Why the Right Is Going All-in on Stoking the WNBA Culture Wars

They Only Have One Bit

It’s been clear for weeks that right-wing media — eager to distract from its leader’s woeful unpopularity and resulting fears about November’s midterms — struck gold with its anti-trans, anti-WNBA crusade.

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham (who put up an impressive triple zero statline in 14 minutes played during Thursday’s loss to the Dallas Wings) proved her worth to the movement by characterizing trans women as male predators infiltrating “girls’” locker rooms, and refusing to back down. Since then, small “pro-Cunningham” protests have been organized before Fever games, and women wearing similar shirts from an anti-trans athleticwear company have made themselves conspicuous at games. 

The t-shirt wearing provocateurs learned from a Seattle Storm game last month that fans of the famously LGBTQ-friendly league would react badly to the display, producing useful footage for Fox News and its ilk. At last Sunday’s game against the Fever, Atlanta Dream security allegedly asked a woman and her daughter to cover up their anti-trans shirts, prompting the team to apologize. The women lost no time getting in front of a camera to bemoan their treatment. 

Washed-up NBA players, too, have gotten in on the action, with Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White proclaiming themselves women, pretending to declare their intent for the 2027 WNBA draft. In a particularly dark twist, Freedom claims that other ex-NBA players will follow his lead for the financial incentive of playing in the W — a league that only recently started paying its athletes a living wage as a result of the enormous efforts of the players’ union. 

“We will approach these important conversations thoughtfully and in alignment with the values of our league,” the league said in a statement earlier this month. “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA, and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”

There are no trans women playing in the WNBA.

In the meantime, Republican politicians have also returned to their favorite well of feigned outrage over certain white players being fouled by Black ones, spinning a news cycle out of Cunningham being fouled by Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington a few games ago. Carrington, who majored in African and African-American studies at Stanford, posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on social media after she was ejected from the game for receiving a “flagrant 2” foul. 

“The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault,” tweeted Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) in response to the foul. 

Florida does not have a WNBA team, so the league does not play there. 

Fever Coach Stephanie White said after the game that she didn’t think Carrington’s foul was intentional, prompting the Fever crowd (made up of many newer fans who came into the league with guard Caitlin Clark) to boo her at the next game. 

“This is the last of the woke era,” intoned Fox News host Bret Baier. “This is why this is so much bigger than a gender story. This is the DEI story. This is the tear-down — America is a flawed country — tear-down-the-statues story. Put your pronouns at the bottom of emails story.”

As Baier spells out, the right’s intentions are not particularly subtle. In cycle after cycle, its leaders cash in on targeting minority populations to blame for the “risk” they present to white people’s social standing and prosperity. It’s been the unifying theme of Republican politics for decades — “welfare queens,” “criminal aliens,” “intercity gangs” — and has become so unmasked in the Trump era as to extend to decorated military officers and career civil servants. Republicans have been candid that “anti-DEI” means no minorities or women in public life. 

Cunningham, white and willing, has been the protagonist the right needed to unfurl its narrative. But the anti-trans campaign, the grousing about professional basketball players being fouled, it’s all in service of a grander mission. In the white Christian nationalist nation the Trump administration is openly trying to foist on the American public, a sports league where Black, gay players are celebrated and (recently, to a degree) paid well is a distinct danger. 

The right’s endless grievance about threats to its vision of a white, retrograde America has never been about freedom to live that way, as its members insist. It’s about punishing and immiserating Americans who defy that worldview — infiltrating their league with bigots and condemning their beloved players as violent thugs. 

The Future Is Filming Everyone

This week, MacRumors surfaced a video providing the first look at Apple’s camera-equipped AI AirPods, codenamed B970. The video was discovered in a Mac OS update package typically provided to developers. That Apple has been developing the AirPods as a foray into wearable AI is no secret. When they will be released and how they will work, however, has been subject to much speculation. As the premier brand in wearable technology, Apple’s decisions regarding the use of cameras and AI in its products could have a profound impact on the technology’s adoption. With public sentiment not exactly rallying behind the promise of AI (or the ubiquity of cameras), a popular consumer product could, in theory, start to sway opinion. Obtaining video evidence of what Apple is planning, then, seems like a big deal. But having now watched the video more times than I’d like to admit, what it seems to offer is less a key to Apple’s AI ambitions than a knowing wink that it would be found and analyzed. 

The video opens with the camera unblurring to show a man in his apartment as a new-and-improved AI Siri announces that, “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable.” The man, in profile with one white AirPod hanging from his ear, picks up a book from a kitchen counter and studies its cover while Siri — presumably speaking into the man’s ear — says, “See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.” The video ends with the man standing alone in his kitchen nodding to himself as the camera again blurs. The whole thing is only 13 seconds long and is sterile and uncanny in the way all simulations of using AI consumer products seem to be. 

On first viewing, I was ready to dismiss it as a bizarre and not particularly insightful demo of a product I would likely never buy. I wasn’t even sure what the product did. Watching again, the scenario in which the man would apparently benefit from using his camera-equipped AI AirPods was even more baffling. Here was a man, seemingly alone in an apartment, who walks into a kitchen with a single book on the counter top, and, evidently seeing “something he likes,” picks the book up and holds it up to his face so that camera(s) and AI in his ear(s) can remember it for later. Either this man has suffered some tragic, Memento-type memory loss* or he is not in his own apartment — and yet alone. Regardless, it’s troubling that the idea Apple came up with to demonstrate the awesome power of this technology is being able to later recall a book you spotted in a kitchen. That is unless the point is for us to focus on the book.

The book is titled, “Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future,” and it was written by Nick Foster, the former Head of Design at Google X — the “moonshot factory” that birthed Google Glass. I have not read the book, but I’m a dutiful enough correspondent to have done some research on Foster. One way to describe him might be an AI centrist (as opposed to an accelerationist or doomer) who markets himself to companies as someone who can sharpen their thinking about the future. He coined the phrase “the future mundane” to explain that evolutions in technology don’t lead to extreme outcomes (utopia/dystopia) but tend to manifest in nearly imperceptible changes in ordinary routines. In a 2025 interview with the New York Times, he described tech companies as being too “glibly positive” explaining that, “If you say, ‘This is the future — it’s going to be great,’ no one believes you. No one thinks that you’re being serious. No one thinks you’re responsible.” Bolstering his resume as someone who understands technology’s transformational power is the biographically convenient detail that he was born in Derby, England, home of the industrial revolution. 

It is possible, of course, that Foster’s book only appears in the video because it happened to be what a production assistant was reading. But for a company as particular about its image as Apple, this seems unlikely. This is the company that literally smashed onto the personal computing scene with a “1984”-inspired Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott. A private product demo is a long way from a Super Bowl commercial and Apple is not the same sledgehammer-wielding upstart it was in the ‘80s or even the ‘90s and early 2000s. Yet, for it to be a coincidence that this book appears in a demo that is only 13 seconds, and otherwise includes almost no detail about what the product does, beggars belief. So what is it doing there?

To understand what Apple might be thinking ahead of the release of the AirPods, it might help to consider the controversy surrounding Meta’s camera-equipped AI glasses. 

Memorably described by the writer Ryan Broderick as “a Cybertruck for your face,” Meta Glasses aren’t just painfully uncool, their ability to clandestinely record video is creeping people out and raising serious privacy issues. As Business Insider reported, Instagram (Meta’s own company) had to ban a certain type of video that was proliferating on the platform where men, wearing Meta Glasses, secretly recorded women as they responded to often offensive pickup lines. Undeterred, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fully committed to the glasses. In his recent manifesto, The Future is For Everyone, Zuckerberg suggests — with the facile optimism Foster scoffs at — that the world would be a more equitable place if everyone had access to portable superintelligence. 

With Meta being Apple’s closest competitor in this market, it’s possible that the presence of Foster’s book in Apple’s video is just a subtle nod that they are the more serious company — a signal that they understand both the dangers and benefits of their technology and will take a more considered approach. A darker reading might be that Apple is endorsing Foster’s belief that a hugely disruptive technology like AI is more likely to bring mundane change than out-and-out dystopia and, therefore, introducing a device that could potentially be used for AI-assisted surveillance isn’t that big a deal. 

But even if dystopia doesn’t come all at once, are we sure we aren’t at least edging toward it? The proliferation of surveillance systems like Flock, which combine surreptitious cameras with AI software capable of capturing and analyzing massive amounts of personal data, has more than a whiff of Big Brother. And giving even a fraction of that power to individuals to wear on their faces seems like a recipe for mass surveillance beyond what even Orwell described. While I’m not naive enough to expect one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world to lead the crusade against surveillance, all they really have to do is demonstrate they recognize there is a problem and not do anything to make it worse. In this way, as the video says, the world becomes savable.

*It’s possible that some additional context for the video is missing and the man is suffering from a true disability the AirPods are helping him overcome. If this is the case, I apologize.

Nostalgic for Racism

One of my passions in life is wasting money on Cleveland sports merchandise. It would be a mistake to say “memorabilia” because I’m not focused on asset appreciation here. It’s just that about half my wardrobe says Cleveland and I’m bald so I wear a lot of hats. So I was surprised to see the sports apparel company New Era offering this hat in particular. The team that is now the Cleveland Guardians and was formerly the “Cleveland Indians” before the 2022 MLB season never in the history of the team wore a hat during games that said “Indians.” So, why is this hat on sale now?

“Maybe this is not actually a Cleveland hat,” I thought to myself. Maybe it’s some other team I never heard of? The description of the hat only raises more questions: “The Major League White 59FIFTY Fitted Cap features an embroidered Major League Indians wordmark at the front panels with stripes at each side.” The Major League Indians, eh? That is not a team, just a vaguely sounding racist arrangement of words!

Now here’s the thing. My understanding is the Cleveland Guardians still own the rights to “Cleveland Indians.” So, is this the franchise trying to be sneaky and drop the “Cleveland?” or is it New Era trying to get around the licensing rights by not including “Cleveland”? Some other shenanigans? Either way, it seems obvious that what is going on here is someone trying to ensure the racist money faucet doesn’t entirely shut off. Shame on them. At least put your name on it.

We’re All Thriving

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Who is the latest member of Congress being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct? 
2. President Trump appeared on a podcast run by this former close ally turned antagonist with whom he has apparently since made up. 
3. Which former Republican congressman is now the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida? 

Answers below

Nancy Mace Thinks We’re Too Fussed About Her Tattoos to Be Sufficiently Islamophobic 

In her pivot from congresswoman to failed gubernatorial candidate to now, apparently, podcaster, Nancy Mace has stayed true to her core identity: troll. The former South Carolina lawmaker went viral this week after displaying some extremely midlife crisis-style tattoos during the soft launch of her new YouTube show. Despite all appearances to the contrary, they aren’t AI or Photoshop; instead, as Mace told Politico in a February profile, she got them in “rapid succession” after losing or firing the majority of her congressional staff in 2024.” Doing so provided, she said, “The pain that I need to feel.” As Texas Chron reporter Gwen Howerton put it, it looks like “nancy mace went to the tattoo shop and just said ‘give me tattoos.’”

The always-desperate-for-attention Mace acted astonished at the attention to her ink, using it as fodder for a promo reel for her new show, which is called Get Maced, because of course it is. In the clip, set to a generic classic rock riff, the title of the show repeatedly flashes on screen in Barbie-pink font alongside clips of Mace surfing, shooting an automatic weapon, and walking through the halls of the Capitol. The accompanying text: “If my tattoos trigger you more than the Islamic invasion, your priorities are as broken as the Biden-Harris border.”

The show seems to consist of Mace monologuing in a studio about the topics she thinks need more attention, like the impending Islamic invasion of the U.S. and tax dollars’ allegedly going towards paying for the surgery of trans inmates. She promises it will also involve cursing and is sure to annoy people. We are sure of that too.

Fair Deal?

CBS News reported this week that the U.S. Army has offered a unit of active duty soldiers in Georgia a four-day pass to play the new Grand Theft Auto VI as an incentive to reenlist for at least two more years of service. Twenty of the 130 soldiers eligible for the offer have apparently already accepted. It’s been 13 years since the last GTA was released, and we can certainly appreciate the hype, but trading four days off to play a video game for two more years of service doesn’t exactly send the message that you value human life. 

Trivia answers: 1) Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) 2) Michael Cohen 3) Rep. David Jolly (R-FL)