‘Mayonnaise Militia’ was supposed to be an insult — then white people decided they loved it

BS BULLETIN

A critic mocked celebrating Indiana Fever fans as the “mayonnaise militia” after Sunday’s wild overtime win over Atlanta.
Instead of taking offense, people online started embracing the nickname.
The joke landed amid a bigger controversy that forced the WNBA to admit fans should not have been ordered to cover XX-XY shirts.

The Internet has once again demonstrated one of its fundamental laws: Never give your opponent a nickname he might actually enjoy.

Following the Indiana Fever’s wild 95-91 overtime victory over the Atlanta Dream on Sunday, an online critic named James Ray took a shot at the exuberant Fever crowd, writing that the “mayonnaise militia” was celebrating as if Indiana had just won the WNBA championship.

Oops.

Instead of recoiling in horror, people started laughing — and appropriating the name for themselves.

Twitchy collected the reaction Monday night, with commenters immediately recognizing that “Mayonnaise Militia” might have been intended as mockery but had accidentally wandered into the territory of a pretty funny team name.

And, for the record, the phrase isn’t new. “Mayonnaise militia” has floated around social media for years as a derogatory nickname aimed at white people, particularly white conservatives. Searches turn up examples dating back years, along with cousins such as “Gravy Seals,” “Vanilla ISIS” and “Meal Team Six.”

But timing is everything.

And Sunday’s Fever-Dream game provided quite a backdrop.

Indiana came away with the 95-91 overtime victory after Atlanta’s Angel Reese missed what could have been a game-winning layup near the end of regulation. Caitlin Clark’s reaction — an enormous grin caught on camera — immediately became its own viral moment.

Clark finished with 26 points and nine assists, while Kelsey Mitchell added 20. The Fever moved to 23-12 and remained among the WNBA’s leading championship contenders.

But basketball wasn’t the only story coming out of the arena.

A Georgia mother and daughter, Kasey Thomason and her daughter Annie, said they attended the game wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics, a company that advocates keeping women’s athletic competition female.

According to their account, they sat through most of the game without incident before security approached them during overtime and told them they had to cover the shirts or leave.

The pair said they weren’t carrying protest signs or disrupting the game. “We were just sitting there,” Thomason said in video of the incident.

The New York Post reported that security gave the women other shirts to wear over their XX-XY apparel. Then came the development that made the episode considerably more significant: The WNBA admitted security got it wrong.

“The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night’s game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts,” the league said. “This should not have happened.”

The Atlanta Dream issued its own statement, saying WNBA security — not Dream personnel — was responsible.

“The Atlanta Dream believes in creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone,” the team said, adding that league security “took actions that fell short of that standard.”

That controversy is part of a larger fight now following the WNBA over transgender participation in women’s sports.

Indiana’s Sophie Cunningham has become one of the league’s most outspoken players on the subject, arguing publicly that biological males should not compete in women’s athletics. Her comments have generated both intense criticism and vocal support, including fans appearing at games in XX-XY apparel.

The league has said there is no current transgender eligibility issue involving a WNBA player and has stressed its commitment to respectful discussion while opposing efforts to demean or marginalize people.

So Sunday already had everything necessary for another chapter of America’s never-ending culture war.

And then somebody looked at a bunch of excited Fever supporters and apparently decided what the moment really needed was a condiment-based racial nickname. Enter the Mayonnaise Militia.

The joke, of course, is that people weren’t sufficiently offended.

Instead, the response became some variation of: Wait a minute. That’s actually pretty funny.

Which brings us to an old Rush Limbaugh observation that applies beautifully here. White Americans, Rush frequently argued, could generally laugh at jokes about themselves without convening a symposium, demanding somebody’s termination or declaring that civilization had been irreparably harmed.

That instinct may explain why “Mayonnaise Militia” didn’t quite produce the desired reaction.

There was no emergency press conference. No demand for a national conversation. Nobody summoned a university diversity officer.

People laughed. Some wanted T-shirts. And just like that, the insult had been repossessed.

MY QUICK TAKE:

I confess.

Mayonnaise Militia is funny.

I’m sorry. It just is.

If somebody wanted white people devastated by this insult, they seriously miscalculated the audience.

Once white folks start accepting the nickname, you’ve got a problem because now they’re going to accessorize.

Give this three days and somebody’s grandmother is going to Etsy looking for a MAYONNAISE MILITIA — HELLMANN’S DIVISION T-shirt. This thing could get completely out of control.

And that’s the lesson: You cannot successfully insult people who immediately begin workshopping improvements to your insult.

Rush understood that.

Call people names long enough and eventually one of them is going to say: “You know what? Put that on a hat.”

At which point the insult is dead. And somebody has a new merchandise business.

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