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It’s Easy Being Putin
Manufacture right-wing outrage with the snap of the fingers
At the risk of being dated, it’s worth rehashing the fabricated (and apparently still ongoing) debacle about the gender of two Olympic boxers, if only to point out just how easily Vladimir Putin can stoke right-wing anger in the U.S.
It’s almost as if the simplified Right Wing Alternative Reality were made for this kind of manipulation.
In Case You Missed the News, Two Olympic Boxers Spurred Outrage
During the Olympics, two women boxers — Lin Yu-Tang of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria — competed and won medals in the welterweight and featherweight divisions, respectively.
In the process, however, it came out that both of them had been declared “ineligible” to compete in the women’s division by the International Boxing Association (IBA) (also referred to as the “AIBA” — the organization is rebranding). That information created some confusion about why they were in the Olympics. You could only overcome that confusion by learning a lot of things that you were almost certainly unaware of at the time:
- The IBA is only one of numerous boxing associations, and not one of the big four? Huh!
- The IBA got suspended by the…
