“How can the biggest dictatorship in the world control a 100 percent American-made organization and put pressure on them to fire an American citizen?”
I sit down with NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom. After playing 11 seasons, his career abruptly ended when he made headlines, speaking out about human rights abuses in China.
“NBA is not the only one,” says Freedom. “You see Hollywood, you see Big Tech, you see academia, you see Wall Street, you see Congress … They’re pretty much trying to invade America from the inside because they know they’re not strong enough to invade America from the outside.”
Freedom tells me about what made him the man he is today, and what gave him the courage to stand up to major multinational corporations and the Chinese Communist Party.
He grew up in Turkey under a repressive regime, and was ultimately forced to choose between family and principle.
“They sent police to my house in Turkey and they raided the whole house. And they took every electronic away: phones, computers, laptops, iPads, because they wanted to see if I am still in contact with my family or not … They put my name on the Interpol list. So, until this day, I am pretty much an international criminal,” says Freedom.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/enes-kanter-freedom-why-i-sacrificed-my-future-in-the-nba-to-stand-up-to-the-chinese-regime_4941221.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Enes Kanter Freedom, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders.
Enes Kanter Freedom:
Of course. Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
These days you are building a foundation that’s going to focus on basketball as a unifying force in the world and I want to talk to you about that. But before we go there, I really want to talk to you about how we got here, because not too long ago you were scoring and getting some pretty great numbers in the NBA. Why don’t we start at the beginning?
Mr. Freedom:
Of course. I was eight years old, and I decided to play a sport. It’s funny, soccer was number one in my homeland Turkey, and I wanted to be a soccer player growing up. I just loved the game, but just because of my height, and because of how big I was, my teammates were just making me a goalie. I was like, “You know what? I cannot do this anymore. I’m just going to switch to sports.”
I actually started playing basketball very late. I was 14 years old when I first started to play basketball. Five years later I became an NBA player when I was 19. Obviously in Turkey, you either have to pick education or sports, you cannot really do both. My family actually wanted me to come to America. They wanted me to play basketball and get my education at the same time. I’m glad that I made that choice because I went to high school here. I went to college, and I’ve played 11 beautiful years in the NBA.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s a very different reality in Turkey. This is something that you talk about, and that you know about. You have been quite vocal about issues you see in many places around the world, but it started there.
Mr. Freedom:
Until my second year in the NBA, I really didn’t care about anything as much as playing basketball, and having fun with my teammates. Pretty much that was it, that was my whole life. And then back in 2013, it was my third year in the league, there was a big corruption scandal that happened in Turkey. President Erdogan and some of his family members were involved in it. I was following the news after he got cut. He was going around and putting innocent people in jail—journalists, prosecutors, judges, and people who own media outlets.
And then after that he started to go around and shut down media outlets. I wasn’t an NBA player, I wasn’t even educated about the situation, so I just put a tweet out there. Because of the NBA platform, it became a conversation in the United States, in Turkey, and in many other countries around the world. I was like, even one simple tweet can affect this much.