Harrison Butker is a devout Catholic, a loving husband and father, a three-time Super Bowl champion, and widely regarded as one of the greatest kickers in NFL history. As of this past Saturday, he’s also a vicious misogynist — at least, if you take the media at their word. Per the BBC: Kansas City Chiefs star Harrison Butker has faced criticism for attacking abortion rights and telling women graduates that one of their most important roles in life is “homemaker”. The three-time Super Bowl winner’s comments were among a number of views he gave during a 20-minute commencement speech at Benedictine College, Kansas. The Chiefs have not commented and the NFL said it was a “personal” matter. However, more than 100,000 people signed a petition for his dismissal. In his speech on May 11, the three-times Super Bowl winner addressed women graduates in the crowd, telling them they had been told “the most diabolical lies”. “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” he said. Paul Kengor has already written a commendable defense of Butker’s entirely defensible (and praiseworthy) speech here at The American Spectator. I want to briefly weigh in on a secondary debate that emerged in the wake of the backlash — sparked, at least in part, by this post from the American Conservative’s Bradley Devlin: Please tell me one other religion in the United States that currently faces more blatant and open persecution than Catholicism… It’s not Judaism, it’s not Islam, it’s not Hinduism, it’s not ‘cafeteria’ Christianity… You can’t name one. https://t.co/1vonFcJNep — Bradley Devlin (@bradleydevlin) May 16, 2024 This is obviously and unambiguously correct — and there’s a body of evidence well above and beyond the explicitly anti-Catholic fervor that met Butker in response to his speech. As Brad pointed out elsewhere, Catholics are without a doubt the single most frequent and substantial religious target of the American security state — and the federal government more broadly. The FBI has tracked, targeted, and even infiltrated the churches of traditionalist Catholics, which the agency deemed as potential violent extremists. The “DOJ,” as Brad noted, “has particularly targeted pro-life Catholics for FACE Act prosecution, but refuses to prosecute FACE Act crimes against Catholics.” Catholic charities have been targeted by federal progressive mandates and dragged into the court system to defend their conscience rights. Even Catholic hospitals have been subjected to increasingly brazen persecution at the hands of the bureaucratic state. (RELATED: Kansas City Chiefs’ Harrison Butker Gives the Best Commencement Speech of 2024) But all this stems from a much more pervasive, targeted anti-Catholic disposition among America’s ruling class. It’s often expressed casually, in passing — such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s infamous “the dogma lives loudly” comment about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett or the rampant and specifically anti-Catholic resentment visible in the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle. But it manifests in material attacks, too: When Roe v. Wade was overturned, left-wing vandalists immediately set about attacking Catholic churches. It was the Catholics — and specifically the Catholics — that they viewed as the wellspring of right-wing evil. All that was on display this week amid the Butker debacle. Within a matter of hours, the outrage on the left shifted from what Butker said, as a distinctive set of statements, to the broader insidious influence of the Catholic Church. On The View, a host accused Butker of “practicing” an “extremist” and “cult-like” sect of Catholicism, comparable to “some religious in the Middle East.” (Butker attends the Traditional Latin Mass). CNN columnist Jill Filipovic reminded her followers that while Butker “deserves all the criticism he’s getting,” the NFL player “also gave this speech at a Catholic school that very much institutionalizes and teaches its students these same misogynist, homophobic values.” She advised them to “worry more about these schools than a single graduation speech.” (“They are the most repressive educational institutions in America,” she added.) There is simply no other religious faith that receives anything akin to this level of open, public hatred — or material state persecution — in modern America. So, it was bewildering when conservatives, of all people, took umbrage at Brad’s statement: I’m just kind of thinking there aren’t any Christian students who can’t go to college right now because they are being harassed and threatened. But I know a lot of Jewish students in that boat. https://t.co/HZd0AZAwBD — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) May 16, 2024 The implication here — that Jews are more persecuted, as a religious cohort, than Catholics in America — is ridiculous. As a brief thought-experiment, think about any of the instances of anti-Catholic bigotry I cited above, and replace “Catholics” with “Jews”: The FBI monitors and infiltrates Orthodox Jewish synagogues due to suspicions that they might be violent extremists. Jewish Supreme Court picks are explicitly interrogated about the nature and fervency of their religious faith, with both U.S. senators and their allies in the media raising concerns that said faith might be disqualifying. High-level political staffers describe Judaism as a “middle ages dictatorship” — the words Clinton allies used to describe Catholicism in their leaked emails. Everyone — not least Republicans — would be screaming bloody murder. It is remarkable to listen to conservatives and Republicans adopt the “safetyism” rhetoric that they spent the past decade mocking, as it pertains to campus anti-Semitism. In response to the campus uprisings, Republicans have scrambled to, among other things, pass brazenly unconstitutional speech-curbing bills to “fight anti-Semitism.” Catholics, on the other hand, have never been afforded that sort of catered legislation — even in the wake of a spate of genuinely violent anti-Catholic attacks over the past few years. That, in and of itself, should tell you all you need to know. The post In Today’s America, Catholicism Is the Most Persecuted Religion appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

One of the most frustrating things for a conservative or right-leaning observer of American politics is watching the Republicans constantly giving away the store every time there’s a negotiation with the communist Left. I talked about this a bit in The Revivalist Manifesto, my first political book (and its sequel, The Revivalist Agenda, is coming up as my next writing project), but there’s a fundamental problem and disadvantage conservatives and Republicans have in those negotiations. (READ MORE: Robert J. Costello, Esq., Should Be Trump’s Defense Witness No. 1) It’s too bad that Donald Trump, who didn’t come up in GOP politics and should have less trouble with this, is falling prey to this dynamic as well. It’s this: Republican policies generally come from the business world, where your aim is to create wealth through the generation and sale of goods and services, or at least the facilitation of those things. In that process, you’re always guided when negotiating deals by the principle of win-win. In productive commerce, a win-win is always better than a win-lose. Win-win deals can be long-term deals. You won’t have to renegotiate them as often, they’re much less likely to end up in court, the other guy is less likely to squirrel out on you, and he’s less likely to go out of business. You can build your business model and make plans and forecasts based on win-win deals. With win-lose deals, you might get the initial euphoria of taking that other guy to the cleaners, but you know it won’t last. When the other guy realizes he’s been had, he’s going to find a way out of that deal. Then you’re back to square one and you’ve got to find a new guy to do business with. But the Democrats don’t do win-win deals, because they don’t come from the business world. They come from academia, or they’re trial lawyers, or they’re union people, or “community activists” whose goal isn’t to build anything but destroy everything. No, they do win-lose deals. When you sit down with them you have to understand you’re sitting down with a predator. (READ MORE: Americans Carrying the Weight of Marxist Utopian Dreams) What exactly does Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton bring to the table when they negotiate with those corporations they shake down? Nothing. What they’re offering is the cessation of threats they make — specifically, they want their intended victims to come up with a price they’ll pay to avoid being defamed as racists. This is a great example of what negotiating with these people is like. It’s not a win-win negotiation. In almost every case, Republicans will come away from a negotiation with the Left carrying less than what they went to the table with. Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal. He should be better than your average Stupid Party Republican win-win negotiator. And yet, Trump’s camp appears, so far, to have been fleeced by Joe Biden’s team on the negotiations over the two presidential debates we’ll supposedly have. 1. Win-Lose Whips Win-Win Every Time What we’ve seen so far of the debate terms looks horribly one-sided. There won’t be three debates; instead, there will be two. One is in June, which is an utterly worthless time frame for a general election voter and was only put forth by Team Biden because he’s attempting to head off his party panicking and replacing him at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Sure, there is some value for Trump in helping Biden stay on the ticket as opposed to somebody younger and saner with less stink of failure in office, but presidential debates in June rather than October are ridiculous. Team Biden wants those debates to be televised by ABC and CNN, which is ridiculous. What does this mean? Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as moderators on CNN? That’s already been announced, by the way. It’s only a matter of time before you hear George Stephanopolous will be on hand for ABC. Under no circumstances should Trump’s camp agree to anything of this sort. Biden is also demanding that candidates’ mics be cut off when they’re not speaking. That might not be all that bad a situation for Trump, as his interruptions of Biden in the first debate back in 2020 were a distraction that led to his underperformance. You would think that talking over Biden might show Trump as more energetic and sharper, but it didn’t work four years ago. Nonetheless, that demand is a direct attempt to limit Trump’s communication at the debate, and it also sets him up for dirty treatment on the part of biased moderators. (READ MORE: Trump’s Best Witnesses for the Defense: Prosecutors) For example, Trump makes a point from a perspective half the country agrees with, and when he finishes, Tapper or Stephanopolous or whatever other Democrat propagandist disguised as an ABC or CNN journo is “moderating” the debate then proceeds to “fact-check” him using some dubious ruling-class narrative. With his mic cut off per Biden’s rules, the “fact-check” is now the last word on that subject unless Trump is willing to gobble up more of his debate time to resuscitate that argument. It’s crazy to agree to that. Frankly, all of Biden’s laundry list of conditions ought to be non-starters — including Biden’s demand that there be no live audience for the debate. 2. Trump Needs A Few Conditions Of His Own The former president issued an “anytime, anywhere” acceptance of Biden’s debate offer, which was presumably before Biden’s conditions were known. Or at least I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Now that Trump has seen Biden’s list, he ought to make his own demands. Here are a few. First, Trump should insist that both candidates take, and release the results of, a drug test both before and after the debate. It’s obvious that Biden’s handlers regularly dose him with stimulants before he appears in public for any length of time. His large black pupils are a dead giveaway of that, and so is his performance. Biden slurs his speech embarrassingly whenever he isn’t on whatever uppers they’re giving him, and then he’ll show up to, for example, his State of the Union speech and scream and yell like a rug merchant at a bazaar for an hour. Everybody understands this, but it ought to be confirmed to the general public. Not just to embarrass Biden. The voters have a right to know if he has to get hopped up on amphetamines to do a critical part of his job. A drug test will either force Team Biden to disclose what he’s on, or he’ll have to go without pharmaceutical enhancements and we’ll see what’s really running the country and how bad off he really is from a cognitive standpoint. Also, Team Trump should insist that nobody with a microphone at the debate be allowed to wear an earpiece. That’s primarily necessary for Biden, who is almost certainly going to be fed answers by his handlers, but it’s also necessary for the moderators — because Team Trump should be mindful that Democrat operatives in the control room will almost certainly feed them one-liners and talking points to slant the debate in Biden’s favor. Trump also ought to reject Bash and Tapper as the CNN moderators and he absolutely should declare Stephanopolous a non-starter. As the Federalist‘s Eddie Scarry suggested, Team Trump should demand that the moderators also have their mics cut off when the candidates are speaking. No “fact-checking.” 3. Let’s Hope This Isn’t A Foreshadowing Of What We Have Coming I really, really don’t like to see this. It has an Archduke-Ferdinant-In-Sarajevo vibe to it. Slovak authorities charged a man Thursday with attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Robert Fico, saying he acted alone in a politically motivated attack that left the longtime leader in serious but stable condition. Fico’s pro-Russia views have contributed to deep divisions in the small European country that borders Ukraine, and the shooting attack Wednesday shocked the nation and reverberated across the continent weeks ahead of elections for the European Parliament. While President-elect Peter Pelligrini and President Zuzana Caputova urged people to dial back the sharp rhetoric that has characterized the country’s political debate, some Fico allies took aim at Slovakia’s media for contributing to the polarization. Robert Fico stood against the perpetuation of the Ukraine war, and it appears the 71-year-old leftist poet Juraj Cintula who shot him was motivated by that issue. Fico is said to be “pro-Russian” and “anti-American.” That’s not really the case. What he’s consistently stood against is the globalist Deep State. What’s scarier is this isn’t a one-off. This also happened: AN Irish nationalist (independent) member of the European Parliament (MEP) threatened with assassination has issued a grim warning, linking his own attack to the shooting of the anti-EU pro-Russian Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. The Irish MP and Slovak PM are both anti-globalist. Fico suffered serious, life-threatening bullet wounds after a gunman in a small crowed of people shot him several times from a pistol yesterday (EU time). He is being treated in hospital and is expected to survive. Fact checkers denied reports that Fico had formally and fully rejected the WHO pandemic accord just days ago. “These are the threats that we face,” said Dublin MEP Malachy Steenson. “Just like the Prime Minister in Slovakia was shot today because he oppposed the European Union agenda. We are going to pay a heavy price in this country for what’s happened. This is the beginning. You have a chance to change it on June the 7th, by voting nationalist across the country.” Steenson, a solicitor by profession, says he and his supporters have evidence pointing to a co-ordinated campaign directed from the very top of the Irish government “to destroy the emerging nationalist movement in this country” and to stop any voices of dissent. It seems like the woke globalist order will be preserved with political violence if necessary. One hopes that determination will stay across the pond, but one also realizes that the horse left the barn and caught a transatlantic flight quite a while ago. 4. About Harrison Butker Paul Kengor did a great job summing up the controversy over Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker’s brilliant commencement speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. Butker gave a stirring, unapologetic defense of Christian living, traditional marriage, masculinity, heterosexuality, and the American way of life, advocating for things that were undeniably mainstream just 20 years ago. (READ Paul’s Piece:  Kansas City Chiefs’ Harrison Butker Gives the Best Commencement Speech of 2024) And he said them at a traditional Catholic school where the students believe those things. For his trouble, some 100,000 people have signed a Change.org petition demanding the Chiefs cut their Super Bowl-winning kicker. How many of those are season ticket holders hasn’t been released, though the answer is almost certainly zero or some number near it. Naturally, the NFL also repudiated Butker, sending out its Chief Diversity Officer to trash his message. The good news is they’re not going to cancel Butker. They can’t. The fans won’t allow it anymore. This isn’t 2015. Hopefully, he’ll keep speaking out. But he’s going to need to make a lot of field goals and extra points this fall. We should be fans of his doing precisely that. 5. The High Prophecy of King of the Jungle  I wrote my latest novel, which has racked up a 4.9-star rating at Amazon since it made its debut there three weeks ago, a few months back. I got started in December after the dictatorial Venezuelan regime held a referendum on the idea of gobbling up two-thirds of its neighbor Guyana. I figured the prospect of a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana would make for a very interesting premise for a novel skewering the political elites both here and in Latin America. Since the book came out, one question I’ve received from the folks who’ve read King of the Jungle has been some variation of this: “Yes, but how likely is this invasion, anyway? Surely Venezuela won’t actually do anything, right?” Well, you wouldn’t think so. On the other hand: Venezuela has moved “substantial quantities of [military] personnel and equipment to the border with Guyana amid its territorial dispute over the Essequibo region. The update comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., which this week released a report on the latest developments in the Venezuela-Guyana dispute. The think tank talks about an expansion of a military base on Anacoco Island in the area, with new roads and a bridge getting built in the past few months. A local airport is also being expanded, CSIS also said, citing satellite imagery and social media posts. According to the report’s authors, the activity could be preparation for a “manufactured crisis” before or after Venezuela’s next elections, set to take place in late July. The Essequibo region encompasses about two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is where most of its oil resources lie, and the site of massive discoveries and new production by Exxon and partners. The International Court of Justice previously ruled that Essequibo is part of Guyana, although this is still not recognized by Venezuela. A written agreement was penned in December between the two that denounced the use of force, instead calling for a commission to address the disputes. So yeah. It’s insane to think a failed state like Venezuela, being decimated by outmigration worse than practically any war-torn country, would invade one of its neighbors. Yet they’re doing all the things you’d expect them to do in advance of going through with it. Which would make the global price of oil skyrocket. It would also cost ExxonMobil and Chevron, two of the largest corporations in America holding controlling interests in producing the offshore oil fueling Guyana’s economy to 60 percent growth last year, billions and billions of dollars if the Venezuelans took those offshore fields by force. All of this would go away very quickly if the American government would make a forceful statement that no Venezuelan invasion of Guyana would be allowed to succeed. That’s an easy threat to make and it’s not so difficult to back it up. Joe Biden does nothing. Maybe he’s trying to sell my book. Thanks but no thanks, Joe. I don’t need the money that badly. The post Five Quick Things: Not Much Art To This Deal appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Sports Illustrated unleashed the latest salvo in its crusade against masturbation this week by placing Gayle King in a bathing suit on its cover. Call it penance for when SI allied against the prudes in the war on masturbation by dropping such bombshells as Vandela Kirsebom and Paulina Porizkova in mailboxes. Does a 69-year-old King on the cover of the swimsuit edition motivate you to buy a copy? No? Well, it inspires nobody else, either. But if you lie and say that it does, then very powerful people will approve of you. We must collectively pretend or individually become pariahs. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 92: Look for Beauty in the Salons and the Ballot Box) Drew Barrymore reacted to her CBS colleague becoming a cover girl by declaring, “It is a moment of true empowerment.” For whom? Certainly not the “readers” who enjoy magazines featuring barely covered models. Another of the four covers features Hunter McGrady, a plus-sized model who weighs well north of 200 pounds. Before a decade ago, when this mania insisting that any woman in a bikini grabs the same attention as Cheryl Tiegs in a bikini started, seeing a 240-pound woman posed in a swimsuit on a magazine cover would seem a type of comedy or a cruel joke. In less than a decade, it has become normalized by producers if still rejected by consumers. Sports Illustrated says of McGrady: “She is unapologetically herself and is constantly moving the needle for true equality throughout all aspects of the fashion and modeling worlds.” In those two words, “true equality,” one grasps just why woke cultural guardians feel it necessary to destroy such things as beauty contests and swimsuit issues. “Modeling” and “true equality” cannot coexist. To acknowledge beauty means to admit the utter farce of equality. A swimsuit issue trips the mental circuits of the woke. (READ MORE: The Anti-Woke Counterrevolution Is Spreading) Some women look better than others. This simple truth blasphemes the social religion of egalitarianism. The mere vision of past cover girls Elle Macpherson, Christie Brinkley, and Tyra Banks offends the modern insistence that “all women are tens.” Sports Illustrated placed them in bathing suits on the cover precisely because they represent not sameness but the exception, not equality but elitism. We’re not supposed to notice what is impossible not to notice. Woke demands of us that we suppress biology to embrace the ideological. This does not work. It forces the oversocialized to lie and the inner-directed to marginalize themselves by uttering uncomfortable truths. Society is worse whenever it rewards lies and punishes truth. Just as a progressive society must squelch jokes that rely on our inequalities for punchlines, they need to ruin the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition as a means of protecting their harebrained dogma. A beautiful woman turns not only men to mush but we-are-all-equal notions to it, too. The same impulse that provoked Pol Pot to dress Cambodia in black pajama uniforms compels the woke to highlight transgenders and fatsos and octogenarians as swimsuit models. Beauty strikes ideological neat freaks as unfair. Perhaps they get that right. But the assumption that this “problem” — as though the sight of Hannah Davis represents a problem — requires a fix (thankfully not yet one of intentionally scarring and uglying up goddesses) seems rather presumptuous given how much people appreciate beauty. It also strikes as incredibly damaging to Sports Illustrated as a commercial endeavor. (READ MORE: Netflix Takes Liberties With Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full) Recall that Sports Illustrated laid off almost every employee earlier this year and that this followed putting transgenders Leyna Bloom and Kim Petras, Elon Musk’s elderly mother, and overweight Ashley Graham on the cover of the swimsuit issue that traditionally served as a great moneymaker for the magazine. Like the aforementioned compulsion that an 81-year-old Martha Stewart in a bathing suit aims to curtail, the ideological tic that imagines Gayle King and Danielle Herrington as equally appealing to connoisseurs of women in swimsuits seems a delusion so deeply ingrained that even bankruptcy cannot cure it. The post Why the Left Destroys <i>Sports Illustrated</i>’s Swimsuit Issue appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from NEM721:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from Revolver News: The Whitmer “kidnapping plot,” “fednapping,” or “hoax,” as it’s more commonly called, is likely one of the biggest entrapment cases the FBI ever staged, aside from January 6. The two plots are intricately connected and part of the same regime scheme to paint Trump supporters as domestic terrorists. However, when news broke […]

Garuda Indonesia 747-412 returns safely to Makassar Airport in Indonesia after an engine failure during takeoff. pic.twitter.com/VibKqCQosc — Breaking Aviation News & Videos (@aviationbrk) May 15, 2024

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Lainey Wilson beat six country men to win the ACM for Entertainer of the Year. Continue reading…