If Enes Kanter Freedom, the retired NBA player who has found a second career as a wingnut publicity whore, had played football instead, we might sadly shake our heads at his recent antics and mutter something about the scourge of brain damage to NFL players and the league’s decades-long whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the long-term consequences of repetitive head injuries.
But since Enes Kanter Freedom played basketball, a sport not known for giving its players concussions on every play, we have concluded that he is just an asshole.
Naturally, being a right-wing asshole attracts other right-wing assholes. Shoot, if you’re going to work with outfits like the America First Policy Institute on your anti-transgender crusade, you likely have “being an asshole” as the first line on your résumé.
On Sunday, Kanter Freedom, who recently announced his intention to play in the WNBA, went to a WNBA game with the clear purpose of causing a scene. He got himself a courtside seat as the Indiana Fever played the Chicago Sky and showed up wearing a T-shirt (which he sells in his merch store if you need a Christmas gift for a total asshole) with a faux dictionary definition that read “WOMAN [noun] - Adult human female.” At some point, Sky guard Natasha Cloud, who is known for her activist work that includes support for transgender people, walked towards him and started yelling. Kanter Freedom stood up and stepped onto the court with arms spread wide in a gesture that usually means either “You wanna fight?” or “What? I’m just an innocent women’s basketball fan here to show my support for the ladies in all their unique femininity that is under attack by woke transgender ideology!”
Security promptly tossed Kanter Freedom from the game and the entire arena. That night he tweeted, “I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA!”
All of this was stupid enough. But now Talking Points Memo reports that Kanter may have been working with the America First Policy Institute, a wingnut “think” tank co-founded by two of Donald Trump’s Cabinet members.
The evidence for it is thin but suggestive. It turns out Ashley Hayek, an AFPI executive vice president and the sort of person who puts “loves Jesus” as the first two words in her Twitter bio, just happened to be sitting a couple of rows behind Kanter Freedom so she could tweet out a picture of him sitting courtside. And after a couple of anti-trans activists sat courtside at another Fever game a few weeks ago (this one in Seattle), they told anti-trans podcaster Brandi Kruse that the $1,300 seats had been paid for by a “generous donor.”
It’s not a coincidence that both these events took place at Fever games. The team’s Sophie Cunningham kicked off the current firestorm by making her opposition to transgender people loudly public, and the entire Right has tried to co-opt Fever star Caitlin Clark as some sort of white supremacy mascot who is forever at the mercy of the league’s savage Black players. (Clark has stayed out of it.)
Not that Kanter Freedom couldn’t probably afford to buy himself a $1,300 seat after his 15-year NBA career. But maybe he can’t! He could have blown millions of dollars and be desperate for cash, he does seem pretty dumb.
AFPI has also been tweeting out footage of Kanter Freedom’s media appearances in the wake of his little stunt, along with pictures of the asshole in an orange “LET FREEDOM PLAY” hoodie and links to the online store where you can buy one yourself, should you wish to also publicly identify as an asshole.
In short, this stunt has all the hallmarks of being a coordinated wingnut ratfucking. And while we can’t know if AFPI co-founders Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins are heavily involved with the Institute while they are very busy wrecking American education and agriculture, we can say for sure that they helped lay the groundwork for loosing this well-funded bigotry on the WNBA.
In the aftermath, league sources told ESPN that no, despite his oh-so-clever attempts to claim he identifies as a woman so he should get to play, Kanter Freedom is not going to be entering the WNBA. There is also the question of whether, like other disruptive fans at sporting events, he will be banned from WNBA arenas for the rest of the season or possibly life. ESPN says that is TBD.
In yr Wonkette’s opinion, there is no need for this decision to be TBD. It’s an easy call. You have to put your foot down right away with the likes of Kanter Freedom and tell him to go peddle his nonsense elsewhere. Otherwise, soon you will have wiseass incels showing up at all your games wearing his dumb T-shirt and creating a scene.
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There are no out trans people in the WNBA as far as I have been led to understand. This whole cavalcade of dipshittery is in aid of undermining and eventually wrecking women's sport.
“I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA!”
No, you just got kicked out for being an irredeemable bigot and thirsty fuckwit.