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
— ClintJoselito 🇨🇱🇮🇱 (@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.
A veteran USA Swimming official of three decades has resigned in protest over the University of Pennsylvania’s allowance of Lia Thomas to compete on the university women’s swimming team after competing for three years on the men’s team.
Cynthia Millen, who has been actively officiating swimming for approximately 30 years, resigned on Dec. 17, saying that she believes trans-identified biologically male athletes should not be allowed to compete in women’s swimming meets.
“I told my fellow officials that I can no longer participate in a sport which allows biological men to compete against women,” Millen wrote in a resignation letter, according to Swimming World.
“Everything fair about swimming is being destroyed. If Lia came on my deck as a referee, I would pull the coach aside and say, ‘Lia can swim, but Lia can swim exhibition or a time trial. Lia cannot compete against those women because that’s not fair.’”
In an interview with guest host Sean Duffy on Monday’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show, Millen said it is fundamentally unfair for males to compete against females.
“The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities. And from the very beginning, when you start out as an age grouper, swimmers are divided by sex and by age group,” Millen said.
“From the very beginning, USA Swimming recognizes that boys swim differently than girls.”
Millen added that differences are accentuated once boys and girls undergo puberty.
“Boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat. Girls go through puberty, and they have a double whammy. They not only grow breasts and hips but they have periods and they often have a totally different center of gravity. They have to learn how to swim over again,” she explained.
Thomas, a biologically male trans-identified athlete, has broken women’s swim records. The student’s participation on the Penn women’s team is the latest episode in the ongoing cultural conflict over “gender identity,” particularly in the athletic arena, where the conflict is especially visible.
“While Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have this advantage,” Millen said.
“The statement for women is ‘You don’t matter; what you do is not important.’ And girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all this. He’s going to be destroying women’s swimming.”
Thomas has broken several University of Pennsylvania records this season by wide margins. In one 1650-meter freestyle race, the second-place finisher was approximately 38 seconds behind the trans-identified male swimmer.
The longtime swimming official claimed she is receiving many letters from dads and moms expressing their support and that past Olympians and professional athletes are coming forward to say that allowing males to compete against women is wrong. Among them is former Olympian Sharron Davies, who won a Silver medal in women’s 400-meter individual medley in the 1980 Olympic games.
Beth Stelzer, the founder of the grassroots group Save Women’s Sports, said it was brave for Millen to resign and object publicly. In recent years, Stelzer has lobbied state legislatures to pass laws requiring athletics to be maintained based on biological sex.
“We will see that her courage will inspire many others to say that enough is enough,” Stelzer said in an email to The Christian Post Tuesday.
“This is like the tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. Women like Cynthia and I are some of the first to point out the obvious. It won’t be long and others will be speaking the truth too. I encourage all administration, officials, and athletes to step up and save women’s sports,” she said.
Some of Thomas’ teammates have reportedly spoken out about the athlete’s inclusion on the women’s team in anonymous interviews with the sports website OutKick.
Thomas’ participation in NCAA women’s competition is “based on NCAA established criteria for participation,” USA Swimming said in a statement shared by The New York Post. The NCAA requirements include undergoing hormone suppression for a year before competing in women’s competition.
The policy states: “A trans female (MTF) student-athlete being treated with testosterone suppression medication for Gender Identity Disorder or gender dysphoria and/or Transsexualism, for the purposes of NCAA competition may continue to compete on a men’s team but may not compete on a women’s team without changing it to a mixed team status until completing one calendar year of testosterone suppression treatment.”
The progressive civil rights organization American Civil Liberties Union has denied the claim that “unfair” advantage exists because trans-identified “athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes” and that success often comes down to technique and training.
A trans-identified athlete’s continuous record-setting performances are causing concern among those who fear that allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports will damage the integrity of women’s athletics.
Lia Thomas, a trans-identified male who has been competing on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming and diving team this season, has shattered records even though the athlete competed on the men’s swim team in previous seasons. As the University of Pennsylvania noted in a statement published over the weekend, Thomas completed the women’s 200-yard freestyle at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio, in 1 minute and 41 seconds, beating the second-place finisher by nearly seven seconds. A detailed list of results reveals that Thomas’ performance marked the fastest completion of the 200-yard freestyle in the history of the Zippy Invitational and the fastest finish in any competition at Ocasek Natatorium at the University of Akron, where the event took place.
Thomas broke other records at the event, finishing the preliminary 500-yard freestyle in 4 minutes and 46 seconds. Thomas finished the 500-yard freestyle finals in 4 minutes and 34 seconds. The University of Pennsylvania described the time as “the best in the country in the event.” On Sunday, the third and final day of the competition, Thomas completed the 1,650-yard freestyle in 16 minutes, beating the second-place finisher by 38 seconds.
Thomas previously swam for Penn’s men’s team from 2017 to 2020 under the name Will Thomas. In the 2018-2019 season, Thomas placed second in the Ivy League Championships in three freestyle events — the 500-yard freestyle, the 1,000-yard freestyle and 1,650-yard freestyle. In the 2019-2020 season, Thomas won a 500-yard freestyle event against Villanova. Thomas’ performance at a previous competition invoked a strong reaction from Clay Travis, radio host and founder of the sports website OutKick. Travis noted that the athlete “swam as a man” for three years before joining the women’s team.
In his remarks just days before the Zippy Invitational began, Travis lamented that “this man, who is now competing as a woman, is destroying female athletes after having competed for three years as a male swimmer.”
“If you think it is in the interest of athletic competition for a male athlete to decide to become a woman and then dominate female athletes with the advantages of the height, the strength, the weight of a male athlete, this represents the potential destruction of female athletics,” he argued. “It’s absurd, it’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”
Travis further argued that “women should not be losing to biological men, especially not biological men who were good enough to be competing on college swim teams before they decided to identify as women.”
While data from the advocacy group Women’s Liberation Front reveals that nine states have passed laws that require athletes competing at the K-12 level to play on sports teams that correspond with their biological gender as opposed to their gender identity, efforts to restrict participation in women’s sports to biological females have been less successful at the collegiate level.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association, one of several associations regulating collegiate sports in the U.S., has threatened to move tournaments out of Idaho in response to the state’s passage of a law banning biological males from competing in women’s sports. The NCAA doubled down on its support for letting athletes compete on teams that match their gender identity in an appearance before the U.S. Senate last year.
Opposition to biological males competing in women’s sports is not limited to conservatives. Thomas’ record-breaking performances at the Zippy Invitational came less than a week after Richard Dawkins, a prominent scientist and outspoken atheist, signed an online document called the “Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.” The declaration aims to “lobby nations to maintain language protecting women and girls on the basis of sex rather than ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity.’” The preamble asserts that “Men who claim a female ‘gender identity’ are being enabled to access opportunities and protections set aside for women.”
The declaration argues that such accommodations for trans-identified athletes in women’s sports is “a form of discrimination against women, and endangers women’s fundamental rights to safety, dignity, and equality.”
Article 7 of the declaration seeks to reaffirm “women’s rights to the same opportunities as men to participate actively in sports and physical education.” The document argues that because of “physiological differences between women and men,” biological males competing in women’s sports means that “women are placed at an unfair competitive disadvantage.”
The document notes that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979 contains a provision requiring state parties to ensure girls and women have the “same Opportunities to participate actively in sports and physical education.” The declaration calls for clarification to Article 7 that would allow “girls and women to participate in sports and physical education on a single-sex basis.”
Critics of trans-affirming sports policies contend that the anatomy of male bodies is different from female bodies as they tend to have increased bones density and muscle mass. Progressive organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, deny that any “unfair” advantage exists for trans-identified biological males who compete against women or girls. The legal group argues that “athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes” and success often depends on mastering techniques and dedication to training.
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are the Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt of rap music. They’re pornographers, all four of them. Hefner and Flynt dominated the visual form of pornography. Dre and Snoop earned fame and fortune dominating lyrical pornography. You’ll read that as a harsh rebuke of the Four Horsemen of Smut. But I am not a hypocrite.
I wrote for Playboy magazine. In June 2008, my name appeared on its cover alongside a lovely photo of a model, Jayde Nicole. Years ago, I attended two parties at Hefner’s mansion. I’ve socialized with women who graced the magazine’s pages.
Dr. Dre is the only celebrity who has made me feel starstruck. His mastery of music and beat amazes me. In the 1990s, I shook his hand at a Mike Tyson fight and mumbled a few words signifying astonishment and admiration.
I don’t have a problem with Dre, Snoop, Hef, or Flynt. At one time, I adored and supported their work. Even today, in all honesty, I’d have to categorize their art as an occasional guilty pleasure, sins of solitude and seclusion.
I do have a problem with Dre and Snoop performing at halftime of the Super Bowl. Pornography and pornographers are unworthy of America’s biggest stage.
Yesterday, the NFL announced that Dre, Snoop, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and R&B singer Mary J. Blige will perform at halftime of Super Bowl LVI. The announcement was greeted as a historic moment of progress, a triumphant landmark in black culture. The country’s strongest pop culture force — the NFL, the No. 1 TV show on five different networks — wrapped its arms around commercial hip-hop music. The conservative and previously traditional NFL embraced the musical genre that defines the liberal NBA.
Free at last, free at last, thank Sodom and Gomorrah, the NFL will let lyrical pornography blast!
We can only hope that censors won’t stop Dre, Snoop, Slim Shady, and Kendrick from repeatedly shouting n***a, bitch, hoe, and motherf***a in front of 100 million Americans. Or maybe a Black Lives Matter flag will fly as Dre brags about never hesitating to put a n***a on his back as gunfire blares in the background.
This is not progress. This is not a great moment in American history, NFL history, or black history. The Super Bowl halftime will be a satanic ritual, a celebration of America’s moral decay.
I’m not saying that as an outsider, as someone with a severe disdain for hip-hop music. I’m saying it as an insider. I’m saying it because I know the music quite well. I own virtually every song Dr. Dre ever produced. I know Snoop’s catalogue of music nearly as well. The same goes for Eminem. It’s a musical collection of old Playboy and Hustler magazines.
It’s hedonism, materialism, immorality, and violence in rhyme form set to music. It’s the soundtrack for a movie about Babylon.
How did this happen? How did a country founded in Judeo-Christian values come to legitimize pornography and allow pornographers to sit atop our cultural throne?
Hefner and Flynt never occupied the space Dre, Snoop, and Jay Z share. Despite their wealth, Hefner and Flynt remained outsiders. They weren’t public friends with presidents (Jay Z and Barack Obama). They weren’t center stage at major mainstream cultural events. They were kept in their lane. They were pornographers, guilty pleasures to be experienced in the shadows.
Hefner and Flynt did not have the right complexion for the connection white liberals have afforded black rappers.
The left has cleverly established race as America’s new religion of choice, replacing Christianity. Black is the highest denomination of the left’s race religion. Their doctrine argues that bowing to blackness is a righteous and responsible response to America’s history of racism.
Anything framed as black cannot be chastised, criticized, or shunned. To do so would be blasphemous and racist. Through hip-hop, pornography has been wrapped in black packaging. Through hip-hop, a self-destructive culture has been wrapped in black packaging.
Music that promotes the degradation and exploitation of black people has been framed as the salvation and glorification of black people.
No one can safely challenge this despicable orthodoxy. I watched a white female host on the NFL Network celebrate alongside Michael Irvin the announcement that Dre and Snoop would host the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime.
Has she heard Snoop rap that “bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks/lick on these nuts and suck the dick”? Does she remember Dre’s lyrics on the N.W.A. song “One Less Bitch”?
We’re in the MeToo era and everyone is going to catch amnesia about Dr. Dre’s violent assault on Dee Barnes in the 1990s?
That’s the power of the race religion. Dr. Dre is black. His history of violence toward women is irrelevant. I’m all about forgiveness and people moving past their mistakes. But Dre’s 2015 album “Compton” featured Eminem rapping about making the women he rapes orgasm.
The race religion is killing America. The Alphabet Mafia — BLM-LGBTQ-CRT — has wrapped every issue in black packaging. Earlier this week, Playboy magazine promoted a bunny outfit using a young black man as the model. The gay and transgender issues have been framed as a black issue.
We’re being used to promote causes that defy God and the principles taught in the Bible.
But you go right ahead and celebrate Dre and Snoop performing at halftime of the Super Bowl. Keep being a useful idiot in the race religion.
U.S. men’s 4 x 100 relay finishes sixth in qualifying heat. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)
The Olympic 4 x 100 relay is racist. That’s the only logical explanation for the embarrassing performance of the United States men’s relay team last night and over the past two decades. We can’t do it. We certainly couldn’t do it last night. And we’ve struggled doing it for the past 20 years.
In a qualifying heat at the Tokyo Games, Team USA finished sixth, behind China, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Ghana. It’s impossible to make the relay final from sixth place in a heat. The United States won’t be winning any sort of medal in an event we absolutely dominated until the race turned racist after our 2000 title at the Sydney Games.
Up until 2004, Team USA had won the gold in 15 of the 20 4 x 100 relays held in Olympic history. We owned the track and virtually all the sprints. We flashed our God-given gifts, our work ethic, and our ability to work as a team for the greater good. It was a showcase of black American excellence. Bob Hayes, Jim Hines, Carl Lewis, and Maurice Greene took the baton symbolically handed to them by Jesse Owens and represented this country at the highest level.
Then something very disturbing happened at the 2004 Olympics. Systemic racism started easing its way into the event at the Athens Games. America finished second in Greece.
Ibram X. Kendi argues the systemic relay racism was always there. But it wasn’t until 2008 that black Twitter and ESPN pointed out that the Proud Boys, Trump supporters, and right-wing insurrectionists began manipulating the relay batons and the baton exchange zones. This manipulation made it impossible for black American men to excel in track and field’s premier relay event. America has not won a single medal in the relay since white bigots took control of the relay.
OK, I’m being sarcastic. Systemic racism has nothing to do with the two-decades-long failure of our once-dominant relay team. Systemic dysfunction actually explains the failure. What we witnessed last night is a symptom of a larger problem we in black America are loath to discuss. Rather than having uncomfortable conversations with white people, we need to have uncomfortable conversations amongst ourselves concerning the fact that black men don’t function well together. It’s obvious to everyone else. We’re the only people who refuse to talk about it. We just hope the Crips and Bloods get old and retire. We think our kids will learn to resolve conflict without resorting to violence when white liberals decide to teach us other options. If we ignore our dysfunction long enough, it will go away.
That kind of wishful thinking led to last night’s relay fiasco. What transpired last night surprised no one paying attention. It’s the equivalent of feigning disbelief on a Monday morning when you learn of how many black men or boys were gunned down over a weekend in Chicago, or Baltimore, or Indianapolis, or New York City. Black male dysfunction is expected.
Last night, U.S. sprinters Ronnie Baker and Fred Kerley struggled mightily to complete the second baton exchange. It took three attempts. By the time it was completed, Baker and Kerley were side by side and Kerley was at a relative standstill. Anchorman Cravon Gillespie briefly climbed to third place and then faded badly as he began to look around at his competitors. Reaction to the collapse was swift and angry.
“The USA team did everything wrong in the men’s relay,” Carl Lewis complained via Twitter. “The passing system is wrong, athletes running the wrong legs, and it was clear that there was no leadership. It was a total embarrassment, and completely unacceptable for a USA team to look worse than the AAU kids I saw.”
We got smoked by China. Not a Jamaican team led by Usain Bolt. China won the heat. Germany beat us. Ghana beat us. Ghana advanced to the final. Ghana apparently doesn’t give a damn about the Proud Boys and the insurrectionists. We can’t use COVID protocols as an excuse. All the other countries have had limited practices because of the pandemic. You can’t cover up 20 years of failure with excuses.
I know I keep making sarcastic jokes about racism. I’m doing it because the most damaging racism impacting black people today is the use of racism to eliminate accountability and responsibility for black men. Our sprinters are irresponsible because we fail to hold them accountable for their failure.
Black people across the globe immigrate to America and achieve their dreams because they embrace a far different mentality than what’s cultivated in black American culture. Black sprinters in Ghana, Jamaica, Canada, and everywhere else don’t have the kind of baton problems we have.
We can’t work together. What happened?
When you’re raised in family dysfunction, that dysfunction follows you for life, especially when you never acknowledge it, pretend it never existed, or believe it’s white people’s responsibility to address it or adjust to your dysfunction.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with black people. The problem is culture. We’ve embraced a culture that undermines our success. We’ve been programmed to believe our actions don’t really determine our destiny. The actions of white people are all that matter. This worldview eliminates accountability and empowers irresponsibility.
Re-watch the 4 X 100 relay qualifier. Maybe one member of the Chinese relay is good enough to make our relay team. But China smoked us. How? Why? It’s not talent. It’s culture. It’s an inability to set egos aside and work together in a cohesive fashion.
Let’s say white people pitted us against each other. Let’s say it started in slavery. No problem. I agree it happened. I also think it’s insanely foolish to expect white people to fix it. It’s not going to happen. It’s no different from a man breaking your leg in a fight and expecting him to do the rehabilitation. Only you can do the rehab.
Black men, we have a culture problem. What are we going to do about it?
It would seem that United States Olympic wrestler Tamyra Mensah-Stock has no time or inclination to act cool or witty or snarky or sassy. Nope. All she has time for these days is getting ready to hit the mat — and pin her next opponent. Then when she scores her next victory, Mensah-Stock’s emotions simply come flooding out.
And at no time was her unguarded, unaffected, pure joy — through tears and laughter — more apparent than when she won the women’s light heavyweight (68-kilogram) gold medal Tuesday at the Tokyo Olympics.
We need to protect this woman at all costs… An infectious beam of positivity, her spirit is undeniable. What an incredible representative of our sport and our great country. This interview is so emotional! We are SO proud of you! 🇺🇸 #TMS@MensahTamStockpic.twitter.com/372k1gpu0O
— The Wrestling Room (Pat Mineo) (@MrPatMineo) August 3, 2021
“I’m feeling very happy, and I keep trying not to cry, but it keeps happening!” she said, trying to catch her breath, at a news conference with an American flag wrapped around her shoulders following her victory.
Mensah-Stock, 28, became only the second U.S. woman — and the first black woman — to win Olympic wrestling gold, NPR said. She is from Katy, Texas. A reporter noted to Mensah-Stock in a brief moment of composure that “you started wrestling in the 10th grade” — and BOOM! More tears.
“I knew I could do it when I first started wrestling,” she explained while continuing to cry. “I felt like I could be an Olympic champ, so I kept going.” With that, Mensah-Stock pounded her hand down and said, “I did it!”
The reporter then brought up her father who died when Mensah-Stock was in high school — in a car accident on the way home from one of her wrestling meets, Yahoo Sports said. With that, harder tears from Mensah-Stock as she placed her head on top of her arms on the podium as the reporter asked how her dad might be reacting to her victory. She then stood, cried some more, and rubbed her eyes: “He would be so proud! He would be so happy!”
Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @MrPatMineo
Mensah-Stock then broke into a smile when she noted that her late father was from Ghana and that he was “like enemies with Nigeria,” which made her final match against Nigeria’s Blessing Oborududu “kind of like poetic.”
Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @MrPatMineo
Jumping up and down
She turned things up a notch when the reporter brought up that women’s wrestling has been an Olympic sport only for a couple of decades — and with that, Mensah-Stock began jumping up and down. “Yeah!” she cried before explaining how proud she is that younger girls can look up to her and perhaps follow in her footsteps.
‘By the grace of God’
Mensah-Stock added later in the interview that “it’s by the grace of God I’m able to even move my feet. Like, I just leave it in His hands and I pray that all the practice … the hell that my freaking coaches put me through pays off, and every single time it does, and I get better and better, and it’s so weird that there is no cap to the limit that I can do. And I’m excited to see … what I have next.”
And when the reporter asked how it felt with the American flag around her shoulders, she had more than enough gas in her tank to give a shout out to her home country: “It feels amazing. I love representing the U.S. I freaking love living there. I love it. And I’m so happy I get to represent U-S-A!”
Yahoo Sports noted that when Mensah-Stock was asked what she would do with the money attached to gold medals, she had a very specific idea.
“I wanted to give my mom $30,000 so she can get a food truck, ’cause it’s her dream,” Mensah-Stock said, according to the outlet. “And I told her five years ago, ‘Alright mommy, I’ll get you your food truck, but you gotta be responsible. So my mom’s gettin’ her food truck!” Yahoo Sports noted, not surprisingly, that she danced from side to side, adding that her mom is “gonna have her little cooking business. She can cook really, really, really well. Barbecue!”
Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand competes during the Weightlifting – Women’s 87kg+ Group A on day 10 of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Tokyo International Forum on August 02, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. | Getty Images/Chris Graythen
A biological male who identifies as female was eliminated from women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics after failing three attempts in the women’s 87+ kilogram competition but still made history as the first trans-identified individual to compete in the Olympic Games.
Laurel Hubbard, a 43-year-old transgender weightlifter from New Zealand, failed three attempts in the snatch category and was knocked out of the competition as a result, reported Yahoo Sports on Monday.
“Thank you so very much for your interest in my humble sporting performance tonight,” Hubbard told reporters. “I know from a sporting perspective I did not live up to the standards I put upon myself.”
“[The International Olympic Committee has] been extraordinarily supportive and I think that they have reaffirmed the principles of the Olympics that sport is something that all people around the world can do, that it is inclusive and successful.”
Hubbard, who has competed against biologically female athletes for years, made headlines in June for reportedly being the first trans-identified athlete to qualify for the Olympics. Hubbard transitioned to a female at the age of 35. New Zealand Olympic Committee CEO Kereyn Smith said in a statement at the time that Hubbard had met the qualifications to join the South Pacific nation’s weightlifting team.
“We acknowledge that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play,” stated Smith.
“We are committed to supporting all eligible New Zealand athletes and ensuring their mental and physical wellbeing, along with their high-performance needs, while preparing for and competing at the Olympic Games are met.”
At the 2019 Pacific Games, Hubbard won gold by defeating two women from Samoa by lifting 268 kilograms, 7 kilograms more than the silver medal winner.
Beth Stelzer, a weightlifter and founder of Save Women’s Sports, an activist group opposed to allowing biologically male athletes to compete in female athletic competitions, denounced the decision to allow Hubbard to compete against women at the Olympics as “shameful” and “a mockery of the sport.”
“Identities do not play sports; bodies play sports. The rights of females should not end where the feelings of a few males begin.”
News of Hubbard’s elimination comes as the IOC is considering revisions to its policy regarding the participation of transgender athletes, especially biological males participating in women’s competitions. Hubbard qualified under the IOC’s 2015 guidelines, which allowed the lifter to compete without a sex change surgery as long as drugs are taken to lower testosterone to below 10 nanomoles per liter for 12 months.
IOC’s medical and science director Dr. Richard Budgett recently said that 2015 guidelines were no longer backed by science, according to The Guardian.
“At the time the 10 nanomoles per liter was set because we thought that was the lower level for men,” Budgett was quoted as saying. “We know now that they go down to seven and women can be higher as well. Agreeing on another number is almost impossible and possibly irrelevant. You can debate that endlessly.”
Budgett said that the IOC wants to “increase inclusion in sport as one of the fundamentals, but at the same time our highest, highest priority is fairness.”
Katie Mascagni, the IOC’s head of public affairs, told Yahoo Sports that in some sports, “testosterone or other aspects come into play in order to justify the reasons there is a disproportionate advantage.” But in other contexts, she said those factors might “be totally irrelevant.”
On social media, LGBT activist and bestselling author Amanda Jetté Knox used Hubbard’s Olympic result to bash arguments from those who oppose trans-identified individuals competing in women’s sports. She stated that Hubbard “was eliminated from competition after not performing as well as the cis athletes who will be competing in the Olympic finals.”
“B-b-but how is she going to grab all the gold medals with her ‘unfair advantage’?!” Knox wrote on Twitter.
The activist group Fair Play for Women stressed, however, that Hubbard’s ability to qualify for the Olympics resulted in a biological female not having the opportunity to participate in the Tokyo Games.
“This is Roviel Detenamo. She should be at Tokyo 2020 today but she’ll be watching the games from home because the IOC rules allowed a male person to compete in her female category,” the organization tweeted Monday.
In the new woke NFL, the Deshaun Watson story is quite incredible.
Despite more than 20 civil allegations of sexual misconduct hanging over the Houston quarterback, Watson reported to training camp, business as usual, and the Texans are weighing options to trade him to another team. Watson is drawing a paycheck, and demand for his future services remains strong. That’s incredible.
According to a story on ESPN.com and Watson’s attorney Rusty Hardin, 10 women have filed criminal complaints against Watson with Houston police. The lawsuits and criminal complaints should have Watson on the commissioner’s exempt list, a tool Roger Goodell uses to sideline players charged with or under investigation for violating the league’s personal conduct code. The exempt list is a paid leave of absence until the player settles his legal matters.
The fact that Watson isn’t on the list is baffling at first glance but understandable upon further review. The left-wing website Deadspin published a column Monday asking, “Why isn’t Deshaun Watson on the commissioner’s exempt list?” Funny that Deadspin would ask this question when the site is part of the reason Watson isn’t sidelined.
Roger Goodell, the NFL, and the Houston Texans are playing racial politics. They fear attack from the identity politics police on the left. They’re afraid to discipline a high-profile black quarterback. Deshaun Watson can’t be treated like Pittsburgh’s white quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
Eleven years ago, Goodell suspended Big Ben for six games because he faced a relatively small number — in comparison to Watson — of sexual misconduct allegations. Prosecutors declined to bring charges against Roethlisberger after a 20-year-old college student accused him of sexual assault. That did not stop Goodell from punishing Roethlisberger and requiring him to undergo a comprehensive behavioral evaluation. Big Ben faced discipline long before the #MeToo movement and long before Trump Derangement Syndrome politicized every aspect of American life.
My point is, given the tenor of the country now, Watson should be facing a harsher scrutiny and punishment than Roethlisberger did a decade ago. Watson is not because the league fears a racial backlash. Black privilege is the only explanation for the league’s hands-off approach to Watson. It’s the only explanation for Watson not being totally radioactive and untradeable.
I’m not arguing Watson’s guilt or innocence. Some of — or even all of — his accusers might be motivated by money. Maybe he had a series of innocent sexual misunderstandings with personal masseuses he contacted via Instagram. I’ve heard that requesting a rub-and-tug from an amateur does lead to misunderstandings.
Whether miscommunication or criminal assault, 22 allegations in this climate should lead to Watson sitting in a corner somewhere until his legal matters conclude. A strong push from Goodell could compel Watson to financially settle with his accusers. That push doesn’t appear to be coming. Goodell has prioritized Black Lives Matter above #MeToo. Given the racial dynamics and gender of his employees, Goodell’s pragmatism makes sense.
So does Watson’s reluctance to settle with his accusers. A settlement could provoke more accusers. How many massage therapists has Watson negotiated a happy ending with? This is starting to feel as if a fast-food drive-through employee sued me for misconduct. By the time the allegations finished rolling in, I would need a Dream Team of lawyers twice as large as O.J. Simpson’s defense team.
The left constructed a safe space for Deshaun Watson. I’m not sure they’re happy about it.
Baylor University men’s basketball coach Scott Drew speaks with players during a timeout. The Baylor men’s basketball program won its first NCAA championship on April 5, 2021. | Baylor University
Fostering a Christ-first, others-second team model, the Baylor University Bears won their first NCAA men’s basketball national title earlier this month, completing a championship turnaround over 17 years after scandal and murder rocked the program. But unlike many other Division I basketball teams, the Bears took steps to ensure Christ was at the center of their program, not selfish ambition.
Moments after clinching the national title and being presented with the national championship trophy, Baylor Coach Scott Drew told CBS’ Jim Nantz that his team plays with a “culture of J.O.Y.,” which stands for “Jesus, Others and then Yourself.”
Drew, who has been the men’s head basketball coach at the Waco, Texas-based university since 2003, told The Christian Post in an interview last Friday that the “culture of J.O.Y.” motto factors into how the team seeks to honor God and love others.
“J.O.Y., it’s pretty simple, ‘Jesus, Others, Yourself. [Its] very easy to remember and yet so hard to do. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure we always honor and give credit to Jesus first, and our teammates and others second, and talk about ourselves third,” Drew, the son of National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame coach Homer Drew, explained.
He said all Baylor coaches strive for their team to play selflessly. But with a Christ-centered approach to life, this is easier to achieve.
“As coaches, your mission and goal for any team is to put your teammates in front of yourself,” he said. “Obviously, the only person you would want before others would be God. So if you could keep that priority, then obviously you’re playing selfless, you’re playing for others, you don’t have the pressure on yourself to perform.”
“At the same time, as we get older in life, you know it’s much better to give than to receive. Yet, obviously, with sin in the world, we get prideful, we get jealous, we want to get the attention. So it’s a constant battle …,” he continued. “It’s such a hard thing to actually enact. So you do have to love your teammates to put them in front of you, and it’s only through God’s grace and mercy are we able to do those kinds of things.”
Since Baylor is a Christian university — one of America’s largest Baptist universities — there are many ways for team members to become active in their faith. But the coaches seek to integrate faith into the team’s routine. Every practice begins and ends in prayer. The team also has Bible studies and holds gameday chapel services.
“So basically, everything we do is intertwined with being a Christ-centered program,” he said.
While in Indianapolis for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, players had the opportunity to have communion together for Easter weekend, Drew shared.
“Everyone comes into college spiritually at a different stage of life, and that’s the beauty of working at Baylor,” Drew said. “We’re trying to prepare champions for life. So, it’s a four-prong attack. It’s not only on the basketball court, but it’s also spiritual development, academic development and then character formation. So, what you’re trying to do is to touch and affect every part of their life. Obviously, winning in the game of life is most important and that would be the spiritual part.”
The Baylor atmosphere is ideal for 18 to 22-year-old college students surrounded by so much temptation, Drew explained.
“Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy, and we all sin,” the 50-year-old coach said. “We’re all saved by grace. So our staff does a great job at not judging people but trying to help them come along and mature as their years at Baylor progress.”
Drew has witnessed this in the spiritual growth of his team. He has had years where as many as six players have been baptized in one season.
Drew, who grew up in a Christian home and was saved at an early age, said his relationship with Christ began to mature when he became involved with Athletes in Action, a Cru ministry that teaches athletes to find and grow in a relationship with Jesus.
Baylor University men’s basketball coach Scott Drew claps his hands in approval during a game against the University of Kansas. The Baylor men’s basketball program won its first NCAA championship on April 5, 2021. | Baylor University
After following in his father’s footsteps by coaching at Valparaiso, Drew accepted the Baylor men’s basketball position in 2003 after the team had experienced the murder of one of its players by a teammate and was under fire for NCAA violations, bribery and drug use.
“When [the Baylor position] came open, the first thing I obviously did was pray about it. And then, I felt led to come here. And after meeting with the leadership at the time, I loved the vision they had for the university and the plans they had …,” Drew recalled. “They wanted to make it one of the premier Christian institutions in Division I and they had a lot of big plans as far as new buildings, new facilities and ways to honor God and bring attention to the Gospel through it.”
When he arrived at Baylor, the men’s basketball program had a long way to go to reach championship success after being imposed with strict NCAA sanctions and self-imposed restrictions due to its violations. The team was also recovering from the tragedy involving the murder of forward Patrick Dennehy, who teammate Carlton Dotson shot in the summer of 2003. Even then, Drew never doubted the team would one day win a national title.
“[A national championship] was always the goal,” he said. “We never put a timetable on it, but when we took the job, being younger, I probably thought it would happen sooner because when you’re younger, you’re a little more ambitious or think things can happen a little quicker than they actually do.”
In recent years the team had come close to winning the title, he said. In 2010, Baylor lost to Duke University in the Elite Eight. And in 2012, Baylor lost to the University of Kentucky, who went on to win the national title. Baylor has averaged 24 wins per season since the first year that Drew led the Bears to the NCAA Tournament in 2008. Since 2008, Baylor has become one of the most consistent men’s basketball programs in the nation. Waiting nearly two decades to win the national title at Baylor made winning that much sweeter, Drew said.
“God’s timing is always best,” Drew stressed. “So, after being close but not having reached the Final Four or won a national championship, it made … me appreciate it that much more and know just what a blessing this year was when we made it to the Final Four and won a national championship. I think if we’d have done it in 2010, we probably wouldn’t have appreciated it or understood what a blessing it was.”
Oral Roberts University Coach Paul Mills coached with Drew at Baylor for 14 years before becoming ORU’s head coach in 2017 and leading ORU on a Cinderella run to the Sweet 16 in 2021. Mills shared with CP in a recent interview how Baylor’s program always emphasized that ‘unless the Lord builds the house, [the labor is in vain].’”
Drew alluded to this nod toward Scripture and said a strong foundation is essential.
“If God doesn’t ordain it, bless it, then it’s not going to happen, it’s not going to last,” Drew stated. “[It’s] Very similar to building and having a strong foundation on the rock rather than sand. So you gotta be prepared for when the storms come because the storms are going to come. And if you don’t have that solid foundation, then you’re not going to last, and it’s not going to hold up.”
On Sunday, the Baltimore Ravens all but two players stood during the “black national anthem,”but most either took a knee or sat down as the American national anthem was played.
As the Ravens faced the Cleveland Browns in the season opener, all but two of the Ravens proudly stood as “Life Every Voice and Sing” rang out over the stadium’s public address system. Ahead of the song, the Ravens lined up at the goal line as a show of support. As the “black national anthem”played, Ravens players Marlon Humphrey and Matthew Judon took a knee, according to Baltimore Sun sports reporter Daniel Oyefusi. But when the U.S. national anthem started, more than half of the Ravens took a knee in protest.
The Baltimore Sunadded that defensive coordinator Don ‘Wink’ Martindale, and defensive end Calais Campbell and quarterback Lamar Jackson took a knee during the national anthem.
“A lot of players on this team are really passionate about the community, about our backgrounds and where we come from,” Campbell said after the game. “I think most of the guys wanted to protest against the injustices in our community. … This is just an opportunity for us to use this platform to try to affect change in the communities.”
Protests were rampant across the NFL on Sunday. Dozens of players and staff from the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions protested during the national anthem on Sunday. The Carolina Panthers also protested during the anthem.
The NFL is continuing its slide into “wokeness.” For years they’ve let players anger fans with Anthem protests.
And after this year’s widespread politically-driven riots, it seems the league is becoming even more left-wing. Not only will the league allow kneeling, but they are also playing the “Black national anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” before the real Anthem. Players are even allowed to wear emblems honoring victims of police violence (though emblems to honor police were not allowed).
One brave player is standing up to the “woke” NFL, and he may be the new anti-Kaepernick:
Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Stephon Tuitt said on Monday that he will not kneel during the national anthem this upcoming NFL season.
And he explained exactly why on Twitter:
Why It’s Important:
Pittsburgh’s Stephon Tuitt says he will stand for the Flag and National Anthem. He criticized those who would “have a problem” with his patriotic act. He told a story about how his grandmother emigrated to America, working “her ass off” to do it “the right way.”
It appears Tuitt is proud of the country and his family and is willing to defy pressure from the woke, leftist mob. And good luck to the people who try to argue with him or his grandmother.
But even with men like this standing up for the country (a minority in the professional sports it seems), will it be enough to save the NFL? For the last few years, the league has allowed players to kneel. Fans from coast to coast have expressed outrage over these stunts. Many social media posts and videos show fans calling out their teams, even destroying their hats and jerseys. As a result, ratings (and stadium attendance) has been plummeting, year over year.
Also, worth noting is the harm extended COVID lockdowns have done to other professional sports leagues. Other leagues have suffered huge financial losses, thanks to states mandating an end to large gatherings. Those restrictions will hurt the NFL, too. So, at a time when the league needs to bring in every last fan possible (to stave off losses), they are deliberately insulting millions of patriotic Americans.
Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to us.
Will you be tuning in to NFL games this fall?
Key Takeaways:
Steeler’s Stephon Tuitt promised to stand during the National Anthem.
He challenged anyone that would be upset by his act of patriotism.
The NFL has suffered a drop in support after allowing Anthem protests.
Adam Casalino is a freelance writer, cartoonist, and graphic designer. He is a regular contributor for the Patriot Journal. Find his other work: http://www.talesofmaora.com
Hall of Famer, Mike Ditka, the man who reinvented the tight end position is calling for all kneeling athletes to leave the country. Ditka was very critical pf Colin Kaepernick and the others who started the movement and now that practically everyone is kneeling it has not improved his outlook on the situation. Ditka is one of the toughest players who ever played in the NFL and he still looks like he could take on a large building and win.
Ditka said:
“If you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country.”
“That’s the way I feel. Of course, I’m old fashioned. So, I’m only going to say what I feel … You don’t protest against the flag, and you don’t protest against this country who’s given you the opportunities to make a living playing a sport that you never thought would happen. So, I don’t want to hear all the crap.”
He can expect incoming from the left, but frankly I don’t think he gives a rat’s behind if he is attacked. He won two Super Bowls as a player, one with the Bears and one with the cowboys. He won one as an assistant coach with the cowboys and another one as head coach of the Bears.
At the MLB’s Opening Day earlier this week, the entire rosters of the Washington Nationals and New York Yankees knelt for a minute while they clutched a single, long black cloth that stretched behind the foul lines. The teams did then rise for the anthem.
President Trump, another major critic of athletes who knelt back in 2016, said last week that he hope[d] to see all professional athletes standing for the anthem this year.
Given the current social climate, it probably came as little surprise that every MLB player from the four teams that played on Opening Day took a knee as a statement about inequality.
Well, every MLB player except for one.
San Francisco reliever Sam Coonrod was the only player among the Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Washington Nationals who didn’t take part in the demonstration.
To be clear, the players all knelt before the playing of the national anthem. They all held a black ribbon while a recorded message from actor Morgan Freeman played. Some players stayed kneeling during the national anthem. But again, not Coonrod. And his reasoning for not partaking in the social justice festivities is as good as it got.
“I’m a Christian,” Coonrod told reporters, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I can’t get on board on a couple of things I’ve read about Black Lives Matter, how they lean toward Marxism and said some negative things about the nuclear family.”
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He went further to explain that he meant “no ill will” by not taking a knee.
“I don’t think I’m better than anybody,” Coonrod said. “I’m just a Christian. I believe I can’t kneel before anything but God, Jesus Christ. I chose not to kneel. I feel if I did kneel I’d be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”
Of course, it didn’t take long for the establishment media mob to jump on the Giants reliever as cancel culture reared its ugly head. Sports Illustrated said Coonrod “stood out like a sore thumb” and that he “hid behind his religion.” The Chronicle claimed that there might already be a “sticky situation” in the Giants clubhouse. USA Today compared Coonrod to Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, who has largely been vilified for her critical Black Lives Matter sentiments.
And of course, amateur internet sleuths just had to dig into Coonrod’s past, dredging up the fact that he once wore a “Make America Great Again” hat on the Fourth of July.
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While it will be fascinating to see if anyone joins Coonrod or cites similar faith-based reasons for not wanting to partake in the social justice demonstrations, the tide is certainly working against him. MLB seems insistent on committing to the Black Lives Matter movement, no matter how divisive some may find it.
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While most players so far haven’t taken a knee during the national anthem, some are doing so. It’s more than a little jarring seeing a player like Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts, a man who just signed a monstrous $380 million deal, kneeling during the anthem as a form of protest against “inequality.” It’s more jarring yet seeing MLB promote and endorse the kneeling on its official Twitter account.
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Much like Dr. Anthony Fauci’s opening ceremonial pitch on Thursday, MLB might have an embarrassing miss on its hands if its social justice initiatives are going to ostracize anyone who would dare have a dissenting opinion.
Bryan Chai has written news and sports for The Western Journal for more than two years and has produced more than 1,300 stories. He specializes in the NBA and NFL as well as politics.
Imagine for a moment you’re a female weightlifter.
For years, you’ve started every day with a run. You spend grueling hours in the gym and live with the sore muscles as a testament to that. Your diet is just as strict and regimented as your workout routine — every calorie and macronutrient is accounted for, and you force yourself to drink protein shakes between every meal.
Feeling prepared and at the top of your game, you enter a state powerlifting competition. All of your hard work is about to pay off. After watching the women competing, you’re sure that first place is yours.
But after the women’s division winners are announced, a 280-pound man walks up. The judges hand him a gold medal, and then he raises his hands in a victory pose.
You get a second-place ribbon. Better luck next year.
This could have been the story of any woman at January’s United States Powerlifting Association Minnesota State Championship. Despite the countless years of gym time between all of the women there, a man with a single year of training under his belt walked home with not onlytwo women’s gold medals but one of their state records as well.
The man is JayCee Cooper, a 31-year-old amateur weightlifter who describes himself as “queer-n-trans” on his Instagram profile.
His championship victory didn’t sit right with everyone. The conservative clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson even weighed in on Cooper’s “accomplishment,” in his own sarcastic way.
“Such an impressive accomplishment,” Peterson wrote in a Twitter post. “Defeating all those women. And so quickly. And by such a margin. Miracle? Or narcissism of an incomprehensible quality?”
After sweeping the competition at the state championship, Cooper’s powerlifting ambitions were halted by an email from USA Powerlifting — the big dog of American lifting federations. As Cooper revealed in an interview with Compete Network: “The USAPL will not allow me to compete because I am a transfeminine person. And, according to them, it confers some sort of anatomical advantage, even though I’m not sure where they’re getting that ‘science.’”
Despite Cooper’s apparent lack of understanding about the fundamentals of biology, science is pretty clear on the subject of sex differences and physical ability. A Duke University study found that even Olympian Tori Bowie’s lifetime best 100-meter time (less than 11 seconds — an impressive speed) was shattered by men and boys over 15,000 times in a single year. And this is just for a 100-meter dash. Strength competitions will obviously have just as large of a disparity, if not a bigger one.
In the Compete Network interview, Cooper acknowledged he’s only been seriously into weight training for about a year. It’s a good bet the women he defeated at the competition have been training much, much longer than that.
Unfortunately for female athletes, it appears as though Cooper’s victory is emblematic of the unfair advantage they may often face in the future.
And leftists, obsessed with “transgender causes,” are abandoning the very women they claim to be supporting.
Jared is a husband, dad, and aspiring farmer. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard. He has been an assignment editor for Conservative Tribune since 2017.
A biological male competing against biological women wins the competition. What. A. Shocker. Who could’ve seen this coming? The answer, of course, is anyone with any sense. The shocking part is that this athlete was allowed to compete against women at all.
Just last year the Olympics set out guidelines on how to include transgender athletes into international competition, and it’s rather controversial.
Allowing biological males to compete against biological women in ‘women’s sport’ is perfectly fine says the new World Cycling Champion. As a matter of fact, Professor McKinnon is an ‘expert’ in this very field of study — the new world champion of the UCI Masters Track Cycling Women 35-44 is tweets, ‘I’m an internationally recognized expert on the science and ethics of transgender inclusion in sport.‘
[Editor’s Note: To avoid confusion, and to follow the Associated Press Style Guide for news outlets, Rachel McKinnon, a Ph.D. in Philosophy will be referred to as ‘Professor’ rather than Dr.]This particular individual believes it is ‘discriminatory’to force transgender women to suppress their natural testosterone.
I swear I’m not making that up.
So, just say you’re a woman and stay a biological male to compete?
McKinnon is also an Olympic hopeful.
But right now, Prof. McKinnon is reveling in the rush of the win.
A biological male who identifies as a transgender woman won a women’s world championship cycling event on Sunday.
Rachel McKinnon, a professor at the College of Charleston, won the women’s sprint 35-39 age bracket at the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles.
McKinnon, representing Canada, bested Carolien Van Herrikhuyzen of the Netherlands and American cyclist Jennifer Wagner to take home the gold.
McKinnon celebrated the victory on Twitter, writing: “First transgender woman world champion…ever.”
Not fair, you say? Well, according to some transgender activists, that’s just straight-up bigotry.
Earlier this year, McKinnon and another transgender cyclist, Jillian Bearden, were profiled in USA Today to contrast their very different views on testosterone levels when including transgender athletes into sporting competitions. Bearden agrees with the Olympic guidelines that state that biological men with naturally occurring testosterone have a competitive advantage over biological women. McKinnon, however, says that subjecting transgender women to testosterone blockers violates their human rights and ‘furthers the oppression of transgender people.’
In other words, McKinnon is all for using biological men using their natural male hormones to compete against women in a women’s competition.
That is a level of insanity that is beyond words.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s look at some of Professor McKinnon’s words.
McKinnon says whether other competitors believe transgender women have an unfair advantage is irrelevant because she says there is no way to measure if such advantages even exist.
“This is bigger than sports and it’s about human rights,” McKinnon says. “By catering to cisgender people’s views, that furthers transgender people’s oppression. When it comes to extending rights to a minority population, why would we ask the majority? I bet a lot of white people were pissed off when we desegregated sports racially and allowed black people. But they had to deal with it.”
(Emphasis added.)
McKinnon says that it isn’t about what is fair and unfair in the rules — it’s a ‘human rights’ issue.
McKinnon, who teaches a class on ethics and inclusion at Charleston, cites the Olympic charter in saying that sport is a human right.
“We cannot have a woman legally recognized as a trans woman in society,” McKinnon says, “and not be recognized that way in sports. … Focusing on performance advantage is largely irrelevant because this is a rights issue. We shouldn’t be worried about trans people taking over the Olympics. We should be worried about their fairness and human rights instead.”
ClashDaily’s Associate Editor since August 2016. Self-described political junkie, anti-feminist, and a nightmare to the ‘intersectional’ crowd. Mrs. Walker has taken a stand against ‘white privilege’ education in public schools. She’s also an amateur Playwright, occasional Drama teacher, and staunch defender of the Oxford comma. Follow her humble musings on Twitter: @TheMrsKnowItAll
The three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year launched a fund on YouCaring.com to raise money for victims of Hurricane Harvey on Aug. 26 with an initial goal of $200,000. At the time, that seemed like a sizable yet attainable goal. In hindsight, perhaps Watt (and the rest of us) underestimated humanity’s goodwill and willingness to help others in need.
Watt recently closed the fundraiser after raising an astonishing $37,097,298, which is more than 185 times his initial goal.More than 200,000 people donated, meaning Watt got as many donors as he expected dollars.
Watch how he was received by fans:
His accomplishment was immense:
The fundraiser’s progress has been accelerated by a few big-time donations from billionaires. Charles Butt, who owns the San Antonio-based supermarket chain H-E-B, donated $5 million, while Tennessee Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk donated $1 million.
A number of celebrities have contributed to the cause; new Houston Rocket Chris Paul raised $50,000, H-Town lover Drake put up $200,000 and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon announced that his program would donate $1 million.
It is well established that bars and restaurants rake in much of their cash on NFL game days and many fear a boycott of the NFL will hurt their bottom line. But this year on Veterans Day, as millions of Americans decided to boycott the NFL over its constant anti-American protests mounted during the playing of the national anthem, one bar in New Jersey decided to risk its bottom line to support America. And the community turned out in droves.
Bars are especially loathe to turn off the NFL, but the owners of Woody’s Roadside Tavern in Farmingdale, New Jersey, decided that patriotism and America meant more to them than money. So, Chris Maltese, one of the owners of Woody’s, decided to turn off the NFL especially on Veterans Day, according to APP.com.
If Maltese and his employees felt any trepidation over turning off the NFL last weekend, it turned out that they needn’t have worried. After their fellow citizens learned of the Veterans Day plans, they turned out by the dozens to fill the place with patriotism and revelry despite the absence of the anti-American protesters of the National Football League.
Woody’s announced that they were going to turn off the TVs on Veterans Day and were instead going to raise money for the Special Forces Association Chapter 19 and military families. And once word got out what the bar was planning, the town went wild.
Far from losing cash because they turned off the NFL, Woody’s found itself filled to capacity and even running out of glasses and cutlery for the customers.
“We’re not trying to be political here, we’re just trying to support our veterans,”Maltese said. “I think people are looking to have some kind of voice in the whole NFL thing… and this is their voice.”
Patrons of Woody’s were pleased with the bar’s decision to turn off football.
Bar patron Andy Barcellona is one who loved the bar’s decision. Barcellona, who is a former staff sergeant in the Army’s 3rd Infantry, entered Woody’s wearing a T-Shirt saying, “I stand for our flag,”said he was “kind of shocked”when he learned of the bar’s plans for Veterans Day. But he said he was all in because he is offended by the NFL’s constant anti-American protests.
“I was a diehard Giants fan… No more Giants. No more football,”Barcellona said. “The flag is more important than football.”
Other customers agreed:
“I haven’t watched a game since they started (the protest),” said Randy Lynd, 55, of Manasquan, a former Special Forces Green Beret who served 27 years in the Army.
Lynd, who said he served five tours in Afghanistan, expressed little sympathy for professional athletes who he said made millions of dollars each year while soldiers continued to fight and die for the flag.
“I think people doing the right thing should be supported,” he said outside of Woody’s as he gestured toward the restaurant. “This is the right thing.”
In the end, the bar sponsored a mass Pledge of Allegiance and celebrated the U.S.A. instead of wasting their time with football. And the bar came away with more money than it ever made in a single day and raised money for our veterans at the same time.
Meanwhile, the NFL has proved that it still doesn’t get it.
The league even sponsored a disgusting Veterans Day commercial filled with some of the worst, anti-American protesters in the league peddling the lie that they love America and our veterans.
Anthem protesters like the Philadelphia Eagles Chris Long and Malcolm Jenkins, the Seattle Seahawks Doug Baldwin, and the Tennessee Titans Delanie Walker all tried to pretend that they are still patriotic Americans despite their constant anti-American protests. They are trying to fool America into imagining that their protest is not against America, but is “only” about police brutality.
But that isn’t what the inventor of the national anthem protest said of his brainchild. In his own words, former San Francisco 49ers second-string quarterback Colin Kaepernick said that his protests were specifically meant as a protest against the United States of America and all it stands for.
I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder
There you have it. In his own words, Kaepernick told us he couldn’t stand up for the flag or the country.
This is the same Colin Kaepernick who said the U.S. “has never been great.” He called our police “pigs” by wearing socks with cartoon police pigs on them. He outraged America’s Cuban immigrants by complimenting murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro and also wore a T-Shirt lionizing the murderous dictator.
So, don’t fall for the NFL’s lies. These protests continue to occur during the song that pays homage to this great nation, and the inventor of the protest was counting on just that to serve as a platform for his stand against the United States of America.
With nobody showing up even for the BIG games, Goodell is focused on more important things, like building crazy perks into his own new contract.
Leadership like his, where have we seen it last? Maybe Neville Chamberlain?
Or would you rather compare him to Nero fiddling while Rome burned?
What kind of judgment and leadership has Goodell been demonstrating?
Well, he’s taken NEITHER side on the anthem issue, with the predictable consequence of angering people on both sides of the issue.
ClashDaily’s Big Dawg takes Roger Goodell and the NFL to task beautifully:
But while ten weeks in, stadiums are only about half-filled, even for big rivalries like the Green Bay and Chicago, Goodell is busy trying to line his own pockets.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is reportedly asking for a $49.5 million annual salary and a private jet for life in contract negotiations with league owners.
“That number for Roger just seems too much,” an owner told ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen. “It’s offensive. It’s unseemly.”
Goodell’s latest proposal also included lifetime health insurance for his family. His current deal includes compensation of roughly $30 million per year.
Source: BleacherReport
Because a multi-millionaire shouldn’t have to cover his own health care expenses, amirite?
How do fans feel about Goodell’s list of demands, considering he’s not listening to yours?
Judging by all those empty seats, you’re not feeling appreciated at all.
The only thing you’d need to complete the picture is a tumbleweed or two to go rolling through them.
A real American hero, Retired Navy Cmdr. John Wells, who is also executive director of the Military Veterans Advocacy based in Louisiana, was chosen by the New Orleans Saints to receive its Peoples Health Champion Award for highlighting the “health and well-being of our military, veterans and their families.” It’s an honor to be recognized for the good work one is doing in their community to make a difference in the lives of their neighbors, but it matters “who” is bestowing the honor.
“Although I am touched and honored to be selected for such an award, the ongoing controversy with NFL players’ disrespect for the national flag forces me to decline to participate in the presentation,” he said. “I am unable, in good conscience, to enter an NFL stadium while this discourtesy prevails. Since this award is tainted with the dishonorable actions of the NFL and its players, I cannot accept it.”
What a spectacular response.
Over the last two years many of the New Orleans Saints players have been involved in protests against the National Anthem, the police, the President, and anyone else they deem worthy of their spite.
Now, the entire league is suffering under collapsing TV ratings as they play inside of mostly empty stadiums and they are beginning to realize that they could be hurting their own bottom line. So they find a worthwhile veteran and attempt to use him as a prop in their public relations battle to improve their image.
What did the Saints do when he refused? Did they display any class or understanding?
NOPE.
In fact, the Saints disrespectful response to Commander Wells proves that the entire event was simply a PR “stunt” attempting to win back a few of their lost fans.
Here’s what some classless twit in the Saints front office responded with:
“We will not allow Mr. Wells’ decision and subsequent media appearances to distract our players and organization from continuing to honor and support our military and veterans,” the Saints said in a statement. “We, as an organization, have decided to move on from this sad and divisive discourse and focus our attention on supporting our military and veterans.”
How ironic and infuriating is that?
The Saints blaming Wells for “sad and divisive discourse”? The Saints chose to protest during our national anthem, but Wells is the one being divisive? Wells focuses his life’s work on advocating for veterans in Louisiana, but the Saints are pretending that they’re the ones who truly support our military and our veterans?
It’s unconscionable and I hope the Saints continue to lose profits and games as this season drags on.
In light of the ongoing anthem-protesters by entitled football millionaires, a group of former NFL legends showed the current crop what true greatness is all about. This past summer, 18 NFL Hall of Famers were baptized in the Jordan River in Israel, Sports Spectrum reported.
In Matthew 3, the Scriptures record that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.
The group of players who were baptized included Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Roger Staubach, Joe Greene, Cris Carter, Andre Reed, John Stallworth, Eric Dickerson, Marshall Faulk, Dave Casper, Jerome Bettis, Ron Yary, Aeneas Williams, Lem Barney, Willie Lanier, Mike Singletary, Andre Tippett and Bruce Smith,according to Sports Spectrum.
Former Arizona Cardinals player Aeneas Williams, who is a pastor at The Spirit Church in St. Louis, Missouri, was there to help perform the baptisms for the players.
This is the sort of stuff that the media should be covering, but of course they won’t because it would show something other than people kneeling on the ground to take part in a pointless protest.
“Baptism is an outward sign of what has already happened on the inside of us,”Williams explained.
“Getting in the water, literally, your sins have been washed away and when you come up, it is symbolically a new person. The old person has been buried. We rejoice in the Lord,” he stated.
This action also highlights the generation gap between football players. The old guard are concerned with their love for God, while the newer generation is more concerned about how many people will like a picture of them kneeling.
The newer generation really has its priorities screwed up. In a few years, once their bodies are completely shattered from playing football, they will be completely forgotten by the American public and will having nothing to show for their protests.
However, the old guard have made their peace with God, and have clearly accepted something more important than a cool hashtag and a 30-second sound bite.
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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