You know things have gotten weird when Fox News hosts are begging the secretary of defense to intervene in ... cheerleading. But that’s where we are now, with Will Cain suggesting on Fox News Saturday Night that maybe Pete Hegseth—Minneapolis native, Vikings superfan, and guy currently in charge of America’s military—could do something about the two male cheerleaders on his beloved team’s squad.
Here’s what happened: The Minnesota Vikings added Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn to their cheerleading roster for the 2025 season. They went through the same tryouts as everyone else. They made the team. And right-wing media absolutely lost it.
Actor Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules back when that was a thing, posted that he’d been a Vikings fan all his life but now—sigh—needed a new team. His tweet got millions of views, which tells you everything about how desperately some people needed to perform their outrage about this. Former NFL player Antonio Brown went further, using a homophobic slur to describe one of the cheerleaders. People threatened to cancel season tickets.
But the Fox News segment really gave away the game. Cain made this big show of explaining how he’s totally fine with male cheerleaders—the “right” kind, anyway. The Texas A&M kind. The burly guys who throw women in the air. What he’s not ok with? His exact words: “male cheerleaders being female cheerleaders.”
The Vikings cheerleaders’ crime? Existing while presumably queer in public. Dancing at a football game. Having the audacity to do the same job as their female colleagues without performing the kind of aggressive masculinity that would make guys like Cain comfortable.
This is the same exact playbook we saw with Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light. Remember that meltdown? A trans woman posted a single Instagram video with a personalized Bud Light can—one video, among dozens of influencer partnerships the company runs—and conservatives acted like Anheuser-Busch had personally come to their house and transitioned their beer. They shot cases of Bud Light with assault rifles. They declared boycotts. Kid Rock posted a video of himself shooting Bud Light cans with a semiautomatic rifle because a trans woman dared to exist in proximity to his beverage of choice.
The pattern is stupidly consistent: A traditionally “masculine” space includes someone visibly LGBTQ. Right-wing media frames this as an assault on their values. They demand the space be returned to its previous state—which is to say, purged of visible queerness. Then they pretend they’re the victims in all this, somehow oppressed by ... having to know gay people exist?
About one-third of NFL teams now have male cheerleaders. The Rams started this in 2018. Six years ago. The world didn’t end. Football didn’t collapse. The only thing that changed is that some guys who can dance really well got jobs dancing really well. But for the right, that visibility itself is the threat. These people don’t want to share public spaces with anyone who disrupts their fantasy of a purely heterosexual world where men are men and cheerleaders are women and nobody ever has to think too hard about gender.
The hysteria would be funny if it wasn’t so revealing. We’re talking about two guys with pom-poms, and Fox News hosts are joking about military intervention. Cain brought up how Hegseth had “a pretty big hand in those B-52s flying over Vladimir Putin’s head” before suggesting maybe the secretary of defense could handle the cheerleader situation. Because apparently two dancers in Minnesota are a national security issue now?
Cheerleading literally started as a men’s activity in Minnesota in 1898. For decades, it was exclusively male. Presidents did it—George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower were all cheerleaders. Nobody thought civilization was crumbling back then.
What changed? Cheerleading became feminized, then sexualized, and now these guys are mad that men are “invading” a space that originally belonged to them. But only certain men are the problem—not the ones doing stunts and throwing women around, but the ones who dance. The ones who move wrong. The ones whose existence suggests that maybe masculinity isn’t as rigid as conservatives need it to be.
Kevin Sorbo complaining he needs a new team after a lifetime of Vikings fandom? My guy, you kissed a man on-screen in Meet the Spartans. You played a Greek demigod in a leather skirt for years. But two real men dancing at a football game is where you draw the line?
The desperation is palpable. They’re so invested in maintaining these little bubbles where they never have to confront the existence of LGBTQ people that they’ll turn two cheerleaders into a culture war crisis. They need their football Sundays to be a safe space from gender nonconformity. They need their beer commercials straight. They need their cheerleaders female or, if male, sufficiently masculine to pass their arbitrary masculinity tests.
After all that outrage, all those threats to abandon their teams, all that performative fury, what did Shiek and Conn do? They posted a photo of themselves in uniform with the caption: “Wait … did someone say our name?”
Perfect.
Because that’s really what this is about: names being said, people being seen, existence being acknowledged. The right wants to return to a world where LGBTQ people knew their place, which was nowhere visible. They’re nostalgic for when gay people were punch lines instead of cheerleaders, when trans people were plot twists instead of influencers, when everyone pretended that football was a totally straight sport watched by totally straight fans who definitely never had a complicated thought about Jimmy Garoppolo’s eyes.
But that world is gone. It’s not coming back. And watching conservatives lose their minds over two guys with pom-poms just shows how desperate they are to pretend otherwise.
Cain can joke about calling in airstrikes on cheerleaders. Sorbo can search for a new team to disappoint him. Brown can tweet slurs into the void. None of it changes the fact that Blaize Shiek and Louie Conn are going to show up this season, do their jobs, and dance really, really well while doing it.
The right keeps demanding spaces free from visible queerness. They’re not going to get them. Not in their beer aisles, not at their football games, not anywhere in public life. And the sooner they figure that out, the sooner they can stop pretending that two dancers in Minneapolis constitute some kind of national emergency.
Though, honestly? Watching them melt down over pom-poms is pretty entertaining. Maybe they should keep going. At this rate, by next season they’ll be demanding congressional hearings every time a quarterback has good hair.
