The Anthem War Comes for Its Own
A conservative governor criticized a conservative coach because ... why not?
Dear readers,
The two sports that typically bring us the most joy — baseball and basketball — both left us feeling a bit disappointed this week. The Mets and the Nationals got off to uninspiring starts in the new MLB season, and the Knicks’ long-shot title hopes evaporated on Thursday after Julius Randle had season-ending surgery. It’s tough going out here, but at least we got to watch some great hoops at the college level — most notably the LSU-Iowa women’s Elite 8 matchup on Monday.
In the days since the game, though, the performances on the court have once again been overshadowed by a bizarre political firestorm. That’s our main topic this week.
-Ian and Calder
The morning after LSU women’s basketball lost a back-and-forth game to Iowa, news of a different sort reached the governor’s mansion in Louisiana.
A cavalcade of conservative commentators had begun to complain about LSU’s players not appearing on the court during the national anthem. In response, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called on the state’s Board of Regents to implement a policy mandating that college athletes be present for the anthem — or else risk their scholarships.
On its own, Landry’s grandstanding isn’t particularly surprising. He’s an outspoken conservative and a vocal Trump ally, so he’s naturally inclined to take the right-leaning anthem discourse to its logical conclusion: It’s not enough to yell at the players; you’ve got to punish them when they defy you. His comments echo Trump’s rhetoric from back in 2017, when the ex-president said that NFL players should be fired — and “maybe” deported — for kneeling during the anthem.
What makes Landry’s comments unusual is the team about which he is complaining. LSU is led by Kim Mulkey, the Tigers’ famously combative (and flamboyantly dressed) head coach. Mulkey has largely steered clear of talking about national politics, but it’s not very hard to guess where her sympathies lie. During her early press appearances at this year’s tournament, she tried (and failed) to pull off a Trumpian front-run of a forthcoming Washington Post profile of her. When the piece finally dropped last week, though, it was hardly the “hit piece” that Mulkey had made it out to be. Instead, it expanded upon many of the details of Mulkey’s life that the public already knew: She publicly defended her former employer, Baylor, during a sexual assault scandal. She refused to publicly support her former player, Brittany Griner (who is gay), when the Russians threw her into prison. According to other former LGBTQ players, Mulkey had a habit of criticizing her gay players for their appearance, though she’s denied those charges.
In his statement calling on the Board of Regents to force players to appear for the anthem, Landry flicked at Mulkey’s right-coded popularity, writing, “No one has a greater respect for the sport and for Coach Mulkey [than I do]. However, above respect for that game is a deeper respect for those that [sic] serve to protect us and unite us under one flag!” But such perfunctory performances of respect hardly placated Mulkey, who quickly shot back at Landry, arguing that the whole thing was one big misunderstanding.
“Honestly, I don’t even know when the anthem was played,” Mulkey told reporters after Landry’s statement. “We kind of have a routine when they’re on the floor and they come off at the 12-minute mark . . . I’m sorry, listen, that's nothing intentionally done.”
What Mulkey didn’t mention was that her players (who are mostly black) had already been subject to a slew of weird and gross insults during the tournament. In one particularly bizarre instance, an LA Times staff writer called LSU’s players “Louisiana hot sauce” and “dirty debutantes,” while describing LSU’s (mostly white) opponent, UCLA, as “milk and cookies” and “America’s sweethearts.” (It seems like they’re having a normal one over there at the LA Times.) Just last year, LSU’s star player, Angel Reese, got caught up in a bizarre, racially-inflected controversy after she trash-talked Iowa’s star, Caitlin Clark, prompting a whole news cycle about how black players are held to higher standards of decorum than white players.
Though left unstated, that context serves as the unstated backdrop to Landry’s comments. Even with their Trumpy coach, LSU’s team makes an easy target for conservative culture warriors (and clueless liberals) looking to score some easy political points. And from this vantage point, it doesn’t really matter whether or not LSU was attempting to make a political point (and all evidence suggests that they weren’t). If it plays well with the base, so the thinking goes, have at it.
This is, no doubt, a silly and cruel way to act toward other people, and at the end of the day, we don’t really care if teams stand for the anthem or not. But even bracketing the question of its rightness or wrongness, is picking on a popular college basketball team even an effective way for the right to do politics? In an abortive effort to mimic the power of Trump’s insult-ridden rants, many conservative culture warriors have taken to denouncing anyone who appears to transgress minor right-wing shibbolets, even if that means denouncing their nominal allies, as in the case of Mulkey. But it also means demonizing a lot of public figures who the rest of the country sees as totally normal (and even admirable) people — like popular sports figures and ultra-famous pop stars and beloved cartoon characters. We would guess that the only people who are nodding along with Landry in his campaign against LSU are those who have had their brains so poisoned by the culture war they’re fully unable to tell the difference between a sinister leftist plot and a harmless coincidence.
For what it’s worth, a handful number of people on the right are waking up to the fact that villainizing very popular celebrities in the name of ideological purity probably isn’t the best way for the right to win Americans’ hearts and minds (or for Republicans to win elections). But, as the Landry episode illustrates, those people aren’t getting through to the leadership of the GOP — which, from the left’s perspective, may be a very good thing.
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