What Simone Biles Reminded Us About the Right-Wing Activist Playbook

And why Riley Gaines will never stop talking about tying for 5th place with a trans athlete

Over the weekend, Riley Gaines, a former NCAA swimmer who famously tied for 5th with trans athlete Lia Thomas in a 2022 Championship Meet and turned it into a career, turned her sights on the Minnesota girls’ high school softball team, who’d just won the State Championship:

The situation escalated when the GOAT, Simone Biles, as famous for her legendary skills and medal count as she is for advocating for mental health and helping to put away Dr. Larry Nassar, who abused hundreds of girls in gymnastics, had something to say:

Fast-forward to this morning, and Riley’s calling out Simone for bullying her. Here’s how Fox News described the interaction:

Biles launched into an attack on Gaines on Friday as the former NCAA All-American swimmer reacted to a transgender athlete winning a state championship in Minnesota softball.

Oh, the ‘attack’ came out of nowhere? One transgender athlete won against an entire softball team? Now that’s a story.

All the ‘campaigning’ isn’t because Gaines lost a race. Gaines should be thanking Lia Thomas. If not for that 5th-place tie, highlights from her NCAA career would be reserved for Masters’ swims later in life or small talk between other parents at swim practice. Gaines was in the right race and finished at the right time to platform a loss into a career win as an agitator for the right. (We’ll get into the second part of Biles’ tweet later.)

The Minnesota softball story is not all that different from how Gaines got her start. All it would take is one conventionally attractive young woman from the opposing team to tell her story to a media outlet for the next Riley Gaines to take shape.

Right-wing activists aren’t born, they’re made. Let’s look at the Riley Gaines story and the dog-eared playbook for creating these activists.

March 2022: University of Kentucky senior, Riley Gaines, had just tied for 5th place in the 200m Free at the NCAA Division I Women’s Championships. She was visibly upset. The Team Captain shared the podium with Lia Thomas, a trans female swimmer from UPenn who had become a target for right-wing groups and their anti-trans activism masquerading as concern for safety for women in sports.

“Who are we trying to protect here, and who are we trying to fight for here?” Gaines told the conservative outlet, The Daily Wire, in an exclusive telephone interview days later.

Gaines was upset about trophies. Lia was handed the 5th-place trophy while Riley was forced to hold a stand-in 6th-place trophy. An agitated Gaines was assured by the NCAA rep. handing out trophies that her correct trophy would arrive in the mail. He assumed the trophies went in chronological order according to lane placement, hence Riley’s stand-in trophy. (Thomas placed 2nd in prelims, while Gaines placed 7th. I’ll discuss this at the end if you’re interested.**)

Thompson and Gaines with their trophies.

As for Thomas, Gaines told The Daily Wire:

“I am in full support of her and full support of her transition and her swimming career and everything like that,” insisted Gaines.

She worked hard, just like I worked hard, there’s no question there. […] Gaines said she told the official as she argued with him. “But can I ask why she gets the fifth-place trophy before I do? Especially last night, she just won the national title.”

Within a month, Gaines would testify before the Kentucky Senate in favor of a bill banning trans women from sports.

Nearly a year later, Gaines sounded even further to the right, now misgendering Lia.

It is hardly surprising that in Gaines v. Biles dust-up, Gaines found a way to fight against a woman who did the very thing she purports to stand for.

Who’s made sports safer for women? Point: Biles.

Back to the second half of Simone’s tweet, which challenged Riley to find creative solutions to make sports more inclusive to trans athletes or create a new avenue for trans people in sports. It’s a sensible conversation if the goal is to find a way to create an environment where trans athletes can exist while continuing to protect girls in sports. The problem is that those two issues are conflated by the right to deepen the culture wars and the divide that creates partisan activists to inspire another generation.

It’s not about problem solving, it’s about problem creating.

True Life: The rise of an alt-right star

Right-wing outlets were frothing at the mouth for more on the Lia Thomas story in 2022. They were no doubt trying to speak to anyone who competed with her. Gaines was willing to talk.

Soon after her Daily Wire interview came the Fox News spots. According to research from Media Matters, “Gaines has appeared on Fox News 29 times for a total time of more than two hours and 38 minutes between April 2022 and the end of May 2023.”

Someone saw where this was going. A domain was registered in Riley’s name in early May of 2022. On the website, there’s an inquiry button. When you click on it, it goes to a new URL, a domain established in 2023, called “Keep Women’s Sports Female”. At the bottom, it tells you it’s powered by the Independent Women’s Forum.

People like Riley Gaines don’t rise to prominence without the backing of one or more massive, interconnected right-wing organizations.

Independent Women’s Forum, or IWF, is one of them. IWF describes itself as a 501c3 nonprofit organization that works to engage and inform women about how policy issues impact them and their loved ones. They pursue “policies that reduce government red tape and return resources and control to people, so that we have healthy communities and people can pursue their own visions of happiness.”

Translation: A vision of happiness that defines the role of women to a strict, conservative, Christian definition of womanhood.

In December of 2022, IWF announced that Gaines was their newest hire as a Stand with Women Spokeswoman.

They have other athletes they are spotlighting as well, most likely hoping for another Riley Gaines.

It’s not lost on me how often these are white, blonde young women.

A new job, along with a group platformed by IWF, was just the beginning for Gaines. She’s since scored a podcast, book deals, merch, an anti-woke beer brand calendar that raised money for her other initiative, headlined national speaker tours, and was front and center for President Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” Executive Order.

According to must-reporting from

Uncloseted Media

, she also launched the Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, another, you guessed it, powerful right-wing organization.

The tagline for the Leadership Institute is: Where Conservative Leaders Are Made.

Katherine Stewart

writes about the Leadership Institute in her book, Money, Lies, and God, and their training methods, which include offering “a 24-hour online course to train conservatives to run for school board and ‘stop teaching of Critical Race Theory before it destroys the fabric of our nation.”’

The Leadership Institute has also advised Moms for Liberty from the start, according to Stewart’s reporting.

That’s just one slice of their work.

In my conversation with Stewart, we discussed how it’s not just the media landscape where the right-wing has an advantage. They also have a structural advantage when it comes to these massive organizations that help train and fund future activists, politicians, initiatives, etc., like Riley Gaines. They are like talent scouts, always on the hunt for the next big star to platform their cause.

The woman missing from the 2022 NCAA Women’s 200m Freestyle Final

In all the ‘uproar’ around Riley and Lia’s tie for 5th, the winner of that race has been forgotten. Her name is Taylor Ruck. After struggling through the pandemic with an eating disorder and a disappointing couple of years in the water, Taylor showed up and won her first individual NCAA championship.

That should have been the big story. Maybe it would have sparked a larger conversation about another safety issue in women’s sports: disordered eating. The duality of the pressures of being a woman in a society that values beauty and thinness, with being a top athlete that requires you to mold your body, unnaturally at times, with exquisite precision.

Riley Gaines is a young woman with massive right-wing organizations behind her. She isn’t swimming in uncharted waters or making waves, she’s circle swimming. She’s obediently following sets and making corrections to her strokes as her coaches call them out.

-Meredith

**In swim meets, you are placed according to your fastest entered time or your prelim time. For example, in the Women’s 200m Free Prelims, Lia Thomas placed 2nd, Riley Gaines placed 7th. That determined their lane lines for the finals. In finals, Riley overperformed her seed time and Lia underperformed.