Jeff Bezos and his hatchet men at The Washington Post will disagree, but the sports pages can tell you an awful lot about where a country stands, and where it takes its stands.
Arizona was supposed to host Super Bowl XXVII in January 1993, but two years earlier, the NFL switched the game from Tempe to the Rose Bowl because of the state’s persistent reluctance to enact a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
In July 2016, the NBA moved its All-Star Game out of Charlotte, on seven months’ notice, in response to a North Carolina bill designed to supersede local nondiscrimination laws and, infamously, police transgender use of public restrooms. The law was ultimately repealed.
Just five years ago, Major League Baseball pulled its own All-Star Game from Atlanta, on three months’ notice, to protest a new Georgia law designed to suppress voting by people of color.
When it’s time to take a stand against other countries, the Olympics inevitably come into play.
On the eve of the 2014 Sochi Games, the Obama administration announced its diplomatic delegation to the event, and the roster included three LGBTQ athletes in an obvious rebuke of Vladimir Putin’s homophobic “anti-propaganda” law. After Putin invaded Crimea just as those Olympics ended, Obama pulled his delegation for the Paralympics in March.
Likewise, Joe Biden opted not to send a delegation to the 2022 Beijing Games, given what the administration deemed the genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in western China. “U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these Games as business as usual in the face of [China’s] egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “and we simply can’t do that.”
The U.S. delegation to this year’s Olympics, set to begin hours from now in Milan, is led by JD Vance, whose slanderous 2024 comments about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, didn’t prevent his ascension to the vice presidency. People in Springfield are now terrified by the prospect of Vance’s boss unleashing ICE and Border Patrol on the Haitian community, much of which recently lost its Temporary Protected Status thanks to a Trump administration ruling. Historian Timothy Snyder warns that such an operation could amount to ethnic cleansing, or even a pogrom.
In the first year of their second term, Trump & Co. took aim at the gay and lesbian community, refusing to commemorate Pride Month while stripping Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship. But they focused most of their hate on transgender Americans, curtailing their access to health care, hounding them out of sports from youth to college levels, and yes, continuing their creepy fixation with bathroom access.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Putin launched days after the Beijing 2022 flame went out has become a four-year slog of a war; it’s clear that Trump, whose attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the focus of his first impeachment, doesn’t give a damn about Ukrainian independence and will ultimately sell Kyiv out. You’re also familiar with his feelings about Venezuelan, Canadian, and Greenlandic independence, no doubt.
The 2021 Georgia voting bill remains in place. MLB held the All-Star Game in Atlanta last summer. Late last month, Trump’s FBI raided the Fulton County elections office, confiscating ballots in service of the repeatedly debunked lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
A few weeks before that, the administration removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from a list of holidays on which Americans could visit national parks for free. Workers recently took a crowbar to plaques describing the history of slavery at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. Overnight, the president went on his social media site and shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
This is the nation that Team USA will represent at the Opening Ceremony today. It’s almost too much to stand.