On the eve of the Final Four, Wonkette is dutifully coming to you with your weekly sports news. This week I have the sad duty of skipping all the news about the home runs in the net with a 4-iron to tell you that the women of LSU’s basketball team may very well see their careers end soon. “Well sure,” you say. They lost Monday night’s rematch with Caitlin Clark’s University of Iowa team. LSU beat Iowa a year ago in the national title game, but this time Clark was too much, scoring 41 points with 12 assists, an absolutely absurd total only matched in recent history by Clark herself.
With LSU’s season over, you might think that some of the team seeing their careers end might not be news. Certainly a few of them are seniors, and not everyone moves on to playing pro ball, right? Dog bites man, no? Ah, but no. That is not the threat that came out of LSU’s performance Monday night.
“Then Crip Dyke, certainly the threat to their careers must come from some 6th grade trans girl thinking about joining her friend on the school volleyball team?”
I readily concede that if trans kids wanting to play with their friends were no threat, then surely 24 states would not have passed legislative bans on trans kids’ free and full participation in their sportsball of choice. State governments do not waste their time on frivolous causes. But, no. The issue is not a terrifying trans pre-teen.
“Well, what is it then?” you ask.
Well, as it happens, on Monday night LSU did something that they did all year long.
“Play really well?”
Okay, sure. But something else, too. Like some other teams, it is the habit of the LSU women’s basketball team to stretch, feel out the court, loosen up, and take a few practice shots during pregame and then head back to the locker room not long before tip off. They spend the last 10 minutes or so listening to their coach’s instructions, reviewing strategy, amping up the team’s emotion, whatever they need to do, then they come out ready to ball right when the game is about to start.
Most of the year this has gone by without attention, but Monday’s game was so hyped that some of the Republicans who claim to care about women’s sports actually watched a women’s sporting event.
And they noticed that LSU was not on the floor during the national anthem.
Being who they are, those Republicans naturally assumed that the 83 percent Black team was refusing to take the floor in protest of the US flag. The collective freakout of the right wing immediately rocketed to over 690 milli-TransVisibilityEasters.
“OMG, THEY’RE WOKE!” seemed to be the deplorables’ general consensus. Look here:
Said Benny Johnson:
LSU Women’s Basketball Team skipped the National Anthem
Iowa stood proud
LSU just got their ass beat
With the entire stadium cheering against them
Season over
Let this be a lesson to all players: the cringy, selfish woke athlete moment is OVER
Now fair is fair, Benny Johnson, formerly of The Blaze, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Newsmax, is a noted 2014 national champion of — checks notes — plagiarism. He was shitcanned by his Buzzfeed employer (after a false start when they defended much of his plagiarism as the product of one of the internet’s most “deeply original writers” before finding out that, oh, yeah, there was WAY MORE plagiarism than that), so this is a man who knows a thing or two about disrespecting his betters and losing everything that matters.
Now when you’ve worked 10 or 20 months at as many conservative media outlets as Johnson, the GOP is going to take note of your latest outrage. And take note they did.
The response was, of course, proportionate. Mindful Intelligence Xitted, mindfully,
LSU announced it has every intention on continuing to be a terror org hellbent on overthrow the American republic. This college should be investigated for treason. Arrests should be made, not of the girls, of the leaders, starting with the coach.
While Bruce Alrighty added:
Glad Iowa stomped those Pathetic America hating LSU woman’s bball b*tches!
He seems nice.
But the real threat wasn’t from these tweets or the random nobodies suggesting that the LSU team move to North Korea. No that came when the Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana chimed in:
.
Quoth Landry:
My mother coached women’s high school basketball during the height of desegregation, no one has a greater respect for the sport and for Coach Mulkey. However, above respect for that game is a deeper respect for those that serve to protect us and unite us under one flag!
It is time that all college boards, including Regent, put a policy in place that student athletes be present for the national anthem or risk their athletic scholarship! This is a matter of respect that all collegiate coaches should instill.
Don’t criticize Mr. Landry for rushing to condemn a protest that didn’t happen, just because the thing that didn’t happen involved Black women who bounce balls! He has seen Black girls bounce a basketball once or twice, back in the day. His mother even let one use the locker room once!
Now some people thought that maybe a day would pass and then we could all relax, because it’s just the internet, and no one takes anything seriously on the internet unless it’s a Jesus-hating hermaphroditic Easter bunny! But Landry was not to be mocked for his very serious policy proposal, so he immediately dispatched an identical letter to each of Louisiana’s four college and university systems stressing that yes, this is a big deal, and yes he’s serious that the First Amendment requires athletes to salute the flag any time a nearby loudspeaker plays the national anthem.
Much of the letter repeats his tweet above, but the big add for university regents and supervisors is tacked on near the end:
“Therefore, I urge the board to create a policy that mandates all student athletes to be present […] for the National Anthem or risk losing their athletic scholarships.”
He concluded,
“[T]here should be no question about the university’s respect for our country.”
Because in Magastan nothing is more American than cancelling talented athletes for being late to the local Flag Day parade.
You might think that a team that won the national championship just a year ago might have earned some credit with the GOP governor. Perhaps even enough that he would have defended them against the rabid hordes? But not this governor. He’s so eager to cancel women’s sports you’d think he was a trans woman who kinda likes water polo.
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