When Tyler Perry leading lady Crystal Renee took center stage at State Farm Arena to sing the national anthem before the Atlanta Dream’s WNBA finals clash with the Golden State Valkyries on Saturday afternoon, a smattering of photographers, game officials and event security took their familiar places around her as the capacity crowd stood for the flag. As soon as the lights went back up, the teams returned to the floor to resume their shootarounds. Anyone genuinely invested in the finals would have been unfazed by them briefly stepping away – if they remembered it at all after the Valkyries’ 67-62 win tied the series at two games apiece. But for many watching the game, basketball is beside the point.

Seven years ago, Jay-Z declared that the culture had “moved past kneeling” and similar national anthem protests, seemingly sounding the death knell for an era of sports activism that had helped raise awareness of racial disparities as a broader social movement gathered force. The line cemented his partnership with the NFL as the league bowed to political pressure to crack down on anthem protests, with other major US sports eventually following the NFL’s lead. But rightwing media and politicians never got the memo. They’re still making sports a battleground for patriotism, with basketball as the war’s chief casualty.

Credit OutKick, Fox’s renegade sports arm, for providing the spark that reignited the right’s outrage machine. They tipped off the WNBA finals by making a story out of Atlanta and Golden State leaving the court during the national anthem, then amplified the indignation aimed at LeBron James for appearing to practice his golf swing during the anthem at a Philadelphia 76ers game that same week.

That was all the scene-setting Donald Trump needed. “You know the NFL did that for a while and they stopped because people stopped watching games. I think you should do the same thing with women’s basketball,” Trump said. In a Truth Social post, he called James a “disgrace” and demanded he “apologize to all of those Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag, and all that our Country stands for!”

Basketball has grown accustomed to this kind of punching down from the White House and the familiar cycle of provocation and outrage, especially when the administration’s poll numbers are dragging. James dismissed Trump’s diss as a sign of a “slow news day at the office” and the WNBA declined to engage, beyond noting that players haven’t been on court for the anthem for years now. Meanwhile, the Dream and Valkyries have been too preoccupied with winning their first championship to really enter the chat.

“For me, it’s staying off social media. It’s just going inward with our teammates and staff,” said veteran Golden State center Kiah Stokes, who helped drive her team’s victory with her stout defense of Atlanta star Angel Reese. “Staying together. That’s been one of our keys all season.”

But no matter how hard the WNBA resists the urge to clap back, no matter how valiantly it tries to keep the spotlight on basketball, there will always be someone on the right looking to steal it for their grievance grift. As OutKick and Trump reheated the stale anthem controversy, former NBA player turned Maga wannabe Enes Kanter Freedom was making a grand show of his latest appearance at a WNBA game, asking for special security arrangements so he could watch Game 3 of the finals from a courtside seat. The Dream offered to accommodate Kanter Freedom – who has disrupted WNBA games in the past – with a fully stocked suite, courtesy of the team and State Farm. But Kanter Freedom refused and beat a retreat with his camera crew.

Jennifer Sey, the red-pilled former US gymnastics champion, has attended this year’s finals in her anti-trans athletic gear – and her efforts to incite a reaction from the W’s progressives went largely unnoticed, too.

It is unfortunate that these finals have become a microcosm of the WNBA season, a tug-of-war between a basketball product that has never been better and a political class desperate to bend it to its own agenda. But the longer the right keeps up its fight, the more it gives its game away – exposing the hypocrisy beneath its moral posturing. We’ve seen how urgently conservative culture warriors believe women need protecting when the alleged assailant isn’t transgender. “Cornell’s a fine school,” Trump said in response to the university’s handling of a student’s gang-rape allegations. “I’m sure they’ll do what’s right.” We’ve seen how much this administration cares about its great American heroes as it sends them into an open-ended conflict, keeps sailors at sea for record stretches and downplays casualties, injuries and damage to US assets in the war with Iran – all while slashing veterans’ jobs across the federal government.

We know why basketball makes such a ripe target for attacks from Maga’s crusaders of the American way: the game’s politics lean left, its players are well-traveled, culturally sensitive and have no qualms about dunking on trolls. And we know why the WNBA, in particular, gets under the right’s skin: it is so Black and queer, and its players have set the tone for political protest in American sports. The Dream, specifically, helped usher Raphael Warnock, the Atlanta pastor who delivers sermons from Martin Luther King Jr’s pulpit, into the US Senate.

We see the play Kanter Freedom is trying to run by seeking out an altercation with a player in front of Atlanta’s largely African American crowd, and the statement Sey hopes to make by swanning around queer-friendly Ballhalla in her statementware. We see how closely these grifters actually follow women’s sports. That much was clear again in a recent episode of The Georgia Gang, Atlanta’s long-running political TV roundtable, when the talk turned to the hometown team’s WNBA finals berth. “Go Sophie Cunningham, she my’s girl not Angel Reese,” said panelist Phil Kent, a conservative consultant – a contrarian move that also betrayed his refusal to appreciate the absorbing WNBA finals matchup we are being treated to: Maga It girl Cunningham and her Indiana Fever crashed out in the first round. When others at the roundtable praised Reese’s selection as defensive player of the year, Kent doubled down (“I question that”) – and the clip has since drawn a torrent of criticism. “These white men are so broken,” said one Twitter user. “It’s never been about basketball.”

The Valkyries enter Game 5 with momentum on their side (“Block out the noise and understand the gameplan” was coach Natalie Nakase’s recipe for victory on Monday), but how the rest of the series unfolds is anyone’s guess. Will Stokes keep holding Reese in check? Will the Dream be forced back into their rinky-dink home arena for Game 6? Will the series go the distance and break more ratings records? The storylines are almost too juicy – the last thing anyone on the right will want to talk about.