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Despite Caitlin Clark’s repeated refusal to join the culture wars, the culture wars won’t let go of her. There is a clear and present divide in how the WNBA star is represented in media — and who her most ardent defenders are off the court.
Take Clay Travis, the talk-radio host and OutKick founder, who recently said that the Indiana Fever star should leave the WNBA and start her own league. “The players could own the league in conjunction with media partners. It’s a no brainer, honestly. She’s worth more than entire WNBA,” Travis said on X.
“The audience is there for her; they will follow her,” he said.
Clark is widely credited with the surge in popularity in women’s professional basketball: More people watched the women’s NCAA championship game in 2024 than watched the men’s title game. But Clark’s foray into professional sports has been checkered and overlaid with political themes, despite her efforts to resist them.
She has not shown any solidarity with people who want to make her difficulties in the WNBA about race (cue the tasteless joke about her by Shane Gillis at the ESPY awards) or any other kind of identity. She doesn’t talk like a culture warrior — although when she was Time magazine’s athlete of the year, she said she had enjoyed privilege as a white person and recognized that the league had been largely built by Black women, comments that some conservatives didn’t like. Her ideologies, whatever they are, don’t fit neatly into a box.
Despite this, conservatives seem to keep trying to find reasons to claim her as their own, right down to the latest headlines about whether or not Team Clark was “very present” for a meeting about players’ demands for more money. (Any hopes of Clark being anti-union were dashed when she appeared in a “Pay Us What You Owe Us” T-shirt.)
And those of a more liberal mindset keep wanting Clark to not stand out — wanting to say that she’s just one talented player among many.
“Why couldn’t they have put the whole WNBA on that (Time) cover and said the WNBA is the league of the year because of all the talent we have? Because when you keep singling out one player, it creates hard feelings,” Washington Mystics owner Sheila Johnson said right after Time’s “Athlete of the Year” edition came out.
Johnson went on to say, “We have so much talent out there that has been unrecognized, and I don’t think we can just pin it on one player.”
There is so much to unpack in the Clark story, and much of it has to do about cultural worldviews at odds with each other, such as the debate over whether a society should try to engineer equal outcomes for its citizenry. That’s a question that won’t be settled by the WNBA, or by Harvard University or Congress, for that matter. There are also prickly issues about race and gender that are being raised in the darker corners of the internet.
Meanwhile, the WNBA convulses, unsure what to do about the unprecedented popularity of a straight, white woman in a league that is “74 percent Black or mixed race, with a sizable gay population” (according to Christine Brennan’s new book about Clark, “On Her Game”). And Clark keeps getting hurt.
Unlike the NFL, where referees are routinely accused of protecting the star quarterbacks, many people say the WNBA is doing nothing to protect Clark from intentional fouls. And outrage is growing among her fans.
“The WNBA is in the process of blowing the Caitlin Clark gift,” said conservative sports commentator Jason Whitlock, calling the saga “the most fascinating story in sports.”
Clark herself seems perplexed to be anywhere near the culture wars. In Time she said, “I tell people I feel like the most controversial person. But I am not. It’s just because of all the storylines that surround me. I literally try to live and treat everybody in the same exact respectful, kind way. It just confuses me at times.”
Meanwhile, on Google Trends, the most searched questions about Clark are “Is Caitlin Clark playing tomorrow?” and “Is Caitlin Clark playing tonight?” There’s a lesson in there somewhere for the WNBA, and for all of us.
Sometimes we really just want sports to be about ... sports.
About that Hunter Biden interview
Many of us made the mistake of thinking that after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the Biden family would retreat from public view. That has not been the case. First there was Joe Biden’s interview in May, and this week YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan released a three-hour conversation with Hunter Biden that news organizations struggled to cover because of the profanity it contains.
He used one particular profanity as commonly as other people use articles or nouns; it was as if the encounter had been directed by Quentin Tarantino, the director whose films are so profanity-laden that people make charts about the expletives in them.
Anyone hoping that the former president’s son, whose drug addiction and other exploits have long been fodder for political foes, had turned a corner had to be dismayed by this performance. It was so bad that almost every media outlet reporting on it made reference to the language, overshadowing other revelations in the conversation, such as Biden’s assertion that the sleep medication Ambien was responsible for his father’s disastrous debate.
Hunter Biden has been trying to rehabilitate his image in the aftermath of the sordid revelations of the laptop. The interview did him no favors, but it showed once again how long-form video interviews are transforming media.
Recommended reading
Children belong with their parents, but what about when those parents are using drugs? Naomi Schaefer Riley examined what happened in New Mexico when the state tried to keep children with their parents under these circumstances — and why there’s now a different policy in place.
She writes: “In response to the 2016 federal Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which required states to offer services to newborns that have been substance exposed, New Mexico created ‘plans of safe care’ which refer families to voluntary support and treatment for babies and parents. But it became clear almost immediately that offering only voluntary services for kids who were born substance exposed was going to be a big problem."
Do babies belong with drug-addicted mothers? New Mexico has a change of heart
Jacob Hess takes on the Coldplay kiss cam scandal that upended the internet, and the lives of two people who most definitely did not want the world’s attention.
He writes: “If there’s anything remotely positive about this story, it’s a reminder that while attitudes have become more lax over time, most people still have strong feelings about infidelity. A 2022 Gallup survey found 9 in 10 Americans say infidelity is morally wrong — invoking more moral disapproval than any of the other behaviors surveyed (including abortion, suicide, death penalty, premarital sex, pornography and polygamy).”
The Coldplay kiss cam memes are funny. The story they highlight is not
Gordon Jones leads a Utah college with a Great Books curriculum that has chosen not to seek accreditation. He explains why, and what he tells parents who worry that accreditation is necessary for their children’s success.
He writes: “The fact is that as a useful concept, accreditation died some time ago. Its zombie existence cannot continue. Higher education should welcome a new, unaccredited world.”
Why my college will never seek accreditation
Endnotes
The Stephen Colbert announcement has gotten an enormous amount of oxygen this past week, largely from people who think “The Late Show” ending is related to Donald Trump. But, as I pointed out here, it’s likely more a story about math than politics.
Nate Silver had a similar take, noting that the show reportedly has a $100 million budget and 200 employees. (In contrast, Fox New’s “Gutfeld!,” which has more viewers than “The Late Show,” has a staff of about 20.)
“I think politics was possibly a contributing factor. But the fact that ‘The Late Show’ will air for almost another year, giving Colbert a platform to go scorched-earth against CBS, Paramount, Skydance and Trump, is evidence against it," Silver noted.
Last week, I also looked into the theory that young men are going to YouTube to watch video games and getting caught up in some sort of conservative pipeline that spits them out the other end as Republicans. It’s an idea that remains contested, but I loved this quote from Dan Schneider at the Media Research Center:
“It’s not that YouTube is converting young men into conservatives. It’s that there are cogent, logical arguments that individuals are putting on YouTube and convincing people that we’re right.”
As always, thank you for reading and being part of the Right to the Point community. You can email me at Jgraham@deseretnews.com, or send me a DM on X, where I’m @grahamtoday.