What unifies Americans: Free Brittney!

I was in a laundromat in Reno the other day. The place is a little seedy; the neighborhood is solid working class, but in a slightly decayed sort of way. Mostly white, as far as I could tell. Women were diligently washing and drying mountains of laundry. The place seemed a sort of community gathering center. Retired white men clustered in the corner, talking animatedly.

"It's a terrible thing, what they are doing! They are locking her up for nine years; she didn't do anything. ... She was just trying to do what she does for a living ... we should get her free ..."

I realized they were talking about Russia's imprisonment of Britteny Griner, the WNBA star, tatooed, dreadlocked, Black, married lesbian beauty. 

I could have taken them for likely Trump voters -- in this knife-edge state, there's a good chance I might be right. But they're behind "that gal."

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Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer, puts Brittney Griner's situation into the international context:

Griner was arrested just days before the invasion of Ukraine, which is to say that she was grabbed after Putin and his circle had almost certainly made the decision to go to war. She was perfect for the part that the Russians wanted her to play as a possible bargaining chip. She is a prominent American, but not too prominent. She is gay, Black, and covered in tattoos, the kind of defendant for whom the average Russian will have no sympathy. Detaining her for a minor drug charge must have been an easy call for the Russian intelligence services.

Better yet for the Kremlin, the American determination to get her back home serves a Russian-propaganda purpose. Russia does not value all its citizens equally; some Russians matter and others vanish without trace. The efforts to spring Griner, however, almost certainly feed into a Russian narrative that America, too, does not care about all of its citizens equally and that we value racial or sexual minorities disproportionately—exactly the case that anti-Western hysterics like Putin have been making for years. ...

Unionized sports leaders are keeping keeping the heat on the Biden administration to get her out of there. Sign on with them at Free Brittney!