Transgenders will destroy women's sports

I must confess I’m becoming quite confused. We’ve got girls wanting to play on boys sports teams. We’ve got guys who aren’t really girls but who identify as girls wanting to play on girls teams. We’ve got upset girls who now have guys who identify as girls but are still equipped as guys getting naked in the girls’ locker room. How I long for the days when girls were girls and boys were boys. I’m afraid we’re way past that now.

A doctor in New York State was let go by the school board after he wouldn’t clear a 12-year-old girl to wrestle on the boys’ wrestling team. He cited New York law allowing him to make that judgement based on the girl’s safety. Safety be damned. We have a society to upend here.

That’s basically the motivation behind all of this. We have boys teams and girls teams for a reason. The reason is girls and boys are different. I know this may get me banned from cocktail parties in San Francisco, but males tend to be physically stronger than women. Smart women understand this. They don’t want men competing in women’s sports. That’s going to be the final frontier. Once that happens women’s sports as we know it will cease to exist.

It’s already well on its way with so-called transgenders competing as women. What’s a transgender? Well, that’s the problem. It can be anyone from a man who’s had a sex-change operation to some guy who enjoys wearing dresses. A case can be made for the former to compete alongside women. Allowing the latter to compete is inexcusable. 

There was a case recently where girls were in tears after the school approved some dude who ‘identifies’ as a girl to use the girls’ locker room. This guy’s cavorting about stark naked in front of girls and dares anyone to challenge him. The crazy people running the school sided with him. I don’t have daughters, but I can imagine I’d be fit to be tied if this were happening to my girl.

This is happening all over the world. Guys who identify as women are invading women’s sports and mopping up. Again, this is why we have men’s and women’s sports. It’s like allowing professional basketball players to play on a high school team. Pretty soon there would be nobody who goes to that high school making the team. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

But there’s a new purpose. That’s what I still can’t quite get my mind around. Is it to totally destroy women’s sports? Because that’s what it’s going to do.

Venus and Serena Williams once boasted they could beat any man in tennis. Some guy ranked 203rd in the world took the challenge and beat both of them back to back. This battle of the sexes in tennis has been played out dating back to 1888. In every match but one the man was victorious. The only victory for a woman was Billie Jean King over Bobby Riggs and that’s the one everybody’s heard of. They’ve never heard of the other nearly dozen battles. In fact, the same year Bobby Riggs lost to Billie Jean King he beat Margaret Court who was ranked number one in the world. Nobody remembers it.

What’s my point? My point is the Riggs-King match notwithstanding, you turn men loose in women’s sports and they’ll destroy them. You want to see LeBron James in the WNBA? Me either. Nor do the women in the WNBA. Let’s stop this before we ruin women’s sports.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Impeachment hearings expose arcane bureaucracy

I’ll have to say that the impeachment hearings have proven to be quite elucidating. One pattern is becoming crystal clear. There is a deep-seated problem with government bureaucrats who think they, rather than the president, set foreign policy. Each witness called before Adam Schiff’s committee has expressed concern about, in the words of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, “outside influencers” promoting a “false narrative” about Ukraine that, in Vindman’s mind, was “inconsistent with consensus views of the interagency.” 

Let’s analyze that for a second. The “outside influencers” Vindman was referring to are Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. Think about that for a moment. These are two of President Trump’s hand-picked people and Vindman calls them “outside influencers.” That’s because he believes he and other government bureaucrats dictate America’s foreign policy. When pressed by a Republican congressman on whether he tried to discourage Ukrainian officials from cooperating in Trump’s requested corruption investigation he answered, “The president of the United States has the authority to do this, I guess. I don’t know.” You guess? You don’t know? Who else would have the authority to do that? Vindman added, “I didn’t think it was right.”

Here’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter what Vindman thinks is right. He says Trump and his associates created a “false narrative” about Ukraine. He says Trump’s Ukraine policy was “inconsistent with consensus views of the interagency.” Dude, Trump’s the president of the United States. He sets the policy. It doesn’t matter what the so-called “consensus view” is. It doesn’t matter what Vindman thinks. The job of every member of the National Security Council is to give the president the best advice they can then get on board with whatever decision he makes.

Vindman was born in Ukraine and speaks the language fluently. He’s also rabidly anti-Russian. He’s upset because he’s the self-described “authority for Ukraine” at the White House and Trump’s not listening to him. That doesn’t mean he sets the policy. Those who work with him say he has a bad habit of going outside the chain of command when he doesn’t get his way.

But Vindman is not alone. Other career government bureaucrats like Acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor somehow believe that anything that runs counter to their views on foreign policy somehow constitutes a crime. Taylor’s aide, David Holmes, overheard a conversation between Trump and Sondland where Trump was asking about the progress on the “investigation.” This is seen by impeachment nuts as some sort of evidence of wrongdoing. President Trump had just discussed the “investigation” the prior day with the president of Ukraine. Following up with Sondland the next day is neither unusual nor criminal. However, it does cut against the grain of “consensus views” of the foreign policy bureaucrats, but so does slapping tariffs on China. We heard ad nauseam about how that was going to lead to a global depression.

President Trump is overturning the tables of the business-as-usual bureaucrats, and they don’t like it. Just as we’re liable to see when the Department of Justice completes its investigation into how the whole Trump/Russia collusion hoax got started, there are lots of bureaucrats who have gone to extremes to protect the status quo. When government is on auto-pilot no matter who occupies the White House we have serious problems.

This same establishment thinks it’s unseemly to investigate a questionable deal between a VP’s son and a corrupt Ukrainian oil company. I suspect it’s because that corruption is just the tip of the iceberg.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The gatekeepers of thought

I have to admit I don’t follow hockey. If I’m honest I’ll tell you that hockey doesn’t really interest me. However, when I saw that one of hockey’s longest-running commentators had been fired over something he said, I had to know why.

Up until recently Don Cherry was an 85-year-old hockey commentator on ‘Hockey Night in Canada,’ a sports program on Sportsnet. The network issued a statement saying Cherry “made divisive remarks that do not represent our values and what we stand for.” His partner on the show, Ron MacLean, went even further writing, “Don made comments that were hurtful and prejudiced.” I had to know what he said.

Don Cherry

I read the quote, frowned, scratched my head, then tried to dissect the statement in order to ascertain what was so offensive. This is what he said. “You people that come here, whatever it is—you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price.”

I knew he was talking about immigrants so I thought it might be the poppy part. Was that offensive to Middle Easterners since heroin comes from the opium poppy grown in the Middle East and Asia? No, I was way off. The poppy that Cherry was referring to is a tradition started by the Brits dating back to the first World War. The tradition is to wear a poppy in remembrance of those who died in war. That comes from the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae who was a lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. He had just lost a friend in the battle of Flanders, Belgium. On the bloody battlefield thousands of bright red poppies appeared among the carnage. McCrae was so touched by the scene that he memorialized it in verse.

Remembrance Day is observed in the UK and Canada. It’s much like our Memorial Day and falls on our own Veterans Day. A deeper dive into Don Cherry’s remarks reveals he was lamenting the fact that fewer and fewer people are wearing the poppy on Remembrance Day. “Very few people wear the poppy,” he said in the same conversation that got him fired. “Downtown Toronto, forget it. Nobody wears the poppy. Now you go to the small cities. You people that come here, whatever it is—you love our way of life. You love our milk and honey. At least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price for that.”

Okay, I still wasn’t getting it, although I had my suspicions. But that couldn’t be it. Ross Perot was chastised for that way back in 1992 when he spoke to a black group and was forced to apologize. Then I saw a CNN story. That was it. Don Cherry’s horrible offense was he used the term “you people.” OMG.

I’ve spoken to dozens of groups. Women’s groups, black groups, Hispanic groups. I’m almost positive I’ve used “you people” in the course of my speech. “You people do great work” or “You people know exactly what I’m talking about.” We use that term when we’re not part of that group. Oh, but you can’t say that…anymore. It’s offensive.

It’s offensive only to the dim-witted or the speech police. And I don’t know which one’s more dangerous.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

It's time to declare war

I have long advocated that we declare war on drug cartels and gangs. We should be sending these animals to Gitmo now that Obama has emptied it out. If you sat there as I did and watched coverage of the nine American women and children who were butchered by a drug cartel in Mexico you’re probably nodding in agreement. If you’re waiting for the Mexican government to do something about it you’re going to be waiting a long time.

Mexico is a corruptocracy. Yes, that’s my word for it, but it accurately sums it up. Mexico is run by the drug cartels. That’s why the government there has done very little to stem the flow of illegals into this country. The liberals will tell you these are people doing the jobs Americans just won’t do. I will tell you the truth. The truth is we have no way of knowing who’s good and who’s bad. That’s what border checkpoints are for. We have them at every airport. You can’t enter this country without first being checked by a border agent. Why in the world is the Southern border any different? It’s not.

What we just saw in Mexico happens here with regularity. In 2014 a drug cartel hitman confessed to killing 40 people, mostly in California, for hire. There have been beheadings in Arizona, countless gang killings in LA. As much as we like to think this is something that just happens south of the border, it’s here. And it’s been here. And it’s getting worse.

Our open border policy has blurred the lines between a civil society and barbarians. Did you see the way Mexican police cowered in the presence of El Chapo’s son recently? These people are scared to death of the drug cartels, and we should be, too. The only way we’re going to survive is to wipe these people off the face of the earth as we’ve done with ISIS.

It’s almost comical how the hysteria has been over Turkey’s incursions across their border into Syria, but these same people don’t give a damn about the invasion into our own country. Think what you will about the Kurds, we’re abandoning our own people in border towns across the Southwest and in big cities and small hamlets across our own country.

We don’t need a war on drugs. We need a war on drug cartels. And I don’t mean a figurative war or a rhetorical war. I mean bombs. I mean strafing. I mean everything short of boots on the ground. If the Mexican government’s not going to clean up the problem, we should.

We also need the military all across our southern border. A wall would be nice, but it doesn’t look like Congress is going to give Trump the funding anytime soon. He doesn’t need Congress’s approval to put troops on the border.

President Trump has warned us that most of the drugs coming into this country from Mexico aren’t coming through the checkpoints. The idiots at the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets pointed to a Border Patrol report that chronicled the large amounts of drugs being caught at border checkpoints in order to prove him wrong. What they fail to see is the Border Patrol can only report what they catch.

The Border Patrol seizes under 3 tons of heroin per year. Americans use around 22 tons of heroin a year. Where do these people think the rest is coming in from? It’s coming across our open border from drug cartels south of it. And it’s time we did something about it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Explaining the Barr investigation

Ever wondered why the Democrats were so quick to move to impeach the president over a telephone call? I mean with all the things they’ve threatened impeachment over it ends up being a simple phone call to the Ukrainian president? It was completely out of the blue over the course of one weekend and boom! Suddenly we were in the middle of an impeachment inquiry. Don’t worry. By the end of this column everything will make perfect sense.

President Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian president sent shivers down the spines of certain Democrats. It should have indicated to the rest of us that Trump and his people were over the target. 

This whole thing begins and ends with a man named Joseph Mifsud. Professor Mifsud split his teaching time between London and Rome. He was the one who allegedly told George Papadopoulos, a Trump advisor, that the Russians had Hillary’s e-mails and had found dirt on her. Papadopoulos ended up telling that to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat. Downer, in turn, told the FBI and thus began the whole Trump/Russia collusion investigation.

As we’re now finding out, both Mifsud and Downer may very well have been U.S. intelligence assets. Papadopoulos contends he was set up. He says he was fed information from one U.S. intelligence asset and then coaxed into giving the same information to another U.S. intelligence asset thus creating probable cause. The truth of the matter, as it now appears, is the Papdopoulos affair was an isolated incident. Papadopoulos was in a closed loop and the FBI knew it from the start. The question that remains is whether it was the FBI who desperately tried to conflate the Papadopoulos angle or if it was the Mueller team

Ever since Bill Barr became attorney general he’s been trying to untangle the complicated web that was weaved in the Trump/Russia collusion scandal. As Mueller’s report found, there was no collusion. Then how does such a conspiracy take root and consume the front pages for better than two years?

Professor Mifsud has maintained that he was not an intelligence asset and that he never discussed dirt on Hillary with Papadopoulos. Whatever his story, he went missing from the university at which he teaches in Rome and sometime later turned up at the doorstep of Italian intelligence claiming his life was in danger and requested police protection. He gave a taped deposition explaining why he thought his life was in danger. The Department of Justice was alerted and Bill Barr was on his way to Rome within two days along with U.S. Attorney John Durham.

Once at the American embassy in Rome, Barr insisted on a secure room where he could meet with high-level Italian intelligence agents and listen to Mifsud’s tape. Soon after returning from Rome, the inquiry into the origins of the Trump/Russia collusion story was upped to a criminal investigation. 

What’s interesting—and telling—is how the mainstream media continually refer to the Mifsud angle and the possibility that Trump was set up as an ‘unfounded conspiracy theory’ yet they treat the Mueller investigation as totally legit. If there ever was an unfounded conspiracy theory it was that Donald Trump was a Russian spy.

Once the Democrats had impeachment lodged in the American psyche they immediately moved to destroy Barr’s reputation by claiming he’d “gone rogue.” And now that Barr has kicked his investigation into high gear the Democrats suddenly call for an impeachment inquiry vote? You tell me which one is the conspiracy and which one’s the theory.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The China question is not hard

I’ve heard a lot of commentary lately on what to do if you’re an executive of a company doing business with China. Surely you’ve been following some of the flap in the NBA over a tweet by Rockets GM Daryl Morey. Morey tweeted, “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Innocent enough, right? Who could be against fighting for freedom? Well, the NBA threw a hissy fit. They made Morey delete the tweet then began their tightrope act trying to balance between pleasing their Chinese market and not looking like the stooges for communism and oppression that they are.

LeBron James weighed in saying Morey needed to educate himself on the subject and sided with the Chinese communists. Apparently it’s James who needs to educate himself. The Chinese have murdered far more people than the Nazis ever thought about killing. Yet James Harden, who plays for the Rockets, felt compelled to apologize for his boss’s tweet.

Since the controversy began I’ve heard political pundits and business experts chime in on the dichotomy of running a corporation and supporting freedom at the same time. I’m going to make it real easy for everybody.

There are alarm bells that go off in the heads of most people when they’re doing something wrong. It’s called your conscience. This is your inner sense that guides you. When you get too close to doing something wrong you start to feel something in your stomach. Some people condition themselves to ignore this inner sense and plow forward anyway. These people are what’s known as psychopaths. They are the kings of rationalization. They will convince themselves, then in turn try convince others, that what they’re doing is actually right when they and everybody else knows it’s wrong.

If you made $200,000 last year but only claimed $50,000 on your tax returns because the other $150,000 was made through the sale of cocaine then an alarm bell should be going off in your head. You can rationalize it by saying your employer doesn’t pay you what you’re worth or you’re just providing a service for people who are going to get their coke from somewhere, but you’re a psychopath. You know it’s wrong, but you continue to ignore your conscience and do it anyway. Eventually your conscience is pushed so far away that you no longer even hear it.

If you’re a businessman and you do business with the mafia you know it’s wrong. You may not even rationalize it. You just know it’s wrong, but it’s too lucrative to turn down. You also know that if you ever criticize anything the mafia holds near and dear you’ll be swimming with the fishes. So you keep your trap shut.

Here’s the bottom line. Making money and freedom of speech are not mutually exclusive. If you’re making money but you can’t stand up for freedom and liberty because of it, then alarm bells should be blaring in your ears. You’re doing something wrong.

Think about how you’re making money right now, whatever your job. Would you get in trouble if you tweeted support for Hong Kong? Would you get in trouble if you tweeted support for freedom and liberty anywhere? Then you’re not selling your soul for your livelihood. You’re doing the right thing.

This ain’t hard, folks. It’s something I’ve been preaching for over 20 years. We should not be dealing with a brutal, murderous, communist regime. If that’s the way you’re making your money then you’re doing something wrong. And if alarm bells are blaring in your head right now then there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

I don't care about diversity

When it comes to dealing with a business, I couldn’t care less about diversity. That may sound like heresy in this day and age of political correctness, but diversity is the enemy of excellence. There was a story recently where Air Canada is going to stop announcing ‘ladies and gentlemen’ on their flights in recognition of ‘gender fluidity.’ News flash: Gender is not fluid. You’re either a man or a woman. Sure there are some men who want to be women and vice versa, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Nor does my identifying as the King of England make it so.

While Air Canada brags on their website that they’ve been named one of Canada’s Best Diversity Employers, they’ve also been named the worst airline in North America for flight delays. You see, referring to people as ze, zir, or zem ain’t getting them to their destinations on time. Diversity is killing customer service.

Does that mean I want everybody I deal with to be white? No, just the opposite. I don’t care who I’m dealing with as long as they’re great at what they do. Diversity for diversity’s sake forsakes everything else. What these companies who put diversity first end up doing is attracting people with chips on their shoulders because society won’t accept them for this or that or the other. When I’m trying to book a flight I don’t give a rat’s rump about your personal problems. Sorry. All I care about is getting to where I’m going to on time and in reasonable comfort.

To show you how ridiculous this diversity thing has gotten, Asians apparently aren’t diverse enough anymore. Harvard has been blocking the number of Asians it accepts because, well, they’re too darn qualified. They’re taking up spaces black or Hispanic people could occupy. The Asians took Harvard to court for discrimination and they lost! Yes, they lost. The judge wrote in her ruling, “Ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race conscious admissions.”

See there. It’s all about ensuring diversity at Harvard. It’s not in the least about excellence or who’s most qualified, or any of the things that used to matter in a great country. All that matters is a school or business ‘looks like America.’

Let me ask you something. Does the NBA ‘look like America?’ Of course not. You know what the NBA, the NFL, NHL and MLB are all about? Excellence. You think a sports fan cares about anything else aside from winning? Sports are the last frontier of excellence in America. It’s all about being the best, regardless of race or gender or perceived gender.

Ever wondered why customer service stinks? Wonder no more. When a company is more interested in accommodating the employee rather than the customer then customer service will always stink. 

Georgetown University, riddled with guilt over the Jesuit priests who sold 272 slaves in 1838 to keep the school afloat, announced affirmative action for descendants of those slaves. The interesting part is they don’t get automatic admission. They get the same advantage as ‘legacy students.’ These are students whose family members went to Georgetown. Yeah, universities across the country do this, and it hasn’t occurred to even one liberal diversity do-gooder how patently unfair that is.

So legacy leg-ups stay and they’re adding an advantage if you’re a dude who wants to be a woman. Where is excellence in all of this? It’s not there, and it will be the downfall of this country if we’re not careful. It’s time we got back to being better rather than being different.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.