Kelley “I’m gonna fuckin win” O’Hara

⚽ Sam Kerr 38′ (assist by F. Kirby)

SERIOUS sexual assault trigger warning to anyone who sees that article for The Athletic about Paul Riley.

there’s also about a million other things that are so fucked about it but please, if you’re a survivor in any sense of the word: approach with care and caution.

“The opportunity to work with Heath stands out as something extra special, though.”

“Rodman lights up when talking about Heath’s dribbling prowess.”

“Toone also credits US forward Tobin Heath for her development.”

Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman, Ella Toone, some of the most brilliant promises of women’s football future. After Horan, Pugh and recently also Beth Mead, these young players too have voiced what Tobin Heath has meant for them growing up in this environment. I feel like these bits of admiration come out quite randomly, quietly, away from the big headlines. Because that’s exactly how Tobin lives, works and evidently inspires. She’s not a captain and she has never embraced her popularity, so when they talk about the players who inspired and changed the face of women’s football even off he field, less than rarely they mention Tobin Heath.

But since the very beginning, as soon as she stopped being just a rookie or the New Kid, she accepted the responsibility that comes from success and fame and she started giving back what she felt she had received. Many times she doesn’t even do it knowingly, she doesn’t do it with big speeches or fancy gestures, it’s just the way she plays on the field and lives her life outside of it.

In Paris, she saw a young girl home-sick, afraid and deeply bullied and she just reached to her; when the USWNT called this college kid and then Portland drafted her, she just shared her experienced freely, she made herself available for any advice she could give. She talks when no one else outside a locker room can hear her, she works when no one is watching. She doesn’t stand on the platform, she’s the one building it.

y’all i think mal and dansby are like...in deep. her insta follows alone paint a scary picture:

@uncensorabletruth: you can get a lot from the username alone here...but this acct is private so idk what it is exactly but their link tree is to all sorts of super anti-vax etc. stuff...

@redpillrevv: weirdly this acct seems to be almost the same as the above? same bio

@drmondo: a “therapist” who has promoted such things as anxiety disorders aren’t real and anxiety is just your “body’s wisdom,” as well as a healthy amount of covid denying

but then of course, dansby is even worse. he also follows the last two of those accounts as well as:

@dr.john.pharmd: some quack doctor, i didn’t look at much but one of the most recent posts is about how vitamin c and zinc cure covid and studies that say otherwise were designed to fail or some bs

@drericnepute: first post is super transphobic fake news conspiracy bs about trans people asking for photos of children’s genitals (this feels like such a backwards conspiracy thing considering that is LITERALLY what some people want to do to trans kids but yanno), second is some more zinc solves all problems including covid antivax bs, more science is fake stuff, a bunch of vaccines are deadly bs (the daily mail article headline is hysterical like what is anyone who does now dead bc of the covid vaccine), your rights surrounding if your employer says you must be vaccinated, anti covid relief bill propaganda...you get the gist.

but then let’s talk about his twitter likes:

he liked tweets about multiple election conspiracy theories, including big tech primarily promoting ads from democratic candidates and dead people voting.

also there could very well be more for both of them, i just got bored of scrolling and i think you get the gist. and this is all on top of dansby following prageru and mal posting the 5G EMF QAnon wack job thing...

There was an article that came out a few months ago about how conspiracy theories have infiltrated a lot of “wellness” spaces online (link here), and I think that that’s what Mal has really gotten sucked into. She’s quieter about it than Dansby is (baseball has a fairly conservative fan base and woso obviously doesn’t), but if you click through some of the accounts she’s following on Insta it’s immediately obvious that she’s immersing herself in a lot of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and Covid denialism. She may or may not be into the culture wars/transphobia/election conspiracy stuff that Dansby is, but I think it’s important to recognize that far-right politics aren’t the only way that people get sucked into that shit.

Here’s a screenshot of some of Mal’s follows on Instagram. The first one is some sort of detox product with lots of autism fearmongering, the third is a chiropractor whose content is mostly vaccine conspiracies, the fifth is another anti-vaxxer (who made sure to include it in his profile picture 🙄), and the last is some sort of woo, leaky gut, mold, chronic Lyme person who has posts comparing vaccines to the Holocaust. I’ve been pretty quiet about this stuff online, but it’s genuinely scary stuff and I’m starting to feel like it’s important for fans to understand the people and the ideas that she’s choosing to surround herself with. She’s five years into adulthood (something that I think people tend to forget), and her very public social media shouldn’t be too taboo to talk about. No one is following that many horrible Covid denial accounts without agreeing with them.