Former Celtics player Enes Kanter Freedom blasted the WNBA’s Natasha Cloud for calling the country “trash.”
The Washington Mystics guard went on a days long social media rant that crossed over from Instagram to Twitter, beginning on June 30.
Cloud originally shared a CNN article about SCOTUS’s affirmative action decision, which she captioned, “Keep on moving backwards…”
After the Supreme Court ruled that forcing a Colorado graphic designer to create same-sex websites would be a violation of her religious freedoms, Cloud, who identifies as gay, lashed out on Twitter on Friday.
Just ask your colleague Brittney Griner how “trash” America is.
Calling America trash huh?
Let me know when your season is over, I’ll buy your ticket and we can go together to counties like China, Russia, IRAN, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, & Turkey.
Forget about calling them… https://t.co/A3Kfojx9jQ— Enes FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) July 3, 2023
“Our country is trash in so many ways and instead of using our resources to make it better we continue to oppress Marginalized groups that we have targeted since the beginning of times,” Cloud tweeted.
“Black/brown communities& LGBTQ+ man we are too powerful to still be attacking issues separate.”
Kanter, who officially became a US citizen January, after being exiled from Turkey for his vocal opposition of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019, clapped back at the WNBA player.
The former Boston Celtics star told Cloud she had “no idea” how lucky she is to have been born an American.
“Calling America trash huh? Let me know when your season is over, I’ll buy your ticket and we can go together to counties like China, Russia, IRAN, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, & Turkey,” Kanter offered.
“Forget about calling them trash, I would like to see if you can even criticize those regimes,” he pointed out.
“You and your family members would be thrown in jail, tortured to death, and raped,” Kanter said painting a grim picture.
In January, he told Fox News that the FBI called him back to the United States from Vatican City, when Erdogan and the Turkish government put a $500,000 bounty on his head.
“When I had a conversation with my friends on the ground, they said the mafia, the serial killers actually, professional hitmen and cartels could be after my case,” he told Tucker Carlson.
“And I was speechless. I was like, ‘This is this cannot be happening to an American citizen in U.S. soil.'”
Kanter was simultaneously named as one of Turkey’s most-wanted terrorists for calling Erdogan the “Hitler of our century.”
“People have NO idea how lucky and blessed they are to be in a country like America,” he told Cloud in his Twitter reply.
“I’m not saying America is perfect, but trust me, you don’t wanna see the other side,” he acknowledged.
He said that Cloud should ask her “colleague Brittney Griner how ‘trash’ America is,” after she returned home ten months into a nine-year prison sentence for bringing cannabis vapes into Russia.
Griner returned to the WNBA for her tenth season in May, after spending the entirety of the 2022 season in a Moscow prison cell.
The Phoenix Mercury star has since changed her stripes about her stance on the National Anthem.
“I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season,” she remarked in July 2020. “I think we should take that much of a stand.”
At the time, Griner said that she would “protest” the Star Spangled Banner if the league continued to play it by remaining in the locker room.
The player noted that she didn’t believe that the song represented Black Americans.
“I personally don’t think it belongs in sports. … Black people didn’t have rights at that point,” Griner stated in 2020.
“It’s hard disrespecting a song that didn’t even represent all Americans when it was first made.”
In a preseason presser in May, Griner clearly changed her tune. “Just being able to hear my national anthem, see my flag, I definitely want to stand,” she told reporters.
“What I went through and everything, it just means a little bit more to me now,” she continued.
“So I want to be able to stand. I was literally in a cage [in Russia] and could not stand the way I wanted to. I appreciate everything a little bit more. That has changed.”
Viktor Bout, the arms dealer Russia was traded for returning Griner, announced that he was running for office as a member of Russia’s far right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
Bout, who was once known as the “merchant of death” for the amount of arms he sold, was freed after serving 10 of the 25 years he was sentenced to in US federal prison.