National Public Radio on Saturday posted a 2,000-word story by “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef -- a fever dream of liberal paranoia in reaction to justified criticism of the women’s professional basketball organization WNBA: “An WNBA team calling in national security experts.”
After letting Chicago Sky team owner Nadia Rawlinson pat herself on the back for “excelling at the highest levels in corporate America and in sitting in public and private boardrooms” (which apparently makes her an expert on racism), Yousef painted the WNBA as passive minority victims of a right-wing culture war.
That background, Rawlinson said, also meant she understood at a personal level what her players were going through when they started to become targets of ugly, and sometimes frightening, online abuse.
….
As the WNBA heads into the final weeks of its regular season, outsiders continue to bombard the league with stunts aimed at inflaming division over culture war issues.
The soaring popularity in women’s basketball in recent years has made it an alluring platform for bad faith actors to raise their personal profiles and stoke political tensions. Increasingly, players across the league have raised the alarm that they have been inundated with targeted abuse, harassment and threats – both online and offline....the Chicago Sky is taking its protective measures a step further — by enlisting help from national security experts.
Enter one of public media’s favorite academics, Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University's Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab, or PERIL. That would be right-wing "extremism,” not any other kind.
According to Rawlinson, the Chicago Sky is the first WNBA franchise to partner with American University's PERIL, the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab; and with the threat intelligence company Moonshot….The team hired Moonshot to monitor online threats against its players – using tools that Moonshot developed a decade ago for national security purposes.
National security monitoring software? Not something the left would normally champion, but if it’s being used to go after racist right-wingers it must be acceptable.
Yousef talked to they/them Frankie de la Cretaz, “an independent journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports and gender,” about her love for the WNBA, which abruptly ended in 2024 when she allegedly heard racist taunts from the crowd.
NPR skipped allegations that players in the majority-black league are targeting Clark on the court out of professional jealousy, or perhaps because Clark is considered the “Great White Hope,” as de la Cretaz herself dismissed Clark.
Yousef offensively lumped in an appearance at a WNBA game by former NBA player Enes Kanter, who has announced his intention to enter the WNBA draft, with actual racist threats, while studiously ignoring the point Kanter has been making: Does self-identifying as a woman actually make you a woman, as the left says, or are the WNBA and other trans supporters being hypocrites?
Screenshot via Smerconish (CNN)/SnapstreamLast week, provocateurs threw sex toys onto the courts at games in Chicago and Los Angeles. Days later, a former NBA player who has used the WNBA as a vehicle for anti-trans advocacy was ejected from a Chicago Sky game, after engaging in an altercation with team guard Natasha Cloud. The incidents relate to controversy around the eligibility of transgender women to play in the league, even though the WNBA does not have, nor has it ever had, players who are transgender women.
For Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founder of PERIL, the dangers that WNBA players face stem from the same source that fuels violence of every type: misogyny. Miller-Idriss's new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism, delves into this link.
NPR leaped from Kanter's harmless and amusing stunt to school shootings with remarkable agility.
"[Misogyny] is one of the biggest common denominators in gang violence, in stalking harassment of athletes, in gender disinformation campaigns against politicians, and in school shootings and other acts of mass violence, terrorism and targeted violence," Miller-Idriss said…..
Interestingly, the most serious cases NPR found of actual threats to WNBA players (Clark and her teammate Sophie Cunningham) didn’t fit the race angle Yousef was straining to push. Yet Yousef remained insistent that “statistically, online abuse has disproportionately taken aim at Black women athletes.”
De la Cretaz said that the very characteristics that made the WNBA inclusive and diverse are now the reasons that the league and its players are under attack.
"Almost all of [the players] are multiply marginalized, which means that they have more than one identity that they can face oppression and marginalization over," de la Cretaz said. "They are majority Black women. Many of them are openly queer and/or masculine-presenting. And so the combination of identities means it's not just that they're going to experience sexist abuse or threats. They're also experiencing racism. They're also experiencing homophobia."
Yousef liked de la Cretaz’s rants so much she concluded with another one.
"They reject the idea that women shouldn't play sports. They reject the idea that you have to be a 'tradwife.' They reject the idea that you have to be feminine," they said. "And so there's so many different places that they are really opposed to the kind of the more conservative cultural push right now that I think they're just kind of taking the brunt."
Who’s saying women must become tradwives, besides imaginary sexists conjured up in left-wing feminist fever dreams?
A version of this story was also broadcast on Wednesday’s All Things Considered.
