American women covered their country in Olympic glory in Paris on Thursday. Katie Ledecky broke the record for most swimming medals won by a woman when the U.S. team captured silver in the 4x200-meter freestyle, while Simone Biles won gold in her second women’s gymnastics all-around Olympics event and her teammate Suni Lee took the bronze.
But on this side of the Atlantic, the American right was apparently more interested in bemoaning the purported death of women’s sports than cheering on their compatriots. The leading lights of the right-wing media spent Thursday melting down over an Olympics welterweight boxing match between two women from Algeria and Italy as they sought to drum up a ragefest they could use to firm up Donald Trump’s wavering election prospects against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Imane Khelif of Algeria won her Olympics boxing match against Italy’s Angela Carini when Carini forfeited after taking several blows to the face in the fight’s opening seconds (in boxing, for those unfamiliar with the sport, competitors try to hit each other in the head as hard as they can and can win by rendering their opponent unconscious). The U.S. right quickly seized on the match and plugged it into their obsessive anti-trans hysteria, falsely declaring Khelif a man who had beaten up a woman.
If you want to know more about Khelif — a veteran of international women’s boxing competition who was eliminated in the quarterfinal round of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and whose passport, from a country where you cannot legally change your gender, identifies her as female — read Paolo Armelli’s story on the controversy for Wired. If you are interested in the history of sports competitions grappling with complex questions about the gender and sex of athletes, my former colleague Parker Molloy wrote nuanced pieces on the subject for Vice News, CJR, and at her Substack.
What was quite clear on Thursday, however, is that the weirdo right, obsessed with conducting bizarre “transvestigations,” doesn’t care about any of this. They simply want to misgender Khelif, invoke the rage associated with domestic violence by claiming she is a man punching a woman, and channel the resulting outrage and anti-trans hate into their own political gain.
A MAGA media frenzy quickly ensued on X after the match, with Riley Gaines, the right-wing activist who built her career complaining about trans women competing in sports, at the heart of the outburst.
Gaines posted early Thursday morning that the fight had been “glorified male violence against women.” Declaring that “Men don’t belong in women’s sports,” she launched the hashtag “#IStandWithAngelaCarini,” which went viral as other MAGA influencers chimed in over the course of the day.
“Enough of the gender insanity and the pandering to avoid hurting someone’s precious feelings,” TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk wrote in a post sharing video of the fight. “The Olympics just allowed a biological man, Imane Khelif, to pummel Italian Olympian Angela Carini… Her life’s work was stolen by a man who beats up women for sport. Will someone have to die before people wake up?!”
“Italian woman quits boxing match against man allowed to compete as a woman at the Olympics,” wrote Outkick’s Clay Travis. “Every Democrat leader says this is perfectly fine and the man is a woman. It’s way past time for choosing on this issue.”
“Kamala Harris supports men beating women,” Benny Johnson added.
“I've not watched any of the Olympics,” Fox’s Lisa Boothe added. “Between the opening ceremony and the male boxer beating up a woman, it just seems gross and uninspiring.”
For the Heritage Foundation, the powerful right-wing organization that oversaw the development of the radical Project 2025 agenda, the boxing match ensured that “August 1st has been a bad day for women's sports.”
The match between the Algerian and Italian boxers was a major story on Fox News that evening, as the network’s star hosts repeatedly misgendered Khelif and put the blame for her being able to compete on Harris and the Democrats.
These people are sick. pic.twitter.com/OsHFU4bpXR
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 2, 2024
Hosts on The Five called Khelif “a guy” and a “so-called person,” claimed that “he's going to end up with a gold medal,” and suggested the boxer be tried “for assault.”
Laura Ingraham devoted roughly 11 minutes of her show to the fight, which she linked to the “fanaticism of politicians like Kamala Harris.” One of her guests said of Khelif, “I certainly would fight a man that thinks he's a woman and wants to beat up on other woman,” adding, “I'll fight that guy.” Ingraham offered at one point in the segment, “the speed of that punch. That’s man-speed.”
Jesse Watters used his prime-time show to describe Khelif as a “genetic male,” adding that “they are going to let this guy keep beating up women in Paris and they're just going to hand him a gold medal for it.”
Watters added, “You have a female nominee for president of the United States, of the free world and this is one of the biggest gender controversies of the year in the Olympics. And Kamala Harris hasn't said anything and she hasn't even been asked about it and that's a cover-up and that's a real shame.”
This sustained freakout is a perfect example of how the right-wing media has become pickled in its own outrage. They simply cannot let themselves — or anyone else — enjoy good things that normal Americans enjoy, like the dominance of U.S. women at the Olympics. Instead, they build their audiences and make their money by constantly trying to find something they can get mad about. Being a right-winger in good standing in recent years has required working oneself into a culture war frenzy over the NFL, Budweiser beer, Disney movies, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, among other all-American icons.
And because Republican politicians are either just as stuck in that swamp as the party’s propagandists — or because they need to pretend to be that way in order to rise within the GOP — they’re stuck on the same hateful hamster wheel.
“This is where Kamala Harris's ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match,” vice presidential nominee JD Vance posted to X on Thursday. “This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”
His running mate — who a jury found liable for sexual abuse, and who was introduced at the Republican National Convention last month by a man who had been captured on video hitting his wife in the face — chimed in.
“I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!” Trump posted to Truth Social.
Other Republican politicians, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott; Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Anthony D’Esposito of New York, Greg Steube of Florida, and Mike Collins of Georgia; North Carolina gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson and Senate nominees Hung Cao of Virginia and Kari Lake of Arizona also contributed to the sick debate.
Normal people are too busy cheering for American champions like Ledecky and Biles to spend their time doing chalkboard scrawls explaining how Kamala Harris should be blamed for who Algeria sends to the Olympics. But with Trump’s polling lead slipping away and his campaign apparently trying to reignite by focusing on what appeals to the party’s weirdo wing, we can expect much more of this in the months to come.