A FISKING.

Former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines has been doing women's sports a solid.

Riley Gaines has taken up the cause of keeping crossers with residual male musculature out of women's sports.  That's having salutary effects on public perceptions of higher education.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con.  A gratifyingly large cohort of current students is not.  Nor should they respect anyone, holder of a terminal degree or not, who is condescending, disrespectful, or too full of himself."

For taking up that cause, she has apparently crossed Ruth Graham, Dallas stringer with New York's Times.  "The former college swimmer has used her race against Lia Thomas, a trans athlete, to propel her career as an influential, and unsparing, activist."

Unsparing, that is, because it's lacking nuance and sophistication to call attention to a man born to woman going on a hormone regimen and then competing on the women's swimming circuit.

The commentators calling the 200-yard freestyle final never once mentioned the name of the swimmer in Lane 1, Riley Gaines. A senior at the University of Kentucky who planned to enroll in dental school in the fall, she swam in the middle of the pack. So did Ms. Thomas. In the end, they tied for fifth place.

But as Ms. Thomas has largely dropped from public view in the years since, Ms. Gaines has turned that fateful race into a thriving career as an activist against the participation of transgender women in women’s sports. By turns a roving speaker, indignant influencer and canny provocateur, she has embraced her cause with such zeal that she has become a variation on the target of attention that Ms. Thomas once was.

“All of this campaigning because you lost a race,” the gymnast Simone Biles told her online in June, after Ms. Gaines referred to a transgender high school softball player as a boy.

Ms. Gaines’s views, taboo in liberal spaces only a few years ago, are increasingly mainstream.

Reality has no regard for your liberal taboos.  Former Levi's chief executive and onetime college athlete Jennifer Sey, who has herself been mugged by reality, tells Ruth Graham it's game on.

Look, we’re not asking for biased treatment in our direction. How about straight up the middle? You know, reporting? But that seems to be beyond Ruth Graham’s capability.

I’ll admit, it annoys me because I’m in it. And I recorded the interview so I know what I said and she leaves out anything I said that would contradict her pre-planned narrative. And that narrative is that Riley Gaines is a mean, bigoted conservative who hates “trans” people and just wants to be famous. In wanting to be famous, she has leaned into the moment that she tied with Will/”Lia” Thomas at the 2022 NCAA swimming finals to catapult herself into the public eye.

First of all, so what? Why can’t Riley be ambitious? The left cheers for “progressive” women who are ambitious. But a conservative woman who is ambitious and competitive is an evil, unprincipled grifter?

This is why we don’t trust you anymore media people. This is why people are abandoning the mainstream media in favor of independent media which at least doesn’t pretend at objectivity.

This is also why people are leaving the Democratic Party. We are sick of the condescension and judgement and finger wagging. We are sick of the fancy people telling us what we are supposed to think and do. We are tired of the “elites” telling us we just don’t understand biology — it’s complicated! — or that we are “low information” voters or that we have been captured and brain washed by Joe Rogan.

So much for those better people who care more!  But if they didn't want to be Fisked, maybe they shouldn't have ventured arguments that were complicated, nuanced, and wrong.  London's Daily Mail have the formal Fisking.  I'll borrow a few bits from Sey Everything.

And why can’t Riley have a thriving career as an activist and media personality? She’s good at it. We’re lucky to have her. But it’s written with an obvious sneer. But any left leaning woman who did the same — leveraged a moment to build a career — would be championed.

“Three years after finishing fifth in Atlanta, she has essentially not stopped talking about a race that lasted less than two minutes. And right now, she feels like she’s finally winning.”

She can’t stop talking about it? That lasted two minutes? Everything about this is designed to make Gaines seem like a petty, bitter grifter. When in reality, she had trained her entire life for that moment. Sporting events often (always?) come down to a few minutes or seconds. Why minimize it? It was the last race of her competitive career. She placed 5th in the entire country. That is an achievement and she deserved to have her moment on the podium.

It goes on to some snark about how Gaines doesn’t like to lose. So what? Who does? Clearly Thomas doesn’t like losing either. He switched categories so he could move up nearly 550 places.

“But to Ms. Gaines, it was a galling slight.”

It is a galling slight. This is so petty and misguided and frankly, snarky. The NCAA chose a woke photo op over the woman who earned the trophy. Not to mention the woman who was 6th who got bumped off the podium entirely. And why shouldn’t Riley have that moment she’d trained her entire life for?

The point of Fisking journalists who cross the line into advocacy, though, is to make it more likely that accusations of "fake news," whether defensible or not, have purchase.

Ruth — I know it is what reporters do, they act nice and like they agree with you when doing an interview that is considered a “get.” They do it so you open up. But honestly, I would prefer a contentious interview. Don’t smile and nod like you like me and agree with me then write a bullying takedown. Just be honest. Ask aggressive questions and let me defend my viewpoint. I would be more than happy to do that.

Of course the writer doesn’t share my background as a long time leftie, non-Christian, atheist. Or someone who exposed abuse in sports and has fought for female athletes’ safety for two decades.

She is happy to have the whole movement dismissed as a right wing grift. Which is a lie. 70% of Californians agree with Trump’s executive order. This is a broad movement with support from people of all political persuasions.

The lie that it is not just right wing, but bigoted and grifty is architected to ensure that others don’t join. But they are joining. Because we can all see that Will Thomas is a man. We see the lies. And the deceitful narrative isn’t working any more.

But an article like this is evidence that the fight continues. Because it will, in fact, scare a lot of people who agree with me and with Riley that women’s sports must be protected will be too afraid to say anything after reading something like this. They don’t want to get lumped in as an alt-right grifter.

But each time something like this is written, a few more people get mad enough to say no more.

Or, perhaps, to conclude that if you're going to be denounced as alt-right or fascist, to look more carefully at those positions.  You'd think people of the left would recognize that calling advocates for civil rights "communists" did more to recruit comrades than it did to change minds.  Let the mugging by reality, and the restoration of a state of good repair, continue.