“There is no such thing as new truth; error might be old or new, but truth is as old as the universe.”
Frederick Douglass, 1863
“Popular Error and Unpopular Truth”
In May of 2024, a biological male transgender high school runner won the Oregon high school 6-A women’s’ 200-meter state title by two-tenths of a second. His time of 24.11 would not have placed in the men division, as the 6th place men’s runner was nearly 2 seconds faster. Controversary erupted when the transgender teen was booed as he crossed the finish lines. A prominent Oregonian sports columnist, as well as the editor for the Oregonian, castigated the crowd for “an extraordinary and painful moment.”
In April of 2024, South Carolina beat Iowa for the Women’s National Basketball championship South Carolina’s coach, Dawn Staley was asked if she supported the idea that biological men can legitimately compete in women’s athletics. After some uncomfortable hesitation, her answer was “yes”.
What is ironic about Coach Staley’s response is she had just made a point of saying that one reason her women’s team is so good is because it practices against an intramural men’s team that is better. She thanked this men’s team for helping her women win a national championship. Intramural. These were men who could not make South Carolina’s men’s team - a team which did not win its own league.
Riley Gaines is an outstanding swimmer at the University of Kentucky and a Southeastern Conference Championship. However, when she went to the NCAA championships, she found herself competing against a man going by the name of Lia Thomas. For three years, Thomas had competed unremarkably as a member of the University of Pennsylvania men’s swimming team. He then “identified” as a woman, swam for the University of Pennsylvania women’s team and became a women’s national champion. ESPN honored Thomas during its Women’s History Month as one of the top female athletes of the year.
What happens when truth is lost, and ideology is celebrated?
Sports is the ultimate meritocracy. The best man or woman or team wins – at least until recently. Sports should bring us together, not divide us. If you have watched a football game at a major college stadium, you have experienced this. Whether the fan was white, black, Asian, or Hispanic, male or female, Democrat or Republican – when the home team made a big play or won the game, the fans celebrated as one, without giving a thought to race, gender, or politics. It’s a great feeling.
Something important is being lost. The most watched basketball game in U.S. History was game six of the 1998 NBA finals. Almost 36 million viewers tuned in to watch the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz by a Michael Jordan game-winning jumper. In 1998, there were 70 – 80 million fewer people in America than today. So, 36 million then would be roughly the equivalent of 44 million today.
In 2024, about 11 million people tuned in to watch games in the NBA finals between the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks. So, the NBA lost 80 percent of its audience during a time when the population of the U. S. grew by 30 percent.
How did this happen? It has nothing to do with the game of basketball itself. College basketball has been hitting record highs in terms of popularity. The NBA is reaping the toxicity of embracing woke ideology.
In 2020, the league painted the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on its basketball courts. It postponed a playoff game because a black man named Jacob Blake, a serial domestic abuser armed with a knife, was shot by police who had been summoned to the scene by a black woman terrified of Blake. WNBA players joined the protests writing Blake’s name on their jerseys. Then players in both leagues began replacing the names on their jerseys with left-wing political slogans. The NBA supports the transgender movement in the U.S. and pulled its 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, North Carolina, because the state legislature had passed a bill to protect women by keeping men out of their bathrooms.
While the NBA denigrated America as “systemically racist” and rotten to the core, it was cozying up to communist China. It is forbidden in the NBA to say a negative word about China as the league works to expand its audience and increase its profits in that country. And it held NBA games in Middle Eastern countries where the mere fact of being gay is a crime punishable by death.
It is in response to this anti-American wokeness that so many Americans lost interest in professional basketball. In an expanding market, their audience has cratered. Have you heard that story reported? Chances are you have not because the sports media in our country is even more woke than the mainstream political media.
What the Oregonian sports columnist and editor fail to understand is that the boos they heard were not directed at the individual, but at the woke ideology that is destroying the integrity of the sport these parents and fans loved. And the media is complicit by endorsing that ideology.
Sports fans understand that men should compete against men and women should compete against women. There is a huge market for the truth in a culture in which so many people are peddling deceptions. And there are consequences. Those lies are destroying the dreams of young women who have worked so hard to achieve equality with men in scholarships and facilities. It is difficult to conceive of anything more unjust than men, who could not succeed within their own gender, claiming the right to compete in women’s sports and demanding that the rest of us endorse their claim as legitimate.
This is an extraordinary and painful moment in our national culture. An important part of the solution is for fans – all of us – to summon the courage to defend the truth. Truth, indeed, as old as the universe, permanent things that participate in the eternity of God.
Tim Powell
(Some of the above was taken from “Imprimis”, a publication of Hillsdale College, from a talk given by Clay Travis.)