Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Acton Line podcast: Communist China dunks on NBA; Robert Doar on poverty in America
Acton Line podcast: Communist China dunks on NBA; Robert Doar on poverty in America
Mar 12, 2026 1:27 PM

On October 4, Daryl Morey, manager of the Houston Rockets, posted a tweet that included the words “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong.” Afterwards, China severed several partnerships they had with the Rockets in retaliation, leading Morey to delete his tweet and apologize for it and also prompting missioner Adam Silver to issue a statement declaring that the NBA does not regulate the speech of its players. Since then, however, the NBA has made attempts to appease China. So what’s the current state of the NBA’s relationship with China and does the NBA have a moral responsibility to denounce China? Micah Watson, professor of political science at Calvin University, joins Acton staff to discuss.Afterwards, Robert Doar, president and Morgridge scholar at es onto the show to speak about effective solutions to poverty in America. He also shares how he came to be deeply interested in battling poverty, recalling the career of his late father John Doar who did heroic work in the U.S. Justice Department fighting racial discrimination and working for voting rights during the 1960s and ’70s.

Check out additional resources for this episode:

Read: “NBA abandons Hong Kong for Communist rule,” by Dan Hugger

Read: “Corporate America’s bet on China,” by Jordan Ballor

Game Over? Meet the Chinese NBA fans calling time out over Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet

Watch: Hongkongers protest at NBA game in New York

The NBA may have just thrown Hong Kong’s protesters a new lifeline

How China gets panies to parrot its propaganda

How One Tweet Turned Pro-China Trolls Against the NBA

Watch: Robert Doar on poverty in America

Listen: AEI Banter podcast with Robert Doar on poverty, think tanks and the future of AEI

John Doar remembered as a Civil Rights pioneer

New to the Acton Line podcast? Subscribe here! We also mend starting with these episodes:

Do you have feedback for the Acton Line podcast team? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. If you like Acton Line, don’t forget to leave a rating and review on the Apple podcast app!

Previous Article：Fact check: 5 facts about the fourth Democratic debate of 2019 Next Article：Corporate America’s bet on China
Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Noodles in Nigeria: When private business breeds economic development
In the West’s various efforts to alleviate global poverty, we continue to see the promotion of top-down solutions at the expense of bottom-up enterprises and institutions. Yet despite the setbacks and slowdowns caused by various governments and foreign aid, the entrepreneurs and workers on the ground aren’t sitting idly by. Across the developing world, people aren’t waiting for policies to change, conditions to improve, handouts to be given, or risks to evaporate. They are actively transforming their environments and creating...
Russia bans fake news: a lesson in unintended consequences
For months, French President Emmanuel Macron has asked European leaders to crack down on fake news. At last, someone has taken his advice. Last month, Vladimir Putin signed a law banning Russian websites from posting “fake news” stories. The government, of course, will be the arbiter of truth and falsehood. Coincidentally, the same day he signed a bill punishing websites that post stories insulting Vladimir Putin. The Moscow Times reported: The legislation will establish punishments for spreading information that “exhibits...
Rev. Ben Johnson: The socialist bizarro world of David Bentley Hart
When e across a think piece so catastrophically wrong as David Bentley Hart’s April 27 New York Times column, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” you marvel at the effort, intentional or not. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and, as the Times puts it a “cultural critic,” says he knows that, “in this country we employ terms like ‘socialism’ with wanton indifference to historical details and conceptual distinctions.” He’s right, but not in the way he thinks he’s right. After...
Religious toleration in a religious state
The concepts of toleration espoused by theologians in the officially religious states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deserve closer examination. So argue Tobias Dienst and Christoph Strohm in their introduction to Martinus Becanus’s 1607 treatise, On the Duty to Keep Faith with Heretics. Becanus (1563–1624), a Dutch Jesuit theologian who became court confessor to the Holy Roman Emperor, lived in and supported an officially Roman Catholic state, but this did not prevent him from developing a concept of religious...
America doesn’t have a radically capitalist economy
Socialism, it seems, is back. But maybe the real question we should be asking is how far the United States has embraced various features of what might be called social democracy over the past 100 years. This is one of the points underscored in a well-written paper by the Heritage Foundation’s David Burton, entitled “Comparing Free Enterprise with Socialism” (April 30, 2019). Among other things, Burton also manages to: • bring clarity to the free markets versus socialism debate by...
The Federal Reserve as lender of last resort
Note: This is post #121 in a weekly video series on basic economics. If you heard a rumor that your bank was insolvent, asks economist Alex Tabarrok, what would you do? As Tabarrok says, a typical reaction is to panic. And if you can’t get your money out, your next step would likely be to try and get all of your cash in hand. The rumor could even be false, but if enough people responded as if it were true,...
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris: We need to ban right-to-work laws
Speaking at a recent a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) event, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said there there is a need for “banning right-to-work laws.” It’s unclear how Harris plans to do this from the federal level, as Right to Work laws are state laws that guarantee a person cannot pelled to join or pay dues to a labor union as a condition of employment. “Kamala Harris wants to make absolutely sure that we know she’s an authoritarian,” says...
Acton Line podcast: The moral hazard of student debt; Unraveling Islam
On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Andrew Kloster, deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Administrative State at George Mason University, about the student debt crisis. Kloster claims that the student debt crisis is the greatest moral hazard of our Nation and explains how he sees the crisis panning out in the future. On the second segment, Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, sits down with Mustafa Akyol, senior research fellow at the...
The dangers of Catholic anti-liberalism
Korey D. Maas, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, has written a timely warning to American Catholics at Public Discourse titled, ‘The Coming Anti-Catholicism.’ Maas begins his essay with a recounting of the early history of American anti-Catholicism, its mitigation in the 1960s, and its troubling resurgence in recent years: bined effects of Camelot and the Council were to make political anti-Catholicism gauche almost overnight. Nobody, therefore, is surprised today when conservative Catholics and liberal non-Catholics alike respond to...
Half of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country
Yesterday was May Day, a date which some people—mostly socialists munists—consider to be an observance of International Workers’ Day. Others believe instead of celebrating labor the day should be considered an international observance of Victims of Communism Day. Law professor Ilya Somin explains why we should use the day memorate the victims munist totalitarian tyranny: While the influence munist ideology has declined since its mid-twentieth century peak, it is far from dead. Largely munist regimes remain in power in Cuba...
Related Classification
RELIGION & LIBERTY
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
About
Terms and Conditions Privacy policy Cookie Settings Contact Us
Services
Login register
mreligion RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE RELIGION & LIBERTY
Links
zpostcode Recruit weather mreligion Yellowpages sport constellation shopping name game directory literature Word tour furnish Lottery tftnews lyrics News digital car dir Edu Finance
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved