Basketball star Enes Kanter Freedom, who was blacklisted from the NBA after condemning China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, trashed Olympic skier Eileen Gu on Tuesday as a “traitor” for taking advantage of American freedom and then switching her allegiance to China.
“She was born in America, raised in America, lives in America, and chose to compete against her own country for the worst human rights abuser on the planet, China,” Kanter wrote in a post on social media platform X.
“She built her fame in a free country, then chose to represent an authoritarian regime while cashing in on endorsements linked by watchdog groups to mass detention and forced labor camps,” he continued.
“When human rights come up, she disappears,” he noted. “That’s not neutrality. That’s a choice.”
Gu got back in the news this week by getting involved in the dispute between freestyle skier Hunter Hess, who injected politics into the Olympics by claiming it was “hard” for him to “wear Team USA gear” because he disagrees with America’s immigration laws, and President Donald Trump, who called Hess a “real loser.”
“I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be,” Gu said, to the delight of Chinese Communist state media, which boosted her remarks as an attack on Trump and U.S. immigration law.
It does not appear to have occurred to Gu to ask how her new patron country, the People’s Republic of China, deals with migrants who violate its strict immigration laws. Kanter zeroed in on that hypocrisy in his social media post.
“She chose to play for a country responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own people and that is running concentration camps right now, instead of the country where she was born and given opportunity,” Kanter said of Gu.
“You don’t get to enjoy the freedoms of U.S. citizenship while acting as a global PR asset for the Chinese Communist Party. By choosing to promote the CCP on the world stage, Eileen Gu forfeited any moral claim to America and should not keep her U.S. citizenship,” he said.
“She chose Communism over Freedom,” he concluded.
Gu, a two-time gold medalist, narrowly lost the gold medal to Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud on Monday. She blamed injuries, time spent on academics instead of skiing, and “some mental stuff” for losing the gold to Gremaud.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m carrying the weight of two countries on my shoulders. Just being able to ski through all of that, you know. To still show my best and still be so deeply in love with the sport,” she said.
As Enes Kanter Freedom would probably be quick to point out, that is not true. Gu chose to abandon her old country and now plays for only one, the People’s Republic of China, and she should probably be careful about using phrases like “two countries” within earshot of her Beijing overlords, because they are very insistent that there is only one China.
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