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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   12856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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This forum seems to be missing the biggest actual culture war battleground of the week: The US Hockey Gold Medal team.

For those who haven't heard, the US Men's Hockey Team won the gold medal over Canada, on an overtime goal by Jack Hughes. The team celebrated, the country celebrated, and everything was great, until it wasn't.

Kash Patel was part of the celebration, for some reason. Apparently he's a hockey fan, as I've read he was attending games when Ovechkin was nearing Gretzky's goal record. And then there was a call from Donald Trump to congratulate the team, where he made a joke ("I'll have to invite the women's team, too, or they'll impeach me.")

Of course, the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to scold then men for being bros.

Jodi Walker called them losers.

The New York Times decided to praise the defector while shaming the victorious Americans.

Mary Clarke says that they failed to meet the cultural moment, and boy is she waging the culture war. Some highlights include reminding us that a black woman won a gold medal in hockey, bemoaning that the NHL is 44% Republican, decrying the hiring of someone accused of and found not guilty of sexual assault, implying his guilt.

Then, finally, she has the gall to say this:

That is what the lasting message of this hockey team should have been. Not laughing at jokes about their peers, not going mask off after the doors close, but a celebration of life, of joy and of a teammate that tragically passed away way too soon.

Well, Mary, you are responsible for writing the message of this team, and you are participating in making sure the message you dislike is the one that's getting spread.

For a reasonable take, I always go back to the characteristic machine:

this doesnt work because olympic athletes winning a gold medal for their country are, alike unto greek olympians of old, bedecked in sanctity and elevated above other men of their polis in their moment of triumph
not sure why @marycclarke cant see this as a sports writer

if theyd taken the opportunity to shit on the US that would have been another thing because they would have been fucking up the ritual! but they followed the old forms with aplomb and were imbued with the divine aura of champions
this is just basic civic ritual yk

And a quoted response

Haters always hate to see an mf in his aristeia. Always begrudging the requisite giving of kudos.

This really does cut to the core of it. There is a civic ritual, which we can all participate in. Civic in a way that crosses race and sex and religion, or should, at least. But not anymore. We are not allowed to have civic rituals unless they pay obeisance to the cult of multiculturalism, unless they celebrate black women and foreigners and anyone but straight white men.

ETA: Two more posts, more from the fans with substacks and less from the professional pundits:

Don't Let Them Fucking Take It From You

Fascists want us miserable. They want to destroy us in more ways than one, and one of those tactics is taking away all sources of joy from the oppressed. The MAGA movement descends upon this sport like an invasive species of mold, demanding we uproot ourselves and claiming hockey as theirs. Don’t f*cking let them. Don’t let them take away the game you love. Because if we give up, if we all leave, if we forsake what we hold dear, then they have won.

The Sports Exile

It’s been terrible to watch patriotism and sports alike both claimed and weaponized by the right. Pride in one’s nation shouldn’t inherently be tied to one political movement and in my mind there is no greater form of love than self improvement. It shouldn’t sound like wide eyed high school senior idealism to want better for everyone.

This second one really pissed me off, and this quote in particular. Patriotism was abandoned by the left, not weaponized by the right. You left (pun intended). As evidenced by a later paragraph:

When Quinn Hughes is shouting out the troops and Auston Matthews is saying he’s proud to be an American, there is no more pretending about who these men are and what they stand for. The answer, in short, is nothing but themselves and their boys.

"I'm proud to be an American" "Wow, why do you only care about yourself, why don't you care about me?"

They reveal themselves as unamerican at every opportunity.

Wait, that was the misogynistic joke? That’s it? I’m not sure how that’s supposed to be offensive or sexist to anyone.

To quote the video (in the video Trump says this in a joking way, breaking into a chuckle as he mentions the women's team):

President Trump: We'll do it at the White House... we'll just have some fun, we have medals for you guys. And we have to, I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that?

United States men's hockey team: [Laughter and cheers]

Trump: I do believe I probably would be impeached, okay?

Team: [More laughter]

To steelman:

  • The joke implicitly undermines the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports - and they're instead a kind of annoying dysfunctional burden parasiting on the men's team's success ("sorry Timmy, but you have to bring your little brother along!")
  • They were engaging positively with Trump and Kash, who are both Republicans, and who likely (certainly in Trump's case) hold anti-feminist views. So the team was normalising them, and Republicans in general, in the hockey fandom ("if there's one Nazi at a table of 10 people, it's table of 10 Nazis", "neutrality in the face of oppression", etc)
  • The whole video shows the locker room dynamic for this team is very "bro"ish, so this kind of attitude will discourage some marginal women from going into hockey.

I get that you see nothing wrong with it (and I think it is fine too), but that is why some people (like Clarke) find it offensive - and there is an actual conflict between worldviews here, the feminists aren't just mistaken.

the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports

is a ridiculous idea. It's like pretending that children's sports is equal to young adults', or that local leagues are equal to world championships. Obviously false, and everyone knows it. Is it really necessary to pretend otherwise?

What are you actually trying to claim here? "Children's sports are not literally the same as young adults'" is a very different claim than "women's sports matter, and should matter, as little as children's sports compared to men's".

Personally, I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration. In that, women's sports are equal to men's sports because exceptional women are still exceptional. Local leagues and children's leagues are transitional, at least in theory, and that's why they are not the same as women's leagues.

Should I have a daughter, my fatherly advice to her will not include "even if you become the best of all women in X, this won't matter in the slightest because male boys are still going to be better than you" or whatever argument against female sports is common those days. You're welcome to tell your daughters otherwise, of course.

I believe that humans reaching the height of what their bodies can perform does deserve celebration

As stated, this is a fine and consistent view (professional sports is ultimately about entertaining the fans, so it is up to the fans to decide what is entertaining), and the standard one I hear in defence of women's sports.

But do you actually believe this as stated? If we look at Olympic medalists in the men's 100m sprint, all 33 of the Gold/Silver/Bronzes since 1984 have been Black (the closest exception being Marcell Jacobs, who is Black x White) And looking even further, the remainder have been White.

If the committee were to split the 100m into a Black, White, and Other Race category (with the Black category in practice being the open category, and the White category open to any non-Black), would you consider a winner worthy of celebration? It is still true that an exceptional (amongst non-(Black/White)s) runner is exceptional.

And even more generally - many people's physical peaks will vary based on genetics (but in ways that don't count as an actual disability, e.g. a healthy man who cannot put on muscle very well) - would you also consider them reaching their respective peaks as not only worthy of celebration (I'm happy with celebrating it) but of deserving a special segregated category (that is treated as equal to the open category) with its own parallel medals?

I'm guessing that you don't (certainly, this is an unpopular view amongst women's sports defenders as a whole) - so I'm not sure how to defend women's sports (and disabled sports) without somehow privileging the genetic shortcoming (vis-a-vis physical sports) of XX chromosomes (and the various genetic defects that count as medical disabilities) over any other kind of shortcoming.

And I don't think it is a bad thing to privilege XX-having (women really are special in the big picture of society) - but I don't think it makes sense in the generalised abstract "everyone should be celebrated for reaching their full potential" way you seem to be gesturing towards.

I do privilege the XX-having as a segregated category.

I'll try to explain with an example. Suppose the human species is split into two fantasy races - one is 9ft tall on average, and the other 3ft tall (with all the commeasurate differences in peak ability). Assuming that we've found an equilibrium in society in most things, rather than fighting forever fantasy race wars or a genocide/utter subjugation of one by the other, it makes perfect sense to me that we would have a 9-footer league in sports and a 3-footer league, and the 3-footer league would be treated as "real sports", rather than being dismissed by all of society as insignificant simply because 9-footers can run sprints thrice as fast.

Now, if you look at sports cynically, then genes determine what your peak is, genes determine how tenacious you are, parents and infrastructure determine how much you're railroaded into professional sports, and political lobbying determines what kind of supplements are considered legitimate as opposed to doping.

Once you choose to not look at sports cynically, then splitting the Real Sports into two leagues based on two groups, where:

  • each comprises half of humanity,
  • each is necessary to perpetuate society and
  • each is represented in any smaller subdivision of community, down to family units

appears to be both a minimal subdivision and a necessary one, if one is to promote general admiration for one's physical form in society. Things such as black people being slightly more represented among peak runners or white people being slightly more represented among peak [stereotypically white-dominating sport] do not appear to warrant further splitting.

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