A stunt could legitimately expose an ideological contradiction, not just in the realm of common sense, but in action.

The WNBA wants the word woman to remain flexible and ambiguous while keeping its league reserved for women only. But the woke can’t have both, and we are hoping some sweet consequence is coming its way for such insanity.

Enter Their Illusion

In his latest Five Quick Things at The American Spectator, Scott McKay identifies what may prove to be a useful political tactic, and more, an echo of the ancient Art of War. Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, two former NBA players, announced that they intend to enter the 2027 WNBA draft, pressuring the league to confront the woke sexual ideology it has pushed onto fans and non-fans alike.

There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that either man identifies as a woman, and their language makes the parody explicit. It is funny, if nothing else.

Not to mention incredibly telling and Scriptural, as we’ll get to later.

Scott calls the broader political tactic of the move “Kanterization,” which means “find the absurdity, find its focal point, and then mount a full frontal attack on it and watch the defense collapse.”

Rush Limbaugh used to make a big show out of illustrating absurdity by being absurd, Scott mentions. This is akin to my insistence on reading narrative warfare instead of getting caught up in the hot-button details every single day.

The narrative shows a bigger picture, and that picture is, well, often absurd.

Which might one day inspire us to stop reacting to it all so hastily.

Anyway, when I used to teach rhetoric, we examined and employed this approach, but by another name: Enter Their Illusion. Rather than even bothering with contesting a false premise of an opponent, you step inside the world in which that opponent insists on operating—the world you disagree with. Tuck yourself inside that world long enough to follow its rules toward their logical end, toward the places their world is somehow blind to, where the morally bankrupt contradiction can reveal itself without much in the way of assistance from you. McKay’s Kanterization is Enter Their Illusion in different language, sharpened into a political tactic.

It also recalls the old strategic maxim about not interrupting an enemy while he is making a mistake. This story isn’t entirely like that because it’s not wholly organic, but still, the shell of it applies.

Michael Smith, writing at RVIVR, offers an adjacent take, asserting that the controversy “has taken on the status of a comical farce, the logical trap in which the ladies of the league leadership have found themselves is actually pretty important because it is a fracture that should threaten the entire postmodern progressive permission structure.” It is our cultural psychosis, in which ordinary people are expected to both recognize and affirm a contradiction. Smith employs three of the great dystopian novels of the twentieth century, two of which I’ve taught:

If you noticed in this essay, I have woven together three classics of literature, Orwell’s 1984, Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, and Huxley’s Brave New World.

I did that because I think these three are the best, most accessible, and most applicable examples of how trying to ignore reality – or being forced to ignore it – is a lot like getting stuck between two giant millstones, one made from hard reality and the other made from progressive postmodern beliefs that are just as hard, but completely irrational and false.

Up is down and down is up.

The theological argument that follows is mine, not necessarily Scott’s or Smith’s. I am extending their observations into territory their columns don’t cover, although they certainly are free to agree.

The Trap

The WNBA’s collective-bargaining language reportedly says that only women may play, although it doesn’t define women or establish that the woke’s self-identification alone creates legitimacy for eligibility. The distinction is important, because Kanter and White have not proved that the league must draft them. What they have done is expose the contradiction—between a world that presupposes the uniqueness of womanhood and an ideology that refuses to honor it.

Here are some pulls, White’s own words, from the Fox News article linked above:

“I’m transgender. I’m a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I’ll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well.”

“I think I’d be unstoppable. But I’m a team-first guy. I’m a pass-first kind of player. I do the little things. I led my team in all five major stat categories at Iowa State University, so I do a little bit of everything. I’ll do whatever the coach needs me to do. I’ll do whatever the girls need me to do….”

“I think it’s only fair.”

“I think the WNBA could come out and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association.”

I’ll do whatever the girls need me to do?

Funny.

The point being shown is that the W is in an obvious trap here, and maybe they’re fortunate that it is revealing itself in such a theatrical way before something real comes at them.

Here is the trap:

1. Define women according to biological reality—the league rejects the self-constructed ideology, thereby running counter to today’s universal woke and “tolerant” spirit.
2. Treat womanhood as an identity available to a man simply if he wantsta, and the league loses its organizing principle: giving women a separate league of their own.

Smith compares such a predicament to being caught between two millstones. One is reality, which resolves contradictions whether souls and society consent to it or not. The other is postmodern belief, which must preserve the contradiction or else surrender its authority to that which it originally rebelled against—which takes us back to reality.

Scott puts it this way:

If it’s a league for biological women, then that’s a defensible position, and while a player of G-League level talents might believe it’s grossly unfair that people who aren’t as good as he is as players would be making 10 times what he makes, there’s not much actionable about his belief.

But if it’s a league which buys into the woke “inclusion” language and purports to inflict the effects of that language on its players, then there is no reason why a G-League men’s player can’t declare himself a woman and claim a WNBA salary.

Rules matter. Either write them according to the reality at hand, or watch the absurdity walk through the door.

The trap is rather marvelous, even if it isn’t organic.

The Psalms and the Operation of Error

A serious lesson, however, is still ripe for the picking here, and one that can serve as a cautionary tale for issues in our world that should be parody but aren’t. The human creation of a stunt to prove a point doesn’t discount an old pattern found in the Book of Psalms.

No to the cynic, we are not declaring that God personally commissioned two former NBA players to embarrass the WNBA. Kanter and White found a contradiction ripe for exposure and walked right into the room wearing clown shoes.

But before Kanter and White, the law of unintended consequences remains. Once institutions organize themselves around the denial of a fixed human and divine reality, they can’t control who will prod at the insanity, what self-benefits will be demanded from it, or, in this case, whether any of it will even be done sincerely. A false premise, having been concretized into policy pushed by an entire sick wing of a culture, eventually stops being corralled. Naturally speaking, it will inevitably drift back toward home base, back toward reality.

This is where my connection to Scripture and the Psalms comes in, inspired by a new devotion I’ve been practicing, the Divine Office.

Read together, Psalms 77 through 80 offer a terrifying picture. Israel demands of God what it desires and, instead of being told no, is “not defrauded of that which they craved.” It is the same lesson found in two other passages we have spotlighted in this space many a time—Romans 1 and 2 Thessalonians 2, where God “gave them up to the operation of error.”

Psalm 80 gives us the line toward which the entire story has been churning:

So I let them go according to the desires of their heart: they shall walk in their own inventions.

He gave them up to their own operation of error.

This isn’t God creating the disorder through His sovereign will, but God allowing it through His permissive one. Having refused His order and commands, souls may eventually be permitted to inhabit their alternative constructions long enough to discover exactly what houses of cards they built. He does it to draw souls back to Him after they presumably hit rock bottom, because that’s the only way they’ll learn, but rarely does anyone cooperate for long, it seems.

Human passions morph into a governing principle, and by extension, that principle becomes the understood law of man.

And then Kanterization walks through the door with mischief on the mind.

A similar contradiction already exists in abortion law. Unless I’m misinformed or didn’t read this correctly, federal law can recognize a child in utero as a member of the human species when that child is injured or killed during certain crimes, while expressly exempting consensual abortion from the offense. Louisiana law defines an unborn child as an individual of the human species from fertilization and implantation until birth, and its feticide statutes permit a separate charge when someone kills that child—while again exempting abortion.

Despite any loopholes, the contradiction is still worth noting.

Enter Their Illusion asks the establishment, however new or manufactured, to explain its contradictions or else live inside them—to exist with authenticity inside its own world. Kanterization asks the same.

None of this guarantees that the WNBA or its woke culture will collapse. It may continue to double and triple down as it knows Americans’ attention will be deflected to something else soon enough. It may rewrite a rule, sure, maybe issue a statement, denounce the stunt as an illustration of typical male dominance, or simply wait for everyone to move on to the next non-story.

Power can preserve a contradiction for a long time, which is part of Michael Smith’s warning.

Reality, or God Almighty, can also afford to wait while that power leads itself down the road of rock bottom and ruin.

Scott calls the tactic Kanterization, and Smith applies the dystopian warning. I call it Enter Their Illusion.

Psalm 80 has the divine lesson.

Don’t interrupt them. It’s the only way back, sometimes, to Reality.

And, as Scott himself observed in an exchange we had while I was drafting this, there may be one last absurdity worth savoring: two men staging a parody may have just done more for women’s sports than 90 percent of the women involved in them.

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.” – St Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest who surrendered his life at Auschwitz for another prisoner

Thank you for reading The Hayride!