Title IX Betrayal: Steve Bannon and Dr. Naomi Wolf on Girls’ Sports and Meritocracy

STEVE BANNON (HOST): This thing is driving me nuts.

Because I’m no feminist, but I saw in sports the way for working class kids of all races to get a ticket out. And to hear this thing that you let boys come in and compete with them, it’s a freak show.

Why are we putting on these little girls, these becoming women, the type, I mean aggressive, tough, stick to it, no quit. Every American quality you want, right? What Title IX was supposed to do, it actually, I saw that. Because my sisters, my dad was a great athlete, my brothers, my sisters weren’t great athletes because that just wasn’t the thing you did back then. It’s totally different now.

And yet we have this freak show. And that’s what it is. It’s a freak show. Ma’am.

NAOMI WOLF (GUEST): Well, I don’t agree with you that people who identify themselves as transgender are freak shows or freaks. I don’t think that’s helpful language. It doesn’t help us understand each other. But I definitely think that men who are seeking to compete in women’s sports,

STEVE BANNON (HOST): We can disagree with that. We can disagree with that. But in my small Mick brain, they’re freaks, but continue on.

NAOMI WOLF (GUEST): But I definitely think it’s more than name calling. Men who are seeking to compete in women’s sports are engaging in really abusive, intimidating, and inappropriate behavior on many, many levels. It totally violates Title IX. And then going down to the level of minors, I think you are a feminist in spite of yourself, Steve.

Because, you know, no one I’ve heard yet outside of a very small group of women, like Jennifer Sey, the former, I think, Olympian athlete who’s been very vocal about this, has expressed so well what the injustices are, as you just did.

You know, again, in spite of your commitment to not being a feminist, that’s a very feminist set of empathic comments you made about the struggles of girls, and you’re a thousand percent correct. It’s girls from low income neighborhoods. It’s girls from the barrio. It’s girls from, you know, middle class, hardworking, working class backgrounds. And this is their one shot.

They’re not going to come up with $60,000 a year, you know, to pay. Their families won’t, to pay for that college education. If they want a college education, it’s going to be through that hard work, that effort, that grit, as you put it, of playing a sport and excelling.

And the minute you’ve got a guy in a dress or with a ponytail or whatever de minimis thing, you know, he thinks he needs to do to be called a girl competing, there’s the advantage gone. But it’s deeper than that. There’s the meritocracy gone, it’s a crushing of dreams.

STEVE BANNON (HOST):
Naomi, for the little girl, and they’re either going to go to a Division I school and play big time college volleyball, or even go to Division II. Going to Division II, they’re going to go to some of the best colleges in the country that normally just feed in from elite prep schools. These kids are going to have a shot because women’s sports is big there because of Title IX, and they’re going to have a shot to go to Union and Hamilton, right, and, uh, and Bucknell and all these schools.

Year round, right? It’s almost year round to get at that level that you can compete.

Mo’s mom, I’m telling you, she’d be out there, she’d be throwing some fists. She’s not going to let a guy compete against her daughter. Those mothers, at least at that time, this was back in the ’90s and early 2000s, these mothers were quite competitive. They’re not going to let some guy, some teenage boy, come in and compete, and particularly the harm they could do of just hurting the girls, because young men are obviously stronger than young women.

Your thoughts, ma’am.

NAOMI WOLF (GUEST): Well, so much. I mean, first of all, you’re right. It is a family commitment for so many families. And also, like, what do we want? What do we want kids in school to see? How do we want them to behave? We want this. We want the wholehearted commitment to excellence. We want the effort. We want the families getting behind them and going to those tournaments. And we want it to be fair and to make a difference. Otherwise, what’s the point of anything that we’re doing with educating our kids?

I think about my stepson, who’s an athlete. He plays football. He’s 14. And it’s literally like if someone had a small horse and brought that horse, you know, to a football field and said, this is a boy. You know, yes, he can run a lot faster than the 14-year-old boys can. He can cover a lot of ground, but he identifies as a boy, so he’s a boy, and, you know, we’re just going to make it be fair.

The other thing you’re not, like, we have to take into account is those girls are not the only ones competing and making an impact on what young girls think about meritocracy. It’s also the girls and the boys in the stands. Those girls are watching, right? And if they watch the girls trying their best and being kind of wiped out, being wiped out by a bigger, stronger boy no matter what, it’s those girls watching too who are getting the message that nothing they do will matter. There’s no point in making an effort.

And lastly, I mean, you know, athletes inspire more than just the people on the field. They inspire the people watching as well. Lastly, we haven’t even talked about this situation, the dressing rooms, which is absolutely terrifying. You know, by the age of 14 or 15, a substantial number of young girls have already been molested or sexually abused by trusted males in their circle or by strangers. Typically, it’s by someone they know. And so they’re already traumatized.

You know, saying like, girl, just go watch girls get dressed, you know, and masturbating again in the girls’ changing room. This isn’t rocket science to predict that such a thing would happen if you tell boys they can go in the girls’ locker rooms and watch the girls undress. I mean, it’s just such a derogation of responsibility on the part of adults to create what Title IX guarantees, which is a safe and egalitarian environment for education for girls. We’re going to look back on this time in history and just be horrified at what we allowed to have happened to girls.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Naomi, if we can get up on the screen, this thing hit me right in the solar plexus when I read what you put up online. And I’ll let you explain it, but let’s do a split screen so we get it up there so the audience can see it.

Talk to me about, you actually put this thing up the other day about it, because I can’t figure out the rage of these Karens, these white women. They’re just, I don’t know, they’ve lost it. And you have a brilliant analysis and breakdown of it. So once you, because I think a lot of the audience is seeing now all the footage, and it’s not just from what happened the other day, and not just Minneapolis, but it’s all over. Can you explain what you believe is going on, ma’am?

NAOMI WOLF (GUEST): Sure. I mean, it’s a bit of a pivot, but, you know, obviously there’s been a lot of video and a lot of events around primarily white women confronting ICE agents in a very aggressive way. Unfortunately, there was a horrible fatality in Minneapolis, and I’m not talking about that situation specifically in this post.

But I was kind of checking in with myself. What is going on? Like, this is a full-blown cultural moment. Now we’ve got so many white women getting in the faces of these big, strapping ICE agents and taunting them and taunting them, trying to provoke them to violence.

And, you know, I of course support the free, First Amendment protected expression of speech, but this is not that. This is a psychodrama of some kind. And I couldn’t help but notice, again, not talking about Renee Good, may she rest in peace, I’m talking about the bigger picture, that there was a psychosexual element to this.

And that I put it in the context, of course I’ve no scientific studies confirming this, but anecdotally, there’s been sort of a 20-year war on the left against masculinity. And the left has told all these liberal men, you can’t be strong. You can’t desire women. Male gaze is objectifying. There’s something toxic, toxic masculinity. There’s something wrong with you if you have normal male impulses toward aggression or sexual desire.

And there’s also a lot of estrogenizing going on of men medically, which is a whole other topic, but that’s notable on the left, that the ideology reinforces be submissive, don’t protect women if they’re threatened, let them protect themselves, and so on.

And then you’ve got these ICE agents who are big, strong men for the most part. There are women ICE agents too who are very strong and well trained, but the men are out there. And the kind of inflammatory training that the left is giving activists is basically a green light for, I’m just going to say, sexually frustrated middle class white women to act out their sexual aggression, sexual frustration, their hatred of men in some cases, their anger at their male partners, whatever it is that they’re not getting in their personal lives.

It gives them a legitimate, in fact even kind of lauded, celebrated way to vent their frustrations and to taunt and taunt and then get that contact, get the handcuffs, be dragged off. And I can’t, like I’ve been a commentator about women’s psyches for 40 years, there is an element of play or provocation that is eroticized here. And I wish that there wasn’t, but there is.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Is there a solution here? Is this a moment, or is it going to work itself out, burn itself out? Because it’s coming more and more aggressive. And we know they’re going to shut down the government because of ICE. This ICE thing, the whole thing of deportations of illegal aliens, is going to be, as I predicted, the central beating heart of what’s going on here in the country.

Do you see that part of it, which is now at the forefront of kind of this revolt, do you see that burning out? I mean, how do you see it playing out?

NAOMI WOLF (GUEST): Yeah. Well, to be more serious for a moment, it’s really dangerous, because these liberal, frustrated white women are being weaponized and spun out by people who definitely want civil war in our streets. You know, the Red-Green Alliance, the globalists, they want things to spin out of control. They want to have the excuse to run the kind of articles the New York Times ran about President Trump today.

You know, have basically taken everything and set up the context so it sounds like he’s saying, well, she was disrespectful, since OK shooter. You know, they want to portray what the Trump administration is doing as cracking down on peaceful freedom of assembly in a horribly violent, exaggerated way, instead of focusing on the enforcement of law and making streets safer.

They’re getting what they want. It’s going to get worse unless there’s an intervention, because it’s such a toxic permission structure. It’s like giving a bunch of horrible, vicious racists permission to act out all of their racism against ICE agents of one race or whatever.

So we’re going to see a lot more escalation of these conflicts unless there’s a change. I think there are some practical things that can be done, and I’m glad to see the Trump administration is doing some of them. You’re seeing more female ICE agents out there, and that’s a really good idea. It’s good to show that ICE agents come in both genders.

I think that the training the ICE agents are getting is incredibly good, because they’re overwhelmingly really respectful. But at a certain point, especially with this escalation using noise, drums, beating, shrieking, and so on, there’s a limit to how much the human mind can take. ICE agents are actually being tortured.

What is the solution?

Oh, gosh. I mean, honestly, for ICE agents to know that there’s an element of crazy that they just literally cannot step into. These women are not going to respond to reason. They’re not going to respond to de-escalating language. I think that’s important to know in the training.

We’re not in a normal time where normal pedestrians can be told don’t interfere with law enforcement and they’ll behave in a normal way. I think that’s the best we can do.

But certainly there are things to do around this, which is the leaders, the municipal leaders who are inflaming this and saying put your body out there on the line. Those people are committing violations at least of the law, and they need to be held accountable.