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UPDATE (April 4, 2024, 5:58 p.m. ET): This article has been updated to include comments from Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. letter to the highest officials of higher education in his state.
Over the past week, the right-wing anger machine has produced some surprisingly childish controversies. And that’s saying something, given that we’re talking about the same conservative movement that, in recent memory, kvetched about Santa’s Race And The Lack of Sex Appeal in M&M Candy Cartoons.
Even by these embarrassing standards, the right’s whining of the past week has been remarkably stupid – and intolerant, to boot.
The last outrage of the day concerned the Easter coincidencewhich falls on a different date from one year to the next, and Trans Visibility Daywhich occurs on the same date every year. People who were outraged by this completely random event exposed their ignorance and religious intolerance at the same time, given A) they don’t seem to know how holidays workand B) they clearly think that simply acknowledging the existence of trans people is an affront to God (despite the The Christian Bible has nothing to say on the subject).
We saw something similar with the manufactured controversy that followed Monday night’s NCAA tournament women’s basketball game between Louisiana State University and the University of Iowa. After conservative social media accounts noticed that LSU’s team wasn’t on the court for the pregame national anthem, Right-wing activists have hurled angst-filled insults and other invectives in the team, describing them as unpatriotic.
The game — between a majority-white Iowa team and a majority-black LSU team — was already loaded with racial tension. The outrage, then, seemed to be an obvious attempt to stir up this tension by portraying the LSU as social justice activists who stir up controversy, just like conservatives did with Colin Kaepernick years ago. Some people online have accused the LSU team of being “woke,” a hilariously absurd claim to anyone knows something about conservative LSU coach Kim Mulkey.
Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry rallied with the MAGA crowd Tuesday when he proposed stripping scholarships from athletes who don’t stand for the national anthem before a game. At a time when the Louisiana governor should have been celebrating a local team for its breakout season, he was trying to score political points on the cheap.
Landry even sent letters to the state’s top higher education officials, urging them to adopt his proposal.
To be clear, LSU has every right to skip the anthem for any reason, and forcing someone to listen to the anthem goes against the First Amendment rights that Republicans claim to support.
But the truth behind the story was far less controversial. As Mulkey and several reporters have pointed out, LSU did not intentionally ignore the anthem. All year, the team’s pregame routine required them to head to the locker room a few minutes before the game started, meaning they routinely missed the anthem.
Much like the outrage over Trans Day of Visibility, the contrived controversy over LSU and the national anthem is instructive. It shows how the MAGA movement, fueled by questionable figures in the press and on social media, is easily drawn from one manufactured culture war to another.
The Republicans’ goal is clear: stoking these baseless tantrums is to ensure that their voters remain good and angry—and motivated—to turn out on Election Day, no matter how pathetic. It’s a strategy that is as dubious as it is desperate.
