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‘This fall can’t happen quick enough’: Caitlin Clark ticket sales foreshadow WNBA collapse

The Blaze
1 week 5 days ago


The Indiana Fever team has been having difficulty selling tickets for its season opener against the Dallas Wings — and BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock not only believes it’s “a sign that the WNBA is about to potentially crash and burn,” but knows why.

“They’ve probably already burned up the goodwill that Caitlin Clark earned them by entering into the league. If they’ve diminished the star of Caitlin Clark, what they’ve really diminished is the entire league,” he explains.

Whitlock points out that while some of the WNBA players are making seven-figure salaries, the attitude of the league leaves fans wondering if they’ve earned it.


“People are going to want their money’s worth, and the WNBA can’t give it to them. And when you don’t feel good about the players, when these players are walking around making seven-figure salaries, pretending like they’re superstar celebrities, pretending like they’re just the same as NBA players, all the goodwill is going to disappear,” he explains.

“We already see it in Indiana with Caitlin Clark. The goodwill is gone. ... Women’s basketball in the WNBA and professionals, it’s bloated. It’s overrated. It’s hot garbage that’s being paid like it’s pristine and some prized possession,” he continues.

And while the players are paid well, Whitlock points out that one of the biggest issues with their attitude is that they “hate America and have portrayed themselves as victims” who have “blackmailed and guilt-tripped their way into a seven-figure salary.”

Now that the league can’t sell out the Indiana Fever’s first home game, Whitlock believes “the entire league is teetering at the brink of an uprising and a backlash that’s really long overdue.”

And Whitlock is among those leaving the league behind.

“I’m prepared, like the rest of you, to de-emphasize my passion for the WNBA,” he says. “This fall can’t happen quick enough.”

Want more from Jason Whitlock?

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BlazeTV Staff

The media can't hide behind 'we' forever

The Blaze
1 week 5 days ago


Following the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, there was an immediate and predictable rush to the microphones.

“We need to tone it down.” “We need to be better.” “We need to lower the temperature.”

The statements came almost reflexively, as if the script had already been written.

The same people now saying “we” have spent years writing and rehearsing the very script they now decry.

It brought to mind a scene from "Blazing Saddles," when Governor William J. Lepetomane gathers his Cabinet and declares, “We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen,” prompting a chorus of obedient “harrumphs.” When one man fails to join in, he is immediately called out for it.

That scene was meant to be absurd, but it’s hard to laugh when it looks so familiar.

The chorus we hear now from the media is not all that different. The language is more polished, the setting more formal, but the substance is the same. A unified sound, carefully rehearsed, that spreads responsibility so broadly that no one person has to carry it.

“We need to tone it down.”

Who is “we”?

The rush to say “we need to tone it down” or that “both sides” must do so reveals something else. The media knows it has a credibility problem. What it refuses to admit is that it has an ownership problem as well.

“We” is a convenient word to hide behind. The same people now saying “we” have spent years writing and rehearsing the very script they now decry. They used language that casts opponents as existential threats, invoking terms like “Hitler” and “fascist” as routine descriptors rather than historically loaded warnings.

That kind of language does not stay contained. It shapes how listeners understand the stakes. It tells them that what they are seeing is not a mere disagreement, but a moral emergency. And when everything is framed as a moral emergency, there will always be someone who hears that not as metaphor but as instruction.

That does not excuse the person who acts. Responsibility for violence remains personal. But it does expose the gap between those who help set the tone and those who later step forward to warn about it.

The problem is the distance built into the language.

What would it sound like if that distance were removed? Not “we need to dial it back,” but “I do.” Not “we have to be more careful,” but “I have not been careful.” That kind of sentence lands differently because it costs something. It does not distribute the burden. It accepts it.

I did not learn that lesson in Washington. I learned it as a caregiver. There are days when everything is compressed at once, when the routine collapses, the body gives out, and the phone rings at precisely the wrong moment. On those days, it is easy to feel as though everything is being dumped on me. Sometimes that is true.

But caregiving has a way of stripping away illusions, including the ones I prefer to keep about myself.

Because while there are days when I feel like the statue, I have had to admit that there are other days when I am the pigeon — not because I set out to do harm, but because I make impatient decisions in the middle of exhaustion, speak more sharply than I should, or try, in subtle ways, to elevate myself at someone else’s expense.

That does not excuse it. One does not get a free pass to be an ass.

Washington has a hypocrisy problem. The media has a credibility problem. I have done the same thing in smaller rooms with lower stakes and fewer cameras. I have used tone, timing, and words to shift blame, to justify myself, to make someone else carry what was mine to own. That recognition has steadied me more than any sweeping call for “all of us” to do better.

I am not in a position to correct a culture that rewards outrage and then feigns surprise when it produces consequences. But I am in a position to confront myself with the truth.

RELATED: Follow the facts, not the script

Stellalevi/Getty Images

First-person plural spreads the blame until it disappears. First-person singular removes the cover. And once the cover is gone, something else becomes possible: repentance.

Not “we will do better,” but “I will do better.”

That is where leadership begins. Not on a stage or behind a podium, not in a ballroom full of cameras, but in the quiet decision of a single person to own what is his to own.

Life, whether it unfolds in Washington or in a hospital room, is shaped the same way — one voice, one decision, one sentence at a time. Which means it can only be corrected the same way. Not “we.” But “I.”

Peter Rosenberger