The left doesn’t care about sports in general unless an athlete does or says something to further the left-wing agenda. Colin Kaepernick was the ultimate hero for years because he spouted every left-wing cliché in the book. The NBA and college football players who came out as gay stood on the left’s pedestal even as their careers never amounted to much. And don’t get me started on mouthy lesbian soccer players.
There’s one massive exception to the left’s apathy toward sports: its favorite professional sports league, the WNBA. Supporting WNBA teams and players is always a terrific way to virtue signal — especially when players try to make the apples-to-oranges comparison of equal pay with the NBA.
Liking the WNBA is the red AIDS ribbon of professional sports for the left:
Leftists want to prop up the WNBA so badly that one Democrat governor is considering using state money to buy a share of a team. If you think that’s bad enough, wait until you see what funds he wants to use.
Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Conn.) is toying with the idea of using state pension funds to purchase a minority stake in the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun to keep the team from pulling up stakes and leaving the state. CT Insider reports:
Gov. Ned Lamont elaborated some more Wednesday on how a state ownership stake in the WNBA's Connecticut Sun might work, including commitments for the team to remain in the state and play some games in Hartford.
Lamont and Treasurer Erick Russell fielded questions from reporters about how state pension funds might be used to purchase a minority ownership share of the WNBA franchise during a news conference concerning how the pension funds performed in the last fiscal year.
"We’re still in the middle of negotiations now. We have a very competitive bid out there for the Connecticut Sun," the governor said. "I think they belong in Connecticut, which is the birthplace of women’s basketball."
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Let’s just agree with Lamont for the sake of argument that the Sun “belongs” in Connecticut. Why is it the state’s responsibility to ensure that it happens? Why use any state funds, much less pension money, to prop up a women’s basketball team?
The Mohegan Tribe currently owns the Sun, but in the spring, ownership said that it’s looking for private buyers for the team. Current offers could potentially move the team to Boston or Houston.
“The Sun's ownership group announced in May that it was searching for a potential buyer for the franchise and had hired investment bank Allen & Company to conduct the probe,” CT Insider explains. “The Mohegan Tribe bought the franchise for $10 million in 2003 and relocated it from Orlando that year.”
But state money? Pension money? Can you imagine if a red-state governor did something similar? Imagine the left-wing outrage if Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) took money out of the Employees' Retirement System of Georgia to give to the Atlanta Braves or if Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) earmarked Florida Retirement System money to set up an NIL collective for the University of South Florida Bulls.
But this is the WNBA and a blue state, so it’s (D)ifferent. The libs will do whatever it takes to prop up a precious.
My friend and colleague Athena Thorne told me, “These leftists just want to MAKE people like women's basketball so hard that they will literally gamble with other people's retirements to make it happen.”
Democrats haven’t met a left-wing pet cause that they won’t throw public money at, have they?
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