Republicans seemed to have found the perfect thing to be upset about: a boxing match in France between an Algerian and an Italian. The real story is a bit more complicated than they want Americans to believe.
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— NAVIGATING THE INSANITY* —
Donald Trump and the GOP are struggling. Caught flat-footed when President Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election, they now face Vice President Kamala Harris and a rejuvenated, much more enthusiastic Democratic Party. In addition, they are being called “weird,” and have no idea how to react to that.
Fortunately for Republicans, there are a couple of bread-and-butter issues they can turn to when they want to rile up their base: crimes committed by immigrants and men playing women’s sports.
It’s relatively easy to tie Harris to the former. She is, after all, the vice president, and was tasked with curbing the flow of immigrants to the US border.
The latter requires a bit more creativity… almost Olympics-level mental gymnastics.
On Thursday, Republicans thought they had found the perfect cause.
Harris was somehow to blame for an Italian boxer with a heart-warming story quitting her bout against an Algerian fighter in the French city of Paris.
“This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match,” wrote GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (OH). “This is disgusting, and all of our leaders should condemn it.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was even more explicit in assigning blame for this supposed injustice.
“Many of us watched in horror as Angela Carini was beaten up by a man in the Olympic boxing match today,” she stated. “Kamala Harris won’t condemn or speak out against what she saw, because she supports men playing in women’s sports. She’s the embodiment of the radical Left.”
First of all, these people should not complain about being called weird if they expect a presidential candidate to respond to whatever their manufactured doléance du jour (outrage of the day) is.
Apart from none of the participants having anything to do with the US, it turns out that this narrative has some holes.
Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who is being vilified by the MAGAverse, is a woman. She was born as one and has competed as one all her life.
Therefore, as much as Republicans don’t want this to be true, this is not about some dude who wants to win a medal, calls himself Loretta, and enters a women’s competition.
“This isn’t, and I should make this absolutely clear for everyone, this is not a transgender issue,” said International Olympic Committee (IOC) spokesperson Mark Adams earlier this week, noting that there has been “some misreporting” on the issue.
No kidding!
In other words, nobody is transitioning, and nobody is undergoing hormone replacement therapy.
Instead, this case highlights how tricky this issue is and why there are no black-and-white solutions.
Sure, that’s how people on both sides of the issue want to characterize it, but nature is a bit more complicated than that.
The controversy in this case stems from the decision of the International Boxing Association (IBA) to disqualify Khelif and a Taiwanese boxer from the 2023 world championships because they failed some unspecified test.
However, since the IOC does not recognize the IBA, that decision did not affect their eligibility for the 2024 Olympics.
It does appear as though Khelif has elevated testosterone levels.
That in itself, however, should not disqualify athletes since humans are born with different levels.
“Testosterone is not a perfect test,” said Adams. “Many women can have testosterone in what would be called ‘male levels’ and still be women and compete as women.”
He also noted that, in the case of Khelif, we are not dealing with an Ivan Drago-type boxing machine.
“They have competed and continue to compete in the women’s competition,” he said of the two boxers in question. “They have lost and they have won against other women.”
In fact, Khelif has lost nine fights — about one-fifth of all of her bouts — and only won five by knockout.
Carini has lost a total of 23 times… at roughly the same rate as the Algerian. That makes her the world’s 13th ranked boxer, meaning she was hardly a favorite to win a medal.
As you can see, if you care about facts at all, and nobody can accuse Republicans of doing so, a very different picture emerges.
To his credit, former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have realized this.
While he at first jumped on the bandwagon, he later seemed to have looked at this case beyond the breathless tweets from his peers.
“We used to call this violence against women. Now it’s a victory for ‘trans rights.’ A real journalist (if any still exist) should ask Kamala Harris for her position on biological men competing in women’s sports,” he first said.
Again, this has nothing to do with trans rights.
Ramaswamy seemed to have realized this a few hours later.
“Yes, this is a more complicated case than the garden-variety Lia Thomas case,” he stated. “But the bottom line is that Kamala needs to come clean about where she stands on this issue — which is penalizing countless female athletes across America.”
Let’s give him partial credit.
And what about the women involved? Or, as the IOC’s Adams put it: “This involves real people, and we’re talking about real people’s lives here.”
It stands to reason that they won’t be the same after Thursday’s controversy.
Khelif will likely be maligned… and should not consider ever going to the US. And, certainly, her birth certificate will be examined, because that’s the GOP’s go-to move.
Carini, on the other hand, will be just fine.
Boebert, who would undoubtedly make the team if “political stunts” were an Olympic event, started a donation campaign for the young Italian.
The goal is to raise $196,000 for her, which is the amount of money Italy pays its gold medal-winning athletes (and, again, it seems unlikely that Carini would have gotten there).
After a few hours, people had already given $37,000 dollars.
And if Harris doesn’t chip in, it clearly shows that she is behind all of this…
*In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
