Former NBA player turned human rights advocate Enes Kanter Freedom has shared his political ambitions for the future, eyeing a potential run for U.S. Congress in 2028.
Mr. Freedom, the Swiss-born, Turkish-raised athlete, changed his surname to Freedom to mark a new chapter in his life when he became a U.S. citizen in 2021.
Speaking at the recent FreedomFest conference in Memphis, Tennessee, the former NBA player was met with cheers from the libertarian crowd when asked about his potential run for office.
Mr. Freedom said that he wants to run in a state that values freedom and quipped about the electorate also enjoying plenty of sunshine and beaches. However, he believes that the current division within the country makes it too early for him to launch a political campaign.
“I will say it’s a little too early for me to run because right now, unfortunately, our country is so divided,” he told Fox News. “Once you get into politics, you lose 50 percent of the people.”
Despite the enthusiasm from some members on Capitol Hill, urging him to bring his voice to Congress or the Senate, Mr. Freedom said that he plans to wait for the right time to enter politics. He hinted that 2028 is a more likely year for his potential candidacy.
Mr. Freedom identified education as the number one priority he would focus on if he were to run for office. He stressed the importance of providing better opportunities for the younger generation to ensure a brighter future.
Mr. Freedom also expressed his commitment to promoting freedom and raising awareness about censorship issues.
“I just want to show people that how blessed and how good we have it in this country,” said Mr. Freedom.
“We got to do whatever we can to beat that,” he added, referring to censorship in the United States. “So I’m just going to do whatever I can to just, you know, get rid of that.”
$50 Million Cost of Speaking Out
Mr. Freedom embarked on his NBA career in 2011, starting with the Utah Jazz and wrapping up his career as a center with the Boston Celtics. However, he was sidelined in 2022 after expressing opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with China being a significant market for the NBA.
At a July 11 hearing before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mr. Freedom claimed to have lost approximately $50 million in salaries and potential endorsements after his NBA career ended.
“According to my manager, I lost around $50 million dollars, with all the NBA contracts and endorsement deals that I could’ve signed,” the sportsman said.
“I sleep in peace at night knowing that I did the right thing. My only question is: How can the biggest dictatorship in the world, China, control an 100 percent American-made company and fire an American citizen?” he added.
Mr. Freedom said he is concerned about the fear among NBA players to express their beliefs in the face of “cancel culture.” He said NBA players fear repercussions in the form of lost contracts and endorsement deals.
Speaking to Fox News, Mr. Freedom reflected on the patriotism of Americans, recounting an incident in the locker room where his teammates “were calling America trash, and they were saying some really harsh things about America.”
He challenged their perspective by offering to show them the living conditions in countries like China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and North Korea, highlighting the liberties and opportunities that the United States offers.
“People need to understand that how good we have it in this country,” Mr. Freedom said.
The upcoming 2024 presidential election will mark the first time Mr. Freedom is eligible to vote in the United States.
While he remained coy about revealing his favorite candidate, he mentioned that he has met with many of them. His main hope is to see a candidate who can unite the country and lead it to even greater heights.
“I just hope that whoever is going to unite this country and whoever is going to make this country even better than it is wins,” Mr. Freedom said.
Mr. Freedom has been vocal about human rights violations in Turkey for the past 11 years, including concerns about his own relatives being prosecuted under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. He later shifted his activism toward China after being questioned by a parent at a basketball camp in New York about his silence on alleged abuses against Uyghur and other Muslim minority groups by the CCP.
The United States has also accused the CCP of genocide. China has repeatedly dismissed the claims as a smear campaign.
Mr. Freedom made headlines for denouncing human rights abuses in China, including labeling CCP leader Xi Jinping as a “brutal dictator,” resulting in Celtics games being banned from Chinese media.
He also called for a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics in protest of human rights abuses in the country.
Katabella Roberts contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
