This week, it’s the Olympics that have the right-wingers in a tizzy, upset by small examples of alleged “wokeness” from athletes to the Olympic organizers. Indeed, more than a few right-wingers are so offended that they’re actually cheering American losses in the games. What patriots they are!
The US Women’s Soccer team
After the US soccer team knelt in protest of police violence against black men before their first Olympic game, aleged American patriots started rooting for them to lose. When in fact they did lose to the Swedish team, right wingers from former Hercules actor Kevin Sorbo to Donald Trump himself were ecstatic, with some even suggesting that the team’s “wokeness” was the cause of the loss (“get woke, go broke”), despite the fact that this makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Trump drew cheers for attacking the soccer team during a rally in Arkansas.
The US men’s basketball team
Right-wingers treated the American men’s basketball team with similar disdain, with one observer declaring the Americans to be “the most woke men’s basketball team in history,” a “collection of highly-paid social justice warriors – who for some reason are willing to put the USA across their chest but weren’t willing to stand for the anthem just last year.”
Right -wing “patriots” cheered when the team lost its first game. “It’s a good thing most of the USA men’s basketball players don’t care much for the United States — the nation they’re supposedly playing for at the Olympics,” wrote Rick Moran of PJMedia. “Otherwise, the Americans’ 83-76 drubbing at the hands of France might have really hurt.”
Weird how the athletes the right-wingers are getting mad at all seem to be black and/or female. Or trans. Probably just a strange coincidence.
The Olympics in general
Some right-wing outlets went beyond hating specific American athletes and teams for their alleged “wokeness.” They simply started rooting against the Olympics as a whole, reporting ecstatically on the poor ratings the games have been getting.
“Woke Olympics Score 33-Year LOW Ratings For Opening Ceremonies” read a headline on LifeZette, with the attached story declaring the poor results might just
be another example of ‘Go Woke, Go Broke.” … Why does nobody care? With the games being delayed a year, extremely limited access for spectators, and the leftist politics being injected into the games in the name of ‘justice,’ why should we?
Breitbart took it a step further:
Well, fuck you right back, dudes. This is what you’re missing.
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I’m watching dressage. But they’d probably hate that, what with both male and female humans and male and female horses competing on an equal basis. Even though everyone on the teams is super-white.
Are they getting the feels from it being all full of Asians, what with being in Japan (who are capitalizing on the home advantage and doing well), and of course the big Chinese team who so far are #1 in medals? Are they triggered by all the spectators, workers, and officials wearing masks?
God how right-wingers whine. And it’s supposedly liberals and progressives who are the snowflakes. There are reasons to criticize the Olympics but nonr of them include the “woke” athletes.
USA Women’s soccer team beat NewZealand 6-1, undoubtedly because NZ has a female Prime Minister. After all, the US got beaten by upstanding anti-woke…Sweden? And US Men’s basketball got beaten by that stalwart upholder of right-wing standards, France.
Cmon now, y’all know they don’t care about any of those pesky details. They just like whining! Where else is all that energy going to go, if it’s not being used to improve the lives of other human beings..
The more right-wingers conflate protesting racism as being “anti-American” the more they reinforce the notion that racism intrinsic to American society and culture.
Yes, let’s not be woke, let’s not criticize. Instead, let’s just sleep and dream that the USA and the planet have no problems. Criticism is hatred. In conclusion, don’t criticize any person or institution except the ones that Donald Trump criticizes.
>”Woketard”
\
Gotta love ableism.
Eh, I am pretty against the olympic, especially given the situation, but it’s actually heartwarming to see athletes use their time in the limelight to publicize their viewpoints.
Not just progressists viewpoint TBH ; the person who won a gold medal with a witcher amulet is also a positive thing to me, since it make videogame less taboo, as well as making younger culture more visible.
@MexicanHotChocolate : it’s alway projection. They think everyone whine all the time because *they* whine all the time. Generally, seeing conservative accuse people of something is a good indication of what they themselve do. (with caveat, the most classic one being that not all homophobes are homosexuals)
Out of topic : is there a culture where there are demon-like entities that tempt people into sin not by suggesting victimizing other people but by being the ideal victim ? Like a traditional demon would whisper at the ear of a Trump supporter to burn that migrant camp, while what I seek would be in the migrant camp, being rude, making it dirty, releasing rats inside it and whatnot to make people want to take actions against it and justify general racism against migrant.
(that concept is on my brainstorm list of idea of D&D demons that don’t use direct violence or mind control to make things worse ; I fear however that it’s basically impossible to do tastefully)
@Ohlman: IIRC there are evil muses, though I don’t know what they’re called.
And they they have the nerve to call other people snowflakes.
@Ohlmann
Of course not. Something like that would imply that the victims didn’t deserve their treatment, which entirely defeats the point of having designated victims in the first place.
I’m kinda surprised that the right wing dudes aren’t crying over the uniform controversies like the Norwegian women’s beach handball team. Although I’m sure they won’t miss the chance for too much longer.
Also, (but kind of OT) while I guess I’m kinda glad that Sports Illustrated included a trans woman in their swim suit issue, WHY EVEN HAVE THAT, STILL?? Why not work to feature women’s, you know, actual SPORTS more? And while, I’m fantasizing, supporting trans women and girls in women’s sports, too! /rant
Sometimes I think that the old, white, cis, male dinosaurs (like the ones in charge of the IOC, USOC, and Sports Illustrated, and etc.) can’t die off fast enough. I just hope I’m one of those ornery old women who refuse to kick off long enough to see more of it happen.
I say keep the swimsuit issue, but make it equal-opportunity. Include male (and nonbinary) models. IOC, likewise: the men’s beach volleyball athletes should compete in Speedos.
Longer term, figure out how to eliminate the sex-segregation entirely. Where does a nonbinary person compete? In which events?
Meanwhile, am I imagining things or is it Canadian women who are bringing home most of our medals this year? Interesting if so.
Canadian women bringing home more medals than the men isn’t anything particularly new.
A good chunk of it is probably down to ‘Canada pays more attention to women’s athletics than a great many other countries’, meaning the competition pool isn’t as crowded as it is in men’s athletics. (So, similar reason as to why Canada does so much better in the Winter Olympics than the Summer.)
And considering the level of attention paid to women’s athletics in Canada… that’s a really damning conclusion.
I would be way more interested in beach volleyball if the men had to wear Speedos. Only seems fair.
But frankly, I don’t know why everyone in that sport isn’t allowed to dress as they please, probably like the men.
That’s another thing about equestrian — every human dresses alike.
I am also sure that all the whiners featured in this post could have their asses kicked by Megan Rapinoe. Easily.
I say this as someone who loves the Olympics. The Olympics is not “woke” and never has been. In fact, they forbade athletes from engaging in protest at medal ceremonies. But the amazing athletes make me love the games still.
And if ratings are bad in the US (don’t know about other countries) it’s because NBC sports is absolute shit. They barely show any actual sports. I know every gymnastics and figure skating hates their coverage. I suspect fans of other “Olympic” sports do too.
They want you to pay extra to subscribe to all those 400-series channels that are nothing but sports if you want to see the entireties of specific events and not just the highlights.
Unsurprisingly, instead they just get poor ratings.
I damned well better see some heads explode when they discover how many on the left loathe the Olympics for the corruption, the wasteful spending, the sexism, transphobia, and the disastrous effect hosting the events have on the poor and the unhoused of the cities as well as all the nationalistic fervor and jingoism the games dredge up.
@weirwoodtreehugger. Surplus:
There’s a reason why most of my friends in the U.S. near the Canadian border watched the Canadian coverage of the Olympics rather than the American coverage. The American coverage has long been a combination of hagiographies of American hopeuls and coverage of only those sports the Americans are involved with, with even the people who like the sports often annoyed that so much time is being spent talking about the athletes rather than showing the actual events.
And tht’s even before we get into things like the Olympics in Beijing where somebody at NBC had the brilliant idea to cut and paste all of the opening ceremonies during their re-broadcast during American prime viewing hours, so that the countries were all shown entering the stadium in alphabetical order in English rather than in Mandarin which was the order in which they’d actually entered the stadium. (Opening ceremonies is always in alphabetical order in the national language of the host country.) Which was obviously done to ‘avoid confusion’ (i.e., our viewers are too stupid to understand), but instead confused people because teams were seen as already being in the stadium before they were shown entering.
The Canadian coverage may lack the specific flaws of the American coverage, but the free-OTA coverage, at the very least, has been oddly disjointed. The same event gets shown twice, or even three times, and presented the 2nd (and 3rd) time as if it was new rather than a replay; chunks just omitted somehow from the middle of a game; and a much heavier advertising load than is typical for CBC, a publicly funded broadcaster.