I Don't Care if Alysa Liu Is Woke

Ian Haworth
Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:31:41 -0800
Opinion

As the nation celebrated American figure skater Alysa Liu's stunning victories at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, there's a particular collection of embarrassingly sad online dwellers who just can't understand why conservatives might cheer on Liu.

Why? Well, because she is, apparently, woke.

For those who just don't get it, let me explain.
Updated: Tue Feb 24, 2026

As the nation celebrated American figure skater Alysa Liu's stunning victories at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, there's a particular collection of embarrassingly sad online dwellers who just can't understand why conservatives might cheer on Liu.

Why? Well, because she is, apparently, woke.

For those who just don't get it, let me explain.

In the world of sports in which Alysa Liu is thriving, we (the big bad conservatives) simply don't care about your politics if you are proudly representing our great nation — which Liu undoubtedly is — and you leave your politics at the door — which Liu undoubtedly did. We are celebrating Liu regardless of her politics, because her political beliefs are irrelevant when we're busy watching the world's premier sporting event.

This isn't a debate stage; it's a skating rink. They're easy to tell apart, not least of all because one is covered in ice.

This might sound shocking, but for us, politics isn't primary. We don't hungrily seek out a totalizing form of politics in which our beliefs are forcibly infused into every single element of our lives. That's what the left does, which is precisely why they cannot possibly understand how we could possibly cheer on someone who is "woke."

Consider perhaps the right's most widely criticized person in sports in recent years: Colin Kaepernick. Despite what we were told, he wasn't condemned because he is a Black quarterback (hardly an unusual attribute in the NFL), or even because of what he believed (no matter how absurdly ignorant or racist his views on modern-day America were). No, it's because he dragged his politics into the world of football, leveraging his political beliefs to garner fame and fortune while his career started to circle the drain. Even if Liu and Kaepernick had exactly the same political beliefs, which they almost certainly do not, the crucial detail is that Liu didn't show up to the Olympics wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs.

Moreover, let's consider the response on the left if Alysa Liu was a dreaded MAGA supporter. Suddenly, she'd be the ultimate personification of evil, and we would be inundated with claims that skating was somehow institutionally racist, sexist and transphobic, with Liu's presence at the Olympics alone making countless people feel just so unsafe.

Of course the people who would rather die than celebrate someone who voted for Trump could never understand how we could celebrate someone who didn't. The right doesn't care about your politics if you don't force it down our throats when we want to enjoy sports. The left cares about nothing else.

And let's not forget the red elephant in the room: Eileen Gu, the traitorous agent of the Chinese Communist Party who is competing on behalf of China despite being born and raised in the United States. She's actively being celebrated by the same people who cannot believe that we — conservatives — are instead celebrating Alysa Liu, whose father escaped communist China after participating in the 1988 Tiananmen Square protests.

If politics is all that matters — as we are repeatedly told — then I'm going to spend my time cheering on the patriotic Americans representing us on the world stage, regardless of who they vote for. They're what makes this country great, not some pseudo-celebrity who is bought and paid for by a bunch of evil communists.

It's really that simple.