen Brown. And Derrick White had never questioned the league. He had never questioned the league's partners, Nike, in such a way that Jaylen Brown had. So, under ideals of fascism, when push comes to shove, who is treated better? Those who don't question.
The eighth thing you're going to see in both fascism and the NBA is that democratic ideas and ideals of freedom and equality are a threat. And again, we see this very literalized with the NBA draft lottery. It is not a democratic or equal system. It's a very flawed system where a quote-richer team, the Dallas Mavericks in this case, will win the NBA draft lottery over a team like the Utah Jazz or the Washington Wizards. When the Washington Wizards or the Utah Jazz or a lot of other teams need more help than the Dallas Mavericks, they took more steps than the Dallas Mavericks to get to a more equal footing, also known as getting the first overall pick, but they didn't get it. Under a reverse-order draft that you see in the NFL, teams have a lot more agency. If you just lose all your games, you're going to get the first pick. In the NBA, that is not the case. And this is not a protanking take. I hate tanking, but it's just not an equitable system. Teams have less say in their outcomes under a draft lottery than they do under a reverse-order draft. And the NBA loves this mechanism because it can help out the top 1%. If you just did a reverse-order draft every year and there was a small-market team, let's just say the Pacers, who was really struggling to get marquee talent, they would just lose a lot of games every year and eventually they would hit and get one of those top picks. But instead, they could lose every game and still not get the first pick. Democratic ideas and equality are a threat, so they are outlawed.
The ninth throughline that you're going to see between fascism and the NBA is an obsession with expanding territory, where you are to sort of expect that an expansion of this empire is inevitable. And that's what you see in the NBA with all the talk about expansion to Las Vegas and moving back to Seattle. For probably the last decade, they have been two years away from being two years away from announcing an expansion team. And then you also see more of these overseas games in more places: Abu Dhabi, Australia, Paris, London. The NBA is not content with being the most elite basketball league in the world with 30 teams. They want more because more means more money for the powers that be. But also, the NBA has even more leagues that are taking up even more space in our basketball diet. It has the NBA G League. It has the WNBA. It has the NBA 2K League. Who is even watching that? Who is that for? The league is obsessed with taking up more and more of the oxygen in the room and making sure that if you want to watch elite, high-level basketball, they are the only option for that. And you see this with fascist regimes. They start wars. They look to expand their territories. They look to take land that does not belong to them, that has belonged to other people for thousands of years, and say, "This is ours now."
And the tenth and final major throughline I see between fascism and the NBA is just rampant cronyism and corruption, where loyalty to the top is just more important and more paramount than just flat-out competence. And you see this in the league office where guys are there just for decades because they're very good yes-men. But you also see it with teams where essentially the same coaches get recycled year after year, where the same assistant coaches bounce around because their friends are now with different teams, where the only way to get your footing in the league if you are not a player is to have had someone else already do that. There are literally countless examples of this where you see a terrible decision being made by an NBA team and then go, "Wait, why is that happening? How did this guy get that job?" It's like because his buddy was hiring. This is why you see the same mediocre coaches and front office members be in the league for 30 or 40 years. They are lifers because they have people all around them to insulate them and to protect them and to give them one job if eventually they are fired over here. This is why when you go to the Wikipedia page for a coach in the NBA, for half of them, when you scroll down to the parents section, that dad is listed in blue. And sometimes that dad's dad is listed in blue. They don't care who's the best for the job or who is the most competent. They care if you know people already in positions of power. And that is how you just objectively get a worse product. And you see this in fascist regimes where some idiot will be in charge of something very important, but he's someone's son-in-law. And yeah, these are all major tenets of fascism that you see in the National Basketball Association. And none of this means that if something has fascist characteristics, it is fascist. Something might only have one of these and be fascist. Something might have a lot more of these and not be fascist. But once you get some of these working together in conjunction, the fascist ideologies get embedded in the very thing.
I first got the idea to explore this when I gathered my entire family around to watch the 2025 NBA draft lottery, hoping that my Washington Wizards would get the first overall pick. [music] We didn't. We got the sixth overall pick, and I was just thinking, I was like, this is not right. There is something else at play here. And the league is not rigged. We all know that. But I think there's a lot of characteristics of the league which I have now pointed out that I think has left a lot of fans feeling like I did on that night. I hope you enjoyed this video, found it interesting, maybe learned a thing or two. And if you stuck it out to this point, I sincerely appreciate you. As many of you know, my main platform is on TikTok, but I really enjoyed making this video. And this is something I see myself doing more of going forward in the future.