Every summer, conservative television hosts and influencers suddenly discover women’s professional basketball, which they insist they don’t care about, and then they spend weeks explaining why it’s one of society’s greatest ills. This year, just like last, their attempts to turn the WNBA into a proxy war for cultural grievances is failing because it’s not really about the league.
It is a content farm built using Caitlin Clark, her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham and a nonexistent transgender player controversy to conceal old grievances about race and gender. But despite the attempts to sully the WNBA brand, the league is thriving — and the whole spectacle is now backfiring in ways even the people profiting from it can no longer hide.
