Miranda Devine

Miranda Devine

Opinion

Biden, Fauci and Butker each deliver starkly different speeches — and the best message gets vilified

The graduating class of 2024 has been treated to three very different commencement speeches in recent days.

Only one was not self-serving, dishonest and destructive.

You can guess which one made the left flip out.

As part of his Nationwide Pandering Tour to win back dwindling black support, Joe Biden went to the prestigious, black, all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday and told the students that they are victims of racism and white supremacy.

President Biden told the aspiring leaders that American democracy has failed them. WireImage

He told these aspiring leaders that American democracy has failed them. “What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street … when a trail of broken promises still leaves black communities behind … if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” he asked.

He imagined a black man who “loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure.”
He referred to efforts by parents to remove explicit pornography from school libraries as a book “ban” to “erase history” and implied it was racist. “They don’t see you in the future of America.”

It was a rancid, depressing speech that gave nobody in the audience wisdom or nourishment to help make their way in the world.

‘Distortion’

On Wednesday, the vainglorious health bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci showed up at Columbia University to whine to students about the tiny subset of the media that calls him out for his lies and complicity in the pandemic disaster.

“During the past four years, we have witnessed an alarming increase in the mischaracterization, distortion and even vilification of solid evidence-based scientific findings and of scientists themselves,” he told Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons’ Class of 2024.

This is the guy who lied to the world when he said masks will stop you getting COVID-19, and two masks are better than one. He told us the COVID shot would stop us getting the virus or passing it on.

He swore that the virus didn’t come out of the Wuhan lab.

He lied under oath to Congress and said the NIH did not fund Frankenstein gain-of-function research.

He and his underlings at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases covered up their funding of EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted the dangerous research to sloppy scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where it most likely escaped and killed millions of people.

The very day that Fauci was at Columbia last week, EcoHealth finally saw its federal funding suspended for failing to adequately oversee the Chinese research. No kidding.

The day after Fauci’s speech, his ex-colleague, former NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak, contradicted him when he testified before the House Oversight Committee. Tabak said Fauci’s outfit, NIAID, did indeed fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan through EcoHealth Alliance.

Dr. Anthony Fauci showed up at Columbia University to whine to students, writes columnist Miranda Devine. Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) also revealed emails from Fauci’s former long-term senior adviser David Morens to his good friend Peter Dazsak, the head of EcoHealth, boasting about evading Freedom of Information Act requests. “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts. So I think we are all safe,” he said.

“Sadly,” said Fauci, “elements of our society are driven by a cacophony of falsehoods, lies and conspiracy theories that get repeated often enough, that after awhile, they stand largely unchallenged ominously leading to an insidious acceptance of what I call the ‘Normalization of Untruths.’ ”

That is what is defined clinically as “projection” practiced by sufferers of narcissistic personality disorder.
But if you feel now like you need a shower, don’t despair.

The Catholic take

Behold Harrison Butker, 28, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, who delivered a commencement address at the conservative Catholic Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., the previous weekend, which will restore your faith in human nature.

His message to a new generation was a faithful Catholic’s ode to truth, beauty and motherhood, for which, of course, he was attacked as a sexist.

He addressed the women in the Class of 2024: “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and a mother. I am on this stage and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation … and embrace[d] one of the most-important titles of all: homemaker.”

At this point, he choked up. It was a love letter to his wife, the mother of their two children. Any woman not touched by his words must be so damaged or delusional that she is incapable of being loved.

Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker delivered a faithful Catholic’s ode to truth, beauty and motherhood, Devine writes. Benedictine College

He was pilloried by the usual suspects — and the not so usual. The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica condemned him because “his comments seem to have fostered division,” as if it’s his fault that the left twisted his words and went nuts.

You can only hope the nuns were hoodwinked into responding to a false version of Butker’s speech and will set the record straight once they realize their error.

Butker referenced his lesser fellow commencement speakers, Biden and Fauci, as Catholics of a different stripe, who have created dysfunction and disorder in the world through their pride and fear and a lust for power.

“Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally,” said Butker of Biden.
Together with Fauci, “the man behind the COVID lockdowns,” they are a “reminder that being Catholic alone doesn’t cut it.”

Butker’s message to young men was less remarked upon, but it was profound.

“Part of what plagues our society is this lie that has been told to you that men are not necessary in the home or in our communities,” he said. “As men, we set the tone of the culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction and chaos set in. This absence of men in the home is what plays a large role in the violence we see all around the nation.”

He added, “Be unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men. Do hard things. Never settle for what is easy.“

There is a reason that Butker’s jersey shot to number one last week. Gen Z is awake to the truth.

The fact that, of the three commencement speeches, it was Butker’s uplifting moral clarity that was singled out for attack is a reminder of the powerful forces that want us to remain in chaos and darkness.

The world needs more Butkers.