On Saturday, the team will face off against Brazil in the gold medal match at the Olympics, after scoring wins over Zambia, Germany (twice), Australia, and Japan.
For years, the U.S. women’s soccer team has been seen as a bastion of wokeness, perhaps most famously when Megan Rapinoe feuded with then-President Donald Trump.
But one new player suggests the team finally might be getting some ideological diversity.
Korbin Albert, a 20-year-old picked to be a midfielder for the women’s team for the Paris Olympics, is no Rapinoe, who was infamous for publicizing her woke views.
She’s already proved herself in the Olympics, successfully scoring a goal during the Olympics match between the U.S. and Australian women’s soccer teams July 31. The final score was 2-1, the winning goal scored by Albert, who previously played for the University of Notre Dame and now plays for a Paris-based soccer team.
But Albert’s admission to the Olympics seemingly came at quite a high cost. To use the language of the woke, she wasn’t allowed to speak her truth.
When Albert scored her winning goal, NBC commentator Jon Champion highlighted the “controversy” surrounding her. “For the all the pre-tournament controversy that surrounded her, teammates rush to her to share a memorable moment,” Champion intoned. He’s not the only media figure to slap the “controversial” label on Albert.
The Associated Press reported in April about “a controversy over midfielder Korbin Albert’s social media posts,” while the New York Post headlined a June article, “Controversial USWNT star Korbin Albert named to Olympic team.” USA Today dutifully noted, “Albert became the center of controversy in March …”
So, what exactly did this young woman do? Well, the word “controversy” became glued to her when it emerged that Albert … held Christian beliefs. The athlete reportedly liked a politically incorrect social media post and shared another one.
Albert also posted a video during the 2023 Fourth of July weekend on TikTok “showing her family taking turns stating that ‘their pronouns are U.S.A.’” according to The Athletic, a sports news site owned by The New York Times.
The soccer star reportedly also shared a video on social media of a person, seemingly in a church and wearing a “Jesus wins” shirt, discussing with regret how he had pursued same-sex attractions and a transgender life.
Soccer player Korbin Albert is under fire for reposting the video below in which a teen discusses hardships he faced which led him to thinking he was trans. He started believing in God, found faith, and detransitioned.
An X user claimed that Albert had liked a meme taking aim at Rapinoe, who had been injured early in her final game before retirement. “I’m not a religious person or anything, and if there was a God, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” a disappointed Rapinoe said about her injury at a press conference last year, according to Fox News. “This is f—ed up.”
The meme Albert allegedly liked said, “God taking time off performing miracles to make sure Megan Rapinoe sprains her ankle in her final ever game.” (If you’re keeping score, note it was Rapinoe who first decided to make her injury a chance to share her religious views.)
Albert’s social media activity drew notice, and a social media post from Rapinoe ranting about “the people who want to hide behind ‘my beliefs.’” Subsequently, Albert deleted some content and posted an apology that read in part, “Liking and sharing posts that are offensive, insensitive, and hurtful was immature and disrespectful, which was never my intent.”
But the apology didn’t appear to satisfy her critics. Which says a lot about where we’re at in 2024.
For years, players in the U.S. women’s soccer team have been openly political. Just to recap: Rapinoe refused to stand for the playing of the national anthem, citing solidarity with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick; said she would never go to the White House and feuded with Trump; and argued for the inclusion of trans players in women’s sports—a curious stance, given that the U.S. women’s soccer team lost to high school boys in a 2017 scrimmage. She is gay and open about it, and when she was required to stand in later years for the national anthem, she refused to sing along or put her hand on her heart.
Nor was Rapinoe alone in her advocacy. In a 2022 game in Texas, about the time Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was taking action to protect kids from experimental medical treatment, “several USWNT players wore athletic tape around their wrists with the message ‘Protect Trans Kids,’” The Athletic reported.
Later in Florida, another state that has worked to protect kids, The Athletic reported that “[t]he players wore tape on their wrists again, this time with the words ‘Defend Trans Joy.’” In 2023, Becky Sauerbrunn, another player on the team, wrote a passionate opinion column for the Springfield News-Leader in Missouri advocating against a state bill that aimed to ensure only girls and women were playing in women’s sports. Yet it is Albert whose apology tour has never really ended.
Fresh off her winning goal, Albert dutifully praised coach Emma Hayes’ “tough love” in remarks. Hayes in turn told the media, “We all know that she’s been through a lot with her actions, and she’s someone who is truly sorry for what she’s done … She’s had to do a fair bit of growing up.”
— U.S. Women's National Soccer Team (@USWNT) August 1, 2024
The message is clear: There’s no room on the U.S. women’s national soccer team for anyone who espouses different views on LGBTQ+ matters.
So, just to be clear, aside from the alleged liking of a social media post making fun of Rapinoe (whose comments about God also had arguably been offensive), Albert has never been accused of targeting any teammate or saying something to any individual deemed offensive. There’s no suggestion she was ever less than professional and polite to her fellow soccer players.
But she dared to think for herself. And that can’t be allowed, apparently.
Korbin Albert warms up prior to the match between Australia and the United States during the Olympic Games Paris 2024 July 31, 2024, in Marseille, France. (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
More than half of Americans think it’s morally wrong to “change” your gender, according to a June Gallup poll. A third of Americans believe that gay and lesbian relationships are morally wrong, according to a May Gallup poll.
Albert’s views, if indeed the social media videos did reflect her views, might not be popular among female soccer players, but they’re well within the mainstream of American thought. Soccer is the third-most popular sport for female high school athletes, behind track and field and volleyball, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. In the 2022-2023 high school year, more than 375,000 high school girls played soccer. Do they all have to become leftists, or at least take a vow of silence on their politically incorrect beliefs, if they want to play in the Olympics some day?
That’s absurd.
How many Americans regularly work with colleagues, love family members, and cherish friends who don’t agree with us on every aspect of morality? Why should the U.S. women’s soccer team players not be asked to do the same?
I hope Albert scores the winning goal, again, on Saturday. And I hope that when she has proved herself to be invaluable to the team, she can finally be free to be honest about what she believes.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Men, claiming to be women, are now allowed to box against real women in the 2024 Olympics, causing injuries. This is the real “war on women.”
“This is Unjust!” – ‘Biological Male’ Boxer Viciously Beats Female Opponent and Forces Her to Quit in Tears Within Seconds at Woke Olympics (VIDEO)
By Cullen Linebarger – Aug 01. 2024
This is the future Democrats led by Kamala Harris want for all female sports in America.
The Paris Olympics erupted in controversy again on Thursday after a “biological man” easily “prevailed” in an Olympic boxing match after smacking around a much smaller and weaker woman for just under a minute. This follows the Olympic organizers cruelly insulting Christians during the opening ceremonies with a Last Supper reenactment involving drag queens. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
An Italian boxer’s decision to abandon her Olympic match against an Algerian fighter who was deemed to have male chromosomes has reinvigorated controversy around gender fairness.
A former Olympic boxing champion called out organizers for allowing the fight to even take place on “America’s Newsroom” on Thursday.
“It is very hard to qualify for the Olympics,” two-time Team USA Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields said.
“You have to go through so many different international tournaments, country tournaments to even make it to the Olympics. So, for me, I can understand her devastation. But it shouldn’t be ruined due to a man. And I think that the Olympics definitely dropped the ball.”
Angela Carini of Team Italy reacts after abandoning the Women’s 66kg preliminary round match against Imane Khelif of Team Algeria in the first round on day six of the 2024 Summer Olympics at North Paris Arena in Paris on Thursday. (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif defeated Italy’s Angela Carini in Paris on Thursday after Carini abandoned the match 46 seconds after it began, saying afterward that one punch from Khelif “hurt too much” to continue.
“[At] my first Olympics, I was 17 years old, so I hadn’t even fully developed as a woman, so I couldn’t imagine getting inside the ring with a biological man,” Shields said.
“I don’t even see how the Olympics done something like this.”
Khelif fought under a firestorm of controversy regarding a failed gender eligibility test in 2023. DNA tests showed Khelif tested positive for having high levels of testosterone.
Algeria’s Imane Khelif, left, fights Italy’s Angela Carini in their women’s 66kg preliminary boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris on Thursday. (AP Photo/John Locher)
“Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women. According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition,” International Boxing Association president Umar Kremlev said.
Khelif and the Algerian Olympic Committee (COA) both denied the claims. The International Olympic Committee also cleared Khelif to compete in the Games.
Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting was also cleared to compete despite failing to meet gender eligibility standards alongside Khelif in 2023.
“It’s just unfair. I just can’t believe that it’s being done, and I just couldn’t imagine it happening to me,” Shields said.
Italy’s ANSA quoted Rosario Coco, the president of Gaynet Communications in Italy, as saying that he learned Khelif was intersex and not transgender.
“In contrast to the reports that have been circulating, the Algerian athlete Imane Khelif is not a trans woman,” Coco told the news agency.
“From the information we have about her, she is an intersex person, who has always socialized as a woman and has a sporting history in women’s competitions.”
Claressa Shields celebrates after defeating Savannah Marshall during their undisputed middleweight championship fight at The 02 Arena in London on Oct. 15, 2022. (Mark Robinson/Top Rank Inc via Getty Images)
Shields has vocalized her outrage against the decision to allow Khelif and Yu-Ting to compete in the Olympics, arguing athletes should compete against opponents of the same sex.
“I don’t have anything against transgender women or transgender men. All I’m saying is men should fight against men, women should fight against women and transgenders should fight against transgenders,” Shields stated.
Fox News’ Ryan Gaydos contributed to this report.
Madeline Coggins is a Digital Production Assistant on the Fox News flash team with Fox News Digital.
Barbara Butch, the LGBTQ activist who was the center figure in the controversial “Last Supper” Paris Olympic scene is threatening to sue those criticizing her. Butch played the role (wearing a Christ-like halo) viewed by many as a spoof on Christ in the Last Supper. The creators insist that they were going for a type of “pagan party” of Olympic gods and sent a message of tolerance. Art experts have supported the creators and pointed to paintings that inspired the pagan motif. That is not exactly what was seen by millions of Christians who were deeply insulted by the parody.
The question is not the intent of the creators, but the intent of critics in denouncing the display and its participants.
The threat of legal action would not be especially serious in the United States where opinion is given robust protection in both criminal and civil cases. In France, however, free speech is in a free fall with the left pushing for the censorship and criminalization of an ever-expanding range of political and religious speech.
The ceremony itself had some truly powerful and stunning elements. I enjoyed the mix of music and imagery as well as the effort to show the diversity of France. However, other elements were more divisive or excessive. For example, the producers decided to use the ceremony to feature such elements as three young people hooking up for a “ménage à trois.” With many families watching with kids, many of us thought the scene was inappropriate for such an event. However, it was the supper scene that led to protests from clerics and critics. While claiming a message of “tolerance,” the scene was taken as yet another slap at religious elements in society. That is a debate that has continued to rage, particularly on the Internet.
Audrey Msellati, Butch’s attorney, posted a statement on Butch’s Instagram account that the DJ and activist will seek legal action after being “the target of an extremely violent campaign of cyber-harassment and defamation.” She is promising to file “several complaints against these acts.”
Clearly, any direct and intentional threats of violence against Butch should be prosecuted, as they can be prosecuted in the United States. However, the French laws sweep far more broadly in criminalizing opinion and what I have called “rage rhetoric.”
Once the cradle of individual liberty, France long ago became a global leader in the crackdown on free speech.
These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
That is why the homage in the Olympics to Liberté rang hollow for many of us in the free speech community. The French leaders have long been hypocritical in claiming to support free speech, such as marching in support of the Charles Hebdo magazine after the massacre after cracking down on its editors and writers.
Thomas Jolly, the artistic director for the opening ceremony of the Olympics, clearly wanted to be provocative in these scenes. He succeeded. Clearly, such provocative elements will spur debate and discussion, including heated opinions. Use of criminal sanctions for those expressing opinion would make a mockery of the display of fealty to French liberties that Jolly features in his ceremony.
A West Virginia school board “punished” a group of middle school girls who protested a biological male competing against them at a track meet earlier this month, according to a legal complaint.
Cellphone video showed girls from Lincoln Middle School staging a protest in the shot-put ring at the Harrison County Middle School Championships on April 18; one by one, they stepped into the ring and then quickly stepped out without making attempts.
🚨🚨FIVE middle school female athletes in West Virginia refuse to throw shot put against male, Becky Pepper-Jackson.
This comes just 2 days after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the WV law that says you must compete in the category that matches your sex.
While the video in the post from female athlete advocate Riley Gaines appears to show six separate protests by Lincoln girls in the shot put ring, AthleticNet indicated that five Lincoln girls posted “ND” (no distance) in the finals. Gaines also wrote that five girls refused to participate.
Blaze News reported that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just days prior to the meet ruled in a 2-1 decision that a West Virginia law requiring every student athlete to participate in accordance with their biological sex violates the Title IX rights of Becky Pepper-Jackson — the student against whom the girls protested.
Pepper-Jackson — a biological male — has been living as a female and taking puberty blockers for years. AthleticNet said Pepper-Jackson of Bridgeport won the shot put final at the meet with a toss of 32 feet, 9 inches, easily besting the second-place finisher by more than three feet.
What happened next?
Parents of four of the five protesting girls filed the legal complaint against the Harrison County Board of Education. The complaint states the girls attended an April 24 press conference addressing their protest. Attendees included Gaines and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Auditor J.B. McCuskey, along with several Republicans from the state Senate and House of Delegates, the complaint states.
The complaint also states that the next day — Thursday — the father of one of the girls “spoke with Lincoln Middle School principal Lori Scott,” who told him that the girls who protested “would not be permitted to compete in a scheduled track and field meet on April 27, 2024.”
The complaint also states that a father of another girl spoke with coach Dawn Riestenberg, who “informed him that his daughter would not be allowed to participate in the scheduled track and field meet on April 27.” The complaint adds that Riestenberg told the dad that the girls were barred from the meet because it was her job “to score points for the track team,” which the complaint says correlates to “the minor student athletes’ protest and subsequent appearance at a press conference to the decision to ban them from competition.”
The complaint states that the protesting girls “are being punished” by the school board “for exercising their rights to freedom of speech and expression under the Constitution of West Virginia.”
The complaint was filed Friday — the day before the April 27 meet from which the girls allegedly were barred — and seeks no monetary damages, only “injunctive relief.” State Attorney General Morrisey filed an amicus brief Friday in support of the parents’ complaint.
“The only thing this decision does is teach these children to keep their mouths shut and not disagree with what they saw as unfairness,” Morrisey said in a news release, according to WBOY-TV. “That is outrageous and it tramples these students’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.”
Apparently, the complaint and even support from the state attorney general were not enough.
AthleticNet records show that none of the Lincoln Middle School girls listed in the complaint took part in the shot put competition at the Mid Mountain 10 Championships on April 27.
In addition, while it’s been reported that the protesting girls were barred from competition for a longer period of time, all the girls in the complaint are listed on the shot put stat sheet from a Monday invitational meet.
The school board on Tuesday didn’t immediately reply to Blaze News’ request for comment on the complaint.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education unveiled a sweeping set of rules on Friday that effectively erase protections for sex-based spaces by expanding the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” — a term that’s never mentioned in the original law.
A majority of Americans agree that males who claim to identify otherwise should not be allowed to infiltrate girls’ and women’s sports teams. As of now, some 25 states have laws or regulations aimed at keeping boys and men out of female-only spaces, on and off the field. Yet, come Aug. 1, the Democrat regime’s radial redefinition of “sex-based discrimination” poses a threat to sex-based protections and welcomes males into female spaces including athletic competitions, locker rooms, and sex-specific clubs such as sororities, despite state laws.
“The final regulations will help to ensure that all students receive appropriate support when they experience sex discrimination and that recipients’ procedures for investigating and resolving complaints of sex discrimination are fair to all involved,” the rules claim.
The regulations do even more damage, however, such as by undoing Trump-era due process safeguards for those accused of sexual misconduct, which could include merely using accurate pronouns. They also encroach on parents’ rights and threaten academic free speech by incentivizing schools to censor students and teachers with traditional views on sex and marriage, so they don’t lose federal funding.
In the regulations, the Biden administration openly admits it relied on the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision to inform its rulemaking. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined their Democrat-nominated colleagues to expand the prohibition against employment discrimination based on “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
A draft of the rules released in June 2022 received a “record number” of comments from Americans warning that enacting such extensive provisions and redefining terms like “sexual harassment” would bully schools into mandating the spread of radical gender ideology.
In response to Biden’s Department of Education ignoring some 240,000 comments, “a coalition of organizations” including the Independent Women’s Forum andIndependent Women’s Law Center are suing the administration, according to an IWF press release. In 2022 and 2023, those groups sentlegal and policyobjections to the new rule.
“Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘sex,’ which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for ‘gender identity,’ which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX,” Director of Independent Women’s Law Center May Mailman said, noting the rules are illegal.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a West Virginia law that prohibited transgender girls from competing against biological girls in sports. The 2-1 ruling came from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling found the law violated Title IX – in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, its West Virginia chapter and Lambda Legal.
A federal appeals court struck down West Virginia’s transgender sports ban. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
The court said the law cannot be applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 13-year-old girl who had been taking puberty blockers and has identified as a girl since the third grade.
“This is a tremendous victory for our client, transgender West Virginians, and the freedom of all youth to play as who they are,” ACLU West Virginia attorney Joshua Block said.
West Virginia’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” was signed into law in 2021. The law ordered student-athletes to compete and play against those of their biological gender. Lawyers for the girl originally had sued the school board after Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill into law, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment and protections under Title IX.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill in 2021. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, File)
U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin ruled against the transgender girl in January 2023 and also ruled the laws did not violate Title IX protections. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to reinstate a preliminary injunction.
The Supreme Court ruled last April that the transgender girl could compete with biological girls on the middle school’s girls’ sports teams. Supreme Court justices refused to disturb an appeals court order that made it possible for the girl to continue playing on her school’s track and cross-country teams. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision.
West Virginia was one of at least 24 states that had laws barring transgender women and girls from competing against the gender they identify as.
“I will keep fighting to safeguard Title IX. We must keep working to protect women’s sports so that women’s safety is secured and girls have a truly fair playing field,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said. “We know the law is correct and will use every available tool to defend it.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body“to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”
The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports. The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”
That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”
John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.
The Illusion of Testosterone Suppression
But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.
Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.
Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.
While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.
Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.
When ‘Obvious’ Sex Differences Are Not Enough
Brown’s article came out a few months after John Armstrong (mentioned above), sociologist Alice Sullivan of University College London, and I published a paper on the role of sex versus gender expression in distance running. Having been on the receiving end of many tweets and articles saying, “Duh, obvious, did we need research to prove this?” I asked Brown if we really needed quantitative research to prove that boys run faster than girls.
“Some court cases regarding transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports said there’s no evidence of prepubescent sex-based differences. This kind of work does matter to inform policy. Moreover, it can be useful to evaluate the obvious because some of the things we take for granted as truth, maybe they’re not,” Brown said.
The obvious question in response to this accumulation of “obvious” data is: What will it take to restore and enforce sex-based categories in sports at all levels? Even if the International Olympic Committee aligned its policies with the Lundberg paper, the IOC is not binding on youth sports, grassroots sports, or even the NCAA.
Brown is optimistic about “the grassroots level, where girls and women’s sports will start being limited to female athletes. Some school districts and other local organizations are making female-only sports policies when state or higher-level organizations won’t.”
Brown noted the lawsuit against the NCAA by female athletes will “make those in charge of sports have second thoughts about their transgender inclusion policies. Before there was a fear of lawsuits from transgender activists, but now the shoe is on the other foot.”
He also called on “scholarly journals, sports science organizations, and sports scientists to speak out and keep the reality of sex-based differences in sports performance in the news to counteract the 20-year head start the transgender activists have.”
ICONS is funding the lawsuit that Brown mentioned. “We need people to realize there can be no fear and no shame in standing up for women. It’s a basic message that we all have the responsibility to communicate clearly,” said ICONS co-founder Kim Jones. “The stories of women and girls being robbed of fair sport, or even facing injury, are the path of change. It shouldn’t take women and girls being hurt, but everyone has the clear evidence.”
Jon Pike, a sports philosopher and a co-author of the Lundberg paper, advises sports organizations to look to the evidence and not to the IOC.
“They are training and developing athletes who aspire to international competition. They owe female athletes the same level playing field that they will get at the international level. Female athletes at all levels are entitled to fair sport,” he said.
Objective empirical data that accord with everyday experience and observation are the most powerful counters to the emotion, rhetoric, and threats that often accompany attempts to deny the validity of female-only spaces and categories.
The value of studies like those of Lundberg, Brown, Armstrong, and their respective colleagues will play out in board rooms and courtrooms, not to mention the living rooms where so many grassroots sports decisions are made. The more decision-makers can rely on research rather than earnest but shallow plaints of “But it’s obvious!” the more women and girls will flourish in fair and competitive sports.
George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.
A male high school athlete who identifies as a female took first place in a girls’ high jump competition on Sunday, defeating all female athletes in the girls’ Division II high jump at the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association indoor track and field championship.
Maelle Jacques completed a 5-foot-2-inch jump to secure the top spot at the meet held at Plymouth State University, according to meet results. By comparison, 5-foot-8-inches was the lowest completed jump in the boys’ Division II championship meet. The winning jumper on the male side performed a 6-foot jump.
Jacques is a trans-identified Kearsarge Regional High School sophomore who competes as a girl. According to New Hampshire’s Track and Field Results Reporting System, the athlete is tied as the top-ranked high jumper in the division.
Women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines reacted to the news of Jacques winning the state title in a Wednesday post on X, which included a photo of the male athlete adorned with medals.
Maelle Jacques (male) won a state title in girls high jump this past weekend in New Hampshire
He won the women's category with a 5'2" jump. This is 10 inches lower than the best boys high jump at 6'0"
“Another less than mediocre man atop a women’s podium,” Gaines wrote. “He must be so proud.”
In a follow-up post, Gaines shared a video of Jacques performing the high jump that won him the state title.
Video of his high jump that won a girls state title. Watch as he celebrates when his female competitor doesn't clear the jump: pic.twitter.com/c4PUPP5wQH
The NHIAA, which oversees high school sports in the Granite State, did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
NHIAA policies state that the association is “committed to providing transgender student-athletes with equal opportunities to participate in NHIAA athletic programs consistent with their gender identity.”
“Therefore, for purposes of sports participation, the NHIAA shall defer to the determination of the student and his or her local school regarding gender identification,” the NHIAA policy document reads. “In this regard, the school district shall determine a student’s eligibility to participate in a NHIAA gender specific sports team based on the gender identification of that student in current school records and daily life activities in the school and community at the time that sports eligibility is determined for a particular season.”
A school district is required to verify that a student is not merely pretending to identify as trans for the purpose of gaining an “unfair advantage” in competitive athletics. The athlete competed in four regular-season indoor track meets and won first place in the high jump each time, according to the results.
During a congressional hearing last year regarding the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rule changes, Gaines stressed that inclusion cannot take priority over “safety and fairness” for women and girls. Under the proposed rule changes, policies that prevent males who identify as females from competing on female sports teams would be considered a violation of the law.
The women’s sports advocate also highlighted studies that have found trans-identifying male athletes typically maintain a biological advantage, on average, over women even after taking feminizing hormones. She also cited examples of female athletes suffering serious injuries after competing with men.
“There’s a place for everyone to play sports in this country,” the former University of Kentucky swimmer said. “But unsafe, unfair and discriminatory practices towards women must stop. Inclusion cannot be prioritized over safety and fairness.”
Gaines competed against and tied trans-identifying athlete Lia (Will) Thomas during the National College Athletics Association championships in 2022. Thomas competed on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania for three years before he began competing on the women’s team.
Despite tying with the male athlete in the 200-yard freestyle race for fifth place, she said she was denied the trophy during post-meet photos. According to Gaines, an NCAA official told her that it was necessary for Thomas to hold the trophy for photo purposes.
“It was clear to me, my teammates, and my competitors that they had reduced everything we had worked for our entire life to a photo-op to validate the feelings and the identity of a male,” Gaines said.
Former Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders’ career has largely been defined by his record-setting performances on the football field. Whether it was breaking tackles or rushing in touchdowns under seemingly impossible circumstances, Sanders has arguably solidified himself as the greatest running back in NFL history never to win a Super Bowl.
But what may surprise people is that buried beneath the media headlines and glamorous titles is a man who loved the game far more than the celebrity that came with it.
In Prime Video’s “Bye Bye Barry,” viewers are shown a humble Sanders whose excitement for football is generated not by setting personal records or winning individual awards but by playing to the best of his ability for his teammates. During the last game of his high school career, for example, Sanders was less than 100 yards shy of the state rushing title and was offered the chance to keep playing to break it. With his team leading by a comfortable margin, Sanders declined and instead allowed the team’s younger members to get playing time.
Sanders would carry this level of humility with him into his respective careers at Oklahoma State (1986-1988) and Detroit (1989-1998). Following a historic 1988 college season, the Kansas native was designated as a finalist for — and ultimately won — the Heisman Trophy, the accolade given to college football’s most outstanding player. While Sanders was grateful for the recognition, those closest to him noted how he “didn’t want” the award because he “never really cared about accolades.”
When he became the third professional player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season in 1997, he continued to play the game with the same “business as usual” mentality he’d always played with. Instead of celebrating after running a big play or scoring a touchdown, he’d just hand the ball off to the referee and jog back to his team, ready for the next play.
For Sanders, the game was never about him. It was about the team and finding ways he could help bring them to victory. Everything else — fame, awards, media coverage — was irrelevant, so his decision to announce his retirement from the NFL via fax isn’t all that surprising.
Contrast such humility with the behavior displayed by many of today’s professional athletes. Whether it’s making a first down or scoring a touchdown, the average, modern-day NFL player gets up and immediately starts dancing or engaging in some bizarre celebration — even if his team is losing. All that matters is being commended for what he — not the team — accomplished.
And sure, sometimes players engage in team celebrations in the endzone after scoring a touchdown — but they’re no less childish than if a single player did them.
It’s perfectly fine for players to experience joy while playing a sport they love. In fact, we should encourage more of that. But when that happiness transforms into clownish behavior and self-centeredness, the respectability of the game suffers. After all, there isn’t an “I” in “team.”
“Bye Bye Barry” does a terrific job at showcasing Sanders’ legendary career and providing an in-depth look at the man inside the helmet. But above all, it documents a bygone era in which modesty and humility were prioritized over the narcissistic individualism that frequents today’s professional sports.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Two biologically male athletes who identify as females took the top spots in an Illinois cycling competition last weekend after taking the top two places in an October race. Results from the Montrose Beach Cyclocross event in Montrose Beach, Chicago, Sunday show that Tessa Johnson and Evelyn Williamson won first and second place, respectively, in the Cyclocross Women Single Speed race.
Johnson finished the race in 33 minutes and 33 seconds, while Williamson completed it in 35 minutes and 28 seconds. The third-place finisher, Kristen Chalmers, finished the race in 36 minutes and 48 seconds.
In a social media post Sunday, Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has emerged as one of the most forceful critics of policies allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that align with their stated gender identity, said that “two men take 1st & 2nd at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships yesterday.” She lamented, “@usacycling has 2 categories for men and none for women.”
An X account with the handle @i_heart_bikes provided a picture of the top three finishers, asserting that “men took the top two podium spots in the women’s singlespeed category at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships.” The post noted that “Tessa (Michael) Johnson took [first place] and ‘Evelyn’ Williamson took [second place].”
“Thanks to @usacycling, men are racing in women’s categories all over the US,” the post added.
Today male racers Tessa (Michael) Johnson and Evelyn Williamson once again proved they are GREAT at women's cyclocross at Jackson Park in Chicago.
Johnson took 🥇in both the women's 1/2 AND the singlespeed.
A spreadsheet documenting the results of the 2023 Chicago CycloCross Cup, of which the Montrose Beach race was the eighth and final event, shows that Johnson won first place overall in both the Women Single Speed category and the Women’s Category 1/2. This makes Johnson a 2023 Illinois State Cyclocross champion in two separate categories.
Johnson and Williamson took the top two spots at the Chicago CycloCross Cup in October, and Johnson previously competed in men’s categories at Clemson University, OutKick reports.
The participation of trans-identified males in women’s sports has become a hot-button issue in American politics. Arguments against allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex focus on the concerns that the physical differences between men and women give male athletes, on average, an unfair advantage over their female counterparts.
USA Powerlifting, a national sporting organization that enacted bans on biological men competing in women’s sports, identifies the differences between men and women as “increased body and muscle mass, bone density, bone structure, and connective tissue.” A 2020 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans-identified male athletes maintain an advantage over biologically female athletes even after two years of taking feminizing hormones.
Two dozen states have banned trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports at the K-12 level and/or the collegiate level: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A poll of 1,011 United States adults conducted by Gallup in May found that 69% of respondents believed that trans-identified athletes “should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender,” while 26% thought that “transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.”
Individuals who have undergone “any form of male puberty” will not qualify to compete in international women’s cricket, the International Cricket Council has announced.
“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority), protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC noted.
The ICC noted that “gender eligibility at domestic level is a matter for each individual Member Board, which may be impacted by local legislation.” It also noted, “The regulations will be reviewed within two years.”
The issue of whether men who identify as women should be permitted to compete in women’s athletics remains an ongoing point of significant debate between those who advocate radical leftist gender ideology and those who oppose it. Cricket player Danielle McGahey, who apparently identifies as a transgender woman, responded to the news.
“Following the ICC’s decision this morning, it is with a very heavy heart that I must say that my international cricketing career is over. As quickly as it begun, it must now end,” McGahey wrote on social media.
“While I hold my opinions on the ICC’s decision, they are irrelevant. What matters is the message being sent to millions of trans women today, a messaging say that we don’t belong. I promise I will not stop fighting for equality for us in our sport, we deserve the right to play cricket at the highest level, we are not a threat to the integrity or safety of the sport,” McGahey wrote. “Never stop fighting!”
A teammate of the Massachusetts high school field hockey player who was hospitalized last week after a male opponent fired a high-powered shot into her face said it’s time for changes to rules that allow males to play on female teams, WFTX-TV reported.
Dighton-Rehoboth team captain Kelsey Bain wrote in a letter to the state’s lnterscholastic Athletic Association that “boys do not belong in girls’ sports,” the station said.
During Thursday’s playoff game against Swampscott High School, the male Swampscott player fired a shot toward the goal, but the ball instead hit a Dighton-Rehoboth player hard in her face. The ball ricocheted far from the point of impact, and the injured player fell to her knees and cried out — as did her teammates. A number of them turned their faces away after coming to her aid, and play was halted while the injured female player was treated.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
“The shrieks and screams of fear and pain that projected from her after being hit filled the stadium,” Bain added in her letter, according to WFTX. “The looks of horror and shock on the faces of the girls surrounding her were also chilling.”
Massachusetts scholastic rules allow males to play sports with females if there’s no male team for that sport available — and vice versa.
But Bain said enough is enough.
“We all witnessed the substantial damage that a male has the ability to cause against a female during a game,” she added in her letter, according to the station. “How much longer does the MIAA plan on using girls as statistical data points before they realize that boys do not belong in girls’ sports?”
The MIAA told WFTX it stands by the Equal Rights Amendment: “We respect and understand the complexity and concerns that exist regarding student safety. However, student safety has not been a successful defense to excluding students of one gender from participating on teams of the opposite gender.”
When play resumed following the injury to the Dighton-Rehoboth player, the male Swampscott player quickly scored a goal. In fact, he scored both goals for Swampscott, giving his team a 2-0 victory and eliminating Dighton-Rehoboth from the tournament.
It won’t come as a shock that the male Swampscott player is reportedly a Northeastern Conference All-Star. He’s also a four-year varsity player and team co-captain, WCVB-TV reported, citing Swampscott Public Schools Athletic Director Kelly Wolff.
Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said the injured female player was released from the hospital Friday but suffered “significant facial and dental injuries,” the Sun Chronicle reported.
A female Massachusetts high school field hockey player was sent to the hospital Thursday for “significant facial and dental injuries” during a state tournament game after a male on the opposing team hit her in the face with a field hockey ball. In the video circulating social media, viewers can see the male player (No. 2) hit the ball, which launches up and hits his unnamed female opponent in the mouth. After the hit, the girl is heard screaming while her teammates look on with their hands laced over their mouths in shock.
The game was between the number No. 12 Swampscott Big Blue and the No. 21 Dighton-Rehoboth Falcons.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
According to the Media Research Center, the male player in question is Sawyer Groothuis, who plays for Swampscott and is a “Northeastern Conference All-Star in the women’s league.” The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook effectively allows for men to compete in women’s sports and vice versa.
While speaking with the media, Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey called for the MIAA to take a “renewed approach” to protecting student athletes, but stopped short of saying men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports.
Rather than highlight the unnamed female players’ injury, at least one local news outlet completely ignored the egregious nature of a man dominating Thursday’s game. In its brief “roundup” of local sporting events, for example, ItemLive ran with the headline, “Big Blue, big-time performance from Groothuis,” and didn’t even mention Groothuis sending the opposing female player to the hospital.
“Swampscott led at the break thanks to a goal from Northeastern Conference All-Star Sawyer Groothuis,” the article reads. “The Big Blue had a corner and the ball was loose in front of the goal. Groothuis was quickest to react, and poked it home for the early cushion. In the second half, it was Groothuis again finding the back of the net and sealing the game.”
You’d like to believe that a girl screaming out in agony and being sent to the hospital after getting a ball to the face would warrant at least brief mention, if not a paragraph. Especially when considering that the ItemLive write-up of the game is about Groothuis and his performance.
But at the end of the day, many local media outlets are just as bad at their jobs as their national counterparts. It doesn’t matter that the aforementioned female athlete got knocked out of a state tournament game because a male decided he wanted to impose his will on women’s athletics. All that matters is advancing the leftist agenda — no matter what.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
While American physical education programs demonstrably fail the nation’s K-12 students, Christian homeschoolers have found an alternative that’s proven far more effective. The result is that homeschooling is now a driving force behind one of the fastest-growing sports in America: Ninja Warrior.
Since 2009, NBC has broadcast a U.S. version of the Japanese sports reality show “Sasuke” as “American Ninja Warrior.” The dynamic obstacles require a level of skilled athleticism far beyond the basic programming of K-12 gymnasiums. The courses’ difficulties have made both the triumphs and the wipeouts award-winning television with 22 nominations to boast while inspiring a new generation of competitive athletes. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Browning of Tennessee is among them.
A three-time contestant on NBC’s program who nearly made it to the million-dollar rope climb in round four, Browning has been competing in obstacle courses since he was 10.
“I’d always grown up watching the show ever since I was 5, 6, 7 years old,” Browning said in a sitdown interview with The Federalist before another competition just south of Denver, Colorado. Then, “me and my mom started finding competitions all over the country for the leagues outside of Ninja Warrior.”
Browning started experimenting with ninja games when his grandfather constructed obstacles at a family farm. A builder for more than 40 years, his grandfather reconstructed common hurdles from the show that have become staples in the sport both on and off the airwaves — from the salmon ladder to the cliffhanger.
“Lucky for me,” said Browning with a smile between sips of coffee. “We started at his house because he had already built these like elaborate tree houses for me, so we were like, adding all these obstacles to the tree houses.”
Also lucky for Browning was his mom’s decision to choose homeschooling over public school, which allowed Browning and his 14-year-old brother, Julian, to take the sport seriously. Browning has now trained and competed in 136 ninja gyms across 35 states and three different countries.
“Most of those [contestants] that are really competitive and serious are homeschooled because you have to travel so much to compete,” Browning said. “You have to travel to stay relevant and compete, and you really can’t take a season off.”
The televised program films from March through May. But beyond the show are dozens of other leagues holding competitions throughout the year. Browning maintains a rigorous training schedule of two- to three-hour workouts six days a week. It’s a workout regimen that sets Browning far apart from the less than 1 in 4 U.S. high school students who are physically active for at least 60 minutes on a daily basis. It’s also a grueling regimen that Leila Smith’s two homeschooled Illinois teens are intimately familiar with.
Tyler Smith, 17, has been on the podium for ninja games at least 110 times, and his 14-year-old sister, Sydney, at least 62. To the family’s frustration, however, Tyler has yet to be on the show, and Sydney is still too young. NBC’s eligibility cutoff begins at 15. Sydney, their mother says, has a much better chance by virtue of her sex.
While Tyler has applied for the televised league twice, the reality is that NBC is still producing reality TV. Guests are featured with generous introductions, put together by producers, before they tackle the obstacles in front of millions watching at home. As a white, midwestern male in a male-dominated sport, Tyler has struggled to grab casting producers’ attention despite his record as one of the best teenage athletes in the sport. Ethan Swanson, a nine-time NBC contestant who now coaches other athletes on the outskirts of Chicago, says Tyler is “one of the most acclaimed” teenage ninjas in the country.
Tyler’s tough luck has led the family to prioritize outside leagues over legacy TV. At 17, Tyler was able to buy his first car outright after having made $20,000 from competitions. He bought an Audi A7 entirely with his prize cash. While it might seem like a large sum for a 17-year-old kid, Tyler’s $20,000 winnings reflect a sport that’s still growing. Obstacle course competitions are not yet commercialized with the support of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), so there are no six-figure scholarships to dish out to high-performing high schoolers. Tyler’s financial success, Swanson said, is by far the “high-water mark.” Even then, it’s no full-time salary after graduation.
Ninjas on a Mission
Christian homeschoolers are trailblazing the growth of competitive ninja leagues in the meantime. Browning’s mom, Renee, called the sport’s expansion “exponential.”
“The Christian homeschool community is always looking for outlets for their kids that are unique and uplifting and encouraging, and that is 100 percent what this sport is,” Renee said. “It’s not cutthroat and mean, like it’s all a bunch of incredible families, and I think that’s appealing to the Christian homeschooling world.”
Leila Smith offered a similar assessment about the sport’s popularity among Christian homeschoolers, calling the community “tight-knit” with a camaraderie of “ninja moms.”
“Knowing that there were Christian families kept us in the sport more,” she said.
Christian ninjas have congregated in Colorado Springs for the past two years to participate in “Warriors on a Mission.” The annual conference features a worship service, book signings, and speakers on how faith has guided athletes’ journey through obstacle courses.
The event is put on by Suzanne Himka, a 53-year-old grandmother who herself still trains and competes in obstacle races. Earlier this month, Himka captured the gold medal in the Mammoth Lakes Obstacle Course Racing World Championships in California. In Colorado Springs, she operates a faith-based gym called Lost Island Warrior where she coaches a team of about 50 competitive athletes and another team of exclusively homeschoolers. The annual conference is her way to “spread the gospel through ninja,” she told The Federalist.
“It’s more than ninja, it’s ministry,” Himka said.
Both Tyler Smith and Elijah Browning were speakers at this year’s conference in June. Next year, Himka plans to hold the conference in Anaheim, California, to coincide with the Ultimate Ninja Athlete Association World Championships so more athletes can attend.
“So many want to come out,” she said, but “it is a big cost.” Himka has spent upwards of $10,000 to help families cover flights and accommodations, but “it’s hard because I’m the only one doing it by myself.”
Himka said 50-85 kids have made professions of Christian faith at the camp every year, and she hopes to keep it running on an annual basis. She speaks regularly to her everyday students and those who come to camp about the analogies between the Bible and overcoming the sport’s obstacles.
“There’s so many analogies,” she said. For example, if kids spend their life looking downward and at a screen instead of upward and outward, “then you’re going to miss a lot of stuff.”
Ninja Inc.
Professional ninjas don’t make a living competing, but the proliferation of the sport has still led prior show contestants to open gyms of their own. The physical demands of the obstacle courses require a unique versatility that leads athletes to peak even earlier than in more popular sports, such as baseball and basketball.
Swanson opened his own gym, Big Time Ninja, in a Chicago suburb with Chris DiGangi, a 12-time contestant on NBC. The facility opened in February after the pair had already hit two dozen buzzers between them and have now chosen to coach the next generation of athletes.
Swanson told The Federalist the top athletes in the sport right now are between ages 16 and 22.
“I think that’s going to increase in the next five years,” he added, crediting advanced facilities such as Big Time Ninja “that offer way more to these kids coming up in the sport.” Swanson estimates the peak age range will shift upward to 17-25.
“All these kids that are learning have better coaches,” he said. “When I was training, I didn’t have a coach.”
But now, even the top teen athletes have begun their careers in coaching. Elijah Browning coaches other ninjas at a gym he launched in Tennessee called Overcome The World. He said about half of his students are homeschooled. Tyler Smith also coaches a team in Illinois on Wednesdays. In Colorado, however, the career of one full-time coach serves as inspiration for athletes who might think competing is beyond their reach.
Just east of Boulder, Nate Hansen, a five-time contestant on NBC, began working at “Ninja Nation” two years before his first invitation for the televised obstacle-course competition. Now known as “Gnarly Nate,” Hansen worked his way from birthday party host in 2018 to head coach at the facility today.
In 2020, Hansen smashed the buzzer on his first run through the course, fulfilling a lifelong mission.
“I was like, ‘This could be the peak of my life,’” Hansen recalled. Despite falling on the fourth obstacle the next day, “that season was definitely like one of the peak moments in my life because it was the time that I got to first execute my dream.”
AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR | National Finals 3 | Episode 1412 | Pictured: Nate HansenIMAGE CREDITELIZABETH MORRIS/NBC
Yet by every measure, biology was stacked against him becoming a professional athlete. Hansen was born with growth hormone deficiency. Also known as dwarfism or pituitary dwarfism, GHD is a rare condition in which affected individuals develop shorter limbs and stature because the body fails to produce enough growth hormones.
“I’m at a severe disadvantage at times being only five-two,” Hansen explained. “I can’t jump as far as, you know, a six-foot-tall athlete.” At the same time, he added, “I honestly appreciate that I weigh less than most athletes.”
The wide variety of obstacles compel athletes to train for an entire range of possibilities on the course and often require just as much climbing as they do reaching. The variation in hurdles means a tall, heavy, athletic body-builder might find it easier to run up the warped wall but more difficult to hurl himself over. An athlete with a lighter stature, on the other hand, probably has an easier time lifting himself through the course.
Yet for all of the disadvantages handed to him by GHD, Hansen defied the odds “by the grace of God” to “show the talent that I’ve been gifted.”
Hansen was among the speakers at this year’s Christian ninja conference in Colorado Springs and credits his faith for carrying him through his athletic career.
“There’s been times where I’m on the Ninja Warrior course that I don’t feel the best or I feel sick, but I just ask that God carry me through and He does,” Hansen said. “Sometimes you fall and there’s lessons to be learned in that too. Sometimes God uses our faults and failures to teach us the most valuable lessons.”
Now Hansen coaches kids on obstacle courses north of Denver, including a handful of homeschoolers. He also has students who similarly struggle with GHD.
“That’s really cool because, you know, I wish I had a role model and a hero with what I had when I was growing up,” Hansen said. “I can kind of motivate and inspire them as young little kids, you know, and say, ‘Hey it’s OK. You’re going to get bullied. You’re going to get pushed down. But you can still do anything.’”
On to the Olympics
Kids who compete in ninja leagues today might even participate in the Olympics.
The 2028 summer games in Los Angeles are on track to feature the first-ever obstacle-course competition in the international series of tournaments.
Terry England, an obstacle-course coach based in New Orleans, told The Federalist the sport will likely be tested in Los Angeles as a replacement for equestrian in the modern pentathlon. The Paris games next summer will be the final year the modern pentathlon will be a five-event sport that includes fencing, swimming, horseback riding, pistol shooting, and running, which were selected to reflect the skills of 19th-century cavalry.
According to NBC, athletes will compete in 10 obstacles up to 100 meters long. Potential hurdles include a rope swing, monkey bars, a rings rig, and a balance beam.
England, which serves on the USA Ninjas Association, is on a committee trying to elevate the sport to Olympic status.
“What does that mean for teen ninjas?” England said. An 8-year-old who has a very good ninja background, he explained, might have a chance to compete on the world stage. “If this 8-year-old can run and swim, then they already have three of the disciplines that are learned to become a pentathlete.”
Exactly why equestrian will be replaced remains unclear, England said. But for ninja, “future Olympics can add events so that there can be longer races, different styles, and team relays in such that would branch out.”
The sport’s addition to the Olympic lineup might also open the door to the league being adopted by American universities. If viewership is good enough, obstacle-course racing may transform from a minor-league hobby with its own television show to a global sport backed by the NCAA. With that would come an even greater flood of interest and money into the sport, including the six-figure scholarships today’s top-tier ninja athletes currently miss out on.
The Olympics may help further popularize Ninja Warrior, but until then, Tyler Smith says he’s ready to compete for “as long as I can.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
There’s little difference between Dayjia “Meatball” Blackwell and Colin Kaepernick. Both are internet trolls, substanceless social media influencers adept at promoting chaos and outrage.
On Tuesday night, Meatball encouraged her Philly followers to meet her downtown. The group eventually looted a Lululemon, an Apple store, a Foot Locker, and a liquor store. Meatball livestreamed much of the action before getting arrested.
Kaepernick, of course, is the former NFL quarterback who elevated his brand seven years ago by kneeling during the national anthem. In the process, Kaepernick became the most polarizing athlete in America. He torched his football career while simultaneously becoming a cult figure to left-wing activists and Nike. On Tuesday, Kaepernick had his rap music buddy J. Cole release a letter Kaepernick wrote to the New York Jets asking for a roster spot on their practice squad.
“I would be honored and extremely grateful for the opportunity to come in and lead the practice squad,” Kaepernick wrote. “I would do this with the sole mission of getting your defense ready each week. If I were able to fill this role, I believe this allows for multiple things.’
“Worst case scenario, you see what I have to offer and you’re not that impressed. Best case scenario, you realize you have a real weapon at your disposal in the event you ever need to use it. In either of these scenarios, I would be committed to getting your defense ready week in and week out, all season long, and I would wear that responsibility like a badge of honor.”
Meatball and Kaepernick are victims of a culture that rewards, promotes, enables, excuses, and justifies self-destructive behavior from black people. They’re collateral damage from the circus “clown show” that I’ve been railing against all week. The social media matrix baits celebrities, journalists, athletes, broadcasters, and influencers into creating content that outrages what used to be the establishment. For black influencers, the establishment is white evangelical conservatives. Black influencers have been convinced that anything that aggravates, annoys, or frustrates white conservatives is a net positive for black people. It’s a ridiculous standard.
But it’s what compelled Kaepernick to foolishly kneel during the national anthem. His protest and support of Black Lives Matter did not save one black life. It accomplished the opposite. It demonized the profession of policing, sparked defund-the-police policies and sentiment, and subsequently made black neighborhoods more violent and crime-ridden. It also wrecked Kaepernick’s football career. It should be obvious to everyone that Kaepernick regrets sabotaging his playing career. How else do you explain someone who hasn’t played football in seven years begging the Jets to sign him to the practice squad? Kaepernick is 35. Two years ago, he released a documentary-style movie about his life and analogized the NFL to a slave plantation. Three years ago, he backed out of an organized workout in Atlanta and donned a Kunta Kinte T-shirt.
Kunta Kaepernick now wants a job back on Massa Goodell’s plantation? Make it make sense. It only makes sense if you recognize and acknowledge that Kaepernick’s original protest was devoid of substance and was driven by the social media stimulus that grants clout and relevance to black people who troll white evangelical conservatives.
This same stimulus motivates young people such as Dayjia Blackwell to loot and produce immoral content.
Leftists have defined Christianity as the “white man’s religion.” They’ve demonized whiteness, which, in their minds, justifies the tearing down of Christianity. It’s all a lie. The first Christians were ethnically Semitic and had light to dark brown skin. All humans, regardless of color, are made in the image of God.
Let me get back to Meatball and the looting last night in Philadelphia. Blackwell streamed much of the activity. She screamed into the camera: “Everybody’s gotta eat!”
You don’t rob Lululemon because you’re hungry. The looting we see nationwide has nothing to do with hunger pangs. It’s a reflection of people’s animus toward a country they’ve been convinced must be torn down and remade. It is a form of protest.
They’re just protesting the wrong thing. The establishment that is truly in control is quite comfortable with black people and others protesting the wrong thing. They’re fine with protesting white evangelicals and Christianity. What the ruling establishment won’t tolerate is American citizens protesting the ruling establishment.
The ruling establishment controls Congress, the Capitol, and the White House. Americans are strictly forbidden to protest there. The ruling establishment constantly points black people to direct their frustration at “whiteness” and away from the wickedness of a secular society.
Joe Biden routinely tells the public that “white supremacy” is the greatest threat to America. He’s providing cover for Satan, who is colorless. Satan is a set of values and beliefs that destroy the soul and the mind. Biden and the left are intentionally inspiring black people to destroy America and themselves.
Colin Kaepernick and Dayjia Blackwell are useful idiots following instructions.
The collapse of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team mirrors the descent of its most famous player, Megan Rapinoe.
Early Sunday morning, the USWNT exited the World Cup in the first round of the knockout stage, losing to an overmatched Sweden team on penalty kicks at the conclusion of a 0-0 tie. It marked the worst finish for the American women’s team in World Cup history.
Our national team has been ranked No. 1 in the world since June 2017 and for all but 10 months since March 2008. The squad has never been ranked lower than No. 2. In the Round of 16, Sweden conquered a dynasty.
Close observers were not surprised. The team has been in mental decay since Carli Lloyd retired (2020) and corporate media anointed the purple-haired Rapinoe as the unquestioned face of American women’s soccer.
For the last three years, the 38-year-old winger has used the team’s spotlight to grow the Rapinoe brand. The game, the competition, and representing national honor all took a back seat to self-promotion, virtue-signaling, so-called social activism centered around the BLM-LGBTQ-Alphabet Mafia, and expressing Trump derangement.
Rapinoe’s handlers and major corporations partnered with corporate media to cast her as “The Great Gay Hope,” the alternative-lifestyle Muhammad Ali.
Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan were all better players than Rapinoe. But none of them can match Rapinoe’s knack for drawing attention to herself for sleeping with women — her superpower, the behavior that makes her a legendary icon.
The same forces that have attempted to make Brittney Griner the Nelson Mandela of basketball insisted that “The Great Gay Hope” take a victory lap on the national team long past her expiration date.
To no surprise, the strategy backfired. Rapinoe acted as a locker-room cancer. She diminished the importance of competition. Throughout the World Cup, the U.S. women failed to play with passion and precision. In four games, they scored four goals and won just one match.
Fox Sports broadcaster Alexi Lalas repeatedly warned that the U.S. team would lose. Lloyd, working alongside Lalas, blasted the team after it laughed off and celebrated following a disappointing 0-0 tie with Portugal in its final group match.
The team had the wrong attitude. The team mirrored its star, Rapinoe, who was being crowned with commercials and feature stories promoting the legend of Megan Rapinoe. The World Cup was a coronation of Rapinoe … until it wasn’t.
On Sunday, with a chance to off Sweden with a penalty kick, Rapinoe missed the entire net wide right. She smirked and laughed in embarrassment. Two other U.S. women missed their kicks as well. But those women earned their spots on the roster. Rapinoe was on the team and on the field because of social pressure and a never-ending marketing campaign. She hadn’t earned the right to fail. The opportunity was bestowed on her.
When it was over, when the No. 1-ranked team in the world completed its epic collapse, supporters of “The Great Gay Hope” refused to pivot. ESPN aired a three-minute feature story on Rapinoe narrated by her “fiancee,” WNBA player Sue Bird.
The Worldwide Leader in Sports carried on as if Rapinoe had stuck a Kerri Strug-like landing, scored 61 points like Kobe, or ricocheted into the end zone like John Elway.
“The Great Gay Hope” crashed and burned. She took her teammates with her.
When asked for her greatest memory of her “legendary” career, she pointed to the lawsuit she and her teammates filed against the U.S. Soccer Federation over alleged pay inequality. Gender pay inequality is a myth and a lie, no different from other popular corporate media narratives like climate change and the alleged genocidal homicide of unarmed black men.
But the truth is irrelevant in the making of an Alphabet Mafia icon. Megan Rapinoe is the George Floyd of soccer. Racism and sexism are the only things that prevented them from being president and vice president of the United States.
Or maybe Rapinoe is just another narcissistic, greedy, entitled celebrity.
Could you imagine Joe Montana or Michael Jordan summarizing their careers by referencing a contract dispute?
Rapinoe is a fraud. She’s the Colin Kaepernick of soccer. Her attitude poisoned the women’s national soccer team. Let’s hope her side effects don’t linger.
NBA player Jonathan Isaac, who made headlines in 2020 when he remained standing during the national anthem even as other players kneeled, has launched an apparel company that aims to celebrate faith, family, and freedom.
“UNITUS brings people together around stylish, high-quality apparel that champions faith, family, and freedom. Together, we’re redefining greatness,” the company’s website states. “UNITUS is a movement—one that starts with U and ends with US.”
During the brand’s launch event in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night, Isaac, who is outspoken about his Christian faith, explained that “true greatness is found in none other than Jesus Christ.” Isaac said that UNITUS has “hopes of aligning ourselves with value-aligned athletes from all sports.” He also noted that the company does not have any links to the nation of China.
Later that night, during a brief interview with TheBlaze, Isaac said that he is a “Bible-believing Christian” and noted that his actions, including “standing in the [NBA] bubble” and opting not to take the COVID-19 vaccine, have “been motivated by my desire to please Christ.”
Some of the people who showed their support by attending the UNITUS launch event included former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Paula Scanlan, and Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who is a fellow and director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological man who made waves while competing against women, tied with Gaines for fifth place in the 200 freestyle final at the NCAA Women’s Championships in 2022, according to swimmingworldmagazine.com. Gaines has been an outspoken in opposing the practice of permitting men to compete in women’s sports. Scanlan, who was on the University of Pennsylvania swim team with Thomas, has also been speaking out about the issue.
At the UNITUS event on Saturday, Gaines told TheBlaze that Isaac had previously reached out to her and expressed his support. Gaines said that she believes people desire “an alternative to put their money towards that aligns with their values” and that Isaac and UNITUS are such an alternative.
The pro-faith, family, and freedom ethos of the UNITUS brand stands in stark contrast to other major companies that promote woke agendas, such as Nike, which, for example, previously tapped transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman, to advertise a bra and leggings.
The UNITUS website features items for sale, including hoodies, T-shirts, sweatpants, crewnecks, a cap, a track jacket, and track shorts. Isaac noted during remarks at the launch event that the company plans to expand its offerings to include “more technical sportswear,” which involves items such as a sports bra, leggings, and men’s tank top. “This upcoming season I will be debuting the UNITUS Judah 1 basketball sneaker,” Isaac noted.
Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson also attended the company’s launch event on Saturday.
“Succeed or fail, Isaac’s Unitus is one of the most significant examples we’ve seen yet of a growing commercial-cultural movement that’s rising up throughout the nation,” Peterson said in a written statement. “Mainstream media outlets are not paying attention, but most Americans are very interested. And we’re going to ramp up our coverage of it for them.”
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A former high school snowboarding coach filed a federal lawsuit last week alleging his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired for expressing his views on transgender-identifying athletes. The 31-page complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a faith-based legal advocacy group — on behalf of David Bloch, along with a motion for preliminary injunction seeking Bloch’s immediate reinstatement.
“On February 8, 2023, Coach Bloch and his team were waiting in the lodge for a competition to start. That day, his team was to compete against a team that had a male snowboarder who identifies as a female and competes against females,” the lawsuit states. While in the lodge, Bloch says he overheard a conversation between two of his student-athletes and briefly joined in.
Bloch “affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics.” He added that “biological differences generally give males competitive advantages in athletic events” — something you must pretend is deeply controversial, despite the fact that a large majority of Americans agree.
According to a new Gallup survey released in June, nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender-identifying athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender” as opposed to their “current gender identity.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center study from last year found that 6 in 10 Americans “say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
“The conversation was respectful among all parties and lasted no more than three minutes. It took place entirely outside the presence of the transgender-identifying snowboarder,” the lawsuit states. “Coach Bloch’s team and the team with the male who identifies as a female competed without incident. After the competition, the two teams and their coaches, including Coach Bloch, shared a bus home.”
But it didn’t matter. Bloch had committed wrong-think.
The coach was allegedly handed a notice of termination the very next day by Windsor Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa. He was accused of violating the school district’s harassment, hazing, and bullying (HHB) policy as well as a related policy of the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA), which oversees high school sports in the state. Bloch was also “barred from future employment” with the district.
“No one should lose their job for speaking the truth. The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to peacefully share their beliefs without fear of government punishment. This means that government officials cannot terminate an employee simply because he expresses a belief that they do not like,” ADF said in a statement.
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the HBB and VPA policies, as well as a Vermont statute requiring school boards to adopt such policies, “contain content and viewpoint discriminatory, overbroad, and unconstitutionally vague definitions of harassment that … censor protected speech.”
The complaint notes that Bloch is “a practicing Roman Catholic who believes that God creates males and females with immutable sex. His understanding of science complements his religious beliefs. Coach Bloch believes, based on scientific evidence, that there are only two sexes, which are male and female, and that sex is determined by a person’s chromosomes.”
Views like these terrify elites and the corporate press. In a May article, The Washington Post bemoaned that “Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth” and worried that (God forbid) some in the country “have become more conservative on these questions.”
It’s worth highlighting the irony that those requiring you to deny the reality of sex today are often the very same people who spent the past three years demanding you “follow the science!”
Suffice to say, these are not good-faith actors; they’re liars and propagandists interested only in advancing a political agenda. Regard them as such.
Kiyan Kassam is a conservative writer. Follow him on Twitter at @kiyankassam.
High school volleyball player Payton McNabb called out the hypocrisy of the Biden administration’s position on transgender students participating in girls’ sports. McNabb accused White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of changing the narrative in order to play the victim.
The Murphy, North Carolina, student began speaking out against biological males competing in women’s sports after she suffered a concussion and a neck injury in September when a transgender player spiked the ball and it hit her in the face. She has since urged lawmakers to take action, saying in an April speech at the Independent Women’s Forum that “allowing biological males to compete against biological females is dangerous.”
“That is a dangerous thing to say that essentially transgender kids, we’re talking about, are dangerous,” Jean-Pierre responded.
On “America’s Newsroom” on Friday, McNabb called Jean-Pierre’s comment hypocritical but said she’d expect nothing else from the administration.
Watch the clip of Payton McNabb getting spiked in the face by a male competing with the women. Then watch her testimony she gave today for the first time publicly. I was honored to stand alongside her in NC to continue the fight to protect women's sports. pic.twitter.com/mvJmwprkaX
“She’s taken what others have said about how this is dangerous for us, and she’s essentially switched it around and played the victim from the situation, which I expect nothing less from that whole administration,” McNabb said.
McNabb said her own experience being injured by a transgender athlete was traumatizing and her recovery has been difficult and slow.
She told co-hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino that her team was aware of the opposing team’s transgender player before the game.
Payton McNabb speaks on “America’s Newsroom” with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer. (Fox News)
“But we couldn’t just refuse the game since it was a conference game. So we had to continue to play them, even though none of us wanted to,” she said.
“I just remember seeing the fear in especially our younger players on the team who’ve never played against them before. So just seeing how scared they were, it was really heartbreaking.”
The North Carolina state legislature has taken up the issue, and a bill banning transgender girls from competing in women’s sports needs to pass one final Senate committee before being sent to the floor for a vote.
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is expected to oppose the bill.
But McNabb said the issue is important to prevent other female athletes from experiencing what she went through.
“The thought of it happening to my younger sister, who’s going into high school, or my other family members, my teammates, if that happened to any of them, it would just infuriate me,” she said.
“I just don’t think this is something that we should even have to be talking about.”
A team comprised of U.S. women’s soccer legends and some of the best female players in the world lost with an astounding 12-0 score to Wrexham AFC, a team from Wales made up of current, former, and guest players.
CBS Sports reported on the game featured in “The Tournament,” a 7-on-7 soccer competition with a $1 million prize to the tournament winner.
The “US Women” brought a team made up of “a roster full of some of the best women’s soccer players in the world,” which was “captained by legendary U.S. Women’s National Team player Heather O’Reilly. O’Reilly has been playing professional soccer since 2004.”
The outcome was less than desirable for the women’s team however, as they gave up seven goals in the first 20 minutes of the game, which was played in two 20-minute halves. The game ended with a 12th and final goal, initiating a mercy rule just after the 40th minute in the overtime period.
Igualdad de genero: equipo de 5ta división inglesa, golea a la selección nacional de mujeres de USA. US Women vs. Wrexham 0x 12 pic.twitter.com/ie4dknzoQX
— Clint Joselito🇨🇱🇮🇱 (@ClintJoselito) June 3, 2023
While the women’s goalkeeper, Lindsey Harris, was often pictured emotional and at times dejected, the women’s team made no excuses and had an extremely positive outlook on the game.
“We’re super proud,” said O’Reilly, a World Cup Champion. “Hopefully we’ve proved to anybody, just go for it, just live. What’s the worst that could happen? We lose 16-0 to Wrexham?” she asked.
“We don’t care because we’re living, we’re being bold and we’re being brave. Here we have two amazing products that American soccer fans are getting behind. It’s just a ton of fun and it’s brought all of us together,” she added.
"What's the worst that could happen? We lose 16-0 to Wrexham? We don't care because we're living, we're being bold, we're being brave."@HeatherOReilly knows the result isn't everything. 🙌 📺: @TST7v7 on @peacockpic.twitter.com/ZOkLOAzEpE
— NBC Sports Soccer (@NBCSportsSoccer) June 2, 2023
The team scored just one goal in their three games played, losing 5-0 to a team representing historically black colleges and universities and 7-1 to a second-tier professional Italian team. The aforementioned Wrexham AFC is a Welsh club owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who have made a historic rise in the ranks of English soccer through the help of their celebrity ownership.
The pleasant responses from the female players is indeed a change of tune when compared to the official U.S. Women’s National Team, which sued the U.S. Soccer Federation. Five women from the team filed a complaint claiming they did not receive pay equal to the men’s national team. The federation settled for $24 million.
Included in that lawsuit was player Megan Rapinoe, who has made rounds in the political talk-show circuit speaking on the issue and recently joined a group to oppose the exclusion of female-identifying men in women’s sports.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ appalling decision to honor an anti-Christian hate group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during their “Pride Night” on June 16 has been met mostly with a deafening silence from the vast majority of Major League Baseball players. Even Catholics, whose faith is particularly singled out for mockery by this LGBT hate group, have been largely mute.
As of this writing, only four players in the entire league have said anything about it, and one of those four has already caved to the rainbow mob. The only Catholic player to come forward has been Trevor Williams, a starting pitcher for the Washington Nationals. Williams denounced the Dodgers and called on his fellow Catholics “to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur.”
The only Dodgers player to come forward so far has been relief pitcher Blake Treinen, who also released a clear statement Tuesday criticizing the Dodgers organization for honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, rightly saying the group “promotes hate of Christians and people of faith.”
The statements from Williams and Treinen were infinitely better than the cowardly response of Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who contented himself with a nonresponse. Instead of addressing the issue head-on, he weakly announced the return of “Christian Faith and Family Day” at Dodger Stadium after a hiatus. “For us, we felt like the best thing to do in response was, instead of maybe making a statement condemning or anything like that, would be just to instead try to show what we do support, as opposed to maybe what we don’t,” Kershaw told the Los Angeles Times recently.
For Kershaw, it seems, the Dodgers should get a pass for awarding a group that openly mocks Christians as long as the Christians get an appreciation night of their own later in the season. What nonsense. It’s like having Christian appreciation night at the Temple of Artemis right before marching the Christians off to the Colosseum. Far from being “the best thing to do,” it would have been better had Kershaw said nothing.
His cowardice was overshadowed, though, by the Toronto Blue Jays’ Anthony Bass, who performed his very own Maoist struggle session over the weekend, giving a scripted apology for the crime of posting something mildly supportive of the Bud Light and Target boycotts.
“I recognize yesterday that I made a post that was hurtful to the Pride community, which includes friends of mine and close family members of mine, and I am truly sorry for that,” Bass said, promising to educate himself and make better decisions moving forward.
Not good enough, Blue Jays manager John Schneider told reporters. “We’re not going to pretend like this never happened,” said Schneider. “We’re not going to pretend like it’s the end and move on. There are definitely more steps that are going to follow.”
The double standard here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s meant to demonstrate hierarchy. The Dodgers can insult every Christian in the country, and only two guys will speak up. But a single post obliquely critical of transgenderism means Bass gets flogged in public by the Blue Jays. As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out, no one was hurt by Bass’s tepid support for boycotts of multibillion-dollar corporations; the real point of all this is “to chill speech and transform relatively common positions about faith and irrefutable biological truths into blasphemous utterances, whether done in private or not.”
And it looks like the Dodgers, the Blue Jays, and the entire MLB are going to get away with it — unless the players themselves make a stand.
As welcome as the statements by Williams and Treinen were, they weren’t enough. Faced with what amounts to open hostility to the Christian faith, MLB players need to do more than issue statements. As Mollie Hemingway suggested the other day on Twitter, players who support religious tolerance should refuse to take the field on June 16 in protest. If the Dodgers want to insult Christians by honoring a group that blasphemes their faith, then players should simply decline to participate that day. It would send a clear message that the MLB pursues aggressive LGBT activism at its peril.
Players could take inspiration from the great Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, who refused to play in the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. “From what I’ve been told, there are no dispensations for this particular day,” Koufax told reporters. The decision to prioritize his faith over baseball is one he had made years earlier, and in fact, Koufax missed a number of games throughout his career when they fell on major Jewish holidays. At one point, he told a reporter that a “man is entitled to his belief and I believe I should not work on Yom Kippur. It’s as simple as all that and I have never had any trouble on that account since I’ve been in baseball.” Saner times, those.
It might be, though, that the courage of Williams and Treinen is becoming contagious. On Wednesday, Robby Starbuck said a large group of MLB players “will refuse to wear pride or trans flags of any kind this year if asked to by their teams. This includes star players.” That would be great if it actually happens. Players should no more be asked to wear pride or trans flags than they should be asked to wear Christian crosses or any other religious symbol — which is exactly what pride and trans flag have become.
But it would be better if a large group of players, including star players, pushed back in a more forceful way and stood up for religious tolerance by sitting out on June 16. They would become instant heroes in a country where most people think it’s wrong to honor hate groups that mock other people’s religious faith. But more important than becoming heroes, they would simply be doing the right thing, which is its own reward.
I’ve argued recently that we’re not really fighting a “culture war” in the sense we have previously understood it, but a religious war in which everyone must choose a side. The controversy now engulfing the MLB is part of that religious war, and every player in the league is involved in it whether they want to be or not. They, too, must choose a side.
Choosing sides will mean different things for different people, but for those who choose the side of the Tao — of objective moral truth, of resistance to the fascism of the left — it’s going to mean some sacrifice. For example, MLB players who refuse to play might face financial penalties. They will certainly be denounced by the media as bigots. Their careers might suffer in the long term.
So be it. Everything is at stake in this fight, and the fate of the country at this point depends more on MLB players refusing to take the field, or suburban moms refusing to shop at Target, or dudes refusing to buy Bud Light, than on who we elect as our next president, or how the debt limit debate shakes out.
This isn’t a fight any of us can escape. Corporate America has decided to wage a religious war on everyone, to force trans ideology and LGBT propaganda on the whole of society, so now everyone must decide what they’re going to do about it. Baseball players have a clear decision before them, one that could galvanize support for them and give courage to the rest of us. Here’s hoping — and praying — they make the right choice.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
One female athlete is suing her home state of Connecticut for its unfair transgender policies, arguing that forcing girls to compete alongside biological men with a “huge” physical advantage is “not fair.”
“All four years of my high school experience, I raced against these two biological males who ended up taking four state championships, two honorary awards, and countless other opportunities for myself to advance. And it’s not fair to force people to participate against biological males, and so that’s why I’m suing,” Chelsea Mitchell argued during an appearance on “Varney & Co.”
Chelsea Mitchell is a college sophomore and track athlete. | Fox News
“It’s not fair that these biological males took these titles from myself and other girls, and so the record should reflect that. But also, we want the policy reversed so that no other female in Connecticut has to go through the same thing that I went through,” she told substitute host Lauren Simonetti on Wednesday.
Selina Soule, a fellow frustrated track and field athlete, is joining the legal battle against the state of Connecticut, and is pleading with other women to take a stand in defense of women’s sports.
“Everybody who has encountered this issue needs to speak up and ask for fairness,” Soule said last week on “America Reports.” “I was one of the very first to start speaking on this issue, and it’s taken a while, but we are finally starting to get somewhere… we need to protect every single girl in this country.”
Soule urged “everybody out there… to start speaking on this issue and ask for fairness to be restored to women’s sports.”
Attorney Christiana Kiefer joined both of her clients, Mitchell and Soule, separately during their TV interviews, detailing the several ways the athletic community can come together and “win” their case.
“It’s so important that our laws and policies, not just in Connecticut but across the United States as well, reflect biological reality. And that’s the whole reason Title IX was passed nearly 50 years ago, was to ensure that girls like Chelsea and like the young woman who are now protected in the state of Alabama, can compete on a fair and level playing field and not be forced to race against males who have inherent physical advantages over them,” Kiefer explained Wednesday.
“It’s been really encouraging to see more than 21 states now protecting women’s sports across our country. And we just want to see that momentum continue.”
As the fight against transgender policy continues to heat up, women nationwide are joining the conversation.
When she initially launched her lawsuit, Mitchell noted that there was “a lot of silence” and “whispered support” for her cause. In the past year, there has been a surge of support for female athletes, making it “much easier” for women to stand up for themselves on a legislative stage. Mitchell continued, spotlighting the ground-breaking impact trans athletes have had, and will continue to have on female sports if changes are not made.
“In competitive sports, we need these sex-separated categories so that women still have the opportunity to win. You know, I mean, I worked for years to get to that state championship, to be on the line, to win that race; and to have that kind of taken from you is really just frustrating and disheartening, especially because you know the person next to you has a huge physical advantage,” she concluded.
Michael Jameson, who changed his name to Lauren Jeska, attempted to murder Ralph Knibbs at Birmingham’s Alexander Stadium in March 2016.
According to the Guardian, at the time of the attack, Jeska’s status as a female athlete was under review, as there were concerns he had a significant advantage over the real women with whom he was competing. The murderous transvestite had, after all, bested women in the 2010, 2011, and 2012 English Fell Running Champion and as well as in the British Championship in 2012.
Jeska, who did not “transition” or have his testicles removed until he was 26 years old, reportedly refused to provide relevant samples of his testosterone levels and other documentation to the governing body, prompting officials to void his race results in September 2015.
After questions were raised about his eligibility, Jeska packed up two large kitchen knives and traveled nearly two hours from his house in Wales to the offices of UK Athletics in Birmingham. In Birmingham, he savagely stabbed Knibbs in the head and neck, leaving a hole about an inch wide. A witness said it looked as though the transvestic eunuch was “trying to skewer meat.”
The premeditated murder attempt, which the judge presiding over Jeska’s case indicated was executed with “chilling precision,” left Knibbs with limited vision in both eyes. The BBC reported that in the “cool, calculated attack,” Jeska also grievously injured two other UK Athletics employees, Kevan Taylor and Tim Begley, who had tried to intervene during the attack.
Police indicated that “Jeska carried out a violent and unprovoked attack on a man whose sole objective was to enable [him] to compete. [He] will now have plenty of time behind bars to contemplate the devastating consequences of [his] actions.”
Jeska was ultimately given an 18-year sentence.
Mara Yamauchi, former Olympian and British elite marathon runner, was among the first to highlight the abuse of the Parkrun’s gender self-identification policy by opportunistic men, reported the Daily Mail. Yamauchi indicated earlier this week that a Parkrun female group course record had been “smashed to smithereens by a trans-identifying male” and possible put “out of female hands forever.”
The Olympian and other feminists noted that Jeska still holds the top two women’s records for the Aberystwyth Parkrun, a weekly competition held in Wales. According to the Parkrun’s official records, Jeska has a time of 17:38 in the Aberystwyth run and is also ranked first in the Bryn Bach Parkrun and third in the Heaton Parkrun, both in the women’s category.
Heather Binning, founder of the Women’s Rights Network, told the Telegraph, “I am lost for words that a male is stealing what should be women’s records first of all, and setting these records that will not be broken — these records are frozen, women won’t beat them.”
Binning added that it was “gobsmacking,” not just that the violent eunuch in jail for stabbing innocents over the question of his eligibility would still hold the title, but that he was “in a women’s prison despite politicians’ mealy-mouthed words that violent male offenders should not be in the female estate.”
“Politicians are turning their backs and sports associations are frightened and are being hung out to dry,” continued Binning. “More people take part in Parkrun than the Olympics — it does matter. The grassroots is where the elite athletes come from — girls and women will not in these circumstances want to participate.”
It appears that the actual top female in the Aberystwyth parkrun is Charlotte Morgan, who had a time of 17:55 on June 24, 2017. Jeska is eligible for parole in 2029. It is unclear whether Parkrun will permit him to resume competing against women.
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Lia Thomas suggested on a recent podcast that women whose support for so-called “trans women” is conditional are “fake feminists” and cast his critics as bigots. He further stressed that real feminists should be interested in breaking down “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is,” especially if those ideals link womanhood to biology.
Schuyler Bailar, the transvestite athlete who hosted the podcast on which Thomas appeared, raised the matter of a February 2022 letter written by Olympic champion Nancy Hogshead-Makar to the University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League on behalf of 16 members of the school’s female swim team.
The letter asked that the school not challenge the NCAA’s new transgender athlete participation policies, as they would exclude men who experienced puberty, such as Lia Thomas, from competing against women in the March NCAA championships, reported CNN.
“We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” said the letter.
It went on to say, “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female.”
Thomas spoke on “Dear Schuyler” to the letter, saying it is “frustrating in the regard that
they’re like, ‘oh we respect Lia as a woman, as a trans woman, whatever, we respect her identity, we just don’t think it’s fair.’ And I think you can’t really have that sort of half support where you’re like ‘oh, I respect you as a woman here but not here.'”
“You can’t do that, you can’t sort of break down me as a person into little pieces,” added the former male athlete.
Bailar noted that the fight to protect women’s sports has become a big movement, executed “under the guise of feminism. Oh, we’re just feminists. We’re just fighting for women.”
Thomas agreed, later saying, “They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs. I think a lot of people in that camp sort of carry an implicit bias against trans people, but don’t want to, I guess, fully manifest or speak that out. And so they try to just play it off as this sort of half-support.”
After arguing that feminists who sought to keep men out of women’s sports were ideologically incoherent, Bailar likened the corresponding claim of seeking fairness on the basis of sex to the ambivalence of racists about black women competing in sports.
“Please tell me why are all these women, you know, in tears? Why are they crying? What is
the pain that trans women are causing them? And the answer was something about opportunities being taken away,” said Bailar, adding, “It was the same exact arguments that came up when black women began to be in sports. … You don’t want a woman who doesn’t look like you, perhaps, or who is fitting your version of womanhood to win.”
Thomas, having ostensibly agreed with Bailar’s remarks, suggested that “transphobia in sports” should be contextualized more broadly in “patriarchal ideals of what a woman is and who can be a woman.”
The Independent Council on Women’s Sports responded to the podcast, tweeting, “We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: ‘You can’t really have that sort of half-support.’ We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in.”
We agree with Lia Thomas on one thing: “You can’t really have that sort of half-support”
We do not in ANY way support the injustice of male participation in women’s sports. We are all in for female athletes. Not half. ALL in. pic.twitter.com/zprRMq5sA4
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) wrote, “There is nothing anti-feminist about saying that Lia Thomas, a man, should not be participating in sports with women. Feminists, and all women, should be outraged that a MAN has the nerve to tell them how they should feel about him invading their spaces and sports competitions.”
“What a joke,” wrote Piers Morgan. “There’s nothing more ‘anti-feminist’ than trans athletes like Lia Thomas using the massive advantages of their male biology to beat women at sport.”
TheBlaze previously reported Thomas was a middling performer on the University of Pennsylvania men’s swimming team until he starting taking hormones in 2019 and competing against women. He went onto crush records set by females in the 500-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships and tie with All-American all-female swim star Riley Gaines for fifth last April in the women’s 200-meter. According to Gaines, it was around that time Thomas exposed his male genitalia in a women’s locker room.
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Biden is putting the final nail in the coffin of Title IX for women’s sports.
Under President Joe Biden’s pernicious proposed rule announced last week, female athletes will no longer have federal protection against sex discrimination in the women’s category of sport. From elementary through middle school, teams designated for girls only are essentially banned. For policies at the high school and college levels, female athletes will have to prove they are at an unfair disadvantage to keep any trans-identifying male off the team and out of their locker rooms.
Despite what Biden claims, Title IX was never about “fairness” as the controlling standard. From its inception until now, Title IX protection has always been about equal opportunity for female student-athletes denied the same benefits as their male peers on the basis of our natural sex.
Biden will have none of that. Men are the new women. Transgender identity is the new sex. Real women had better make way for any men claiming our identity. Males declaring “womanhood” have the upper hand in civil rights claims under his proposal. A male’s feminine feelings and desire for sports participation are prioritized over any psychological turmoil foisted on female athletes suffering the injustice. The disadvantage in sports goes one way, keeping female athletes off the playing field and faced with sexual intimidation in the locker room.
When Biden finalizes these rules, Title IX will be Title None, offering none of the equal opportunity assurances this landmark civil rights law has guaranteed women and girls for the past 50 years.
The perverse rendering of Title IX categorizes a trans-identifying male as a female athlete. Lia Thomas, who swam for three years on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team as Will Thomas, is now “female.” Under Biden’s rules, any “sex-related criteria,” such as having a penis, has nothing to do with defining who can be on a female team.
President Has Not Found Middle Ground
The president hasn’t found a “middle ground,” as some are claiming. Biden is caught in the snare of a binary sex reality of XX and XY chromosomes that no human can re-construct. Title IX requires male and female teams; therefore, all participants are either male or female. Any biology student understands that even a lifetime of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries that try to mimic the body parts of women will never make a male into a female.
Nevertheless, Biden world wants you to think it is possible to have “fairness” in women’s sports by declaring “sex-related criteria” are merely secondary to being a woman athlete. Let’s be real, no Lia Thomas menstruates, and any Lia Thomas can manipulate performance in competition to claim entry would be “fair.”
Women Betrayed
Sadly, some “women’s organizations” such as Champion Women, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, who claim to represent the interests of female athletes, are now betraying us. They’ve surrendered our status as women — naturally born human females — to the ideology of a trans-crazed culture declaring that any man can make a better female athlete in women’s sports, so long as it is “fair.”
If every women’s team has a Lia Thomas or two, that’s all it would take to make it fair. I bet some coaches are already scouting, salivating at the chance to bring their teams from the bottom of the pack to near the top of the conference, like UPenn did with Thomas on the team.
Liberated women need to wise up to the insidious sex discrimination that these so-called women’s sports organizations are condoning. They are betraying your dignity and equal opportunity under federal law. There is no middle ground in a federal mandate that sidelines female athletes in their own sports — at any age, sport, or level of competition. You might as well scrap sex-separated sports altogether — which is what Biden’s rule is apt to force many to do.
Title IX is Title None under this perverted version of sex discrimination. It’s the reason 20 states and counting have already passed protections for female athletes, keeping girls’ sports for girls only — all of which could be tossed out under Biden’s Title IX policy, throwing women and girls under the bus.
Until then, you have the chance to weigh in and oppose Biden’s Title None rule. Any self-respecting woman unwilling to sacrifice our status on the altar of trans-madness and any father who cares about his daughter’s opportunities should make their voices heard.
Doreen Denny is senior advisor to Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.
Image composite of Twitter videos, @ReduxxMag and @icons_women
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Ann Andres is a biological male who claims to be a woman. He has placed first in multiple women’s weightlifting competitions in Canada and holds the record for women’s bench in the province of Alberta. He has gone so far in recent months as to ridicule the real women who compete against him.
Team Canada’s male powerlifting coach Avi Silverberg has evidently had enough of noncompetitive men migrating to women’s sports and gender self-identification policies in powerlifting. Over the weekend, he temporarily identified as a transgender and demolished Andres’ record. Andres is technically Alberta’s powerlift record holder for bench and deadlifts in the women’s category.
According to Open Powerlifting, Andres’ personal bests are 440.9 pounds for squat; 275.5 pounds for bench; and 545.6 pounds for deadlift. The transsexual athlete has won eight out of the nine female competitions he has entered since 2019.
The Independent Council on Women’s Sports, an advocacy group seeking to protect women’s sports from male infiltrators, indicated that outrage mounted after Andres added insult to injury, having denigrated his competitors and claiming women’s bench is “so bad.” Andres said in a video posted to Instagram, “Why is women’s bench so bad? I mean, not compared to me, we all know that I’m a tranny freak so that doesn’t count. And no, we’re not talking about Mackenzie Lee, she’s got little T-rex arms and she’s like 400 pounds of chest muscle apparently.”
“Standard bench in powerlifting competition for women, I literally don’t know why it’s so bad,” Andres reiterated. “My son, he weighs 45 pounds. His max bench is like 33, I’m legit seeing some women in competition who are doing something like 50 pounds, and I just don’t understand it.”
🏋️Trans identifying male, Anne Andres is Alberta Canada's women's powerlifting record holder in bench 🚨competes next month in women's category at the 2023 CPU National Championships
🚩Recognizes no understanding of upper body strength differences btw males & females 🧵 pic.twitter.com/DYEyEWZTLr
Avi Silverberg serves as head coach for Team Canada Powerlifting, beginning in 2012. He has since coached over 4,500 attempts in international competitions. On March 25, Silverberg decided to temporarily identify as a woman — not to remedy possible dysphoria but as a means of protest. The newly minted transgender then attended the Heroes Classic Powerlifting Meet in Lethbridge, Alberta. The meet reportedly adhered to the Canadian Powerlifting Union’s gender self-identification policy, announced earlier this year.
The policy states, “Individuals participating in development and recreational sport … should be able to participate in the gender with which they identify and not be subject to requirements for disclosure of personal information beyond those required of cisgender athletes. Nor should there be any requirement for hormonal therapy or surgery.”
“Hormone therapy should not be required for an individual to participate in high-performance sport,” added the document. “Individuals should not be required to disclose their trans identity or history to the sport organization in order to participate in high-performance sport.”
Silverberg exploited this gender policy as Andres had, then tested the transsexual athlete’s record with him watching. Not only did the male coach beat Andres’ record, he cleared it by nearly 100 pounds. Andres had previously lifted 275 pounds. Silverberg casually pressed 370 pounds. The Independent Council on Women’s Sports noted on Twitter that “Avi Silverberg just broke the Alberta WOMEN’s bench press record in the 84+ kg category at the ‘Heroes Classic.'”
ICONS told the feminist publication Reduxx, “What Avi so obviously points out is that policies allowing men access to women’s sports completely remove any integrity in women’s competitions.”
“It doesn’t matter how Avi expresses himself or perceives himself. He clearly does not belong in women’s sport, and neither does any other male regardless of their motivation for wanting to participate,” added the women’s advocacy group.
A male powerlifting coach self-identified as a woman and broke a women's benchpress record in protest of gender self-identification in sport.
Avi Silverberg performed the defiant act while the current record holder, a transgender male, watched.
Canadian weightlifter and YouTuber Greg Doucette lauded Silverberg’s weighty protest, stating, “How long before the powers that be suddenly wake up and smell the coffee and understand that if you’re born a female, you’re not going to be as powerful, as strong, as tall, as big … as if you were born a male.”
“To me, the answer is simple: We add a separate category, a new category, the trans category,” said Doucette.
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Less than one month after Texas Tech University was busted for using race-based ideology as a litmus test for hiring candidates in the school’s biology department, the four-year university suspended head men’s basketball coach Mark Adams for quoting the Bible to a student-athlete.
TTU Director of Athletics Kirby Hocutt suspended Adams on Sunday after learning that the coach encouraged one of his basketball players “to be more receptive to coaching and referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters.”
The comment, according to the university, was “inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive” and deserved a formal written reprimand from Hocutt, suspension, and an investigation into Adams’ previous “interactions with his players and staff.”
TTU claimed that when confronted with offense over the comments, Adams “immediately addressed this with the team and apologized.” Adams, however, said that was not the case.
“One of my coaches said it bothered the player,” Adams told Stadium. “I explained to them. I didn’t apologize.”
The controversial exchange, Adams said, was supposed to be “a private conversation about coaching and when you have a job, and being coachable.”
“I said that in the Bible that Jesus talks about how we all have bosses, and we all are servants,” Adams added. “I was quoting the Bible about that.”
TTU first hired Adams as head coach in April of 2021 to replace Chris Beard. In Adams’ first year leading the team, he secured the most wins, 27, of any first-year head coach in TTU basketball history. He also led the Red Raiders to the Big 12 finals and the Sweet 16.
Adams’ impressive debut record, however, quickly dwindled earlier this year. One week before the 2023 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, TTU’s men’s team is only 5-13 in the Big 12 and 16-15 overall.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Jason Allen/ISI Photos / Contributor, Nick Cammett / Stringer, Cooper Neill / Contributor, Tim Nwachukwu / Staff, Mitchell Leff / Contributor, Cooper Neill / Contributor | Getty Images
Let’s call it “The Sopranos Bowl.”
Super Bowl LVII, Kansas City’s 38-35 victory, unseated “Made in America,” the finale of the iconic HBO mob series, as the worst ending in television history.
With a little less than two minutes to play and the score tied at 35-35, a would-be Super Bowl classic cut to black, leaving more than 100 million fans pondering what could have been.
Would Philly capo Jalen Hurts rally the Eagles from a three-point deficit and win the game or force overtime? Or did Kansas City underboss Patrick Mahomes and button man Harrison Butker whack the Eagles?
We’ll never know because a referee flagged Philly corner James Bradberry for defensive holding on third and eight at the Philadelphia 15-yard line. The penalty gave the Chiefs a first down, allowed them to drain the clock, and set up a game-ending 27-yard field goal with eight seconds to play.
The unnecessary and unjustified call ruined the Super Bowl.
I don’t care that Bradberry defended the ref.
“It was holding,” Bradberry told reporters. “I tugged his jersey. I was hoping they would let it slide.”
No dice. No way.
It was a horrible call. I’ve watched the replays a dozen times. Chiefs wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster never broke stride. Bradberry’s contact never impeded Smith-Schuster from getting into his route. The refs stayed out of the game for 58 minutes. There were no mystery holding calls in the secondary or along the line of scrimmage. It was a clean game. It was a great game. Until the bogus holding penalty on Bradberry.
I’m not a bitter Eagles fan. I’m a happy Chiefs fan. I lived and worked in Kansas City for 16 years. My mother moved to Kansas City in 1984. I moved there in 1994. The Chiefs are my favorite football team. I bet money on Kansas City winning Sunday’s game. I’m thrilled with the outcome.
It’s the same way I feel about “The Sopranos.” It’s one of my two or three favorite shows in the history of television. It’s right there with “The Wire” and “The Shield.”
But more than anything else, “The Sopranos” is remembered for its trash ending. The screen cut to black. Sopranos fans have spent years arguing whether a hit man in a Members Only jacket clipped Tony Soprano as he ate dinner with Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. as “Don’t Stop Believin’” played on the jukebox.
Endings are important. They can taint the memory of an otherwise perfect story. “The Sopranos” might be the undisputed king of television if not for its blown final episode.
A perfect ending can elevate a TV show. “The Shield” pulled off the greatest finale in history. “Family Meeting,” “The Shield’s” final 72-minute episode, is flawless. Dirty cop Shane Vendrell poisons his wife and kid and then blows his own head off. Dirty cop Ronnie Gardocki is dragged off to jail seconds after finding out his trusted leader, Vic Mackey, snitched to save himself. Mackey forfeits his kids and career, is exposed as a cop killer, and is trapped at a desk job surrounded by federal agents who hate him.
The ending enriched all seven seasons and the 87 preceding episodes of “The Shield.”
Sunday’s Super Bowl was a bitter reminder of what’s wrong with the NFL. Referees have too much influence over the outcomes. They have too many judgment calls to make. The officiating is uneven and inconsistent. Sometimes the games feel manipulated. Calls of pass interference and roughing the passer determine outcomes more than the players.
I don’t believe the NFL is rigged. Nor do I believe former NFL running back Arian Foster’s outrageous suggestion that the games follow a script.
What was scripted was the reaction to Sunday’s game-deciding penalty.
I believe the NFL persuaded Bradberry and the Eagles not to whine about the costly penalty. I believe the league persuaded its television partners to downplay the penalty on Sunday. I don’t blame the NFL for this. It’s smart business. The league’s showcase event botched the ending. Roger Goodell wants fans talking about the magnificent performances of Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Nick Bolton, the Kansas City linebacker. It’s better to discuss the coaching brilliance of Andy Reid than the fact that NFL referees are in an impossible position.
Remember the Saints-Rams pass-interference no-call that sent Los Angeles to the 2019 Super Bowl?
The refs swallowed their whistles and let the players decide the game. The refs were ripped. Saints coach Sean Payton whined for months. He wore a Roger Goodell clown T-shirt. A New Orleans fan filed a lawsuit against the NFL (and later dropped it).
The “Nola No Call” in the NFC Championship is more memorable than the Patriots’ 13-3 Super Bowl victory.
Whelp, this time a ref didn’t swallow his flag. He threw it. He directly influenced the end of the game.
The NFL is a television show. Its goal is to create television stars. Its biggest star, Tom Brady, just retired. Patrick Mahomes is the next man up. The NFL is determined to stop a bogus penalty from tainting Mahomes’ second Super Bowl title.
The final episode of “The Sopranos” aired in June 2007, well before the social media matrix distorted truth with controlled narrative. Sixteen years ago, we were all free to rip “Made in America.” Now algorithms and partnerships determine criticism and dissent.
They want us to “fuhgeddaboudit.” That’s Sopranos slang for “forget about it.”
Fans hold a candlelight vigil for Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center on Jan. 3, 2023, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest and is in critical condition following the Bills’ Monday Night Football game against the Cincinnati Bengals. | Jeff Dean/Getty Images
A new poll reveals that the overwhelming majority of Americans see public calls for prayer in a time of tragedy as a force for good, with such a belief extending across all demographic subgroups.
Summit Ministries, in conjunction with McLaughlin & Associates, conducted an online poll released to the public Tuesday of 1,000 likely voters from Jan. 19-23, asking them to weigh in on the power of prayer.
The poll came a few weeks after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin’s collapse after suffering cardiac arrest during a Jan. 2 game against the Cincinnati Bengals and his subsequent recovery. Hamlin’s recovery followed an outpouring of support from the American public, which included the offering of prayers on his behalf.
With a sampling error margin of 3.1 percentage points, the poll found that two-thirds of respondents (67%) told pollsters that they saw public calls for prayer after a national tragedy as “helpful.”
On the other hand, nearly 20% of those surveyed characterized public calls for prayer amid a national tragedy as “pointless.” The remaining 13% either had no opinion or refused to answer the question.
Belief in the power of prayer cut across all demographic subgroups, with most respondents of all races, age groups, genders, marital statuses, political ideologies and regions classifying it as “helpful.”
The share of respondents with favorable opinions of public calls to prayer in times of tragedy descended with each generation, with 77% of Americans over the age of 65 believing in the power of prayer, followed by 70% of those aged 56-65, 68% of those between the ages of 41 and 55 and 62% of respondents aged 30-40.
Americans between the ages of 18-29 were the group least likely to view public calls for prayer as effective. Fifty-five percent of respondents under 30 identified calls for prayer as “helpful,” while 27% dismissed them as “pointless.”
Liberals had a higher share of respondents who viewed public calls to prayer as “pointless” (30%).
“Some people say there’s not really a generational difference, but there is,” Summit Ministries President Jeff Myers, whose ministry seeks to provide resources to ground Christians in a biblical worldview, said in a statement. “Young adults are more likely to say that they have no religious preference and this poll seems to reflect that.”
Myers expressed gratitude that “still, more than half of young Americans, the most skeptical generation, believe that public calls to prayer are effective.”
“In times of crisis, Americans are still likely to come together even in spite of their partisan differences,” he added. “The fact that people want to pray together, I think, is one of those … increasingly rare moments of unity. If it happens around prayer, all the better.”
The poll illustrated a degree of consensus, with majorities of conservatives (80%), Republicans (73%), Democrats (65%), independents (62%) and liberals (59%) seeing calls to prayer as helpful.
Majorities of African Americans (73%), southerners (72%), women (71%), residents of the Midwest (70%), married respondents (69%), whites (67%), Hispanics (66%), Americans living in the eastern U.S. (64%), men (63%), single respondents (62%) and residents of the west coast (60%) said the same.
Summit Ministries partners with McLaughlin & Associates for a monthly poll to ask questions related to several topics, such as prayer, biblical values and the rejection of cancel culture.
The nonprofit seeks to “find out where there really is consensus in spite of the key divide that we often see in America.”
“We’re finding that probably 70% of Americans are people with solid values who just want to live their lives,” Myers added. “Thirty percent of Americans want to tell everybody else what to do and they can be nasty about it. Sometimes, the fear of the 30% causes the 70% to be silent, and I’m hoping that our polls show that they don’t need to be, that most people are with them.”
Myers expressed gratitude that the nation rallied around Hamlin and that “a lot of people, especially high-profile NFL athletes, felt comfortable with sharing their faith.”
In his first on-camera comments since his collapse on the field, the 24-year-old Hamlin said Saturday that his collapse “was a direct example of God using me as a vessel to share my passion and my love directly from my heart with the entire world.”
Since his collapse, Hamlin’s charity has raised over $9 million to help provide toys for kids in need.
“Now, I’m able to give it back to kids and communities all across the world who need it the most, and that’s always been my dream, that’s always been what I stood for and what I will continue to stand for,” Hamlin said.
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The New York Rangers hockey team took the ice for warmups before their game on Friday night without the promised rainbow-colored jerseys and stick tape meant to show deference to the so-called “LGBTQ+” community, causing outrage among left-leaning media outlets and activists.
For the past six seasons, the Rangers have hosted “Pride Night Friday” at Madison Square Garden, and that tradition continued this year. On January 27, Michael James Scott, a Broadway star who identifies as gay, performed the national anthem. Andre Thomas, the co-chair of NYC Pride and Heritage of Pride, participated in the ceremonial, pre-game puck drop. The arena, especially the jumbotron, was emblazoned in “rainbow colors,” and members of the Rangers Blue Crew, the people responsible for inciting fan engagement, still carried rainbow-colored flags.
But the players themselves did not don any gear making reference, either by word or by symbol, to sexual relationships of any kind. Instead, they wore Reverse Retro jerseys, which depict the face of the Statue of Liberty.
Writers at many news outlets and activists have heavily criticized the Rangers organization as a result. “New York Rangers … FAIL to explain why they backtrack on promise,” a Daily Mail headline howled. Mollie Walker, the New York Post beat writer for the Rangers, complained that the team took an “otherwise a beautiful celebration of inclusivity” and turned it into a “slight” against “members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
David Kilmnick, the president of the LGBT Network in Queens, called the decision “a slap in the face.”
“If the Rangers are saying they’re going to be celebrating Pride Night, everybody needs to, for lack of a better term, ‘come out’ and celebrate,” Kilmnick insisted. “To give the OK to these hockey players to be homophobic is not celebrating pride. It’s the opposite of it.“
Promotions for the seventh-annual “Pride Night” at MSG did promise that “the Rangers will be showing their support by donning pride-themed warm-up jerseys and tape in solidarity with those who continue to advocate for inclusivity.”
The organization has not explained its seemingly last-minute costume change, though it has issued a statement:
“Our organization respects the LGBTQ+ community and we are proud to bring attention to important local community organizations as part of another great Pride Night,” the statement reaffirmed.
“In keeping with our organization’s core values, we support everyone’s individual right to respectfully express their beliefs,” it concluded.
Some have interpreted the second half of the statement to mean that at least one member of the Rangers organization was planning not to participate. Another NHL team, the Philadelphia Flyers, has had to manage a lot of unwanted attention for nearly two weeks after one team member, defenseman Ivan Provorov, publicly stated that, in keeping with the tenets of his Russian Orthodox religion, he would not wear a “pride” jersey.
“I respect everybody’s choices,” Provorov told reporters after the Flyers’ win over the Ducks on January 17. “My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say.”
No Rangers player has stated publicly that he would have refused to participate in the annual “Pride” celebration, but the entire team walked — or perhaps skated — away winners that night. The Rangers trounced the visiting Vegas Golden Knights 4-1 and are now 27-14-8 on the season, good for third place in the Metropolitan Division of the Eastern Conference.
Update: Since writing this article, it was reported that, “Jerseys for Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov have sold out online days after the 26-year-old refused to wear a gay pride-themed jersey for religious reasons.”
Getty Images
Do you remember when the main goal of LGBT activism was creating an atmosphere of “tolerance and acceptance”? Those days are long gone, and the goal posts have been moved dramatically. Today, if you do not partake in the public, mandatory celebration of LGBT pride, you will be marked and you will be ostracized. If you don’t believe me, just ask NHL hockey player Ivan Provorov.
Provorov, who is from Russia and plays on the Philadelphia Flyers, declined to participate in pregame warmups for the Flyer’s LGBT pride night, since he would have been required to wear a pride-themed jersey.
He explained to reporters, “I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion [which is Russian Orthodox]. That’s all I’m going to say.”
In other words, if someone identifies as LGBT, that’s their business, and he respects that. He has his own religious beliefs which dictate how he lives, and he would ask others to respect that. Live and let live.
Flyers coach John Tortorella was supportive of Provorov’s choice, explaining that the team made clear where it stood on LGBT pride. As for Provorov himself, Tortorella said that “he is being true to himself and to his religion. This has to do with his beliefs and his religion. That is one thing I respect about Provy, he is always true to himself, so that’s where we’re at with that.”
But not everyone was as tolerant (remember that word?).
According to hockey journalist Pierre LeBrun, if Provorov really respected the LGBT community, he would have participated in the event and worn the jersey. To paraphrase, “Who gives a hoot about his religious convictions? To respect someone means to celebrate who they are and what they do, even if it is in fundamental contradiction to one’s own beliefs and convictions.”
Hockey commentator Gord Miller seconded LeBrun’s sentiments, adding that Provorov should have been banned from playing in the game. After all, he tweeted, “Freedom of expression doesn’t give you freedom from the consequences of your words or actions.”
To paraphrase again, “Failure to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride has serious professional consequences!”
Sports and comedy writer Rachael Millanta was even more blunt, calling Provorov “ignorant, obnoxious, and homophobic,” also referring to people like him as “bigots” who “hide behind their cherry-picked religion.”
Oh, the beauty of open-minded, liberal tolerance!
So, by Provorov following the consistent Christian teachings of the last 2,000 years (or, more broadly, the consistent biblical teachings of the last 3,000+ years), he is an ignorant, obnoxious and homophobic bigot who is cherry-picking his beliefs. The same can be said for the tens of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians who share these beliefs, along with many hundreds of millions of other Christians of like heart and like mind.
In short, you cannot graciously disagree. You cannot respectfully opt out. Instead, you must deny your convictions, rewrite the Bible, run roughshod over your faith and publicly celebrate something you believe to be wrong. Otherwise, you are a crass human being and a small-minded bigot. Those are your only choices!
Already in 2011 in my book A Queer Thing Happened to America, I could point to the Riddle Homophobia Scale, used in schools to evaluate whether the students were “homophobic.” According to the scale, both tolerance and acceptance were considered homophobic, since homosexuality was not something to “tolerate” or “accept.” Instead, the only way not to be homophobic was to embrace a “positive” attitude which called for “support, admiration, appreciation, and nurturance.”
Yes, if you don’t want to be a homophobe, you must admire your lesbian friend. You must nurture your transgender colleague’s new identity. Otherwise, you will be marked.
Are you surprised?
Well, consider this: “The Riddle homophobia scale was developed by Dorothy Riddle in 1973–74 while she was overseeing research for the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gays and Lesbians.” That’s how far back it goes, although it wasn’t widely released until 1994. That’s why I started my article with this question: “Do you remember when the main goal of LGBT activism was creating an atmosphere of ‘tolerance and acceptance?’”
Most young people, including young adults, do not remember this time because they never experienced it. Instead, they have grown up with the choice to celebrate LGBT pride or be branded, to comply publicly or be ousted.
That’s why one of the chapters in my forthcoming book Why Have So Many Christians Left the Faith is titled, “If Gay Is Good, Christianity Is Bad.” That’s how much the tables have turned, even though the testimony of Scripture remains as clear today as it has ever been.
One of my colleagues, who is now a pastor, worked for years as a computer programmer with Bank of America. He told me that little by little, he was getting pushed out of his job through LGBT activism. By the time he quit, every employee, let alone higher-level manager or executive, could see on your bio whether you identified as an LGBT ally. If not, you could virtually kiss your career advancements goodbye.
Provorov is just the latest example of this reverse bigoted, small-minded, judgmentalism which leaves us with only one ethical choice: We will continue to love our LGBT neighbor as ourselves and we will refuse to back down on our convictions regardless of cost or consequence. That’s what Jesus would have us do.
It doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to realize our country is polarized. Not just politically speaking, but socially, emotionally, religiously, spiritually, and in every way possible.
So much so, that many of us have lost our perspectives along the way. This is indeed an inflection point, because due to our much-splintered societal focus- everything we thought we knew has changed.
In recognition concerning events of late, I’m reminded of these words adapted from 15th century writer John Heywood: “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” Simply put, you can’t see the problem- because you’re concentrating too hard on it.
Sometimes the answer isn’t what you want to believe. Considering the recent Damar Hamlin incident in which the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills’ safety suffered a cardiac arrest on the field as they began their skirmish- it provides the perfect preface.
By all accounts, Hamlin’s condition prior to the game was sound with no health challenges or issues. In high school, Hamlin led his team to a 15-1 record. According to npr.org, he also helped his school garner a ”WPIAL Class AAAA championship and PIAA state title during his final year in high school. In his career thus far with the Bills, he has played in all 15 games so far, tallying 91 tackles (tied for second-most on the Bills), six tackles for loss, two pass breakups and 1.5 sacks this season.”
So why isn’t this the question: “Why would a perfectly healthy football star suddenly have a massive heart attack?”
Before you go into the sports media-buzz rhetoric about the violence of the game being a factor or an accessory culprit, think about these examples:
In August of 2022, a 20-year-old Canadian hockey player died after collapsing during a tournament. According to an article on people.com, Eli Palfreyman, the captain of the Ayr Centennials collapsed in the locker room during a pre-season game. Chest compressions were administered by his trainer but were unsuccessful. He died shortly after being taken to the hospital. The article continued: “Per Shantz, his father told the athletes, “The happiest day in Eli’s life was when he was named captain, and he said you cannot take a shift off the rest of the year because Eli’s spirit will be pushing you to do your best every shift, and I want to see it.”
Shantz added of the emotional meeting, “Then the mother spoke and, you know, the tears were just flowing everywhere when a grieving mother speaks about her son. And instead of going inward, she just talked about us and everything that we did. She was there, she saw it and she just praised us. She said, ‘I know how hard you worked to save Eli.’”
Despite the understandable shock, sadness and disbelief, the question still isn’t being taken under consideration, so I ask again, “how could he possibly be dead at 20?”
Next up is the rising MMA star Victoria Lee.
At only 5 ft 5, and 115 lbs., Victoria Sun-hei Lee was nicknamed, “The Prodigy.” The ONE Championship star was the third in her family to compete, following older sibling’s fighters Angela and Christian Lee. After only her third year in MMA, her short-but-amazing career spawned 3 fights, culminating in 3 wins and zero losses. She had recently paused her meteoric rise to focus on graduating, having not quite finished high school.
Getting her start at age 11, her future looked bright, promising and historic. Fellow Hawaiian UFC fighter Dan Ige was disappointed by the reaction of some concerning the 18-year-old’s sudden death, when he spoke in the MMA Junkie section at CNN.com:
“Was it the vaccine? Was it mental health? Was it this? Was it that? Like, give them freaking respect, because that’s their tragedy, that’s their loss. … Give them some respect.” Pleaded Ige. “An 18-year-old girl passes, and they’re going to mourn that for the rest of their lives. We’re going to wake up Monday and f*cking read the newspaper, ‘What’s next?’ They have to mourn that. It’s an absolute tragedy. They were definitely weighing on my heart, and the only thing you can do is pray for them, because she’s gone, and there’s no bringing her back.”
Tragically, the only answers that we received concerning the mysterious death of one so young is, “no cause of death is shared.” While the tragedies these families suffer is no doubt unimaginable, we find ourselves with more questions than answers. And despite not knowing the causes of death, many are quick to dismiss the vaccine.
Question Everything!
According to the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) it was revealed that there was more than 5,000 deaths and adverse reactions from the experimental vaccines. Although this article records several untimely deaths of youth in the prime of their lives, we are discovering more tragic fatal cardiac episodes striking our young people almost daily.
For many, we chose to dismiss the governmental push to take an unapproved, unproven, untested chemical and inject it into our bodies. For others, they chose to ignore the science and follow the rhetoric, despite the limited testing and lack of results (positive or negative) thus far. As it stands by example, vaccine deaths occur even more in those vaccinated than in those that are not. For instance, vaccination matters, even as it comes to light that more people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 died in August than those who weren’t vaccinated, according to an analysis by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
Cox undertook the analysis for The Health 202, which is published by The Washington Post. Kff.org reads: “The share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen. In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted, and that’s remained true through at least August 2022 (the most recent month of data).”
To date, millions have taken the vaccines, as well as the boosters. Some out of fear; others out of caution, no doubt impatient concerning what the virus could do. Based on the real science, based on what we’ve learned since then, many are now realizing they should have waited longer.
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After Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest during the Bills’ Jan. 2 matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals, people all over the world bowed their heads in solemn prayer for his life and health. While the offer of “thoughts and prayers” for a frightening situation is commonplace, those thoughts and prayers seem to have taken root in this instance. Hamlin’s teammate, quarterback Josh Allen, opened up about a “spiritual awakening” that has occurred in his team’s locker room and in his own heart since the incident.
Allen, 26, makes a regular appearance with NFL Network co-host Kyle Brandt on the podcast “Kyle Brandt’s Basement,” and on the Jan. 10 episode, the two discussed Hamlin’s continued recovery and God’s role in it.
“I said this in my press conference the other day,” Allen told Brandt, “[There was] just kind of a spiritual awakening really for me and … for a lot of other people that maybe didn’t have the strongest belief or wasn’t one of the biggest, strongest Christian followers.”
The “spiritual awakening” is not surprising considering the severity of Hamlin’s medical crisis. Not only did first responders and training staff perform CPR on Hamlin right there on the field, but his uncle Dorrian Glenn later reported that Hamlin had to be resuscitated twice in the minutes and hours that followed his collapse. But despite the precariousness of his health that night, Hamlin has since made a remarkable recovery. He was discharged from the hospital within a week and is now recuperating in Buffalo.
“I’ll be the first to admit, like, I haven’t been the most devoted Christ follower in my life,” Allen admitted to Brandt. “I’ve had my different beliefs and thoughts and ideas and stuff like that, but something got ahold of me there, and it was extremely powerful that, you know, I couldn’t deny it.”
The two men then discussed an event that occurred at the Bills’ next game, an event that Brandt described as “some sort of miracle.” The Sunday after Hamlin’s collapse, the Bills took the field to play against the New England Patriots for their final regular-season game. On the opening kickoff, Bills kick returner Nyheim Hines ran the ball back 96 yards for a touchdown. While the play itself was worth celebrating, fans were quick to note that it occurred exactly three years and three months after Hamlin, who wears No. 3, made the team’s last kickoff return for a touchdown.
In discussing Hines’ touchdown, Allen later told reporters: “I was just going around to my teammates saying, ‘God’s real.’ You can’t draw that one up, write that one up any better.”
Allen told Brandt that he grew up Methodist in Firebaugh, California, and attended church regularly with his family, but as he grew older, he hadn’t made practicing his faith a priority.
“It’s been so long since I’ve actually been to church. I went this last offseason one or two times, but not as much as maybe I should,” Allen added.
However, he also indicated that Hamlin’s collapse and subsequent recovery may have stirred many hearts to return to church and make Christian faith a higher priority. “I think this conversation that we’re having right now, we’ve had all these conversations in our locker room,” he said. “It’s been really cool to see how guys have been moved and touched by this whole instance and situation and to see the country come together in support for Damar and maybe having those talks.”
And Allen isn’t the only member of the Bills organization to discuss the religious component of the Bills’ and Hamlin’s recent events. Head coach Sean McDermott has openly shared his belief that God deserves the glory for Hamlin’s improvement. “Glory to God for His keeping Damar and his family in the palm of His hand over the last couple of days and His healing powers,” McDermott said on Jan. 5.
Two days earlier, football analyst Dan Orlovsky — a self-described “follower of Jesus” — prayed spontaneously for Hamlin during a live broadcast on ESPN. His fellow panelists likewise closed their eyes, folded their hands, and joined him in that prayer.
Though these examples of religiosity may be anecdotal, Allen indicated that there is hope that they could lead to a revival of faith among athletes and nonathletes alike.
“To hear some of these stories and just feelings from our guys, to be going through this situation, it’s been really cool to see that unfold in front of us,” Allen stated. “Again, I can’t chalk it down to anything else but a higher power. Yeah, I’m extremely moved. I don’t really have the words to explain it.”
After a routine tackle during Monday night’s Bills-Bengals game, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on his back in cardiac arrest. Medical personnel administered CPR for roughly 10 minutes before an ambulance carted Hamlin off the field and to a Cincinnati hospital.
While it drove off, onlookers reported seeing Bills head coach Sean McDermott gather his players on the field for communal prayer. As both teams and staff knelt around Hamlin during those 10 minutes of CPR, individual players certainly were praying too. One Bengals fan at the game scribbled “Pray for Buffalo #3 Hamlin” on a paper sign. Minutes later, fans of both teams showed up at Hamlin’s hospital to pray. Players from around the league, fans, and others across social media offered prayers. We join them all in their prayers for his body and soul.
To watch the heart of the man beside you on the field stop beating, as Hamlin’s teammates and competitors did, is to be reminded of the Maker-meeting moment every one of us will encounter. Those reminders compel us to pray for mercy. Only the players and God know the content of the prayers offered from the field in Paycor Stadium last night, but I’d guess they prayed for the mercies of healing, comfort, and more time on this Earth, either to serve God or to encounter his grace.
For followers of Christ, prayer is a familiar weapon. It is a means by which we may approach the holy God and make our requests known to him. It is an act of intimacy and communion with our Maker and Judge, and a channel by which we offer humble repentance and receive unmerited grace. When faced with the threat of tragedy — a symptom of living in a world tainted by our own sin — we quickly remember our constant need for mercy, and it compels us to pray.
In moments like last night, however, it seems it’s not only the adopted children of God who cry out to him. Something prompts even those who, in another moment, might doubt the existence of God, to suddenly seek his mercy. Skeptics love to mock the offering of “thoughts and prayers” as useless or silly, but their quickness to turn to prayer in times of need suggests that deep down, they know its power.
Why? Our souls are created for eternity. Whether we admit it or not, moments that force us to wrestle with our own mortality are less about facing death and more about facing the reality that we are part of a judgment and redemption narrative far beyond the scope of our brief earthly pilgrimage, and which extends far beyond that pilgrimage’s end.
To repentantly welcome that redemption, recognizing our utter need for it and Christ’s exclusive worthiness to procure it, inspires worshipful gratitude. To reject it, or to indifferently ignore it, is to choose a life in which the existence of death rightly inspires fear. As we pray for Damar Hamlin’s recovery, we also pray that his brush with eternity would stir onlookers to grasp their own need for the loving mercy of God.
A few weeks ago, Hamlin spoke on “One Bills Live” about a sobering injury his teammate Dane Jackson had received.
“I can’t even describe it, but I cherish it every second that I can. Every second of every day,” Hamlin said. “We just had our prayer, our DB prayer we do every Wednesday. He was next to me and I just grabbed his hand a little bit harder just because you know, you never know when your last day could be that you get to experience something like this.”
That’s a realization that, for untold observers, Hamlin’s own scare just prompted. In addition to recalling our need for salvation, such reminders of eternity should spur us to pray more diligently and to live more gratefully. Alongside our petitions for Hamlin’s comfort and healing, we pray God would use the events of last night to compel more gratitude, prayerful vigilance, humble repentance, and joyful reception of grace, in Hamlin’s heart and in our own.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Kevin Sabitus / Contributor, Timothy T Ludwig / Contributor | Getty Images
Include football in your prayers for Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who collapsed from a heart attack last night during Monday Night Football. Everyone desperately wants the 24-year-old safety to recover. The same is not true for the sport that enriches him and countless other young men. The woke have programmed us to hate football, to see it as a source of toxic masculinity, unnecessary health risks, and a relic of a dying patriarchy.
Football has been demonized. We watch it while holding our breath, believing that every hit leads to life-altering head trauma.
The 2022 season could very well be remembered as the year the NFL died in Cincinnati. The Queen City is where Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa crumpled, fingers contorted, and lost consciousness after a routine sack during Thursday Night Football. Three months later, another seemingly routine hit precipitated Hamlin’s collapse, loss of consciousness, and rush to a local hospital.
The NFL delights in its ability to attract massive audiences to its stand-alone games. The league’s pervasiveness and overexposure work against it when dramatic injuries occur. Games intended to entertain and distract turn into somber visitations and funerals. Broadcasters inadvertently transform into mourners, eulogists, and priests. Corporate media’s addiction to Twitter compels a competition of last rites and emotion.
The enemies of football are the real winners.
The feminists and leftists pushing the anti-football propaganda campaign have even seduced the sport’s participants. Inside an American culture that rewards victimhood, current and former NFL players cast themselves as martyrs of a game that makes them millionaires.
In reaction to Hamlin’s on-field tragedy, former Pittsburgh Steeler turned ESPN broadcaster Ryan Clark proclaimed that Hamlin’s cardiac arrest was a byproduct of football.
“So many times, in this game and in our job as well, we use the cliches, you know? ‘I’m ready to die for this. I’m willing to give my life for this. It’s time to go to war.’ I think sometimes we use those things so much we forget that part of living this dream is putting your life at risk. Tonight, we got to see a side of football that is extremely ugly. A side of football that no one ever wants to see or never wants to admit exists.”
I played football all the way through college. I have many close friends who had long careers in the NFL. I’ve never heard anyone say they’re ready to die for football. No one I know looks at football as a life-and-death situation. Injuries are always a possibility. No one thinks of death.
In 1971, Chuck Hughes, a 28-year-old Detroit Lions receiver, died during a game. It was later revealed he suffered blood clots. Hughes is the only NFL player to die during a game. I was unaware of Hughes’ death until last night. There was no 24-hour sports news network in 1971. Monday Night Football was just a year old. As a news story, Hughes’ death wasn’t treated as a national tragedy. It was something bad that happened. Bad things happen in all activities.
In 1990, college basketball star Hank Gathers collapsed and died while playing hoops. In 1993, Boston Celtics forward Reggie Lewis collapsed and died during practice. In 1920, a Yankees pitcher struck the head of Cleveland’s Ray Chapman with a pitch. Chapman died 12 hours later. I was at the race in 2001 when Dale Earnhardt slammed into the wall and died. I knew the boxer Randie Carver. I was at the fight that killed him and visited his family at the hospital the day he was pronounced dead in 1999.
My point is that football is not unique. Men and women take risks playing sports, riding the subway, swimming in a pool or the ocean. There’s no reason to blame football for what happened to Damar Hamlin. Like Hughes, Hamlin could very well have a preexisting condition that contributed to cardiac arrest.
But it’s nearly impossible to have measured, nuanced conversations in the media today. Everything said on ESPN and Fox Sports is crafted in a way to please Twitter. It’s all performative emotion and outrage. It’s all dishonest and inauthentic.
Clark continued his performance and analogized Hamlin’s heart attack to his own 2007 medical event while playing against the Denver Broncos. Clark has sickle cell trait. Playing at Mile High Stadium at high altitude compromised blood flow to Clark’s spleen. He was rushed to the hospital and was never allowed to play at Denver again.
“I’ve dealt with this before, and I watch my teammates for days come to my hospital bed and just cry,” Clark said. “I had them call me and tell me that they didn’t think I was going to make it. And now this team has to deal with that and they have no answers.
“So, the next time that we get upset about our favorite fantasy player or we’re upset that the guy on our team doesn’t make the play and we’re saying, ‘He’s worthless’ and we’re saying, ‘You get to make all this money,’ we should remember that these men are putting their lives on the line to live their dream.”
Police officers put their lives on the line. So do members of the military. Football players play a game. Boxers and mixed martial artists take more risks.
What’s going on with football reminds me of the left’s demonization of boxing. Boxing used to be the king of all American sports, the pop culture symbol of male masculinity. Eventually the very people who benefitted from the popularity of boxing turned against the sport.
Eleven months after Muhammad Ali’s last fight, legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell “quit” the sport of boxing. He said this after watching Larry Holmes batter Randall Tex Cobb for 15 rounds. Cosell trashed the fight throughout the broadcast. He later told the New York Times: “I now favor the abolition of professional boxing.”
He milked the sport for fortune and fame and then took a dump on it.
ESPN and its battalion of ex-jocks and ex-journalists are doing the exact same thing to football.
Ask God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit to intervene on behalf of Damar Hamlin. He’s in critical condition. Do the same for football. Its public perception is on life support, too.
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A girls’ high school volleyball player in North Carolina recently suffered severe injuries to her head and neck after a trans opponent spiked a ball into her face.
Early last month, Hiwassee Dam High School competed against Highlands High School in a girls’ volleyball tournament. During the game, an unnamed biological male playing for Highlands spiked a ball over the net and hit an unnamed Hiwassee Dam player directly in the face. Though video of the incident is grainy, the unnamed female player can clearly be seen lying on the floor for some time before recovering enough to walk off the court on her own power. The girl is still said to be experiencing long-term concussion symptoms, such as vision problems, and has not been cleared to return to play either by a physician or a neurologist.
As a result of her injury, the Cherokee County Board of Education voted 5-1 to cancel all future volleyball games against Highlands High School, citing a “safety issue.”
One long-serving coach allegedly persuaded at least one board member to vote in favor of canceling the games. Cherokee board member Joe Wood said that “a coach of 40 years said they’d never seen a hit like this. That was really what sealed the decision, at least on my part.”
The Post Millennial claims to have confirmed that assertion from the unidentified coach.
Fellow board member Jeff Tatham added that the ball had allegedly been traveling at 70 mph when it struck the girl’s face. “I don’t know if that’s faster than normal, but it seemed like it was coming off very fast, abnormally, especially fast,” Tatham said. “It not only hit her in the face, then the ball came off of her face with enough force to then go back through the net.”
In addition to the safety concerns, the board also said it believes that male competitors have a “competitive advantage” over female opponents.
“The competitive advantage issue certainly has to come up in any scenario with that type of transgender conversion, per se,” said Jeff Martin, vice chair of the board. “I can tell you that the board wasn’t searching out this kind of thing. It was brought to our attention based on safety concerns.”
However, despite the concerns voiced by the board, some local residents have chided the decision to cancel district games against Highlands.
“All the events for one incident? It’s not right,” said Tony Graham. “There’s risk getting out of bed in the morning, crossing the street, and going to the store. I’m sure the teammate that did get hurt wants them to go out there and fight for it, right? That’s what we do.”
Board member Arnold Mathews reiterated that the decision applies only to Highlands and only to girls’ volleyball. The North Carolina High School Athletic Association confirmed that each “local school system” can decide not to play games against particular opponents or schools.
“While we would prefer that schools or teams play all games it schedules,” the NCHSAA said, “that latitude does exist.”
Though the WTVC video below does contain clips from the Hiwassee Dam/Highlands game, it does not depict the spike in question. The MaxPreps video for this particular game also appears to be unavailable.
Pascal Le Segretain / Staff, Bob Levey / Contributor | Getty Images
We used to understand that not everything is for everybody. We no longer do. We live in the era of unisex bathrooms. In the name of “inclusion,” we killed the Boy Scouts to make room for girls. We expanded marriage. We bought the lie that everything is for everybody. We embraced the myth that we can have it all. No, we can’t. Our collective pursuit of everything undergirds America’s decline.
Pat Riley, the NBA legend, calls it the “disease of more.” A team wins a championship, and every member of the organization wants more for themselves. The quest for more eventually changes the character of the pursuer. He or she loses life balance and compromises core values in the hunt for more.
In my opinion, the “disease of more” explains Tom Brady’s rumored divorce. You can’t have it all.
It’s a lesson that the NFL will soon learn. The National Football League, America’s favorite form of entertainment, wants to have it all. Under the weak leadership of commissioner Roger Goodell, the NFL has spent the last 15 years pursuing corporate media-defined inclusion.
A sport intended to groom young boys and men to compete in a meritocracy has bowed to the feminist worldview of diversity, inclusion, and equity. The NFL strives to be everything for everybody. The push for inclusion has caused the league to prioritize safety.
Safety is a woman’s priority. Men seek thrills and danger. Men aren’t sadistic. We’re made different by design. Our love of danger leads to progress and advancement. Men called “roughnecks” built skyscrapers in the 1920s. Forty percent of them fell to their deaths or disablement. Women never would have done it.
The NFL’s preference to maximize safety and limit danger poses the greatest threat to America’s most popular sport. It’s a far more damaging initiative than the league’s promotion of Black Lives Matter and anti-American sentiment.
People watch football because we’re entertained by seeing men flirt with danger in pursuit of a goal.
Football is far less entertaining than it was 20 years ago, before an onslaught of rules changes softened the game and demonized hard hits. Yesterday’s Atlanta-Tampa Bay game was ruined when referee Jerome Boger flagged a Falcons defensive lineman for a routine sack of Tom Brady. The roughing-the-passer penalty cost Atlanta any chance of a comeback.
On Miami’s first offensive play against the New York Jets, officials monitoring the game removed quarterback Teddy Bridgewater because he allegedly briefly staggered when getting to his feet after a routine hit. Bridgewater was not allowed to return to the game. Facing Miami’s third-string quarterback, the Jets won in a romp.
The Brady and Bridgewater plays are a direct result of the Tua Tagovailoa controversy two weeks ago. Tagovailoa, who is fragile, suffered brief paralysis after a routine hit. Without a shred of evidence, broadcasters and social media influencers connected Tagovailoa’s brief paralysis to a hit he suffered four days earlier.
Broadcasters demonized the Dolphins organization and the team’s head coach for allowing Tua to play. The NFLPA demanded an investigation and then worked with the NFL to enact immediate new rules related to concussion protocols. Those new rules are why Bridgewater disappeared yesterday after one play.
We all want football to be safe. When it’s not safe, we want to blame somebody.
The game isn’t meant to be safe. It’s meant to be dangerous and entertaining. People are going to get hurt. It’s inevitable. It’s no different from boxing or mixed martial arts. It’s no different from working on a skyscraper in the 1920s.
The NFL won’t make this argument because the league wants to be all things to all people. It wants to avoid upsetting women and men who have been feminized to the point that they might as well be women.
The NFL fears moms. Women who won’t let their sons play football because the sport is too dangerous. They’re the same women who won’t let their kids go to school without wearing a mask. They’re women who want to remove all the risks from life. Women and beta males desire for all of us to sit in our homes playing video games, communicating over social media, watching 50-year-old Queen Latifah beat up men in “The Equalizer” TV series, and waiting for our next booster shot. They want us all to transition into women. Their plan is working.
I’ve watched football for 50 years. I turned off my television when I saw Tua’s momentarily disfigured fingers locked in the air. I briefly lost my appetite for football. That has never happened before. It speaks to the impact of football concussion propaganda. I’ll watch someone get knocked out in the ring or octagon and jump for joy.
But we have been programmed to see violence in football as savage and gruesome. Fifteen years ago, Chris Berman and Tom Jackson could react to NFL big hits the way Joe Rogan and Daniel Cormier still do at UFC events. We’re all still allowed to enjoy seeing fighters get put in the concussion protocol. It’s socially unacceptable to enjoy it on the football field. We pretend that the grossly exaggerated CTE pandemic only affects football players. We’ve been feminized. We’ve been programmed to prioritize our emotions and feelings over logic and fact.
We no longer know when, how, and where we should feed and support man’s innate desire to take risks. We’ve been convinced swiping left and right on Tinder is a better venue for risk-taking than a football field. More kids will be permanently and severely damaged in a hospital operating room undergoing gender-affirming surgery than playing football.
You get my point? The very people trying to make the world safer are actually making it more dangerous.
Football isn’t for women. Trying to make the game more palatable to women is a mistake. It’s why Arizona quarterback Kyler Murray showed up to work on Sunday wearing a lime green Hillary Clinton pantsuit. Among other things, feminized football turns men into runway models.
Female students at a Vermont high school have reportedly been banned from using the girls’ locker room after objecting to a transgender student changing there.
Members of the Randolph Union High School girls volleyball team were banned by school officials from using the locker room pending an investigation after some members objected to a biological male changing with them, WCAX-TV reported. One of the female students told WCAX-TV that the dispute began when the trans student made an inappropriate comment as the volleyball team was changing in the locker room, triggering an incident between students.
The outlet reported that school officials emailed parents to tell them an investigation into whether the transgender student was harassed has been launched.
Female students at Randolph Union High School were reportedly banned from the girls’ locker room after objecting to a trans student using it. (Google Earth)
“My mom wants me to do this interview to try to make a change,” female volleyball player Blake Allen told the outlet. “I feel like for stating my opinion — that I don’t want a biological man changing with me — that I should not have harassment charges or bullying charges. They should all be dropped.”
Allen added that when students have gone to the school about their concerns, they have been told that state law allows for transgender students to change in the locker room based on their gender identity.
A protester holds the trans flag and snaps in solidarity with other speakers, during a demonstration at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on June 25, 2021. (Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Officials reportedly told parents that the school provides “plenty of space where students who feel uncomfortable with the laws may change in privacy.”
“They want all the girls who feel uncomfortable — so pretty much 10 girls — to get changed in a single-stall bathroom, which would take over 30 minutes. Where if one person got changed separately, it would take a minute, like no extra time,” Allen told WCAX-TV.
Lawmakers listen as parents speak about the prospect of their children competing against transgender girls in school sports at the Utah State Capitol (AP Photo/Samuel Metz, File)
School officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Vermont Agency of Education policy states that the “use of restrooms and locker rooms by transgender students requires schools to consider numerous factors” while also saying that a “transgender student should not be required to use a locker room or restroom that conflicts with the student’s gender identity.”
Andrew Mark Miller is a writer at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
Several brave members of a girls’ high school volleyball team in Vermont have taken a stand against a trans teammate sharing their locker room. And now, they may be under investigation by the school for possible harassment.
According to WCAX-TV, several girls on the Randolph Union High School girls’ volleyball team raised concerns about a trans teammate using the girls’ locker room. They allege that the trans teammate made an inappropriate comment in the locker room while they were changing, and now they feel uncomfortable. And at least one of those girls has spoken out publicly in the hopes of effecting “change.”
“My mom wants me to do this interview to try to make a change,” said team member Blake Allen, who spoke on camera wearing her team uniform.
Allen told a local reporter that she and her fellow female teammates did not object to having a trans teammate, but that they did want to have a space where they can change with only other biological females.
Some of girls and their parents then contacted the school about their concerns but were met with resistance. The school defended the status quo, explaining that state law permits a trans student to use the bathroom and locker room that corresponds with their perceived gender identity.
In an email sent to families, school officials also claimed that the girls’ locker room offers “plenty of space where students who feel uncomfortable with the laws may change in privacy.” However, Allen countered that the “plenty of space” is actually a “single stall bathroom” and that forcing all the girls to use one stall rather than the main girls’ locker room itself would be an impractical waste of time.
WCAX reports that Randolph has since banned the entire team from using the locker room while it conducts an investigation into claims that the girls on the team harassed their trans teammate. Allen alleged that volleyball team members are not even allowed to use the locker room during gym class.
And she believes that the negative image that has been cast on her just for raising concerns is unfair.
“I feel like for stating my opinion — that I don’t want a biological man changing with me — that I should not have harassment charges or bullying charges. They should all be dropped,” Allen asserted.
School co-principal Lisa Floyd reportedly said in an email that student safety remains the school’s highest priority and that any violation of school policies will be met with disciplinary action. The school also added that its decision to close the locker room should not be seen as taking sides in the dispute, but rather an as attempt to find a solution that suits the needs of all involved.
The city of Randolph is located near central Vermont, approximately 30 minutes south of the state capital of Montpelier.
Kevin C. Cox / Staff, Icon Sportswire / Contributor, Kevin C. Cox / Staff | Getty Images
I hope I’m wrong about Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati Bengals’ quarterback. I’m rooting for him. No different from how I rooted for Josh Rosen, Robert Griffin III, Cam Newton, and Colin Kaepernick. I root for pretty much every young quarterback. I want them all to be the next John Elway or Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.
Great quarterbacks make sports fun and interesting.
So Cincinnati Bengals fans, back off. We’re on the same team. My tweets analogizing Burrow to Rosen and Griffin were not written with malicious intent. They reflect my gut instincts at the moment.
They reflect the reality that sometimes young quarterbacks trip over their own egos and sabotage their careers. I pride myself on having a highly sensitive QB-ego radar that allows me to detect potential problems before others see them. It starts with a gut feeling and then grows.
Monday afternoon, during a discussion with T.J. Moe and Steve Kim on my podcast, I had a tingling in my gut when we started talking about Joe Burrow. Initially I attributed the tingling to the thought of eating Skyline chili while visiting Kings Island theme park last Saturday. The chili is considered a delicacy in Cincinnati. A humane person wouldn’t feed that garbage to a dog.
Upon review, it wasn’t the chili that set off my radar. It was the realization that Burrow has some of the same personality quirks and characteristics as Rosen, Griffin, Newton, and Kaepernick.
Burrow is off to a horrible start in the 2022 NFL season. Fresh off a Super Bowl appearance, the Bengals are 0-2, having lost to the Mitchell Trubisky-quarterbacked Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cooper Rush-led Dallas Cowboys. Joe Burrow is supposed to be the next big thing in football. In his first complete, injury-free season, he led the Bengals on an improbable run to the Super Bowl. Prognosticators saw Burrow as the second coming of Dan Marino. But now Burrow can’t outscore Trubisky and Rush, two quarterbacks who will be holding clipboards around Halloween. What’s the problem?
Burrow has tossed four interceptions in two games. Despite a dynamic receiving corps, his yards per attempt hover around the bottom of the league. Cincy has scored a total of 37 points this season. Burrow has been sacked 13 times.
You can blame the sacks on Cincy’s rebuilt offensive line, but there’s more to the story. Burrow doesn’t look comfortable in the pocket. He’s leaving the pocket too soon, and he’s not climbing up in the pocket and helping his offensive tackles. The sacks are a combination of bad O-line play and a skittish quarterback who was sacked 70 times last season.
There’s more.
Does Burrow have the right attitude? Is Burrow too cocky for his own good? Has he prioritized social justice virtue-signaling above football greatness? Is Burrow suffering from Colin Kaepernick disease?
The disease killed Josh Rosen in the football womb. The UCLA quarterback entered the NFL with the stated goal of being a social justice champion and complaining about the nine teams that didn’t draft him in the first round. He lasted one season as a starter in Arizona.
Kaepernick disease is a deadly form of arrogance, shallowness, narcissism, and wokeness. The disease is triggered when agents, handlers, and media influencers convince young athletes that their mission is to be more than athletes.
The disease has been around for a little more than a decade. Scientists believe the virus leaked from a laboratory in Portland, Oregon, years ago when Nike executives, at the behest of China, developed a formula to make LeBron James the next Muhammad Ali. The leak sparked a pandemic across football and basketball. An early symptom of the disease was the desire to kneel during the national anthem. New variants of Kaepernick disease cause athletes to speak out on political issues they know very little about.
Burrow recently posted on Instagram about abortion and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In June, he urged politicians to “get those crazy guns.” Back in 2020, during the summer of George Floyd, Burrow and his Bengals teammates made a joint statement standing in front of the National Underground Railroad Museum.
There’s no doubt Burrow has at least a mild form of Kap disease. It’s not just the wokeness. The arrogance and flamboyance are other telltale signs of Kap. Arrogance and flamboyance destroyed Cam Newton and RG3. Like Newton and Griffin, Burrow had a singular, spectacular season in college football, won the Heisman Trophy, and entered the NFL draft amid high expectations.
Early in Newton’s and Griffin’s pro careers, my QB-ego radar started sending me signals that they would not sustain their success. Once Newton committed to dressing like the Queen of England, I jumped ship. When Griffin refused to come out of a playoff game against Seattle, even though it was obvious that his injured knee rendered him useless, I jumped off the Griffin bandwagon. I was ridiculed and reviled for arguing that their egos and off-field ambitions would undermine their success.
That’s what I see potentially happening with Joe Burrow. He wants to be more than an athlete. He wants to be a fashionista. He wants to engage in political discussions. He’s distracted and cocky. He’s headed down the same path as Rosen, Griffin, Newton, and Kaepernick. Those guys all ignored my warning and continued down the path of destruction. Joe Burrow should focus solely on football right now. He can be a runway model and uninformed political pundit in his 40s. Now’s the time to be a great quarterback.
Coach Joe Kennedy at the Bremerton High School football field. | Courtesy of First Liberty Institute
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a Washington school district was wrong to punish a high school football coach for praying on the field after games. In a decision released Monday morning, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Bremerton School District discriminated against Coach Joe Kennedy.
Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the court’s opinion, being joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh.
“Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway,” wrote Gorsuch.
“Both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s … The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.”
In response to today’s opinion, Kennedy said, “This is just so awesome. All I’ve ever wanted was to be back on the field with my guys. I am incredibly grateful to the Supreme Court, my fantastic legal team, and everyone who has supported us. I thank God for answering our prayers and sustaining my family through this long battle.”
Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO and chief counsel for First Liberty, a religious liberty law firm based in Plano, Texas, which represented Kennedy, hailed the court’s decision as a “tremendous victory for Coach Kennedy and religious liberty for all Americans.”
“Our Constitution protects the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of getting fired,” she added. “We are grateful that the Supreme Court recognized what the Constitution and law have always said — Americans are free to live out their faith in public.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, in which she argued that “this Court consistently has recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible.”
“Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” she wrote.
“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state.”
Paul Cement, former U.S. Solicitor General and First Liberty network attorney who argued Kennedy’s case before the Justices, said, “After seven long years, Coach Kennedy can finally return to the place he belongs — coaching football and quietly praying by himself after the game. This is a great victory for Coach Kennedy and the First Amendment.”
A devout Christian, Kennedy had a practice of going to the 50-yard line after high school football games and praying, often with fans and students joining him. In 2015, the school district suspended Kennedy for praying on the field after games and later decided not to renew his contract because of his refusal to stop praying on the field. Kennedy sued the school district in 2016, accusing them of violating his religious freedom.
Earlier this year, Shackelford said First Liberty was representing Kennedy because “No teacher or coach should lose their job for simply expressing their faith while in public.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the coach in 2017, while the Supreme Court initially refused to hear his case in 2019. In March of last year, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit again ruled against Kennedy, with Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. authoring the unanimous opinion.
“[T]here is no doubt that an objective observer, familiar with the history of Kennedy’s practice, would view his demonstrations as BSD’s endorsement of a particular faith. For that reason, BSD had adequate justification for its treatment of Kennedy,” wrote Smith.
“BSD had a compelling state interest to avoid violating the Establishment Clause, and it tried repeatedly to work with Kennedy to develop an accommodation for him that would avoid violating the Establishment Clause while nevertheless offering him options that were narrowly tailored to protect his rights …”
In January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case and heard oral arguments in late April, with the justices debating whether Kennedy’s prayer practice was coercive.
The coroner’s report on Cam Newton’s NFL career should list “lack of self-awareness” as the cause of death, not misogyny.
Newton returned to the news cycle yesterday after media outlets circulated comments about women he made during a recent podcast interview. On the Sunday edition of the “Million Dollaz Worth of Game” podcast, Newton discussed his upbringing, his parents’ long marriage, and his philosophy on women. The latter comments provoked the ire of feminists, the matriarchy, Twitter, and beta males and cast Newton as the love child of Archie Bunker and Cardi B.
Newton said: “It’s a lot of women who are bad bit***s, and and I say ‘bit***s’ in a way not to degrade a woman but just to go off the aesthetic of what they deem as a ‘boss chick.’ A woman for me is handling your own but knowing how to cater to man’s needs. I think a lot of times when you get that aesthetic of like ‘I’m a boss bit**, I’m a this, I’m a that,’ no baby. But you can’t cook. You don’t know when to be quiet. You don’t know how to allow a man to lead.”
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio wrote that Newton’s “outdated views regarding gender roles and obligations” will make it more difficult for Newton to land a job this off-season.
I disagree. Sans the profane language, Newton’s views on gender roles and obligations are commonplace in the NFL or among high-net-worth men. His views are standard among people, regardless of income, with a biblical worldview. Genesis 2:18 says that God created Eve as a suitable helper (helpmeet) for Adam. Newton’s views are not problematic or outside the mainstream, especially within his peer group. It’s his lack of self-awareness that’s the problem. The content of his podcast interview is a reflection of the lack of self-awareness that has undermined the success of his NFL career.
Newton never fully delivered on his seemingly endless potential because of his distorted view of himself. Talent and the coddling produced by immense athletic gifts blinded the quarterback prodigy to the harsh realities and inevitabilities of playing the most challenging position in all of sports.
Talent isn’t enough at quarterback. The intangibles of leadership, film study, technique, and persona matter as much as physical skill. Cam Newton was a rock star playing the one position in football that requires an actor. Newton was Rick James, b***h! He needed to be Denzel Washington.
Had Newton played tight end or outside linebacker, he’d likely be seen as a sure-fire Hall of Famer and a missing piece for some team’s Super Bowl dream. Instead, at age 32, the former MVP is jobless, quite possibly finished as an NFL player, and too many miles from Canton, Ohio, to hitchhike to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Rich Gannon, a journeyman, played in more Pro Bowls, won more games, and had a better career than Cam Newton. Why? Because Newton has no idea how to be a leader. You can see the shortcoming in his attitude toward women.
“You don’t know how to allow a man to lead.”
Newton doesn’t know how to lead. He fathered four kids with a woman, Kim Proctor, he refuses to marry. His relationship with Proctor ended because he fathered a fifth child with an Instagram model.
Why would a woman follow a man with five illegitimate kids? Why would a woman cater to the needs of a man who refuses to cater to her desire for monogamy, matrimony, and spiritual salvation? Why would a woman agree to be a suitable helper to a man who eschews being obedient to God’s will?
You can’t lead without sacrifice. You can’t lead without following first. In order to follow God, man must sacrifice the desires of the world.
This is at the heart of Newton’s professional underachievement. His talents convinced him he didn’t need to do all the little things that make great quarterbacks and great leaders. When it comes to relationships, wealthy men suffer the same delusion. They think finances allow them to bend the rules in their personal relationships with women.
I’ve made this mistake too many times to count.
In the podcast interview, Newton praised his dad and mom for sustaining their 38-year marriage. His parents are devout Christians. Newton said his father set a tremendous example of what a man is supposed to be. Did Cam follow his father’s blueprint? Is Cam obedient to God’s will?
Cam’s lack of self-awareness is the reason he doesn’t know when to be quiet, when to be humble, when to be reflective, and when to evaluate his own behavior rather than analyze the actions of “bad bit***s” and boss chicks.
Newton’s intentions on and off the field are positive. He wants to be a great football player. He wants to build a great family, similar to his parents. Talent and money have prevented him from taking the necessary steps to make those goals a reality.
Virtually every NFL owner, executive, and coach desires a woman who can cook, caters to his needs, knows when to be quiet, and will allow him to lead. They want the exact same thing from their players.
As a football player, Cam Newton is a lot like the “bad bit***s” he describes. Everybody eventually tires of “bad bit***s.” The NFL is tired of Cam.
A transgender female cyclist was blocked from participating in the women’s British National Omnium Championship over the weekend, as Emily Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist, the Guardian reported. In addition, a number of the race’s participants were said to be ready to boycott the race if Bridges was in it, the outlet added.
Bridges, 21, set a national junior men’s record over 25 miles in 2018, the Guardian said, adding that the cyclist began hormone therapy last year to reduce testosterone levels.
However, a number of biological female cyclists discussed boycotting Saturday’s event because they believed Bridges has an unfair advantage, the outlet said, adding that Bridges was involved with the Great Britain Academy program as a male cyclist until being dropped in 2020. In addition, Bridges is still registered as a male cyclist and can’t race as a woman until the male ID expires, according to Union Cycliste Internationale regulations, the Guardian said.
Bridges was “disappointed” with UCI’s decision, the outlet said.
“We have been in close discussions with the UCI regarding Emily’s participation this weekend and have also engaged closely with Emily and her family regarding her transition and involvement in elite competitions,” British Cycling said, according to the Guardian. “We acknowledge the decision of the UCI with regards to Emily’s participation, however we fully recognize her disappointment with today’s decision.”
A comprehensive scientific review by the five British sports councils in September said there were “retained differences in strength, stamina, and physique between the average woman compared with the average transgender woman or non-binary person registered male at birth.”
Trans cyclist banned from national championships youtube
A group of feminists staged a demonstration outside the women’s NCAA swimming championships last week to protest transgender swimmer Lia Thomas from the University of Pennsylvania competing against biological women. Many of the feminists noted that they had been supporters of the Democratic Party. However, they felt betrayed since they believe the Democrats have abandoned women and girls.
Save Women’s Sports – a “coalition that fights to preserve sex-based eligibility for female sports” – organized a protest outside Georgia Tech’s athletic center in Atlanta, Georgia. Amy E. Sousa – a self-proclaimed “engaged embodiment expert” and “radical feminist” – voiced her displeasure with the Democratic Party.
“I am a lifelong registered Democrat who ultimately feels politically homeless,” Sousa told Fox News. “With the whole Biden election, I began to feel more and more disenfranchised from Democrats as a party, and I began to feel more and more that they did not represent my beliefs or my views.”
“Feminism has become so muddied, much like the term Democrat has become so muddied. It’s practically lost all meaning,” Sousa added.
Another Save Women’s Sports advocate shared a similar experience as Sousa.
“I was historically liberal,” the activist explained. “I would say I’m politically homeless now because I don’t think the Democrats care about women and girls.”
Another member of Save Women’s Sports revealed that progressives pushed her away from the Democratic Party because of her views on biological men competing against females.
“I always voted as a liberal, from 18 to 39,” the feminist said. “I registered Republican in 2020 after two politicians told me they did not want my vote because of my stance on the rights for women and girls.”
“They wanted to put men in prisons and men on sports teams and in my daughter’s school, so that’s why I decided I cannot be a part of this party anymore — that doesn’t even recognize my sex class,” the feminist declared.
One of the feminists added, “I know a lot of historically liberal people, especially parents, who have felt like they needed to walk away from the Democratic Party. I don’t know who they’re going to be voting for in the next elections. I think that we’re going to have a lot of people walking away really.”
Others have been outspoken against Thomas competing in the women’s NCAA swimming championships. Kellie-Jay Keen – head of the organization Standing for Women – went viral last week for brilliantly shooting down a pro-trans argument.
Thomas — a biological male who identifies as a female — won the women’s 500-yard freestyle event on Thursday at the NCAA championships with the fastest time this season. When Thomas went to the podium to be announced as the winner, there were several people in the crowd booing.
WATCH: Radical feminists protesting Lia Thomas say they are politically homeless www.youtube.com
Tennis legend Novak Djokovic has made clear that he would rather sacrifice part of his playing legacy and miss out on future tennis accolades than be forced to take an experimental Covid vaccine.
This brave stance against medical tyranny has already cost Djokovic the chance to compete in all but one of the major tournaments this year and has also led to him losing the title of top singles men’s tennis player in the world.
Despite playing just three matches this whole year, Djokovic is currently listed at number 2 on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings – he’s that good.
Nevertheless, back in January, Australia became the first country to hassle Djokovic over his vaccine status, denying his entry to the country and ending his chance to compete in the Grand Slam Tournament at the Australian Open.
Not only did Australian officials deny his visa, but they allowed Djokovic to enter the country and held him in isolated quarantine for a week while he awaited his eventual deportation.
Now, the US is doing essentially the same thing, albeit without the unnecessary extra steps.
On Wednesday, the 20-time Grand Slam champion announced that he will not be able to compete at upcoming tennis tournaments in California and Florida because the Biden Administration will not allow him to travel to the United States due to his vaccination status.
Djokovic tweeted that the Centers for Disease Control made the final call, upholding a regulation that requires all foreign nationals to be vaccinated to receive a visa for entry into the US…
… That is, of course, only if you aren’t illegally sneaking across the southern border, because then, vax status doesn’t matter one bit.
Over 2 million illegal aliens were waved into the country since last year without a vaccine or ID card.
From Djokovic:
“While I was automatically listed in the @BNPPARIBASOPEN and @MiamiOpen draw I knew it would be unlikely I’d be able to travel. The CDC has confirmed that regulations won’t be changing so I won’t be able to play in the US. Good luck to those playing in these great tournaments.”
While I was automatically listed in the @BNPPARIBASOPEN and @MiamiOpen draw I knew it would be unlikely I’d be able to travel. The CDC has confirmed that regulations won’t be changing so I won't be able to play in the US. Good luck to those playing in these great tournaments 👊
In the face of it all, Djokovic continues to stand firm. In an interview last month with the BBC, the 34-year-old future hall of fame member, who’s not getting any younger, explained that the potential damage to his legacy that comes from missing tournaments “is the price that I’m willing to pay.”
The only problem is he, like so many others, shouldn’t have to be paying it.
Ken Mauer, one of the longest-tenured referees in NBA history, says he was forced out of the league at the beginning of the current season because of his religious objection to the COVID vaccines.
During a wide-ranging, two-hour interview on “Fearless with Jason Whitlock,” Mauer, a 36-year veteran known for his slicked-back, Pat Riley-style hair, revealed the reason for his season-long absence.
“I never thought that my faith in our Lord Jesus Christ would prevent me or stop me or get in the way of me refereeing NBA basketball games. … That’s what’s happened,” Mauer said. “Not to just me, but other people.”
Mauer, a lifelong Catholic, has done his own research and has concerns and reasons for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, including his belief that aborted fetal tissue was used in the development of the vaccine. (Many experts dispute Mauer’s contention. Pope Francis has endorsed use of the vaccines.)
Mauer said that as many as 17 referees objected to the vaccine mandate the NBA squeezed into its collective bargaining agreement with the National Basketball Referees Association before the season. There is no mandate for players. He said nine refs initially organized and hired a lawyer to fight the mandate on religious grounds. By the start of the season, Mauer, Mark Ayotte, Leroy Richardson, and Jason Phillips (head of replay center) were the final holdouts. Richardson agreed to arbitration and lost his appeal. Phillips, according to Mauer, is paid to work from home. Mauer and Ayotte filed appeals with the EEOC.
“I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing,” Mauer said in the interview that will air early Tuesday evening. “In fact, I’m very proud of what I’m doing. I’m very proud of my faith. … I’m no different than the truck driver, than the schoolteacher, than the health care worker, than the person working construction or whatever. They either medically or religiously don’t feel like taking the vaccine, and now they’re being forced to or else they’re going to lose their job. And I think that’s a shame.”
“There are many referees that didn’t want to take the vaccine. And there are many referees who were forced to because they have children, they have families, and they have bills to pay. … They’re scared and I’m not. I’m never going to take (the vaccine).”
In the history of the NBA, only Dick Bavetta and Joey Crawford attained more service time than Mauer. Bavetta and Crawford retired after 39 years of service. Mauer, 66, said he planned to eclipse Bavetta’s and Crawford’s standard.
Over the course of the interview, Mauer addressed several NBA-related topics, including the league’s embrace of Black Lives Matter. He relayed a story about a five-hour Zoom meeting among referees that was titled “Black Lives Matter.”“It was one of the worst experiences I’d ever experienced as a professional referee,” he said.
Sports network ESPN has finally run coverage of Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania. But both ESPN’s coverage and the general issue of having a transgender swimmer competing against women have sparked controversy and backlash from viewers. At first, ESPN was confronted for not covering Thomas enough and was called “cowardly” by Jason Whitlock at Blaze Media.
In mid-January Op-Ed titled, “ESPN isn’t man enough to even discuss transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas,” Whitlock called out the sports coverage leader for ignoring Thomas.
Comparing Thomas to “Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Colin Kaepernick rolled into one gender transition,” Whitlock noted that while the Ivy League and other universities had made announcements about Thomas competing in women’s swimming events, ESPN remained silent. Then ESPN finally ran an article about Thomas.
Written by reporter Katie Barnes, who is known for covering LGBT issues and women’s sports, the article highlighted how Thomas has been winning, even in the midst of protests against the fact that he was allowed to compete in races against women. Barnes looked at the policies and discussions taking place over the principles of transgender athletes in various sports and how the NCAA and other organizations are changing policies.
The NCAA revised its policy about the eligibility of transgender athletes. Instead of a blanket policy for all schools and sports, the NCAA decided to use the policies of each individual governing body, meaning that requirements will vary for different sports. The NCAA’s new policy also will require testosterone testing in the championship windows, beginning in 2022-23.
Barnes’ article also explained that, though Thomas has won individual events, he didn’t set any records.
“At Blodgett Pool, Thomas finished first in both of her individual events. But she didn’t set any records in either the 100 or 200 freestyle. She high-fived teammates and laughed with them between races. Despite the controversy continuing to swirl around her, Thomas turned in what is becoming a typical performance,” Barnes wrote.
But after ESPN ran the article, there was significant outcry on social media, as readers spoke up and many disagreed with the idea of a transgender athlete competing in women’s sports.
“Sidelining women in womens sports. Hope everyone is proud of themselves,” one Facebook commenter posted.
“In this case we have a male body racing female bodies. While I do not believe Lia Thomas switched to being a woman to dominate swimming, she has the same advantage over her competitors as a drug cheat would,” another user commented.
“ESPN cheers on the death of female sports. Shameful,” another posted.
“1st and foremost EVERYONE has the right do whatever makes them happy in regards to physical appearance and Identity. With that being said this is obviously unfair to natural born female athletes,” another Facebook user wrote. “It’s my understanding that fairness and equality for all are major pillars of the LGBTQ community. I don’t see either of these under the current format. There needs to be a 3rd division added or compete in the men’s division until we know more…”
Teammates of Thomas have also commented on the situation, though. Not all of them are comfortable with the fact that Thomas is competing against women. Speaking anonymously to the Washington Examiner, one teammate explained how the female swim team members were overlooked in this process.
Apparently, Thomas’ move from male to female swimming was in the works for quite some time and the university knew that the change was coming. But as this one Penn swimmer described, the university’s athletic department never asked those already on the team about adding Thomas.
“Lia swimming was a non-negotiable,” the swimmer said. “The school made it seem like they were trying to say, ‘Don’t even bother to come to us with your concerns or anything like that because we’re not going to help you.’ Or they don’t really care because ‘this is going to happen one way or the other.’”
The swimmer added how stressful it was to be put in this position, because if team members did have concerns, they felt like they couldn’t speak up.
“It just seems like if you say anything, everyone is just going to attack you and call you transphobic, and it’s not even true. We just want to have what we were promised by joining the swim team, which is fair competition and equal opportunities,” she said.
“It’s been really frustrating because we all agree, and I have yet to meet anyone or talk to anyone who thinks what is going on is OK. But yet somehow, these are the rules and allowed,” she added.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that though the whole team had been strongly advised not to talk to media about the issue, another teammate also came forward to complain.
As Thomas continues to compete and beat competitors by large margins (in one 1,650-yard freestyle event, Thomas beat his teammate by 38 seconds, the Mail reported), the controversy continues. From teammates to ESPN readers, there are a lot of people questioning the situation.
Abby Liebing is a Hillsdale College graduate with a degree in history. She has written for various outlets and enjoys covering foreign policy issues and culture.
COVID-19 isn’t all bad. It appears that one of its side effects is turning Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers into a combination of Muhammad Ali and Navin R. Johnson.
Of course, you remember Ali, the greatest boxer of all time. Ali fell under the spell of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and risked prison and invited national scorn by refusing induction into the military and participation in the Vietnam War.
But do you remember Navin Johnson, the jerk? He was the lead character in the 1979 movie classic “The Jerk.” Comedian Steve Martin played the role of Navin, the white adopted son of black Southern sharecroppers. Navin hilariously has no idea that his black parents adopted him.
Rodgers has fallen under the spell of podcasters Joe Rogan and Pat McAfee and has refused the COVID vaccine injection. The quarterback’s defiance apparently is going to jeopardize his chance to win the NFL’s MVP award and has invited national scorn.
One of the 50 voters for the Associated Press’ MVP award, Hub Arkush, labeled Rodgers the biggest jerk in the league and a bad guy and stated that he won’t vote Rodgers MVP for that reason.
Rodgers is the jerk. He had no idea that deciding what’s best for his body would provoke lunatics to treat him like a 1960s black man.
“I don’t think you can be the biggest jerk in the league and punish your team, and your organization and your fan base the way he did and be the most valuable player,” Arkush said during a radio interview. “Has he been the most valuable on the field? Yeah, you could make that argument, but I don’t think he is clearly that much more valuable than Jonathan Taylor or Cooper Kupp or maybe even Tom Brady. So, from where I sit, the rest of it is why he’s not gonna be my choice.”
This is the kind of utter lunacy COVID has sparked among the Branch Covidians, the mask-wearing leftists who believe “my body, my choice” only applies to killing children in the womb.
Arkush reminds me of David Susskind, the popular American TV host who trashed Ali on national television shortly after a jury disregarded Ali’s religious objection and convicted him of refusing the draft.
“I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man,”Susskind said. “He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He is a simplistic fool and pawn.”
I find nothing amusing or tolerable about the way Rodgers has been treated since it was discovered his COVID immunization didn’t include taking the experimental medical trial that is being hailed as the corona silver bullet. Arkush gave voice to a sentiment that could derail Rodgers’ MVP candidacy. Arkush was dumb for publicly admitting his bias, but he’s not remotely alone.
Many people within corporate media think it’s perfectly fine to discriminate against the unvaccinated. Rodgers could face additional discrimination because he appears to be flirting with the concept of publicly embracing conservative values.
During ESPN’s Monday Night Football broadcast, Rodgers yukked it up with Peyton and Eli Manning, bragged about reading Ayn Rand’s pro-capitalism manifesto “Atlas Shrugged,” and mentioned his Chuck Norris bobblehead. Norris, the action movie star, is a prominent, unashamed Hollywood Republican.
Back in October, I wrote a column about Rodgers cleverly supporting comedian Dave Chappelle by ripping cancel culture and the woke mob during a podcast interview with McAfee.
From way on the outside, it looks like someone slipped Rodgers the red pill.
Or maybe the No. 1 side effect of COVID is the red pill? The red pill is ivermectin?
COVID isn’t all bad. It’s forcing people to wake up and recognize the lies global elites, politicians, Hollywood, Big Tech, and corporate media are shoving into our brains and veins. The beauty of COVID is that it impacts all of us. Men, women, and children. Rich and poor. Old and young. Black, white, and brown. Believers and nonbelievers. Educated and uneducated. Famous and unfamous. It’s unifying in the same way that critical race theory has unified parents concerned about what is being taught inside our public schools. Teaching kids to view our country as a force for evil makes a rational person pause, ponder, and push back.
That’s what’s happening with Aaron Rodgers and people across the globe as it relates to COVID and the alleged vaccines. There are too many lies to be ignored or written off as honest mistakes, too many negative consequences to not raise your voice out of concern.
The lockdowns and isolation have sparked a rise in suicides and depression. The normal, healthy development of kids has been compromised. The experimental medical trials don’t seem to prevent COVID as advertised.
The COVID pandemic just might save freedom. It might make men stand up. It has certainly inspired Aaron Rodgers, the NFL’s most talented and interesting player. Rodgers is remaking “The Jerk” into a superhero movie.
Professional sports are no longer a force for good. They do not unify us. They do not inspire us to seek our better selves. They do not provoke participants to take bold and courageous stances. For the first time in my lifetime, I believe professional sports do more harm to American society than good.
This is what ran across my mind yesterday as I watched Tampa Bay wide receiver Antonio Brown strip off his uniform mid-game, toss his equipment to the ground, wave to the crowd, and run off the field.
Professionalized football – collegiate and the NFL – exacerbated the emotional problems that have plagued Brown since childhood. Because of his immense talent, football afforded Brown the opportunity to ignore the mental scars a dysfunctional upbringing in South Florida wrought. Worse, the new social media demands of professional sports sank Brown further into the mental abyss.
Over the next few days, you will hear plenty of analysts and Twitter pundits speculate that Brown is suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy – CTE. CTE and white supremacy are the popular and corporate-media-approved explanations given any time a professional football player, particularly a black one, behaves poorly. They’re bogus excuses that ignore the fact that bigotry and head trauma in sports have been around since gladiators fought lions for the entertainment of the masses. If CTE is real and the cause of unstable behavior, then Spartacus, Bronko Nagurski, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Walter Payton, and Joe Montana should all have melted down.
No, what’s new and what explains both Antonio Brown’s plunge into bizarro world and the rapid decay of professional sports as a force for good is the importance of social media brand-building. Brown has no more or less CTE than Troy Aikman, Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Dick Butkus, or any prizefighter.
Brown is suffering from mass formation psychosis. Yep, the psychological disorder Dr. Robert Malone discussed in his infamous Joe Rogan interview. Malone, of course, was talking about our exaggerated fear of COVID-19. Malone compared modern America to Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
“A very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad,” he said. “When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.”
Here’s how I translate Malone’s explanation: America, the land of individualism and independent thought, is suffering from social and corporate media-induced groupthink. It’s made us choose group fear over individual freedom. It’s made us crazy. Antonio Brown is nuts, and his addiction to Instagram and Twitter is making him crazier. He turned a rather routine sideline dispute between himself and Bruce Arians into a career-ending confrontation and walk-off. It’s not all that surprising if you have been following Brown’s descent. In 2018, ESPN’s Jesse Washington wrote a prescient piece on Brown and his love affair with the social media matrix. The article perfectly captures the negative impact social media was having on Brown’s reality and worldview.
Brown is the micro. Professional sports are the macro. Social media has eroded the value and integrity of professional sports. It’s done the same thing to corporate media and public discourse. It’s at the root of American division. Social media is a cancer. Mass formation psychosis is just a strand of social media cancer.
For today, I don’t want to stray too far from sports.
Let’s look beyond Antonio Brown. Let’s look at a football player with an impeccable reputation and the damage social media is doing to him: Tom Brady. He suffers from mass formation psychosis, too. You will never convince me Brady believes in the experimental COVID vaccines. Never. The man is meticulous about what he puts into his body. But he has a social media brand he must protect, so he pretends to be on board with the experimental medical trials being forced on the American public.
Pro athletes are cowards. They’re tools of major corporations. They’ve completely sold out for money. They live in fear of the social media mob. Combined, Brady and his wife, Giselle Bundchen, are worth close to a billion dollars. Brady has the money and the accomplishments to say and do whatever he wants. He could use his voice and his platform to speak against the vaccine mandates and the stupid and divisive NFL COVID protocols. He remains silent.
The same goes for LeBron James. He’s a slave to his social media following. Pretending that cops are on a murderous rampage against American black men pleases social media and the Chinese Communist Party. The point of view is detached from reality and a symptom of mass formation psychosis.
Professional sports used to reveal and sharpen a man’s character. We’re all flawed. Participation in sports used to shave some of our flaws. Now the games solely reward talent and men willing to swallow and promote whatever agenda Big Tech and global corporations dictate.
Antonio Brown won the talent lottery. That’s why the Steelers, Raiders, Patriots, Buccaneers, and Tom Brady kept bending their standards to make room for Brown. For me, the Great Reset is turning into my personal Great Awakening. Professional sports and their participants solely serve the dollar. The difference between Antonio Brown and Tom Brady isn’t as significant as you might think.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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