Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we're starting today by going back to just over a decade ago, in March of 2012.

TV Excerpt: Lady Bears are rolling a 19-game winning streak. They have been the most dominant team through the first couple of rounds.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, these are the sounds of March Madness. It was during the Sweet 16 matchup between Baylor University and Georgia Tech when the Lady Bears star player Brittney Griner smashed her second duck of the tournament. Take a listen to what ESPN had to say about the 6'8" Griner as she led her team to victory.

ESPN: Griner, open court. She's so ill she makes medicine sick. Jamming at home 35 points 10 boards 6 blocks, that ridiculous jam.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is just one tiny moment in an absolutely extraordinary athletic career. The Houston native lead her high school team to a championship game. In that 2012 season, Griner's Baylor University enjoyed a 40-0 record. A year later, in April of 2013, Griner was the number one pick in the WNBA draft. A year after that, in 2014, she led the Phoenix Mercury to the most wins in WNBA history and a league championship. Brittney Griner, y'all, is not just a basketball player. She's a superstar. She's got a college championship, a professional championship, two Olympic gold medals, and right now, no one in America knows where she is.

Brittney Griner: I've been here almost eight months and people with more severe crimes have gotten less than what I was getting.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was Brittney Griner speaking in a Russian courtroom back in October. You see, in February, one week before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia arrested Brittney Griner. Russian customs officials said they found vape cartridges that contained a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage. Initially, she was incarcerated just over eight months, and during this time we've only caught a few glimpses of Griner, always shackled, caged, somber, and then in late October.

Speaker 5: Final verdict is nine years of imprisonment, of the 9 million rubles penalty in the penal colony.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've lost track of her. She's in one of Russia's IK-2 penal colonies, but we don't know which one. What we do know is that these labor camps are inhumane and that hard labor and torture are routine. With me now is Dave Zirin, sports editor for The Nation and author of The Kaepernick Effect. Dave, welcome back to The Takeaway.

Dave Zirin: Well, thanks much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I started with a bit of Griner's career, because I feel like often as we've talked about her, it's with this kind of dismissive or diminutive way of thinking about just how incredible she is.

Dave Zirin: You're absolutely right. I mean, we're talking about the all-time shot-blocking leader in the history of the NCAA, and that goes for men's players, women's players, what have you. We're also talking about somebody who was one of the most decorated players and is one of the most decorated players in the WNBA. We're talking about one of the most recognizable players in the entire landscape of women's basketball. The fact that she has been disappeared by the Russian state, I mean, I've been beating this gong for months.

This should be a much, much bigger story. I'm not just talking about in terms of the mainstream media, where, of course, any imprisoned American, especially in this act of hostage diplomacy, I would argue by Vladimir Putin, as a result of the tension surrounding the Ukraine war. I actually think that should be a huge story also, though, in the sports world.

Something that we've been saying for so long was that if this was Tom Brady or Derek Jeter, who was somehow going to jail for nine years in a Russian labor camp. I mean, the din would have been loud that there would be this United call from the United States to say, "The world must stop until this person is returned home." Yet, with Brittney Griner, I mean, what I have found in writing about her and reporting about her is that all of the same tired political divisions come up, a lot of racism, sexism, and homophobia when trying to lift her name up to the light, and a lot of resistance in the sports world from turning this into the story that it needs to be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why do you think this is political at all? I don't mean the politics of the US and Russia. I mean internal US politics.

Dave Zirin: This has been a subject that has driven me to such frustration. I can't even tell you, because you would think, and this is my naivete talking, is that you would think the idea of an imprisoned American Olympian, someone who represented this country overseas, and came home with medals on her chest, who is now facing nine years in a brutal penal colony in a land called Mordovia, which is otherwise known as the land of prisons in Russia. We would think that, at least, could garner a kind of universal solidarity in this country, a coming together to say, "We want this person home," but we're not getting anything close to that.

Instead, what we're getting is, and again, my naivete on this is something that I'm taking myself to task for, but we're seeing people throughout the right wing in this country, basically not only shrug their shoulders and say, "Who cares? It's Brittney Griner. It's a woman athlete," but you see in the-- and I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of responses to my writing about this, and what you see is a kind of affection for her capture. I don't know how else to put it, but actually cheering on her plight, cheering on her agony, and they seem to do for the explicit reasons is, they rest on this kind of affection for law and order politics, and the war on drugs.

They say, "Well, you go to another country with a vape cartridge, what do you expect?," completely ignoring the geopolitical realities around the case, and completely ignoring even in Russia, with its incredibly harsh laws, the idea of getting nine years for a vape is something that's completely beyond anything they ever do. I'll repeat, this is hostage diplomacy, and people who don't recognize it as such are choosing not to recognize it as such. It's not just the law and order people, and it's not just about a lack of care for a Black queer woman, although that is certainly a part of it as well.

There's also just this incredible affection for Russia and Vladimir Putin among the authoritarian right. It is an affection. It's almost like they're swooning over what he represents, because of everything from expressions of masculinity, the anti-gay laws in Russia, strong anti-immigrant laws in Russia, the willingness to invade Ukraine. All of these things, they look at as pluses and look at as things to admire and look at as things they want to replicate in the United States. From that perspective, they see what's happening to Brittney Griner as an expression of something they'd like to see in this country, and frankly, that's very chilling.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you talk about the hostage diplomacy and the notion of how this impacts also our domestic politics, I want to take a listen to President Biden earlier this month.

President Biden: My guess is, my hope is that now that the election is over, that Mr. Putin will be able to discuss with us and be willing to talk more seriously about prisoner exchange. That is my intention. My intention is to get her home.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, what role does the public, does sports media, US news media, what role does the public play in making this hostage diplomacy operate in a way that brings Brittney Griner home?

Dave Zirin: It's a great question, and I wish I had an easy answer because, at first, people who cared about Brittney Griner, and specifically people in the WNBA and NBA family, attempted to exercise a politics of silence, hoping that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and this is early on, this is February, March, April, were hoping that he would be able to just organize her release out of fear that too much attention would make Brittney Griner too valuable a hostage diplomacy asset for Vladimir Putin, and make it more difficult to get her home. That wasn't working over the course of months and it wasn't going anywhere.

Brittney Griner's wife Cherelle, she started to actually make some noise and encourage people to do the same. The point of that, at least, was to make sure that her name was at the top of the list of Antony Blinken's to do pad. The point was to do something that hadn't been done before, which was have President Biden comment about Brittney Griner's plight, to meet with Cherelle Griner. These were all positives that have taken place since people started to raise their voices, but I think the hope is that we could build some kind of national unity, I know that sounds precarious to even say, around Griner coming home, and try to find other avenues to make this a reality. I don't know if the United States can reach out to China as somebody who can be an intermediary in this process. China certainly was able to get Putin to step back from his threat of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. I don't know where the points of vulnerability are. We've talked about prisoner exchanges. Viktor Bout, otherwise known as the Merchant of Death, who's an arms dealer in a prison in the United States.

We have, according to reports, offered him up in exchange for Griner, others as well. It does seem like right now Vladimir Putin is far more enjoying seeing the United States in a state of division over this and seeing the people who want to bring Griner home twist in the wind. That seems to be what he is both benefiting from and enjoying right now, because if there's one thing we know about Vladimir Putin is that he probably spends as much or more time studying US domestic politics than he does Russian domestic politics. Seeing Griner as kind of this red state-blue state culture war wedge must drive him to paroxysms of joy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: If that analysis is right, would you presume that unity, univocal perspective across ideological and partisan divides to bring Brittney home would actually take away the value to Putin, that if in fact we were not divided, it might actually move towards that willingness to bring Brittney home?

Dave Zirin: That's a terrific insight, Melissa, and I think that's where this is headed as well, is that Brittney Griner's value to Vladimir Putin. First of all, let's be clear, it's not as a human being, it's not as a wife, it's not as an athlete. Her value comes down to her ability to act as a cudgel to hit against the most tender points of the US political scene right now. We know that those tender points are all over the place. They deal around issues of deep division in this country, really around some of the most basic divisions in this country. We're talking about racism, sexism, homophobia, the criminal justice system, what it means to be tough on crime, what it means to have cannabis legal or illegal and how we respond to that.

All of these things are out there in the air, and Griner's value is in pushing those as pressure points each and every time. Yet, I think if we were able to just get over that and say, "You know what, let's forget about the debate about the war on drugs. Let's try to put aside the hatreds that define this country, and just say, "There's a person in trouble, a human being in great trouble, a human being facing nine years in a labor camp where beatings and torture are reportedly common, and we try to bring her home."" I don't think that that's necessarily achievable, looking at this country. At the same time, the alternative is to do nothing, and that's even more unbearable.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dave Zirin is sports editor for The Nation. He's also the author of The Kaepernick Effect. Dave, as always, thanks for joining us.

Dave Zirin: Thank you, Melissa.

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