I’m surprised it took this long, but the most online White House has finally weighed in on the most online league. On Monday, President Donald Trump gave his two cents on the Alyssa Thomas–Caitlin Clark fracas, saying he thought Clark was “treated rather rough” in what he called “a bad event.” On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee sent a letter to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, demanding the league take accountability for “unnecessary physical hostility and violence” against Clark.
The letter, signed by 11 Republican members of Congress, alluded to using the weight of the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to come down on the WNBA.
Sigh. It’s official. The right vs. the WNBA is here. The Republican Party has officially entered the WNBA culture wars, going straight to the commissioner’s inbox.
If you’re not too exhausted, feel free to do your best impression of Sophie Cunningham pointing her finger and tap the “The WNBA has gone 0 days without being unnecessarily dramatic” sign.
None of this happened overnight. As I wrote just two weeks (two weeks!!!) ago, the WNBA’s failure to manage Clark’s arrival created this opening, allowing right-wing grifters to hijack a story the WNBA failed to seize hold of, and essentially allowing the league to become a political punching bag.
There’s a reason the WNBA is such fertile ground for these types of shenanigans. The league has exploded in popularity at the same moment the country has become embroiled in a cultural, political, and legal fight over the role of women in society. In that time, the WNBA has gone from the margins to the mainstream, alongside its primarily Black, openly queer, politically outspoken, and increasingly wealthy employee base. They represent the antithesis of the messaging the modern conservative project wants women—or anyone—to see, because it’s built around values they insist cannot coexist with excellence and achievement. Their only recourse against the WNBA’s increasing influence is using the perception of Clark’s treatment to separate her from and demean her peers. In the past three years, the league has not done enough to quell this misguided perception, nor has it offered a solution to the underlying causes of the skirmishes Clark ends up in.
The right cares about the WNBA for a lot of the same reasons it cares about who plays Disney princesses: It understands the power of a good story.
If you watch a female coach of color thrive, it’s a reminder that expanding opportunities for historically marginalized groups doesn’t have to come at the expense of excellence.
If you go to a game and find your chosen family, you might feel less inclined to conform to a role in a nuclear family that doesn’t fit.
If the league puts a spotlight on women like Dearica Hamby, who is outspoken in defense of her rights as a mother—not against the rights of mothers—it flies in the face of the narrow conception of choices the right wants women to believe they have.
The right’s worst nightmare is not Caitlin Clark getting hurt.
Their worst nightmare is more people finding out about the Golden State Valkyries, where the energy of a Game 7 meets a gay pride parade and woke has gone anything but broke.
It’s the joie de vivre of the StudBudz, who are the antithesis of the humorless scolds the conservative movement would like to paint the league’s Black, masculine lesbians as.
It’s Chelsea Gray kissing her wife and hugging her son after winning the WNBA Finals.
It’s a league in which athletes, whether white or Black, straight or queer, are the main characters in a story that does not villainize, does not pity, does not evoke feelings of superiority or anger, but offers dimension, complexity, and courage.
This is the league as it actually is, but you’d have to dig through endless layers of rage bait and controversy to know about it.
It’s a league that can organically, just by way of existing, remind America that the lifestyles its stars lead don’t lead to despair and dysfunction.
The things that the WNBA represents stand in stark contrast to the conservative movement’s fixation on curtailing the power of women. In January, the Heritage Foundation—the nation’s most influential conservative think tank—released a report called “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” which lays out a blueprint to incentivize early marriage and childbearing, while critiquing no-fault divorce, contraception, and IVF outside heterosexual marriage and arguing that federal funding for higher-education subsidies delays marriage. In their fantasy world, Clark—who rose to fame by way of becoming a college basketball folk hero—might not even have attended college.
Every compelling lie is built on a kernel of truth. The truth is, there are divides between Clark and some of her peers. She just came in 11th among guards in All-Star voting. But the failure to address these divides—or worse, the attempt to gaslight fans into pretending they don’t exist—has allowed the league’s enemies to portray situational fissures between Clark and a few players as an unbridgeable divide between an entire league and its biggest star. In failing to address concerns around player safety, refereeing, and online discourse, the league has allowed bad-faith actors to use those issues as a Trojan horse to tell a story about the WNBA as a league in which liberal institutional failures run amok.
It also paints Clark, who has spoken up multiple times about the harassment her peers face, including recently, as an ally of the right’s cause. In part to counter that perception, the Fever released a statement saying neither Clark nor any other member of the organization interacted with the congressional group, and saying that they were unaware of the letter.
Right now, this is a battle that the WNBA’s enemies are winning, because they understand the league’s power as a symbolic vehicle better than the WNBA does itself. Commissioner Engelbert, time and time again, has shown up to this knife fight with an empty task force and a rote statement. Her regime has rested its laurels on television rights, sponsorships, and expansion fees while ignoring its biggest asset: its story. The longer it takes for the league to figure out how to tell it, the longer other people will.
