Riley Gaines Just Tried To Slam Kamala Harris For Greeting WNBA Players In Locker Room—And It Backfired Instantly

Former NCAA swimmer-turned-conservative darling Riley Gaines was criticized afer she complained during a Fox News interview about Vice President Kamala Harris greeting players in the locker room after a WNBA game, saying that critics didn't react the same way after FBI Director Kash Patel did the same during the Olympics.

Harris recently attended a Los Angeles Sparks game against the Chicago Sky alongside her husband, Douglas Emhoff. After the Sparks secured the victory, Harris also visited the team's locker room, where she congratulated the players and addressed them following the win.

The news angered Gaines, who called the WNBA "unserious":

“This is just so tragic to me because the WNBA is so unserious, and it does not have to be this way. I watched this video and the first thing that I thought about was, I remembered how mad people were when Kash Patel was in the locker room with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team after they won gold."

"You remember that and the outrage that we saw online? Those same people … haven’t said a single word about Kamala Harris in the WNBA locker room here.”

"She's talking about the impact of women in women's sports when the reality is she thinks men should be in women sports. She would have no problem with Shaquille O'Neal or LeBron James coming on that court and taking those opportunities away from women."

You can hear what she said in the video below.

Gaines—who has opposed the rights of transgender athletes since her fifth-place tie with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in the women's 200m freestyle final at the National Collegiate Athletics Association championships—was referencing the criticism Patel received after partying with the U.S. men's Olympics hockey team.

In footage circulated online by William Turton of ProPublica, Patel appears to down a bottle of beer, throw his arms up, and slam his fist on a table in celebration. Moments later, Matthew Tkachuk of Team USA is seen placing his medal around Patel’s neck, after which Patel joins the victorious hockey players in singing "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" by Toby Keith.

You can see what happened in the video below.

Patel was defensive following reports of his partying, taking to X to ridicule "the concerned media" and saying he "was extremely humbled when my friends, the newly minted Gold Medal winners on Team USA, invited me into the locker room to celebrate this historic moment with the boys."

But the difference, critics pointed out, is that Harris is a private citizen and Patel oversees the FBI on the taxpayers' dime.

Given that Gaines once made headlines for complaining that the University of Maryland should have been "honoring entrepreneurs or veterans or innovators" instead of having Kermit the Frog give a commencement speech at a graduation ceremony, we probably shouldn't be taking her too seriously.