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The Patriot Games Are a Celebration of Affirmative Action
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Every reaping in Panem, the postapocalyptic country in Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series, has one rule. One boy, one girl, per district, drawn from a glass ball in the town square. It doesn't matter whether the district holds 8,000 people, like District 12, or 800,000. Every district sends an equal quota of children to fight to the death.
It was uncharitable, though not surprising, that California Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party reached for this fiction within hours of President Donald Trump announcing the Patriot Games, the military-inspired competition for teenage athletes being held this weekend. "May the odds be ever in your favor," Newsom posted in December, quoting the franchise's catchphrase.
It's a joke, of course. From August 9 to 11, more than 100 teenagers, one boy and one girl from each state, territory or tribal nation, will compete at SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio, the campus where Trump rallied in 2016. They will run skills rounds drawn from football, basketball, soccer and track, the challenges of the revived Presidential Fitness Test , a boot camp circuit and an obstacle course. On August 13, one male and one female champion will be crowned, each collecting $125,000.
So the prize is a scholarship, and the teenagers filled out an application instead of watching their names go into a bowl. But perhaps Newsom and the other Democratic critics were on to something. Because there is an irony in the Patriot Games: it takes affirmative action by geography and sex and applies it to an America 250 celebration . The difference is that it's the kind of affirmative action the administration wants, not the kind it has repeatedly said it doesn't want.
Democratic reaction to the Patriot Games was mostly Newsom-flavored mockery. In response, Dean Cain, the former Superman actor who competed on American Gladiators and now promotes the event, told the New York Post that nobody will be killed, the teenagers asked to be there, and no tribute is required.
The sex split is not incidental either. Announcing the games, Trump promised no men would play in women's sports, tying the event to his February 2025 order reserving female athletic categories.
The fitness test he revived last July, and whose award he brought back in May, sets its own benchmarks by gender too. Nobody on either side of the debate called any of that a quota.
Yet the Patriot Games begin with two decisions made before the selection committee watches a single application video.
The first is that every state and territory must be represented, and the second is that the field must contain one boy and one girl from each.
The committee was therefore never asked to identify the best teenage all-rounders in the country and rank them from first to last. It was asked to find the strongest eligible candidates for positions already defined by sex and geography.
That is a quota. Does it mean it is also unfair?
The National Federation of State High School Associations recorded 852,575 athletic participations in California during the 2024-25 school year: 474,876 among boys and 377,699 among girls. Wyoming recorded 22,217 in total: 12,196 among boys and 10,021 among girls.
That makes California's potential athletic field roughly 39 times larger for boys and 38 times larger for girls. Yet California and Wyoming were each allotted precisely one male and one female contestant.
The organizers did not merely tolerate that disparity, but designed it. The reason is that the Patriot Games are intended to be a national celebration, an attempt to put the whole American map on television as a shared festivity.
That, however, is the point. The Trump administration does not object to group-conscious selection. It objects to particular groups being recognized for particular purposes.
Geography has, in fact, always occupied a place beside race in American affirmative-action theory.
In the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell rejected the medical school's rigid racial quota but allowed race to operate as one consideration within an individualized admissions process.
The model came from Harvard. Its description of holistic admissions said that "a farm boy from Idaho" might bring something to the college that a Boston applicant could not, before making a similar argument about the contribution of racial background. Geography and race were presented as examples of characteristics that might add something to an institution beyond an applicant's scores.
After courts barred race-conscious admissions in Texas in the 1990s, the state guaranteed admission to students near the top of every high school's graduating class. Geography became a race-neutral way of producing a class drawn from different communities, including schools serving heavily minority neighborhoods.
Then, in 2023, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended the use of race as an admissions advantage at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The ruling did not prohibit institutions from seeking geographic, economic or experiential diversity through race-neutral means.
The Trump administration has pushed the distinction further.
Executive Order 14281, signed in April 2025, rejects policies producing outcomes predetermined by immutable characteristics and argues for equality of opportunity rather than equal results. Its central promise is that people should be treated as individuals rather than as components of racial groups.
The Justice Department's subsequent guidance warned that targeting particular geographic areas could become unlawful when geography was being used as a concealed substitute for race. That is not what the Patriot Games are doing: the games are honest about their quotas.
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