here’d be no real reason to talk about it any longer, but these incidents keep popping up. In the past, the sensational star Caitlin Clark was attacked by Alyssa Thomas.
That was that vicious fist to her neck when she was on the ground that caused an uproar and had racial and sexual overtones, and then reflected on the status itself of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Now we’ve got a kind of replay, but with different actors. We have Sophie Cunningham, who’s on the same Indiana team as Caitlin Clark, and she was recently dribbling with a clear, easy layup at the basket, and she was being chased by DiJonai Carrington from the opposite team.
And instead of just fouling her to prevent an easy layup by maybe pushing her hips, as often happens, she chose to clothesline her. She took her entire arm and hit her neck and flattened her. Flagrant foul. She was kicked out of the game, and then she almost immediately racialized the episode by texting or posting on social media, “White privilege.”
I thought that was kind of ironic for an African American young woman to complain about white people when she’s wearing a blond wig, and according to the DEI parlance, she’s culturally appropriating the appearance of a different race, and we’re not supposed to do that. I know that if Sophie Cunningham had been dribbling and she had dreadlocks, people would be very critical of her.
So, it was kind of a weird thing, and it got even weirder because it exposed the problem of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Again, because nobody really stuck up for Sophie Cunningham. In fact, some members faulted her for previously remarking in an interview that she thought transgender women should not be allowed to, if they were biological males, to play in female sports where their height and weight and muscular advantage, i.e., their DNA, gave them enormous advantages that could hurt women, and the same would be true of hurting women that were underage in high school or junior high who were showering and dressing with biological men.
So, that commentary by Sophie Cunningham may have been the subtext of this attack on her because we’ve had coaches in the Women’s National Basketball Association wear jackets promoting the trans issue. We had a co-owner of the Seattle team harass two young girl fans, and all they had were signs to the effect of “Support Sophie,” and the co-owner went over and swore at them and abused them and was given a suspension herself.
We’ve had referees who’ve obviously ignored flagrant fouls against both Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark. And so, this is an ongoing angry league. And now with the trans issue, they really stepped into it because they have been on record–they being the commissioner and the owners–that they cannot define what a male is or a woman is.
That, in other words, if you say that you’re a transgender female and somebody says, well, you’re not because your muscular, skeletal DNA suggests otherwise, and you have the sexual characteristics of a male, but you say you’re female, that doesn’t work. You can’t just declare what your gender is.
And they kind of brushed that off. And now two former NBA players who retired, they have pensions, but of course, given Caitlin Clark has enriched this league and brought in, according to some economists, a billion dollars in aggregate new revenue, whether defined by increased fan attendance, which has soared, or media contracts, which have soared, lucrative contracts, or merchandising opportunities, which have soared.
A once near-bankrupt, subsidized, very isolated, and unknown league is now on everybody’s imagination, and there are people who want to get in on it. So, two men think, well, if they’re paying suddenly $500,000 a year, I can just say that I’m a woman. I’ll put on a wig or something, and then maybe I’ll wear a dress that day. And because you can now create your own gender and the league is on record that they don’t have a definition of what actually a transgender person is vis-a-vis a biological male or female, they have no right to tell me I can’t play. And of course, they won’t believe that I can dominate the league, and they won’t stop me from showering with some very attractive women.
And so, now the league is in a dilemma because their own politically correct DEI rhetoric has put them on the horns of a dilemma. Do they sound like Sophie Cunningham and say, “No, you men, you cannot play because you can’t declare your sexuality contrary to your biological DNA nature”? You can’t do that. Or do they stick to their guns and destroy the league by inviting biological males, as Sophie Cunningham has warned they would destroy the league with their greater advantages in size and strength and endurance?
But what’s behind all this? Why do we even talk about this? Nobody cared about the Women’s National Basketball Association. I don’t mean to denigrate it, but nobody knew it existed. If you asked the average American to name two teams, they could not name them prior to 2024.
So, from 1997 to 2024, nobody knew what this league was about. It was perpetually losing money, somewhere around $20 million to $40 million a year, that had to be either subsidized by the owners themselves, who maybe believed in women’s basketball, or they believed that they wanted a different demographic. Who knows what they believed, but they were willing to lose money because they never made any money for 20 years.
And then the National Basketball Association thought it was a good PR outreach to have a women’s version, a female version, and they were willing to subsidize that $20 million, $30 million, $40 million loss. Then Caitlin Clark comes along. As I said, she brings in a billion dollars of revenue. All of a sudden, there’s all of this drama about Caitlin Clark, her people trying to hurt her, Sophie Cunningham trying to protect her, people going after Sophie Cunningham, and people know about the WNBA.
And the result is the players are flying private to their practices and games. They’re paid $500,000 on average. Many of them are making several million dollars, $5 million, $10 million a year in merchandising and media appearances, etc., etc. In other words, Caitlin Clark single-handedly put the WNBA on the map, and that’s what the problem is, because the WNBA was sort of a little unknown league that was 65% black.
People had suggested it was 35% to 40% gay, and they sort of had their own little atmosphere, their own culture, and they weren’t really being rewarded, but they controlled the ownership, the coaches, the referees, the players, all were on this DEI left-wing page. And suddenly, the great benefactors of all of them happened to be white heterosexuals like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, and they didn’t want that.
In other words, they were willing to commit violence against them, and the league was either going to condone it or plead ignorance rather than all benefit. And there was one subtext that no one talks about, but it’s right there staring us in the face: that Caitlin Clark is probably the best player, and that’s not supposed to happen in a predominantly gay, black female league.
Doesn’t mean that other players are not nearly as good, but we haven’t seen anybody like her in women’s national basketball. And in the case of Sophie Cunningham, she’s tall, she’s beautiful, she’s blond, she’s white, and people resent that as well. You put those two figures together, they create all this controversy and hostility, and they remind America that something is definitely wrong with this league.
It encourages racism, it encourages sexual prejudice, it encourages violence, and nobody wants to touch it. And if it continues, maybe they’ll lose Sophie Cunningham, and they would lose Caitlin Clark, and if they lost both of them, they would go back to their preferred obscurity and poverty.
Monday, August 17, 2026
The WNBA’s Obsession With ‘White Privilege’
Don’t Listen to the Psy-Op War: Now Is the Time for Iran’s Total Defeat
In matters of war and peace, it is vital to think and act in the context of time, place, and history. The U.S. conduct of war with Iran must be thought of this way.
In fact, there are fundamental similarities between the war against the Shia Mullah regime in Iran and the War against Nazi Germany that started World War II. Both Nazi Germany and today’s Shia mullah regime in Iran were and are evil regimes, with no respect for human life, and worse, an all-consuming hatred and commitment to annihilation of the Jewish people. If we say we would have stopped Nazi Germany if only we had known they would undertake a holocaust, then we had better wake up and defeat the Mullah-terrorist-IRGC regime in Iran now.
Let’s revisit what happened before the holocaust. By the mid-1930s, Adolf Hitler had already begun dismantling the post-World War I treaty provisions: rearming Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles (1935), remilitarizing the Rhineland (1936), and annexing Austria in the Anschluss (March 1938) — all without serious Western resistance. Each step convinced Hitler that Britain and France lacked the will to stop him.
Today, the Iranian regime may assess U.S. vacillation in a similar way that Hitler viewed the lack of resolve in Britain and France at that time.
In the summer of 1938, Hitler turned to annexing Czechoslovakia, piecemeal starting with the area known as Sudetenland — a border region with a large ethnic German population. Backed by the Sudeten German Party, Hitler succeeded in whipping up claims of Czech persecution of ethnic Germans and demanded the region be ceded to Germany.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made three personal flights to Germany to negotiate directly with Hitler, culminating in a four-power conference in Munich led by Chamberlain, French Premier Édouard Daladier, Hitler, and Italy's Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was the key actor in brokering the final terms, and would go on to become an ally of Hitler. It is noteworthy that Pakistan, which Iran has supported in several territorial disputes, has been brokering the failed peace negotiations between Iran and the United States.
The September 1938 Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, and Chamberlain returned to Britain waving the joint declaration and famously declared it brought "peace for our time." While bringing temporary relief in Britain and France, the Munich Agreement was hollow. Hitler was emboldened by perceived weakness, and six months later, in March of 1939, he violated that agreement and marched troops into Czechoslovakia to take over the remainder of the country.
Six months later, in September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, starting World War II.
While France joined Great Britain in declaring war on Germany, within six weeks of Hitler’s invasion of France, Belgium, and Holland on May 10, 1940, France’s military defense position collapsed, and Paris fell. On June 22, 1940, the French government signed an Armistice with Hitler.
The U.S. Operation Epic Fury against Iran has cycled through roughly six rounds of escalation → threaten major strikes → pull back for talks → sign a partial agreement → watch it collapse over enforcement disputes (mainly the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's nuclear program) → escalate again. As of today, it's in another one of these fragile pause-for-negotiation windows, with no comprehensive settlement yet reached.
We see these cycles of on again — off again as failed negotiations, but Iran sees them as a successful way to stop U.S. bombing, buy time to get rearmed from China and Russia by land through Pakistan, and move the conflict agenda closer to the U.S. midterm elections. Maybe it is time that the Trump administration wakes up to being played for fools.
There are several big picture takeaways for the United States to think about and incorporate in dealing with Iran from what happened with Hitler’s Germany, France and Great Britain in the early years of World War II:
- First, recognize that evil regimes cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith and they cannot be appeased. They must be defeated, and preferably defeated early, which can save millions of lives.
- Second, weak countries are easily compromised and conquered by powerful evil regimes.
Iran sees U.S. hesitancy at this stage as their victory. It’s also important to remember that right after the first few days of Operation Epic Fury’s massive bombings, the Iran regime launched missile and drone strikes on Sunni neighbors: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
So now, these neighbors of Iran, having been massively struck by Iran, are likely confounded and demoralized by the U.S. on-again-off-again hesitancy.
Very recently, Oman has entered into its own negotiations with Iran over control of the Straits of Hormuz, perhaps because cutting a deal with the devil they know was perceived as a better option than trusting the United States, which they may remember as being inept in Iraq and utterly incompetent in carrying out Trump 45’s Doha Agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan, which was disgracefully and unbelievably botched by the Biden Administration.
Our Sunni Arab allies are aware of the fickle nature of the American electoral political system. But all of them, having felt the pain of missile and drone attacks early in the Operation Epic Fury campaign, may not entirely trust Trump’s staying power in the face of an uncertain mid-term election. They may also throw in the towel on the Abraham Accords because of this questionable durability and inconsistency of American foreign policy.
Trump should turn all this around to the advantage not only of the United States, but also to the advantage of the Sunni states that have put up with the Shia Mullah regime in their neighborhood for the last 47 years, with a recent painful reminder of Iran’s wrath and wickedness.
The U.S. has about 400 fighter aircraft positioned in and around the Straits of Hormuz, while the neighboring Sunni nations collectively have 600 advanced fighter aircraft (that have been purchased mainly from the United States). The Kurds, who are largely Sunni Muslims, and with whom the U.S. has good relations, already have boots on the ground in Iran.
Strong, quiet leadership by the Trump team at this juncture could bring together a U.S.-Sunni, or a U.S.-Israeli-Sunni coalition with overwhelming force and capabilities to get this job done. After all, this is their neighborhood, not ours.
Iran is already a militarily defeated nation. To allow this evil, suicidal regime to rebuild and reconstitute itself would be a tragic missed opportunity to liberate the vast majority of Iranian people who want to live as free people under some form of democracy. And fundamentally, it would be a dereliction of duty to the greater Middle East. Defeating this regime also puts the nail in the coffin for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, all of which dramatically improves the prospects for peace in the region.
If there was a time to get this done and bring the Iran regime to its knees in total defeat, that moment is now.
Is This What Cost Francesca Hong the Election in Wisconsin?
Francesca Hong is likely recovering from the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign, where the far-left candidate seemed like a lock to win. She fell short by 3,211 votes to David Crowley, who Wisconsin voters didn’t want but came out on top after Republicans ran a blitz on Hong’s past remarks about a host of things, including, bizarrely enough, Thanksgiving. These attacks could’ve been saved, as Hong is, at least on paper, viewed as the weaker candidate. Yet she also didn’t counterattack well, being more willing to soak up the abuse. It obviously didn’t work, but one expenditure was absent from her campaign: broadcast ads. And some are saying that it cost her the campaign (via Notus):
Francesca Hong’s Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign embraced the new era of campaigning for progressive candidates, from a social media-dominated bid to her democratic socialist-influenced policy platform.
But part of her razor-thin loss to David Crowley on Tuesday could be explained by the traditional, or a lack thereof: broadcast TV ad spending.
Despite leading the Democratic field by double-digit margins before the primary, Hong was the only active candidate to seek the governorship without running broadcast TV ads, according to ad-tracking service AdImpact.
Some strategists think the Hong campaign’s decision to focus on digital platform advertising ultimately led to its demise, costing her key parts of the electorate.
“In a primary, voters are more persuadable,” Democratic strategist Jared Leopold told NOTUS. “Especially in a smaller primary, it’s a mistake to try to narrow cast too much because you actually do need to hit a wider swath of a primary electorate, because more people are likely to change their votes at the end than in a general election.”
[…]
Exit polls show Hong won several counties helmed by colleges and certain cities like Green Bay, while Crowley swept the majority of Wisconsin’s rural districts, as well as Milwaukee County and its suburbs. Hong, however, appeared to overperform in rural counties in the state’s northwest — including St. Croix and Douglas — which also happen to sit in Minnesota media markets that saw fewer political ads on linear broadcast channels.
Even so, Hong’s lack of broadcast ads likely cost her blocs like older voters who can drive turnout, strategists say.
“It’s a mistake to not communicate with a part of the electorate,” Leopold said. “There’s still a lot of people, particularly older people, who watch a lot of TV.”
Crying About the Kids’ Failures Doesn’t Help Them Succeed
We have all seen the video of the frustrated teacher crying for his senior class on Instagram and on X. The New York Post filled in the details, teaching us more about this depressed academic.
Here’s a key entry from the Post:
A Texas high school teacher was reduced to tears and broke down in front of his class when he realized the seniors he was teaching couldn’t complete a writing exercise.
Darius Williams, a teacher for Houston Independent School District’s Wheatley High School, said he couldn’t get through the first class of the second day of school before his students’ poor literacy skills were too much for him.
“I just finished a three-hour class, and I literally broke down in the middle of class,” Williams said in an Instagram video during his lunch break on Tuesday.
Mr. Williams should be furious. His kids have not been learning, yet he’s expected to give them the last comprehensive review of English literature. Students usually learn about American Lit their junior year, and by the senior year, they’re taking English literature, from Beowulf to the Bloomsbury Group.
These failures within Houston ISD have been festering for a long time.
In 2015, Texas State Rep. Harold Dutton (D-Houston) pushed through a bill allowing the Texas Education Agency to take over Houston ISD. In fact, Rep. Dutton shared in his 2015 interview with The Defender Network that he noticed Houston’s failures as far back as 2003.
Houston ISD was performing so poorly that a Democrat lawmaker wanted Texas to take over the district. He knew he faced political backlash from his own party for standing up to teachers’ unions and putting the needs of children first, but he could not look away and ignore the chronic academic failure of his home district.
Dutton’s bill passed over 10 years ago. Eleven years later, the teacher featured above, who teaches at Rep. Dutton’s alma mater no less, has broken down and cried on camera in his classroom because the students can’t write four words.
This failure is systemic and generational. This is institutional collapse of the highest — or lowest — order, and all guilty parties should not slide.
Who allowed these students to advance from grade to grade without any competence? Don’t the standardized tests mean anything? Where were the teachers beforehand? How far back does this culture of failure stretch? I remember talking with fellow teachers in South Gate, CA, and we were all working at a brand-new school on the west side of town. One English teacher confided to me that he had sought out the transcripts of his current students in his English classes. Throughout their middle school years, the students just advanced, even if they were earning straight Fs. Where’s the accountability? Where are the resources to hold students back who do not master basic skills or content in order to face the next grade level?
And think about the students! They have to endure grade after grade, falling further behind, even though the district pushes them forward unearned. I remember teaching an eighth grader during my student teaching. He literally looked at the book, the assignment, then me, and admitted: "I can't do this."
Horrible!
Some school districts require students to retake courses they failed, or they direct students to remedial or alternative education. Those continuation schools pose different problems for the kids. The environment becomes a malaise of students who refuse to work, who often go to class only half the day, working on basic contracts outlining all the work they must do to graduate. All of this does not ensure that kids will learn anything.
Will they recover their credits? Will they graduate? Many school districts simply dump these failing kids into remedial education just to maintain higher test scores for the regular schools. Unethical, to say the least.
Regarding the standardized tests, sure, they matter. They provide a broad indication of how well or badly things are progressing in the district.
And this time, time itself is another problem.
The reform efforts started more than 20 years ago, when a politician recognized that the local school district was failing the students. He introduced legislation over ten years later to fix the problem. More than a decade after that, the school district is still failing the students.
This is beyond outrageous. The bureaucracy wins again. Moving the ship of state is hard enough, but should children suffer the whole time? More parents are fighting back, realizing that their children don’t have 10 or 20 years to make up for the lack of education in their public schools.
And how many parents are taking the lead to do what is best for their kids? Go to any school board meeting across the country. Aside from the national outrage over mask mandates and obscenity in the libraries, most parents have nonchalantly checked out of their children’s education. It took COVID-19 and the massive lockdowns to force parents to pay attention!
How many generations get harmed by the institutional setback of a bad education? How many families struggle because the children graduate from high school with some expectation that they can start a job, grow a career, build a family, and make a life for themselves … only to run into the relentless reality that they possess no competence to accomplish anything?
This is too much to bear. No wonder teachers are so overwhelmed.
I wanted to cry when listening to Darius Williams’ fraught frustration.
Which invites another set of tough questions …
What has Mr. Williams done to turn the tide on this tragedy of failed education? Or better yet, what can he do? One great teacher can’t make all the difference on his own. Teaching English to seniors depends on the effectiveness of all the teachers in freshman, sophomore, and junior years. You might work your heart out, and the kids come out smarter than the students at the local community college, but will the next teachers carry on your legacy of success?
I don’t understand why so many teachers remain in these failing schools, aside from a sense of last-ditch hope that they can turn things around. If the system in the school district is failing that much, the best thing that a teacher can do is to flee.
Lo and behold, that’s precisely what is happening.
Good teachers need to get out of bad schools, because they cannot turn them around, and they should not enable or take the blame for their collapse. Look at the celebrated case of Jaime Escalante at Garfield High School in South Los Angeles. He challenged the kids, trained up enough of them to take the AP Calculus exam, and many of them passed. Despite the ETS suspicions that they had cheated — due to the students making the same mistakes — the students retook the exams and showed the world that students in a failing school district could succeed.
The ridiculous union rules, the feckless demands of administration, and the pushback from jealous faculty frustrated Escalante, and he eventually found a more welcoming school. Mr. Williams should consider Escalante’s course. He should either find a better district or just give up on public education entirely.
The Media Strategy to Turn Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Into Taylor Swift
The country is currently being dragged along on one famous woman’s interpersonal drama surrounding her most recent breakup, and inviting us all in so she can document her most intimate thoughts and decisions regarding breakups, relationships, and motherhood.
No, I’m not talking about the past 'round-the-clock media obsession with pop singer Taylor Swift — this time it’s a member of Congress. House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The question is why? Why is a member of Congress hauling us all along in a series of personal social media videos on Instagram (IG), where she discusses and lectures about inner strength, taking back her life (from whom or what is unclear), and more Girl Boss clichés, all while treating the camera like it’s a friend she should need instead of an Instagram following?
Ocasio-Cortez, 36 years old, announced that she would be freezing her eggs, and demonstrated the process by sticking syringes into her abdomen while joking to the camera and her viewers to “not be weird.” I will leave the questions about egg freezing to fertility experts and women who have had the lived experience, but my questions involve the timing and the reasoning.
This past week, Ocasio-Cortez’s IG videos were the main topics of crossover TMZ and political social media, and she’s just getting started.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to run for president in 2028. Sure, there’s a chance Democrats recapture the Senate and Chuck Schumer either steps down as leader or retires, leaving a prime open Senate seat for her to capture, but here’s the thing about Ocasio-Cortez: she hates her job.
She hates being stuck in Congress and all the administrative nonsense that comes with it. She would much rather be out in the streets with her fellow comrades tearing down October 7 hostage posters. The presidency has always been on her horizon, and Bernie Sanders, who turns 164 years old this year, likely doesn’t have another populist run in him, but his most valuable and visual disciple does.
What we are seeing, and why Ocasio-Cortez is attempting it, is the (ironically) gestation period of remaking her image to the country — leaning hard into the working-girl-boss image that dominates much of the media coverage of young, working millennials these days. The decision to open her bedroom to her most personal decisions on fertility is a calculated image action to reshape herself as a celebrity.
This is where the media comes in. TMZ, the notoriously influential celebrity paparazzi outfit, recently opened a D.C. bureau to cover politics and politicians as only it can, stalking down members of Congress in quick ambush-style hits to get their thoughts on the Yankees, Taylor and Travis’s wedding, or any other sort of cultural nonsense it can think of.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her dating life are about to become a singular media obsession, just a full year from likely announcing a presidential run. Maybe the newly single “AOC” goes a boring route, and her next relationship or spouse is just some boring policy wonk from the New York Democratic Socialists of America chapter. But that won’t generate buzz, and it won’t make her the main character in the country, a position that has been held by Donald Trump and Taylor Swift now for roughly a decade.
The TMZification of our media will seize on the opportunity to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s personal love life the center of cultural curiosity of the presidential race. Who she is seen out on the town with, who she is having dinner with, who she just broke up with, or who she is engaged to. They see this as an opportunity to do the impossible — to finally rescue control from Donald Trump, who has had a stranglehold on media attention for the past decade.
We know this because she’s already opened the door and let the media and her audience into her home.
Get ready for it. Get ready for “AOC 24/7” — who she’s dating (an athlete or musician or actor, maybe?), “AOC spotted court-side,” “AOC spotted on the red carpet,” “AOC spotted backstage” — and the press to create a media and political phenomenon that cannot be countered by other Democrats in a presidential primary.
Just as Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tie the knot and exit into the background of American pop culture, the ground is ripe for someone to take Taylor’s place, and it appears as though someone already has.