Victor Davis Hanson: The WNBA’s Treatment of Sophie Cunningham Has Been Anything but ‘Privilege’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Victor Davis Hanson: I’ve mentioned a couple of times that on the internet, there’s a whole genre on YouTube, I guess you would call it race wars now. It’s open. It’s just open. And we saw the WNBA. Did you see the hit on Sophie Cunningham by DiJonai? 

Jack Fowler: Well, yeah, we should get into that a little more deeply. But that immediately became a race issue. She was clotheslined by DiJonai Carrington. 

Hanson: What I didn’t understand was that here you had this player, and she was trying to stop a layup. And usually, when you want to commit a foul to stop somebody, you kind of run up behind them because they’re going to make the basket. And she did make the basket. You kind of grab their hips or something or push them a little bit, and then you incur a two-shot foul. It’s kind of an iffy thing to do because if they make the basket, they get one shot, and they can get a three-point play out of it. So you have to be very careful.

But what was strange about it was that she didn’t even make an attempt. She just went up and conked her with her elbow. I mean, conked her— 

Fowler: She clotheslined her.

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Hanson: Yeah. That’s a good term. And so, my point is, what did she do afterward? They didn’t call a foul on her at first. Or they called a minor foul, and then they looked at it and said it was flagrant. And they suspended her from that game, and then she immediately, almost instantaneously, went on social media and said, “White privilege.” And I’m thinking, what does white privilege mean? You mean that you got a foul, and you’re so accustomed in the WNBA that if you’re black, you can do this and nobody will enforce it because you’re 65—you view people not as individuals but as collectives. And the league is 65% black and maybe 35% gay, and this is a little enclave that you feel is protected.

And then I thought, if you think it’s white privilege and you’re so angry, why would you culturally appropriate blond hair? She had a big blond wig. And I’m thinking, if Sophie Cunningham had had dreadlocks when she did that, they would call her a racist. So, what I’m getting at is that the whole thing is so imbalanced, and we all just don’t talk about it. Maybe it’s because half of the African American community is doing wonderfully in terms of purchasing power. They’re reaching parity, but half are not, and nobody wants to talk about that.

But when you look at this WNBA, when it was formed in 1997 until Caitlin Clark came in 2024, it had lost $20 million to $30 million a year, and more like $40 million some years.

It was a charity of the NBA.

It was a charity of the NBA, and the owners bought those cheap franchises. They bought them not for economic reasons, as we saw with the owners of the Seattle team. And what I’m getting at is that at every level, it is weaponized. You see owners weighing in and trying to harass two young girls who happened not to say anything about trans issues. They just said that we support Sophie. Then you see a coach deliberately wearing a trans jacket. Then you see players who are highly weaponized in racial and sexual-orientation terms.

And you say, the whole league is this way. And nobody knew about it because nobody cared about it. It was this little tiny eddy over here, off the river of American sports, a little side eddy. Everybody said, well, it’s women’s liberation, and we should have two basketball leagues. We know that the general public, women included, prefer to watch male basketball, but just to get them off our backs, we’ll give them $30 million or $40 million.

And they were taking buses or flying economy, and nobody said a word. Then all of a sudden, this Caitlin Clark sensation, who could hit 3-pointers from nearly half court, was amazing. She goes into this little enclave and is roughed up for being heterosexual and white. And then Sophie Cunningham, who unfortunately for the WNBA is absolutely stunning. She’s a blond, beautiful bombshell, tall, statuesque, et cetera. She protected Caitlin Clark, and suddenly you had two white people who were the objects of these flagrant fouls.

Even the referees were in the tank. They would never call it right. Even Sports Illustrated had a headline. Did you see it? Sophie Cunningham gets karma, karma, karma. In other words, she deserved that for honestly expressing an opinion about trans issues. And at some point–they don’t play in places like Florida. You can see why. The Florida attorney general already said that if they had played in Florida, he would have filed a felony assault charge for that foul on Cunningham.

They play mostly in blue areas or purple states. But it’s very funny how we have allowed a public—we’re so critical of sports. We had the whole Colin Kaepernick phenomenon, take a knee, and LeBron James lecturing us and all. Then we had this overtly racist and chauvinistic gay league, which was completely intolerant of anybody who did not fit that majority stereotype. Any minority who went in there and played well was an object of derision and attack in racist terms, and I’d say sexual orientation terms too, but reversed from the usual cause of victimhood.

And then, to top it off, Caitlin Clark, according to many economists, has brought in $1 billion in revenue, media endorsements, publicity, and all of them now are making $500,000 a year from almost nothing. They’re flying first class or on private jets. They’re all better off. And how do they look at that? They keep trying to injure this woman because they hate her more than the self-benefit.

So, where did they get that? Where did that idea come from?

And the idea, I should define it, is that you should look at people in racial terms, number one. And No. 2, if you act overtly racist, whether you say the N-word or you go after and try to hurt somebody, you will be protected if you can qualify as a victim on the Marxist binary of oppressed and oppressor.

We’re free to do anything we want as long as we’re a victim and we can prove it. That’s how sick the whole thing has become. What was in the mind of a coach who thought, “I’m going to go across there, and I’m going to harass these two young girls for having a ‘Support Sophie’ sign”? Co-owner of the team.

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