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UPDATE (April 4, 2024, 5:58 p.m. ET): This article has been updated to include Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s letter to the top higher education officials in his state.
Over the last week the right-wing rage machine has manufactured some astonishingly juvenile controversies. And that’s saying something, considering we’re talking about the same conservative movement that, within recent memory, kvetched about Santa Claus' race and M&M candy cartoons' perceived lack of sex appeal.
Even against those embarrassing benchmarks, the last week of right-wing whining has been remarkably dumb — and bigoted, to boot.
The latest outrage du jour was over the coincidence of Easter, which falls on a different date from year to year, and Trans Day of Visibility, which occurs on the same date every year. People who got outraged over this entirely random occurrence exposed their ignorance and religious bigotry all at once, given A) they don’t seem to know how holidays tend to work, and B) they evidently think that merely acknowledging the existence of trans people is an affront to God (despite the Christian Bible having nothing to say on the topic).
We saw something similar with the fabricated controversy that followed Monday night’s NCAA Tournament women's basketball game between Louisiana State University and Iowa University. After conservative social media accounts noticed that LSU’s team wasn’t on the floor for the pregame national anthem, grandstanding right-wingers directed angst-ridden insults and other invective at the team, portraying them as unpatriotic.
The game — between a mostly white Iowa team and a mostly Black LSU team — was already fraught with racial tension. So the outrage seemed like an obvious attempt to inflame that tension by framing LSU as rabble-rousing social justice activists, much like conservatives did with Colin Kaepernick years ago. Some people online accused LSU’s team of “wokeness,” a hilariously absurd claim to anyone who knows anything about LSU’s conservative coach Kim Mulkey.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, lined up with the MAGA mob on Tuesday when he proposed stripping scholarships from athletes who aren’t present for the national anthem before a game. At a time when Louisiana’s governor should have been celebrating a local squad for its stellar season, he was trying to score cheap political points.
Landry even sent letters to the top higher education officials in the state, urging them to adopt his proposal.
To be clear, the LSU team is well within its rights to skip the anthem for whatever reason, and compelling someone to listen to the anthem flies in the face of the First Amendment rights that Republicans claim to support.
But the truth behind the story was far less controversial. As Mulkey and several journalists noted, this wasn’t LSU intentionally spurning the anthem. All year, the team’s pregame routine had them head to the locker room minutes before game-time, meaning they regularly missed the anthem.
Much like the Trans Day of Visibility outrage, the contrived controversy surrounding LSU and the national anthem is instructive. It shows how the MAGA movement, fueled by dubious figures in the press and on social media, is easily baited from one manufactured culture-war skirmish to the next.
The incentive for Republicans is clear: Fueling these fact-free tantrums is how they make sure their voters stay good and angry —and motivated — so that they turn out, come election time, no matter how pitiful that anger may be. It's a strategy as dubious as it is desperate.