The right exploits Caitlin Clark to push its white victim agenda

Fox News needs to stop ruining sports by injecting racist propaganda

Over the last six days, Fox News’ website has posted 21 separate stories and videos about Caitlin Clark. There were two stories on Wednesday, five more stories on Thursday, another five stories on Friday, an additional five stories and a video on Saturday, two more stories on Sunday, and one on Monday.

Was this because Clark did something extraordinary in the history of women’s basketball? No. This news tsunami occurred because Clark, a white heterosexual woman, was flagrantly fouled by a Black lesbian woman. It occurred because Fox and other right-wing propagandists are determined to exploit Clark as a symbol of white victimization.

Clark is a fine basketball player – a dazzling passer and a shooter with amazing range. She’s the league’s most famous player, though not its best one. She’s average at best on defense, leads the league in turnovers per game, and isn’t even the top scorer on her own team.

Yet she’s clearly gifted and fun to watch. So it’s a shame that the right’s racial agenda has cast her as a great white hope mistreated in a league dominated by Black women. Players who handle the ball a lot and drive to the basket often get fouled, whether they’re white and named Clark or not. Sometimes the refs miss the call.

An uncalled cheap shot on Wednesday was the trigger for Fox’s latest gusher of white grievance. Clark lost her footing, fell in a tumble and was punched in the throat by the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas. While no foul was called at the time, Thomas later received a one-game suspension, and certainly deserved it.

Fox, which has often portrayed Clark as a victim, went into overdrive, running headlines like “Haters who framed Caitlin Clark’s success as racial now dismiss race when she’s targeted on the court.”

MAGA politicians weighed in, too:

• Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita tweeted: “That’s it? Just one game? Pathetic.”

• Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa tweeted that Clark “gets consistently treated unfairly on the court.”

• Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told the tabloidy TMZ Sports outlet: “I think it’s trashy. She gets the crap kicked out of her.” (TMZ has gotten “exclusives” from Burchett before, including one story headlined “Rep. Tim Burchett Says the Only Bad Bunny He Knows Was His Horny Pet Rabbit.”)

One of the ugliest reactions to the Clark-Thomas incident came from Dan Dakich, who hosts the “Don’t @ Me” podcast for Fox News’ Outkick. He called Thomas’ foul “street justice ghetto style.” As he showed a photo of the incident, he said, “That picture will be a poster on the wall of every African American lesbian basketball player slash woman in America, right there. Holding the white girl down with a couple other people around and putting her in a chokehold.”

“Chokehold” was an exaggeration by a racist idiot. It was a flagrant foul, but not a chokehold.

Dakich was also outraged that “angry African American lesbians” excluded Clark from the WNBA’s 30th anniversary poster. But he undercut his own complaint by noting a report that Clark was left off because she didn’t license the poster company to use an image of her face. Other famous players, Black and white, were omitted from the poster, too, but Dakich focused on “fellow white women who made the sport … Diana Taurasi, nowhere to be seen. Sue Bird, nowhere to be seen. Elena Delle Donne or whatever the hell her name is, nowhere to be seen.”

Yep, Dakich was really standing up for “whatever the hell her name is.”

And that’s the point. Fox and other exploiters of Caitlin Clark’s story don’t really care about women’s sports except as a vehicle to stoke outrage and drive clicks.

There’s a legitimate issue about the quality of WNBA officiating and whether play is too rough. Clark often complains about it, but not in racial terms. I have seen no evidence that race or sexual preference are factors. Other players may resent the adulation toward her, but if that’s a motive for fouling Clark, I think it’s rare. (I’m no expert, but I watch a lot of WNBA games and have written about basketball in the past. My brother Matthew and I co-authored Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports, a biography of the Harlem Globetrotters founder.)

I’d just like the right wing to find something else to cynically overreact to and leave basketball alone. Enough with headlines like the one in Gateway Pundit reading, “Was Caitlin Clark Assaulted in WNBA Game Because She’s a Single Christian Straight White Girl?”

MAGA demagogues like to attack trans people by talking about “keeping men out of women’s sports.” But this Caitlin Clark “controversy” is a case where the men who need to stay out of women’s sports are the MAGA demagogues themselves.

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This week’s media atrocity

Regular readers know that sometimes I cite a genuine news industry “atrocity” and other times I’m using the word more loosely to just point out something annoying. This week, it’s the latter. Politico wrote a stupid story last week headlined “Democrats grapple uncomfortably with World Cup success.” As if Democrats are rooting for disaster. Ridiculous.

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