NFL has championed the wrong cause

The NFL anthem protests continue without an end in sight. It’s time somebody says what needs to be said so this country can heal and move on. If you’re ready for it, this is it.

In order to understand the protests we must understand what’s being protested. Too many owners, too many Americans are willing to blindly go along under the banner of free speech. Free speech is not the issue. What’s at issue is a perception that America is fundamentally a racist society. Colin Kaepernick said as much when he started all of this. He said he didn’t want to stand for an anthem that represented a country that oppressed black people. To understand where he’s coming from is to get at the root of the problem.

We’ve been over the statistics. Kaepernick believes black people are being indiscriminately gunned down by police. The fact is white people are twice as likely to be killed by police as black people. The liberal media would have you believe that’s proof of racism just because there are more than four times as many white folks as there are black folks in this country. As I’ve explained in a prior column, the racial makeup of the country has nothing to do with it. Were that the case, one could argue that the NFL itself is racist since it’s 80 percent black.

The sad fact is black people commit crimes at far above their representation in the population. For example, 52 percent of the murders are committed by black people. It’s not racist to point that out. It’s just a sad reality. Instead of looking at the number of blacks in prison or those killed by police and assuming racism, we should dig down and try to figure out why those crime stats are so out of kilter. 

That’s what leads us to the crux of the problem. Roughly 72 percent of black children born today will be born out of wedlock. That means, in all likelihood, there’s not a father in their day-to-day lives. Ninety percent of all homeless children are from fatherless homes. Same for runaway children. Eighty-five percent of children with behavior disorders come from fatherless homes. Seventy-one percent of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. Of the kids in rehab centers, 75 percent come from fatherless homes. And the statistic that should hit us all between the eyes, 85 percent of all youths who end up in prison come from fatherless homes. This all according to research by The Fatherless Generation.

That, my friends, is the problem. Not that America is a racist country. Not that America is oppressing black people. Fatherlessness. That is the problem. And this is something the NFL is in the perfect position to help solve. These men are role models for millions of American boys, especially black boys.

The irony is Colin Kaepernick’s father left his mother before he was born. He ended up being adopted by white parents. Some kinda racist society he grew up in, huh? Many in the NFL who kneel know exactly what the problem is. Marshawn Lynch’s father has been convicted six times and is serving a 24-year prison sentence for burglary. He could be a shining example of how to overcome such odds. Michael Bennett of the Seahawks is raising three girls. Why not highlight that instead of protesting the anthem?

Instead of taking a knee, how about take a stand. Use your influence to end fatherless households. That’s how you can help heal this country instead of tearing it apart.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Hollywood has no moral high ground

I was in Europe last week for a river cruise. I highly recommend it, by the way. My wife and I would wind down from the day’s excursions with BBC news. I don’t know what everyone was talking about back here in the States but it was wall to wall Harvey Weinstein. This is not purely a political issue, but I find it so ironic that this pig was hailed far and wide by liberals all across Hollywood as a wonderful guy who gave selflessly to liberal candidates and causes. The irony is that all the while Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment was legendary.

And now starlet after starlet is coming forward to reveal that they too were sexually harassed by Weinstein. They kept their silence because they were afraid it would hurt their careers. What does that say about them?

Everyone’s focused on Harvey, as well they should be, but we have to have a conversation about culpability. You can’t at once say you kept silent to advance your own greedy desires to succeed in Hollywood and call yourself a victim.

I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my point here. There are plenty of women who have been sexually harassed by pigs like Weinstein. They keep quiet for a variety of reasons. Some know they’ll lose in a he said/she said situation. Others actually like the guy and don’t want to ruin his career over what they hope is a temporary lack of judgement or an isolated indiscretion.

What I’m talking is the Hollywood community that knew full well that Harvey Weinstein was a monster. Still, they dealt with him because he could help them. And I’m talking men and women. What they should’ve done was lived by the principles they preach to everyone else and stop dealing with people like him. Instead, they fed on Weinstein for decades when it served their own purposes.

Hillary Clinton is one of them. She’s now going to give the money Weinstein gave to her campaign to charity. Or so she says. She’s using the Weinstein story to bash Trump. “After all, we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office,” she told Andrew Marr on BBC. I’m sitting there screaming at the TV, “What about your frickin’ husband?” Of course, Marr never brought that up.

And another piece of irony is Weinstein helped pay Bill Clinton’s legal bills during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Again, Hollywood knew full well about Hillary’s husband and not only never said anything, they continued and continue to give to the Clinton machine. Hillary once said on the campaign trail that any woman who accuses a man of rape should be believed. Unless that woman happens to have been raped by her husband. Then she needs to be destroyed.

This whole Weinstein thing isn’t just a Harvey Weinstein scandal. It’s a Hollywood scandal. It’s about people like Ashley Judd who put up with Weinstein asking her to watch him take a shower and never say anything, then publicly complain about an airport employee who says she’s pretty. It’s about the countless actresses who came to town very willing to take their turn on the casting couch if it got them that big part and now cry that they’re victims.

And, yes, there are plenty of victims. I just don’t think a whole community who knew of the monster in their midst and tolerated him because he was powerful are among them. Let’s stand against not only the monsters like Weinstein but the many enablers who keep a predator like that in business.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

What really caused the Vegas shooting

The shooting in Las Vegas was on a scale of unspeakable horror. Dozens killed. Hundreds wounded. Predictably, the left immediately launched into an issue they keep in their hip pocket. Gun control. It’s an understandably emotional response, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.

Before I get to that I need to point out a fallacy of the gun control argument. The most obvious flaw is the number of weapons this monster possessed. If news reports are accurate, he had 23 guns in the hotel room and another 19 at home. One has to wonder how he got so many guns into a hotel room undetected, however the left misses one simple point. More guns doesn’t make one more dangerous. You can only shoot one gun at a time. In fact, if he were putting down one gun and picking up another it would stand to reason that he would do less damage, not more. What matters is the capacity of the gun he used to kill.

We won’t know for sure until the investigation is complete, but it appears he managed to convert a semi-automatic rifle to automatic. In other words, he was able to turn a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. There is such a thing as a “full auto kit.” However, these kits are restricted by the 1986 law that bans civilian purchase of automatic weapons. The gun control that would’ve stopped this killer from obtaining a fully automatic weapon already exists. Yes, he had dozens of guns, but it appears the killing machine he used was obtained illegally. Passing more laws is not going to change that.

Now let’s get on to the real problem. The guy was nuts. We seem to have a mental illness crisis in this country. One in six of us is on some sort of psychiatric drug. This includes antidepressants and sedatives. That doesn’t mean that if you’re taking an antidepressant you’re psychotic, but it does mean that roughly 42 million adults are on some sort of psychiatric medication.

If you’ve ever known anyone who’s bipolar you know the difficulty is in knowing where the person ends and the disease begins. We should have the same compassion for mental illness that we do for physical illness but we don’t. It’s easy to dismiss people with mental illness. They’re odd or they’re crazy. Stay away from that guy, he’s nuts. We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. It’s part of what causes people with mental illness to go through life undiagnosed.

I can’t imagine that was the case with the Las Vegas shooter. You don’t get that mentally ill without someone noticing. Unfortunately with mental illness too many of us notice, too few of us help.

But what can we do? I don’t for a second think we need the guys in white jackets with nets prowling the streets in a padded van. However, there are far too many people who are dangerously mentally ill roaming free. Loved ones are oftentimes reluctant to report the danger signs out of compassion for the sick person, but you wouldn’t allow a person you knew had cancer to remain untreated,

The compassionate course of action is to help people you suspect are unstable get well. You don’t do that by ignoring the illness. If you suspect someone is mentally ill take action. Talk to one of their family members. If it’s your family member, talk with a mental health professional. 

Mental illness is bad enough. A mentally disturbed individual with an automatic weapon is a horribly lethal combination.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Hey, NFL, the customer's always right

When I first decided to write about the NFL/National Anthem issue it was before President Trump got involved with his opinion. Now, according to the left-wing media, it’s all his fault. He’s also been accused of making this a racial issue. It was Colin Kaepernick who made this a racial issue. Remember, he first sat for the National Anthem because he refused to stand “to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” 

It’s instructive to examine why he was protesting, other than trying to bring attention to himself as his career waned. He believes black people are being indiscriminately gunned down in the streets because of racist cops. The fact is twice as many white folks are killed by police than blacks. Now, the Washington Post and other liberally biased institutions say you have to adjust for population. That’s intellectually dishonest. If we used the same logic for the NFL we would have to determine that it’s a racist institution since blacks only make up 13 percent of the population but 70 percent of the NFL is black.

A fair analysis of the issue is to look at the percentage of whites and blacks who commit crimes. Whites make up about 61 percent of the population. Blacks make up about 13 percent. According to the FBI, blacks commit 52.2 percent of the murders. That’s a disturbing statistic. Well over 90 percent of the victims of those murders are black, so if Black Lives Matter had its way and we made the prison population look like America those murderers would be turned loose on the black community.

In every major category, blacks are way above their population percentage. Blacks commit 28 percent of total crimes, over double their representation in the population. That is the problem. Not racist cops. Not because of “a country that oppresses black people” as Kaepernick claims. Whites commit crimes at about their population percentage. That means twice as many crimes are committed by whites. And, ironically, we find that whites are twice as likely to be shot by cops. Makes sense now, doesn’t it? 

Don’t get me wrong. There are some trigger-happy cops and cops with anger management problems. Those bad seeds need to be weeded out. But obviously that affects both races equally.

My contention about the kneeling during the National Anthem is it’s bad for business. Know your customer. The NFL is dropping in the ratings all the while multi-million-dollar athletes claim it’s their right to express themselves. They do have that right, but not on the bosses dime. They’re harming the NFL brand and pretty soon the owners won’t be able to afford those multi-million-dollar salaries. When they get their pay cut I’m sure it’ll be racism.

I heard a commentator on CNN say that sports has enjoyed “social justice” protests dating back to Jackie Robinson. Robinson didn’t protest. He simply became the first black man to play Major League Baseball. You didn’t see Robinson taking a knee for the anthem, and if anyone had an excuse to it would be him. Jackie didn’t play the victim, and because of it he became the hero.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones took a knee with the team prior to the National Anthem on Monday Night Football. I’m sure he’s trying to make the players and the fans happy. I get that. The question is has the damage already been done. The customer doesn’t care if your colors are gray or orange or purple, theirs are red, white, and blue.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Cotton is no longer king, it's racist

It was only a couple of weeks ago, amidst the hue and cry over anything Confederate, that we were joking on the radio about how long it would be before cotton was considered racist. My producer, Johnny B, joked that aspirin would be regarded as racist since you have to pick cotton out of the top before you can relieve your headache. Absurdity is now reality.

The president of Lipscomb University in Nashville had some black students over to his house for dinner. It was ostensibly to give them a chance to discuss their experiences at school. That was a mistake. Instead of discussing their scholastic experiences they fixated on a centerpiece that featured stalks of cotton. My wife tells me cotton in arrangements is all the rage. Somehow I’m glad I didn’t know that beforehand. Anyway, apparently cotton is racist. The students complained loudly and angrily about this ‘microaggression’ and the university president offered a written apology.

Now, the apology wasn’t along the lines of “I’m sorry if these students took the cotton centerpiece the wrong way.” No, President Randy Lowry wrote in his apology, “The content of the centerpieces was offensive.” This is exactly why this political correctness has gotten way out of hand. First rule when you’re dealing with crazy people is you don’t recognize crazy as legitimate.

But this is how we’ve been dragged so far down this road. Students at universities all across the country go searching for things that offend them. When they go searching they always find something. Like the students at Ole Miss who saw a banana peel in a tree. They had to shut down a Greek Life retreat. “To be clear, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred at IMPACT,” wrote Ole Miss’ Interim Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Alex Lee Arndt to Greek leaders. I do hope this idiot is just interim and is terminated for kowtowing to these whiny babies. Oh, by the way, a student confessed to throwing the banana peel onto the tree because he says he couldn’t find a trash can. Didn’t matter. The ‘microaggression’ had been committed. Bring in the therapy dogs and the coloring books.

These so-called adults who choose to pander to these overgrown babies are doing them a huge disservice. They’re not always going to be there to shield these snowflakes from that mean ole world. Instead of powdering their backsides they need to be girding them for real life. Good Lord, can you imagine if these creampuffs had to storm Normandy? If we keep this up we’ll be ripe for the picking from any aggressor that wants its way with us.

So, how should the university president at Lipscomb have handled “Cottongate?” He should’ve pointed out the absurdity of cotton being racist. If it really is then we’re going to have to ban the Cotton Bowl, cotton candy, and cotton mouth. He should’ve pointed out that not only is the majority of our clothing made from cotton but so is our money, which features those white supremacists on the front. He should’ve pointed out that children are being used as slave labor in China, there’s ethnic cleansing in Darfur, there’s mass starvation in North Korea. In other words, there are far bigger problems in this world than some pandered cry baby college students getting their feelings hurt over a centerpiece.

This will never stop until sane people stop normalizing crazy. Stop acting like normal behavior is somehow racist. If you truly are not a racist then you have nothing to apologize for.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Don't fall for the hurricane hype

It was inevitable. You go through 12 years of a hurricane drought, the longest stretch of a category three hurricane hitting the U.S. in American history, and when we get hit the climate hysterics come out of the woodwork. See, they say, global warming caused these storms. Even the pope chided ‘climate deniers’ saying, “When you don’t want to see, you don’t see.”

Well, Francis at least got that right. Let’s see if we can see the facts.

Hurricane Harvey dumped a torrent of rain on Texas but it barely exceeded the downpour from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. Back in 1979, Tropical Storm Claudette dumped 42 inches in just 24 hours near Houston, the amount it took Harvey three days to do.

So-called scientists like Michael Mann—who gave us the biggest hoax in global warming history, the debunked hockey stick graph—led with this headline: “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly.” He claimed Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased by a degree over the past few decades which, he claims, cause 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere.

First of all, how does he explain the floods from Amelia and Claudette nearly 40 years ago? There are four major studies on sea surface temperatures according to Anthony Watts at the website WattsUpWithThat.com. Two of them show “weak warming” while the other two show cooling since 1998. This coincides with the land temperature warming “hiatus” that climate hysterics are having a difficult time explaining away.

And then there was the claim that Hurricane Irma was “the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.” Fox News alert: The Gulf of Mexico is in the Atlantic. This was another attempt to exaggerate a hurricane to score global warming points. In fact, if you judge the strength of hurricanes by maximum sustained winds then Irma was tied for second with three other hurricanes. The others were in 2005, 1998, and 1935. Yeah, I think I see a pattern, don’t you? 

If you judge a hurricane by its minimum atmospheric pressure then Irma was tied for 12th place. Again, the top hurricanes were all over the lot ranging from 2005 to 1988 to 1935. And keep in mind, this is only since we’ve had the capability to accurately measure different aspects of a hurricane which only dates back to 1924. That’s a blip in time.

And obviously hurricanes are not increasing in severity or frequency as Al Gore and his minions keep saying. If we’ve just ended the longest hurricane drought in history then that stat speaks for itself.

Climate hysterics have been predicting each year since 2005 was going to be a horrible year for hurricanes. We listened as they droned on about this each year for twelve years. Eventually they were bound to be right. After all, a stopped watch is right twice a day. This is their year to be right. What that means is they were wrong every other year for the last 12 years. They have no credibility whatsoever.

The irony is that Irma came through and blew the last vestiges of Al Gore’s summer flop out of theaters. The jig is up. The evidence is now overwhelming. CO2 continues to rise yet the temperatures have remained flat for 20 years. There is no correlation between CO2 and temperatures.

Oh, and by the way, there’s a new study out that shows plants are globally getting more efficient because of the rise in carbon dioxide. Hilarious. CO2 is not the boogeyman. It actually feeds the planet. I love it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Don't fall in love with a DREAMer

President Trump made the right decision on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was illegally created by Obama’s pen. What Trump did was kick this issue back to where it belongs, the United State Congress. They are the ones tasked with passing immigration laws and this was an unlawful usurpation of an already existing law. The question now is what will Congress do?

This is where it gets scary. They have six months to come up with a solution. Few people argue that children brought here through no fault of their own should be rounded up and sent back to a strange country they’ve never known. I questioned the wisdom of doing something about it on the front end. It should’ve been saved for last. DREAMers were not being rounded up and thrown out of the country. In fact, during the Obama years few illegals of any description were being deported. The problem with granting this class of people amnesty is doing so without securing the border only invited more people to come here illegally thinking they would get to stay. And they did come by the hundreds of thousands. Remember all the kids streaming across the border? It became a crisis overnight. Had the borders been secured then this nightmare wouldn’t have happened.

Congress is the place to settle this issue, but it’s imperative that anti-amnesty hawks keep a close eye on the process. The old Gang of Eight is still eager to pass comprehensive immigration reform, better known as amnesty. There’s no doubt they’ll take advantage of this opportunity President Trump has given them to pass a law much broader than simply solving the problem of children brought here by their parents.

Here are some of the things I can see the pro-amnesty crowd trying to pull. Giving full amnesty to not only children brought over here but their parents. That would be a huge mistake. Their parents knowingly broke the law as adults when they came and they should be sent packing. If they still have minor children in this country then they’re going to have to take them with them. If those minor children were born in America and, legally, are considered citizens then these parents are going to have to make a choice. They can either leave and take their children with them or they can leave the children here to be put up for adoption. If that sounds cruel, it’s not. The onus is on the parents. They’re the ones who put themselves in this predicament. I suspect most loving parents will choose to take their children with them. No matter their decision, if they broke into this country as adults they have to go.

The Gang of Eight is most certainly going to exploit this opportunity to push for a path to citizenship for illegals already in the country. The fact that they have no idea why Donald Trump was elected president is already evident. They see him as weakened by his response to Charlottesville (which has turned out to be spot on, by the way), and they will see this as their opportunity. The saner voices in Congress must step up and kill this effort before it begins. Not one member of that Gang of Eight should be allowed by senate leadership to have any say-so in crafting the DREAMer bill. If something that atrocious does break out of Congress on its way to the White House then President Trump should veto it immediately.

We all remember why Trump was elected. I hope he still does.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.