Why America's Woke Blade Angel Captured The Hearts Of Conservatives
Alysa Liu represented the United States and did so excellently.
Alysa Liu was born in 2005 to a surrogate mother. She was conceived using an anonymous donor egg. Liu is biracial — half Chinese, half white. She was raised in the Bay Area. Her hair is dyed in racoon-like stripes, her frenulum self-pierced with shiny horseshoe-shaped metal. She attends the University of California, Los Angeles.
That is to say, 20-year-old Liu is obviously a deeply principled conservative. Take a look at her Olympic gold-medal winning figure skating routine, which clearly paid homage to Pat Buchanan’s 1999 book, “A Republic, Not an Empire.”
Of course, that isn’t the case. As I noted in my initial piece comparing Liu to fellow Olympian Eileen Gu, Liu presents as left-wing. I didn’t care to confirm my intuitions at the time of writing because Liu’s politics were irrelevant to her performance and behavior at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics.
But the discourse mill has churned, and Liu’s politics are now in the spotlight.
Liu won a team gold medal and a singles gold medal at this year’s Olympic games. The latter accomplishment makes Liu the first American woman to medal in figure skating at the Olympics since 2006, and the first to win gold since 2002. Liu was pictured at the games wrapped in the American flag, beaming, and filmed holding her right hand over her heart as The Star-Spangled Banner played.
In interviews, Liu largely focused on her comeback to figure skating, her family, and her perspective on athletic competition.
Liu represented the United States and did so excellently. She didn’t use the games as an opportunity to score points against the country she was representing, unlike Liu’s teammate Amber Glenn, or skier Hunter Hess. Also, she’s bubbly and cute.
Cue the cheers from right-wing posters on X — particularly given the contrast between Liu and Gu. (Quickly, for the uninitiated: Both are half-Chinese, born and raised in Northern California, and have an apparently domineering parent each. Both were reportedly recruited by the Chinese Communist Party to compete for them. Liu and her father, who fled China following his involvement in protests after the Tiananmen Square massacre, declined. Gu and her mother accepted.)
Thus rang the refrain: “In a world of Eileen Gus [or Colin Kaepernicks, or Amber Glenns] be an Alysa Liu.”
Some leftists were none too pleased to see a left-coded Zoomette claimed as an avatar of patriotism.
The House Republicans’ X account congratulated Liu on her win, provoking Sam Jeske, a former press secretary for Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
“She fucking hates you guys,” Jeske wrote in response to the friendly congratulations. It strikes me as uncharitable to attribute hatred to a public figure on the basis of scant evidence.
Others were simply confused by the right’s embrace of Liu.
Let’s review the evidence for Liu’s “wokeness.”
Glenn, who claims to be bisexual and pansexual, posted a TikTok of herself and Liu, captioned, “they hate to see two woke bitches winning.”
Liu reportedly listed her pronouns on Instagram as “she/they.” Her Instagram account now lists no pronouns.
Liu attended a UCLA pro-Palestine protest, according to screenshots of her Instagram.
“I definitely do really care about what our country is doing. And I think it is really important, also, to, you know, notice, like the faults in our own government … Very similar to my dad, like, yeah, things, things are … a little rough in our countries, but I think every government has its issues. There’s so many protests that are going on, and I’ve attended, and … coming from a family of immigrants … I think immigrants deserve rights,” Liu said to ABC10 during an interview aired Oct. 23, 2025.
So, by all accounts, Liu is probably “woke.” I don’t care. I would be shocked were the 20-year-old biracial alt-girl from Oakland anything but. No one on the right is looking to Liu for political guidance (I presume). They’re praising her incredible athleticism. Liu has accomplished something very few people, woke or not, will ever accomplish. And she did so for Team USA.
The most hardened lefties are incapable of understanding how or why a Trump-voter would celebrate Liu, because they cannot imagine themselves celebrating someone with different politics. I’m reminded of a 2023 study from the British Journal of Social Psychology, which examined the attitudes of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. The authors’ conclusions suggest the label “conservative” is perhaps better appended to the left than the right.
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