President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner — the privileged scion of a corrupt family real estate business who has assumed a top government policy job despite zero experience in the field — has some thoughts about this week’s anti-police brutality protests from professional athletes.
On Wednesday, following the recent police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the NBA team known as the Milwaukee Bucks decided to go on strike to protest the glaring racial injustice. Every other game that had been set to be played on Wednesday night was subsequently boycotted by the respective teams who’d been set to play, and the face-offs were postponed. On CNBC, Kushner dismissively characterized the athletes’ protests as taking “a night off from work.”
Kushner said:
‘I think the NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences for themselves financially. So they have that luxury, which is great. With the NBA, there’s a lot of activism and I think that they put a lot of slogans out, but I think that we need to turn that from slogans and signals to actual action that’s gonna solve the problem… We just have to take this conversation from an emotional one to a constructive one and say what are the policies that we can agree on.’
Watch his comments below:
"The NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they're able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially," says White House senior advisor Jared Kushner on the NBA player boycotts last night. pic.twitter.com/nHlRBNIzaf
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) August 27, 2020
What on earth does Kushner know about government policy? What policy successes can he even claim from his time in the White House? Kushner has been involved with a slew of policy areas while in the White House, from handling the Coronavirus to handling peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. At least in those two high-profile areas, Kushner failed big time, by any reasonable measurement.
Meanwhile, Kushner wasn’t even the only White House official to denigrate the strike. Marc Short, who’s the chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence, called the display “absurd and silly.”
Marc Short, the chief of staff to VP, on #NBAboycott: "It's absurd and silly… If they want to protest, I don't think we care." pic.twitter.com/AxHKOZe5Ab
— The Hill (@thehill) August 27, 2020
Kushner’s original characterization of the professional athletes’ protests as essentially disconnected from tangible policy goals is incorrect to begin with.
On behalf of the team, Milwaukee Bucks player George Hill said:
‘We are calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable. For this to occur, it is imperative for the Wisconsin legislature to reconvene after months of inaction and take meaningful measures to address police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.’
Calling for the legislature to reconvene and take up criminal justice reform is pretty specific. Kushner and his political allies seem to prefer to just look the other way.
