Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

I don’t watch much Women’s National Basketball Association games. Apparently, most Americans have not in the past. But there was an incident the other day between two teams, the Phoenix Mercury and the Indiana Fever, and the sensation of women’s basketball is 6-foot-tall former Iowa college basketball sensation Caitlin Clark.

And here’s the rub. 

She was playing this game, and she was knocked down. Two or three of the Phoenix Mercury team members kind of swarmed her. She almost got a knee in the head, and one player, Alyssa Thomas, was sort of resting on her and then took her fist and pressed right onto her jugular vein or throat on her neck. 

If that had happened just out in public, the public sphere—if you saw somebody knock somebody down and then sort of rest on top of them and put that on their neck—it would be a felony assault.  

TRENDING ARTICLES

But this was in a basketball game. And what made it worse was the referees were right there. They not only did not call a flagrant foul, they didn’t react to it. 

It was only when the people who were watching the game got so angry in public opinion that the league then, I guess, forced the referees to rescind, and they assessed Thomas a foul, but it was only a one-day suspension. 

So, what is going on? Well, what’s going on, according to the popular press—I’m not sure I’m qualified to adjudicate that—is that the league is mostly 65% to 70% black. 

It kind of mirror-images, it’s a completely meritocratic league. It mirror-images the NBA, and many of the black players, as true of women’s sports, has a higher percentage of lesbians than the normal population. And all of a sudden, this white girl from Iowa, 6 feet tall, who you might think would be under the basket rebounding in women’s basketball—she’s kind of lanky, but she turns out to be one of the best outside shooters in the history of women’s basketball. So, for her first two seasons, she was roughed up a bit, but she took the league by storm, and she continued her historic excellence that came out of college basketball with the University of Iowa team. 

And she parlayed that into excellent play and kind of skyrocketed the Indiana professional team. 

But here’s the problem. She’s, for good or evil or happy or sad, she’s responsible, by many estimates, for a 25% increase in revenue, not to mention millions of people are watching women’s basketball because she is such a different type of player. 

Not because of her sexual orientation—that is heterosexual—her race, which is white, but because she has finesse. She’s a great passer, and she can shoot from the outside. 

Now, you would think the league would welcome that and highlight it. But what’s happened is attention has turned from the low-attendance prior league to the high-attendance, high-revenue new league because of Caitlin Clark. 

Part of it is jealousy. Part of it may be race or sexual orientation, but whatever the cause is, the players often are acting against their own self-interest. They’re beating her up. 

The subtext is that she’s lanky and tall, and she shoots from the outside, so they’re going to rough her up. And Fox News not long ago listed a series of 10 or more incidents, including where she had a ruptured eardrum, she was slammed. 

In the game I’m speaking of, she was knocked down by another player in a flagrant foul. 

And so it doesn’t seem to make sense. Why are they doing that? Why are the players trying to systematically hurt someone? 

Now, maybe it’s just a strategy of basketball—that if you intimidate her enough and she goes out on the floor and thinks, somebody’s not going to be playing normal basketball but try to hurt me, then her shooting will be off, her passing will be off. Psychologically, she’ll be damaged. 

And that’s happened. Her  third year has not been as impressive as her first two, and she’s racked up a series of knee and back injuries. 

But what the general public that now has been attracted to this new phenomenon of Caitlin Clark is very angry because what they see is systematic reverse racism: that black women players resent the attention that Caitlin Clark is getting and the new audiences that she’s winning, and even the new revenue of which they are beneficiaries. 

And they believe that they’re going to play tough, physical basketball and injure her, or at least injure her, or at least psychologically put terror into her so she doesn’t have the same excellence as she had before. 

That’s pretty clear if you look at the list of injuries. 

Now, what’s going to happen? 

Well, there’s only three alternatives. 

If you look at the sports commentary, it’s divided. The left-of-center sportswriters, and by the way, sportswriters are among the most left-wing of all journalists. I don’t know how that’s possible. They used to be middle-of-the-road or conservative, but now they are left-wing. I think it’s because of DEI, and they see sports as a social experiment, sort of.  

But they fault Clark, and they say, well, she’s just too sensitive. She’s a whiner. She complains. She looks for injuries that are not there. She just has to grow up. This is the big leagues. That kind of stuff.  

But not the general public. And not many of the players, they know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. So, again, what will happen?  

The first is, if the owners of the league, the commissioner, the referees, and the players continue this, then she will be permanently disabled—maybe in a year or two—injured.  

Or she’ll be so intimidated that she understands she’s not playing basketball but football, or mixed martial arts, and people are going to try to hurt her. And she knows that. 

And more importantly, she knows that the referees will not enforce it, because they are either afraid of the other teams, or the management, or they are afraid of the players. Or they sympathize with the players.  

Who knows? But they have not been doing their job. 

And then she will be injured, she will leave the league. People will be very angry, and the league will rescind back into obscurity and go broke probably, because it won’t just be neutral.  

This great gain and revenue and attention that it’s gotten because of Caitlin Clark—if she’s gone, and forced out and injured, there will be a double reaction. It won’t just be that they will lose their new fans. They will lose old fans too. 

The second is that she just says, Why do I have to put up with this? I know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. Nobody wants to stop it. 

It’s racism, pretty clear it’s racism. If she were black, and perhaps homosexual, she wouldn’t have these problems people say.  

So, there would be some problems because envy and jealousy is a natural human condition. But there wouldn’t be this extent of problems.  

So, she just says, I’m gonna leave. I’m gonna go to Europe, where these problems may not exist to the same degree, and I will have my own career, I will do very well. And bye-bye. See you, wouldn’t want to be you, WNBA. 

Or, three, the referees will get together, the management will get together, the coaches will get together, the players will get together, and they will say privately, we know what’s going on with everybody. We are trying to hurt this woman, some of us are. And some of us know that others are trying to hurt her. And they’re not doing anything.  

We’ve got to stop it for financial reasons. It’s going to hurt us. And we’re on the verge of becoming mainstream and very, very wealthy and prosperous, and we’re going to destroy ourselves. We’re going to commit collective suicide.  

So, it has to stop. It’s wrong. It’s racist. It’s sexist. And we’re not going to do it anymore. And we’re not going to pick on one particular player and try to injure her. 

Of those three alternatives, she now quits and goes to Europe and saves her career and flourishes. The league suffers. The league reforms and stops it or she’s permanently disabled.  

I have a feeling it’s going to be number one. Tragically, that they’re not going to do enough, or they’re not going to do anything, or someone is either going to punch her in the neck, or kick her in the back, or knock her flat, and she’s going to be so permanently injured or psychologically traumatized that she knows she can’t shoot. She can’t pass. And she is going to retire. 

And I think that is the purpose of a lot of the players doing this. 

And nobody in this racially charged country can speak explicitly in the truth, but that’s the truth. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.