The Golden Age of Basketball-Chapter 1677 - 22: Chosen One
In the summer of 1999, the air in America seemed to carry a bloodier scent than in previous years.
A white supremacist named Benjamin Smith launched a three-day "minority cleansing operation" in Illinois.
He drove along the road, firing at minority groups he encountered, resulting in 2 deaths and 10 injuries, finally ending his own life, bringing the death toll to 3.
In mid-July, near the coast of Martha’s Vineyard Island in Massachusetts, a small plane vanished over the Atlantic Ocean, and all three people aboard, including the pilot, were missing.
Police investigation confirmed that the pilot was none other than John F. Kennedy’s son, John Kennedy Jr.
At his birth, his father had just been elected president. He grew up in the White House until he was three, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
After the plane disappeared, the Coast Guard found wreckage at sea, and days later, John Kennedy Jr.’s body was recovered.
The Kennedy family’s curse of death continued to exert its eerie power; John Kennedy Jr. was the tenth family member to die an untimely death since 1944.
By the end of July, in Atlanta, Georgia, a man named Mark Barton killed his wife and children, then went to a stock exchange and committed an indiscriminate shooting spree, causing 9 deaths and 13 injuries.
Mark Barton shot himself before being arrested by the police, marking the largest and most deadly shooting in Georgia’s history.
The perpetrator, Barton, was a former stock trader, fired due to performance issues, and heavily in debt after suffering enormous losses from his own investments during the Internet financial bubble of 1999, he succumbed to depression and ultimately committed the massacre with a gun.
In August, a Jewish community center in Los Angeles was again the scene of a shooting; another white supremacist used a Uzi submachine gun to fire into the center’s hall, injuring five, and later murdering a courier.
This incident sparked massive gun control protests in Los Angeles, with people passionately calling for gun regulation to prevent such tragedies from happening again.
However, the core issue seemed to be more than just about guns.
In September, inside a church in Fort Worth, Texas, another white supremacist and anti-Semitic individual shot seven people before choosing suicide.
Within two months, three shootings related to race, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism erupted across America.
Meanwhile, the Internet financial bubble that had been inflating since 1995 continued to grow, causing any stock linked to the Internet and computers to rise sharply.
The entire American society was engulfed in a speculative frenzy of stock trading to get rich quick, with the NASDAQ index, led by tech stocks, tripling in the summer of 1999 compared to 1997.
The bubble expanded, and as stock prices soared, wealth was concentrating in the mouths of a few Wall Street Jewish tycoons.
Stock market bankruptcies, shooting incidents, one anti-Semitic shooting case after another, and the death of yet another Kennedy family member, these seemingly isolated and unconnected events, in fact, outlined the social issues of America in the last year of the 20th century, before the arrival of the millennium.
Jewish finance, family politics, racial tensions, these vines would entwine the nation and society as they stepped into the 21st century.
Against this backdrop, Gan Guoyang’s spy case seemed much "milder and more amusing," capturing the attention of most Americans, focusing them on a case about whether a "legendary basketball player was a foreign spy," full of sensationalism and legends, yet not reflecting any sharp contradictions.
Such cases were perfect for the public’s gossip and entertainment, for what could be more spectacular than the collapse and fall of an icon?
This case was also sensationalized by the American media as a "century case comparable to the 1994 Simpson murder case."
Indeed, the case later became more famous than the Simpson case, with a more legendary outcome as a millennium spanning case.
The key reason, much like the Simpson murder case, was Gan Guoyang’s powerful counterattack against multiple charges.
The FBI’s investigation never made any concrete progress, and when they had to end Gan Guoyang’s house arrest, as Gan Guoyang shook hands with Michael Jackson and left New York, support for Gan Guoyang peaked in America.
Supporters from around the world sent letters, organized various activities to express their support for Gan Guoyang, believing it was purely persecution by the American Government.
The much larger fan base of Jackson also sided with Gan Guoyang, interacting with Gan Guoyang’s fans to establish a fan association, standing up for their idol. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖
Trail Blazers owner Tang Jianguo stepped forward to support Gan Guoyang, claiming this was a conspiracy by the current government, a persecution event against a basketball hero to divert attention from conflicts.
Of course, Tang Jianguo’s main aim wasn’t to support Gan Guoyang, but to use this opportunity to express his political views.
He proposed a "one-time" net asset tax of 14.25% on those with assets over 10 million US Dollars, to help repay the national debt.
Tang Jianguo also declared that if he became president, he would raise 5.7 trillion US Dollars and eliminate the debt in one blow.
