NBA all-star LeBron James seems unaware of the fact that insulting a large percentage of your fans as ignorant morons because of their political affiliations leads to ruin, a hard lesson that the NFL is very quickly realizing.
Showing solidarity with the social justice cause celebre of athletes kneeling during the national anthem, James hit President Trump on Twitter over the weekend for lambasting the protests and calling for boycotts against the NFL. However, his rhetoric against the President went a particularly ill-advised direction when he trashed his supporters during a press conference on Monday.
According to James, his home state of Ohio “made a mistake” voting for Trump because they were “uneducated.”
“No matter whether you voted for him or not, you may have made a mistake and that’s OK, if you voted for him. It’s OK. I’ve done things for my daughter and realized I shouldn’t have gave my daughter that many damn Skittles. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
Then he hit at his own fans in the state of Ohio for giving Trump the vote, echoing Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comments.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think a lot of people was educated,” he said. “And I think that’s one of the biggest problems that we have. When it becomes vote time, people are just not educated on either the individual or what’s going on in the state of the world right now. … I don’t think a lot of people are educated and they make choices and say things that are uneducated.”
As Hillary learned, calling people stupid is not exactly the best recipe to win them over to your side. To LeBron, though, whether the states were “educated” or not matters little to him, because in the end, they all made the mistake of not voting for Hillary.
“And am I saying that the people of Ohio wasn’t educated?” he ponderd. “Am I saying that some of the other states that voted for him was uneducated? They could have been or they could not have been. But that doesn’t mean it was the right choice.”
Though LeBron supports the athletes taking a knee during the National Anthem, he will not be doing the same, since he says people know where he stands.
“What I say, I think it should hit home for a lot of people that know where I stand,” he said. “I don’t believe I should have to get on my knee for me to even further what I’m talking about.”
LeBron also does not believe that kneeling for the National Anthem represents any sort of hostility against the United States or the troops, saying that it’s not about “disrespect of the flag and our military and everybody who has made this world free. It is about equality and people having the option, the freedom, to speak about things that they feel that’s not just.”