At this point it's clear that the Caitlin Clark conversation, for lack of a better term, isn't going anywhere. Some things just become so ubiquitous and so useful as a culture-war cudgel that they can never be put down. You have to accept the fact that everyone is eventually going to get their swings in.
Let this process go on long enough, and you are guaranteed to see some things you never expected. The only utility that comes from typing "Caitlin Clark" into a search bar is potentially encountering a set of thoughts that you previously could not have imagined springing from a human mind. One day you live in a world where no professional sportswriter has ever taken umbrage with a league for not responding to three requests for comment about a player suffering a minor injury, and then the next you have to make sense of Christine Brennan doing just that. There's some rueful entertainment to be had in these moments, which is all I could take from the Wall Street Journal's unbelievably odd attempt at plugging into the Caitlin Clark discourse machine.
"The WNBA and Caitlin Clark’s Civil Rights" is the headline above an opinion piece written by Sean McLean, a lobbyist and former staffer for Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn. McLean argues that the WNBA "has fostered a hostile workplace" for Clark because she gets fouled a lot by black players who target her out of racial animus. By paragraph nine, McLean is citing Supreme Court cases, and by paragraph 15 he's calling for a full Congressional investigation into the WNBA:
Congress and the administration should demand answers from WNBA leaders, investigate officiating and internal league communications, hold hearings, and insist on real reforms. The Labor Department should review league protocols for workplace safety. If evidence shows discrimination or retaliation, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division must act. If leaders remain inert, Congress should reconsider the WNBA’s special privileges, including its antitrust and broadcast considerations. Checking referees’ work with NBA-style “Last Two Minute Reports” would be a meaningful first step toward building trust.
McLean is far from the first right-wing freak to imply that the WNBA is being run by a cabal of black lesbians who are out to injure Caitlin Clark, but he is surely the first to do so while invoking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It is useful to see how the QAnon-flavored obsession with Clark evolves as it crawls out of the swamps where Clay Travis swims, into Christine Brennan's book, and now onto the pages of the Wall Street Journal. As more fronts are established in this particularly exhausting culture war, the more obvious it becomes that the strongest link uniting all these combatants is a bone-deep wackness. McLean's op-ed strips away all the provocation and bravado that someone like Dave Portnoy tries to muster when screaming about Caitlin Clark and reveals who and what is always at the center of these arguments: little babies who don't understand sports and want to go crying to the refs about it.
You can only laugh at this stuff for so long, though. The Wall Street Journal getting in on the Caitlin Clark outrage racket is a bad omen in that it only increases the likelihood that this will at some point catch the attention of Donald Trump, who has already demonstrated his willingness to wield his spite and anger against any person or institution, no matter how insignificant. We are now one step closer to Trump standing on the tarmac outside Air Force One and yelling, "We're looking at what's happening with Caitlin and we're going to make sure everything with fouls is perfect," followed by a headline announcing that the WNBA will pay a $50 million fine to avoid a civil rights investigation.
