It’s 8/24. Kobe day. As I reflect on the life of this incredible LA icon, I’m struck by how sad I still am over his loss. In many ways, it felt like when he died…America died.
There are a few rare moments in recent memory that served as true inflection points in America. It’s different than just a historic moment, or a profound tragedy; I’m talking about glitches in the Matrix. Tears in the Truman Show dome. These distinct moments like 9/11 where the world fundamentally shifted on its axis, and the world was never the same, ever again. Doesn’t it feel like that’s what happened when Kobe died?
His helicopter crashed on January 26th…2020. Shortly thereafter, we shut down the entire world over the flu, and civilization devolved into something that none of us could even recognize, and still don’t. Families turned on each other. Neighbors ratted out neighbors to the government…like we were living in East Germany…but with masks, and no toilet paper. Riots became normalized. Criminality was venerated. Destruction was celebrated. We completely inverted our moral framework of the last 220 years, and we did it so easily. Mass surveillance, government-mandated injections of an experimental drug…I’m sorry, but that wasn’t America.
Most people didn’t realize it at the time, but they were watching a communist color revolution play out in full force. And it basically worked. Our world will never look like it did when Kobe was here. In a lot of ways, when Kobe died, it felt like America died. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen so many people so profoundly saddened by one man’s death. Not a president nor a movie star…it felt like the whole world was mourning him.
Kobe Bryant was America. In so many ways, he embodied American greatness more than any President, astronaut, or business leader. Talented, powerful, determined…a natural leader. Unmatched work ethic. A great father. Married young. Had a bunch of kids. He was a renaissance man. Truly. He spoke Italian and Spanish. He was a voracious reader. He woke up before everybody, outworked everybody. He was tough. While his peers took a wheelchair off the court after shitting their drawers, Kobe blew out his achilles, walked to the line and sank 2 clutch free throws and walked himself off the court. He had pride. And dignity. When he retired, with 5 championship rings, he went out and became a filmmaker and won an Oscar on his first try. A true renaissance man. He embraced his role as a girl dad, and was the #1 advocate for the WNBA, frequently attending LA Sparks games to lend his support. Many WNBA players credit him for the league’s very survival.
He was fiercely loyal to his organization…he never played a single game for any team except the Lakers. You don’t see that, ever. He wasn’t a journeyman, he did’t star-shop to find a team that could win a championship any given year. He stuck with the team that brung him, for better or for worse. The only other jersey he ever wore…was America. He led the “Redeem Team”, pushing a bunch of entitled punk kids to reclaim American greatness at the Olympics after a humiliating loss 4 years prior. He refused to accept anything but American dominance.
He was naturally gifted, of course. 6’6” with springs for legs. But everyone knows that it was his fierce determination that set him apart from everyone else. The “Mamba Mentality”. He was an old-fashioned, red-blooded American male, fully loaded with an infinite supply of red, white, and fuck you. Kobe was the ultimate anti-communist, because he embodied American greatness. It’s a level of achievement that’s antithetical to the communist worldview. It’s not a coincidence that you never see communists build great things. Because there’s a fundamental flaw in how the communist thinks; they refuse to accept failure. The thing is…Kobe Bryant shared that same allergy; he refused to accept failure, too. The difference between Kobe and the commie…is how they choose to dispatch with that failure.
When Kobe first entered the league, he was a child! I think that’s part of the reason he was so beloved, and why we were all so sad when he died; it was like watching your son die. We grew up with him. Watching his career was like watching your boy grow up into a man, even if he were older than you. He skipped college and went straight from Lower Marion High School to the show. And man, did he put on a show. He carried the “Showtime” mantle for the Lakers, long since extinguished from the Magic years. He was a human highlight reel. And for the first time in a long time, we Lakers fans finally felt like we had a chance to reclaim our glory days and get back to the finals. We were ready to kick the tires and light the fires in a good old-fashioned LA championship riot! And then, the air got let out of those tires with a big fat airball. 4 of them. The kid missed 4 clutch shots and knocked us out of the playoffs in humiliating fashion. He didn’t just miss. He airballed. It was an embarrassing failure…the kind of pain you wouldn’t wish on anyone. But that failure fueled him to become the greatest ballplayer we’d ever seen.
This is what the communist mind can never comprehend. The weak-hearted socialist, the Mamdani voter, the masker, the chronically-offended…they hate capitalism because they’re horrified by the prospect of winners and losers. Cowards are terrified of failure, but it’s failure that drives us to succeed. The communist envisions a world where nobody loses, which also means…a world where nobody wins, either. You can’t have winners without losers.
For great men, the sting of failure is what gets their ass out of bed at 4 in the morning to get better. The prospect of victory is what drives them to strive for greatness. Reinvent themselves. Innovate. Achieve. Overcome. Advance. In the communist world devoid of winners or losers, we all just wallow in a concrete grey soup of banality and squandered motivation. We aren’t robots. We aren’t cattle. We aren’t satisfied with just…existing. You can call it a flaw if you want, but you can’t deny human nature…as much as the communist tries, this is what we are. We want more than we have.
God made us in His image. Ascendent. Not complacent. There is a reason Godlessness is such a prominent feature of communism. They need you to believe that you’re not special. They need you to think you’re nothing more than a meat sack, like a grazing cow. They want you to suppress your humanity. They want you to be fine with shoveling shit. To accept mediocrity. To demonize success. To see every wealthy man not as someone who achieved something great, but as someone who merely exploited peasants to get there.
Neither Kobe nor the communist accepts failure…but they reject it in different ways. It’s what we do with failure that matters. Kobe overcomes failure with greatness. The communist overcomes failure by eliminating victory. By taking from the victor, and giving to the have-nots. You cannot have victory without failure. You cannot have anything that you enjoy without the prospect of victory. There’s a reason that competition has been a fundamental part of every human society since the dawn of man. The human animal cannot accept mediocrity. Communists don’t invent televisions and airplanes and automobiles, communists don’t do great things. What’s the point of striving for greatness when the state will simply cut you down at the knees to take it away?
Jeff Bezos recently said “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system…we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins” That’s not how greatness works, Jefe. Greatness isn’t a numbers game, it’s a culture game. India has twice as many people as the entire population of the earth in Mozart’s time. They’ve produced precisely zero Mozarts. Numbers don’t create great men…cultures do. Free cultures.
Does loss hurt? Fuck yes. So does a marathon. So does love. So does giving birth. So does every single thing that makes you bigger, better, stronger, faster, badder, and more complete as a God-blessed human being. Americans don’t resent greatness. We don’t fear the pain of losing. We don’t wallow in self pity and demand that winners give us more. We don’t run from the pain of losing…we use it as rocket fuel. We blow shit up? We make it better. We lose a bunch of money, we win it back. We lose our buildings? We build them taller. We drop an airball, we put a million shots through the net until that motherfucker goes splash when it counts. This is America…we will never be a communist country, because we don’t know anything but greatness.
You can’t have glory without failure. You can’t have life without death.
God bless you, Mamba. Rest in greatness.
I have to say, this is a great piece of journalism. You have hit the nail on the head, Thanks for sharing.
Love this so much Spencer. Kobe was America and he defined Girl Dad. POWERFUL read, thank you.