I have no real objection to the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Gregg Popovich, insulting President Trump. That’s his right as an American citizen. But I do find it contemptible that he would then take the opportunity to dismiss the 61 million Americans who voted for Trump as “a—holes.”

What annoys me the most is that he is one more leftist who pretends it takes extraordinary courage to defame Trump, pretending as if he’s living in Iran, Turkey, Russia, China or North Korea. Heck, because he’s won several NBA titles over the past 22 seasons, the schmuck knows he’s not even risking his job, let alone his freedom or his life.

In fact, probably the worst that he can expect is that a few fans will follow the lead of a local woman who identified herself as a lifelong Spurs fan who let it be known that in the wake of his intemperate remarks, she has tossed out all of her San Antonio sportswear and pennants.

Only in America can someone get away with trashing the nation’s leader and at least half of his own hometown fan base and still pat himself on the back, saying: “You have to speak out because so many people are afraid to speak the truth.”

Perhaps Coach Popovich has spent too many years in gyms and locker rooms to have noticed that despising President Trump is a growth industry that offers employment to virtually everyone at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the entire Silicon Valley, most of academia, the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the entire entertainment industry, nearly the entire sports industry, 70% of the residents in New York City and nearly the same percentage of Californians.

The only people facing pushback and the possibility of losing their jobs in America if they don’t toe the leftist line are those defending President Trump and police officers who dare confront black thugs and illegal aliens.

It will probably not come as a surprise that the only thing Popovich hates nearly as much as he hates Trump is the Second Amendment, which this deep thinker predictably blames for gun violence.

---

In reading Ron Kessler’s The Trump White House, I was reminded how repulsive liberals in high places are. Although whenever they’re on the campaign trail, they pretend to be just plain folks, whenever the TV cameras are turned off, they show their true colors.

That’s probably no surprise to anyone who isn’t dumb enough to vote for them, but the thing I have always found remarkable is that so many of them treat members of the Secret Service, the people sworn to take a bullet for them, like trash.

When she was first lady, Hillary Clinton made no secret of the fact that she resented their presence, as she did everyone in uniform who had White House duty.

As Kessler related in his other eye-opening books, Mrs. Clinton was so hated that her Secret Service detail understood that the assignment of guarding her was regarded as punishment, worse even then being assigned to a field office in North Dakota.

Joe Biden had so little respect for the female agents assigned to him as vice president that he would regularly swim naked while doing his daily laps.

And let us not forget that John Kerry ridiculed a Secret Service agent who got in his way on the ski slopes during the 2004 presidential campaign, an agent who certainly hadn’t begged to stand freezing in the snow while Kerry frolicked.

During the same campaign, Kerry warned a group of California students that if they fell down in their studies, they just might wind up in the military. Kerry is also the guy who lied about his own military service, his injuries and even lied about throwing his medals over the fence at the Pentagon; he threw someone else’s. He framed his own and eventually had them displayed on the wall of his Senate office.

One thing you can say for Kerry is that he made his money the old-fashioned way; he married it.

---

I was recently amazed to hear that of the 10 smoggiest cities in America, eight of them are right out here in California. The only two that are outside our borders are Phoenix and New York City.

How is it possible that the state with the most demented Mother Earth cultists, where billionaire boneheads like Tom Steyer pledge hundreds of millions of dollars to any candidate running as an environmentalist, could still have the filthiest air in the nation?

This is California, for heaven’s sake, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting half a dozen brie-noshing, wine spritzer-sipping tree-huggers — thus making cat-swinging a favorite pastime in certain circles.

---

I recently had an exchange with a reader who tried to convince me that Russia has a far larger, more robust economy than China. I let him know that it was my understanding that China’s was 10 times the size of Russia. But after reading a speech titled “How to Meet the Strategic Challenge Posed by China,” delivered by China expert David Goldman and reprinted in Imprimis, I believe the differential is even greater than that.

China is also more threatening to America and America’s interests than Russia. Whereas Vladimir Putin seems to be satisfied with having a presence in Crimea, Ukraine and Libya, China is looking to expand its influence and its economy not only into all of Asia but into Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

One of its main ways of expanding its power is by dangling its enormous 1.4 billion population and the market they represent before the greedy eyes of American technological companies and their stockholders.
 A staggering fact is that there are more people in China than there are in the U.S., Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Iran, South Korea, North Korea, France and the United Kingdom, combined! The only country that even comes close to China is India, and even India falls short by 50 million.

The club that China wields over the technology industries is that if they wish to have access to the Chinese market — the biggest chip market in the world — they have to turn over their research.

As Goldman writes: “From the standpoint of Intel stock prices over the next five to ten years, that’s a pretty good deal for the companies. But it’s a bad deal from the standpoint of America’s national interests. I’m a free trader, but national security sometimes supersedes the free market. This would be such a case.”

He goes on to state: “Virtually all of American investment in research and development today goes to software. This means that we’ve already conceded to Asia, and especially China, the actual manufacturing, to the point that we can’t put a warplane in the air without Chinese chips.”

He is not entirely pessimistic about the future because he believes in American innovation and entrepreneurship. “If the Chinese are spending tens of billions of dollars to build chip fabrication plants and we come up with a better way of doing it, suddenly they’ll have a hundred billion dollars’ worth of worthless chip manufacturing plants on their hands. But you can’t predict the outcome in advance. You have to make the commitment and take a leap of faith in American ingenuity and science.”

Of course, for that to happen, we have to make certain that the Chinese don’t swipe the technological advances through espionage or by having them handed over in exchange for a bribe, the way that President Bill Clinton did back in the 1990s.

I wouldn’t ever want to count the U.S. out of any competition. As we saw in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union put Sputnik in orbit, the U.S. responded by putting men on the moon a few years later.

But, today, we are at a distinct disadvantage when China’s colleges are producing four times as many graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics as we are and twice as many Ph.D’s in those subjects. In the U.S., roughly 6 percent of college students are majoring in engineering. In China, it’s close to 40 percent.

Smart people know better than to take a knife to a gunfight. We’re taking China on in a technology battle, perhaps a battle to the death, armed with liberal arts students who are majoring in Black Studies, Lesbian Studies and the Evolution of Comic Books.

At the same time, we spend a fortune housing, feeding and schooling millions of people who have no business being here, while simultaneously doubling down by subsidizing millions of able-bodied Americans, insisting they do nothing for the money, except, perhaps, continue to breathe, use illegal drugs and fornicate.

Then, because we hold these sacred cows in such high regard, if the sexual activity results in pregnancies, we offer them the option of having a tax-funded abortion or giving birth to the baby that we then promise to support even after it grows up and goes to jail.

In the meantime, China looks on and smiles.