Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Over the last few weeks, the right-wing media and the Republican Party have fashioned themselves as instant experts on the WNBA.
Usually, the right is dismissive of women’s sports—which it has derided for years as inferior to men’s. But the sudden attention being paid to women’s professional basketball is about what the right truly cares about: bigotry.
The right is currently over the moon over Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham, who has been an outspoken anti-transgender rights advocate. Cunningham echoed the bigotry that’s pushed every day on Fox News and at the White House.
“I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” she said.
Her open hostility toward a minority group that’s currently under attack earned her praise from the Trump administration, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance.
“I would tell Sophie, ‘Keep going,’” Vance told Fox News.
Of course, these are the people who think that athletes like Colin Kaepernick should simply shut up and play sports when advocating for racial equality, not hate against transgender people.
But if you think you’ve seen the Cunningham playbook before, that’s because you have.
A few years ago, Riley Gaines was a second-tier collegiate athlete who complained to right-wing media about fellow swimmer Lia Thomas, who is transgender. Gaines turned her hate into a whole career, becoming a professional right-wing pundit and activist.
Similarly, actress Gina Carano was fired by Disney from her role in “The Mandalorian” after making bigoted social media posts. Carano instantly became a darling of the right and now appears in weird right-wing propaganda movies.
So how, exactly, does this well-oiled grievance machine work?
The right is always in need of a wedge issue to get voters out to the polls to vote for Republicans—which is especially important during times like this, when the GOP is in charge of the entire federal government and still manages to screw up on domestic and foreign policy.
Conservatives are already familiar with the anti-transgender playbook—a favorite of President Donald Trump’s, much like his anti-immigrant and anti-Black playbooks.
The right blames society’s ills on a small group of people, demonizing them to a receptive audience. The core issue isn’t what matters; the grievance can be immigration, COVID-19 policies, healthcare, or a long list of other things that conservative voters fear.
The right has already made a blanket determination that everything it dislikes is “woke,” and—without bothering to go into details about what that really means—the idea is to find someone they can portray as a bold truthteller rowing against the oppressive politically correct tide.
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Conservatives particularly love when they can find a spokesperson who fits into their archetype of the “perfect” aggrieved victim: A conventionally attractive white woman.
Cunningham and Gaines fit this demographic, just like the University of Oklahoma college student who had a boomlet last December when a professor criticized her bigoted essay that used the Bible to attack transgender people.
After aligning herself with bigots, Cunningham was booed while playing at a game against the Portland Fire. To the right, this is proof that they made the right call. Backlash fits right in with conservatives’ obsession with pretending that they’re persecuted—even when the GOP has all of the power and is using the federal government to oppress transgender people, including children.
The right features figures like Cunningham and Gaines on a loop, reinforcing the narrative that these telegenic ambassadors of right-wing views are being persecuted for their beliefs.
It doesn’t matter if their careers are actually hurt by their stances; the mere existence of dissenting voices—even those raised in opposition to hate—are depicted as part of a monolith seeking to stifle the right.
After pushing the issue again and again, while telling audiences that the only way to end the outrage is to vote for Republicans, the endgame is usually to make the aggrieved figure permanent.
Gaines is now part of the right-wing media, just like commentator Tomi Lahren, who went from complaining about the “woke” left online to working for years as a Fox News contributor.
At that point, the cycle begins again. A new spokesperson is sought out, and sometimes a new issue is brought to the surface. And the right keeps pumping and dumping bile and bigotry, infecting the public discourse with hate.
All that matters to the right is feeding the grievance machine—and it’s never, ever satiated.
Oliver Willis
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