When we heard that Enes Kanter Freedom had been traded by the NBA’s Boston Celtics and then promptly cut by the Houston Rockets, our first thought was: He’s too decent a dude for the money-grubbing, commie-loving, genocide-enabling NBA.

That was our second thought, too. And our third.

Freedom, the Turkish-born, 29-year-old, wise-beyond-his-years basketballer who loves this country so much that he recently became a U.S. citizen and changed his surname to reflect our most fundamental value, has been a human-rights thorn in the side of the bad guys for as long as he’s had a voice. He’d been speaking out against the Erdogan dictatorship in his native Turkey for nearly a decade before setting his sights on China. And that’s when it all changed.

Freedom had a sense it would one day soon cost him his job, and it did. Why? Because the bad guys — the genocidal Communist Chinese — call the shots in the NBA. Freedom says that more people watched the NBA in China last year — 400 million — than the entire U.S. population, and the annual revenue the league takes in from China is $5 billion. To no avail, he called for an athletic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and he labeled former NBAer Yao Ming a “puppet” of China. He’s brought attention to the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China, worn a “Free Tibet” message on a pair of custom-painted sneakers, and even spoken out against the league’s most well-known superstar and ChiCom stooge, LeBron James. As columnist Marc Thiessen writes:

Enes Kanter Freedom sensed the end was coming. “I have 25 games left in my contract, and it’s up after this season,” the 10-year National Basketball Association veteran told me last week. But recently, he said, former teammates and coaches began telling him, “We love you, so we have to tell you the truth. This is your farewell tour. Enjoy it. Smile. Have fun with it. I hope you win a championship, because I don’t think you are going to get another contract after this year, because the things that you talk about cost [the NBA] millions of dollars.”

Their malign influence extends beyond the basketball court. U.S. corporations now effectively act as foreign agents of the Chinese regime, lobbying Congress on its behalf. Freedom pointed out that U.S. corporations such as Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which bans imported goods made with slave labor. “Instead of Communist Party, they are the ones that are doing their propaganda,” he said.

It didn’t take long for news of Freedom’s fortunes in the NBA to make waves in China. And it didn’t take long for its state-run media to weigh in. Here’s a sample from The Global Times, an English-speaking rag run by the Communist Chinese: “After [ESPN] announced the trade through a Twitter post, netizens swarmed to the platform, mocking the player who has been ignorant and arrogant on China’s core interests and internal affairs such as those involving Xinjiang, Xizang, and Taiwan. … Broadcasters in China have yet to resume games featuring the Celtics, making the anti-China Kanter Freedom look like a burden to the league that has hundreds of millions [of] audience members in China.”

So a principled young freedom-fighter is now looking for work. His numbers make clear that he’s no Colin Kaepernick; he’s still a good, strong, productive backup center by NBA standards. If he isn’t picked up soon by one of its teams, then the message will have been sent loudly and clearly: In the NBA, you can speak out against “white supremacy” and in favor of the money-grubbing Marxist rioters of Black Lives Matter, but you can’t speak out against the league’s ruthless and oppressive Communist Chinese masters.

Shame on the NBA.