State rep threatens NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder tax benefits if players take a knee
An Oklahoma state representative issued a statement Friday threatening to re-examine the Oklahoma City Thunder’s tax benefits should any players kneel during the national anthem.
Rep. Sean Roberts said that kneeling is an “anti-patriotic act” and shows “disrespect to the American flag and all it stands for,” and if any of the players kneel, he would take a look at tax benefits the team receives from the state.
“If the Oklahoma City Thunder leadership and players follow the current trend of the NBA by kneeling during the national anthem prior to Saturday’s game, perhaps we need to re-examine the significant tax benefits the State of Oklahoma granted the Oklahoma City Thunder organization when they came to Oklahoma. Through the Quality Jobs Act, the Thunder is still under contract to receive these tax breaks from our state until 2024,” Roberts said in the statement.
Roberts also said that Black Lives Matter movement has “ties to Marxism.”
In a 2015 interview that has resurfaced, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and organizers as “trained Marxists.”
“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories,” Cullors said in an interview with The Real News Network. “And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk.”
Since 2015, the movement has widened and most of its followers see the message as anti-racist and not Marxist.
“Regardless of whatever the professed politics of people may be who are prominent in the movement, they don’t represent its breadth,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton University African American Studies professor and author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation,” told PolitiFact. “There are definitely socialists within the movement, as there have been in every single social movement in 20th century American history and today. But that does not make those socialist movements, it makes them mass movements.”
During the restart of the NBA season on Thursday, players have been linking arms and kneeling during the anthem to peacefully protest systemic racism.
The Thunder take on the Utah Jazz on Saturday.