Victor Davis Hanson: The Racist Plot to Retire Caitlin Clark from the WNBA

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:49)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I don't watch much women's basketball association games. Apparently, most Americans have not in the past. But there was an incident the other day between two teams, the Phoenix Mercury and the Indiana Fever.
The sensation of women's basketball is six feet tall, former Iowa College of Basketball Sensation, Caitlin Clark.
And here's the rub. She was playing this game, and she was knocked down. Two or three of the Phoenix Mercury team members kind of swarmed her. She almost got a knee in the head. And one player, Alicia Thomas, was sort of resting on her, and then took her fist and pressed right onto her juggler vein or throat and her neck.
If that had happened just out in the public sphere, if you saw somebody knock somebody down and then sort of rest on top of them and put that on their neck, it would be a felony assault. But this was in a basketball game. And what made it worse was the referees were right there. They not only did not call a flagrant foul, they didn't react to it. It was only when the people who were watching the game got so angry in public opinion that the league then, I guess, forced the referees to rescind and they assessed Thomas Afal, but it was only one day suspension. So what is going on? Well, what's going on according to the popular press, I'm not sure I'm qualified to adjudicate that, is that the league is mostly 65 to 70 percent black. It's kind of mirror images. It's a completely Americanic league. It mirror images the NBA, and many of the black players, as true of women's sports, has a higher percentage of lesbians than the normal population. All of a sudden, this white girl from Iowa, six feet tall, who you might think would be under the basket, is rebounding in women's basketball. She's kind of lanky, but she turns out to be one of the best outside shooters in the history of women's basketball. So for her first two seasons, she was roughed up a bit, but she took the league by storm, and she continued her historic excellence that came out of college basketball with the University of Iowa team, and she parlayed that into excellent play and kind of skyrocketed the Indiana professional team. But here's the problem. She's for good or evil or happy or sad, she's responsible for many estimates of a 25% increase in revenue, not to mention millions of people are watching women's basketball because she is such a different type of player, not because of her sexual orientation that is heterosexual or her race, which is white, but because she has a finesse. She's a great passer and she can shoot from the outside. Now you would think the league would welcome that and highlight it. But what's happened is attention has turned to the low attendance prior league to the high attendance, high revenue new league because of Caitlin Clark. Part of it is jealousy, part of it may be race or sexual orientation. But whatever the cause is, the players often are acting against their own self-interest. They're beating her up. The subtext is that she's lanky and tall and she shoots from the outside, so they're going to rough her up. And the Fox News not long ago listed a series of ten or more incidents where she had a ruptured drum, she was slammed. In the game I'm speaking of, she was knocked down by another player in a flagrant foul.
And so it doesn't seem to make sense. Why are they doing that? Why are the players trying to systematically hurt someone? Now, maybe it's just strategy of basketball that if you intimidate her enough and she goes out on the floor and thinks somebody's not going to be playing normal basketball or try to hurt me, then her shooting will be off. Her passing will be off. Psychologically, she'll be damaged. And that's happened. Her third year has not been as impressive as her first two. And she's got racked up a series of knee and back injuries. But what's the general public that now has been attracted to this new phenomenon of Caitlin Clark is very angry because what they see is a systematic reverse racism that black women players resent the attention that Caitlin Clark is getting and the new audiences that she's winning and even the new revenue of which they are a beneficiary. And they believe that they're going to play tough physical basketball and injure her and at least injure her or at least psychologically put terror into her so she doesn't have the same excellence as she had before. That's pretty clear if you look at the list of injuries. Now, what's going to happen? Well, there's only three alternatives.