/
October 17, 2024
Chiefs Placekicker Harrison Butker Goes Wide Right and Finds Political Power
The Kansas City Chiefs kicker has started a far-right super PAC to encourage conservatives to vote for “traditional Christian values.” He is part of a terrifying political trend.
Harrison Butker, #7 of the Kansas City Chiefs, celebrates after defeating the Cincinnati Bengals at Arrowhead Stadium on September 15 in Kansas City, Missouri.
(Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Harrison Butker resides at the bottom of the most majestic mountain in the National Football League: the least important player on the most important team. Butker is the placekicker for the two-time defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. He is very good at his job, but no matter how many field goals he sends through the uprights, he is the lowest-caste athlete in the locker room, somewhere behind the assistant strength coaches but ahead of the office interns. (Adam Sandler wrote the song “The Lonesome Kicker” for a reason.)
Yet, even though merely a kicker, Butker’s star is on the rise in spaces far from the football field. Looking like the handsome, dashing villain in a World War II film, he is no longer lonesome. Butker has a new home away from football at the right-wing edge of US politics. Earlier this year, Butker “very intentionally,” as he put it, announced his “traditional Catholic” views while delivering a commencement address at Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal-arts school in Kansas. Butker chided the women in the audience for their ambition and expressed the trad-Catholic doctrine that their only true happiness would be as a wife and fertile mother. He praised his own wife, Isabella, saying that she would be “the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother” and expressed his joy over the fact that she has embraced “one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.”
Butker, true to his predicable anti-LGBTQ views and staunch anti-abortion activism, also criticized “liberal Catholic leaders,” whom he faults with “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America.” He also attacked the “tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion” and cried out against “things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media,” which supposedly “all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.” Targeting the male graduates, Butker told them to “be unapologetic in your masculinity,” and to “fight against the cultural emasculation of men.” Happy graduation, everyone!
Butker wants to loudly and proudly spread the belief that the ills of the 21st century are rooted in the resistance of women to get married and “love, honor, and obey” (heavy on the “obey”) their husbands. If this all sounds familiar, it’s the gospel of JD Vance and his contempt for cat-owning single women as well as all women—let’s be real, white women—who don’t see themselves as born to breed. That Butker’s own mother, Dr. Elizabeth Butker, has been a medical physicist at Emory University’s department of radiation oncology since 1988 suggests that he needs less time giving speeches and more time in therapy.
Butker is, of course, a symptom of a growing toxic strain in this country’s political lifeblood. The “trads” are now longer content to thunder from the pulpit or smuggle their ideas into minority opinions on the Supreme Court through one of their purchased jurists. Their agenda is now the center of the GOP. When you hear about Vance and the right’s desire to monitor menstrual periods or to prosecute women who go across state lines for an abortion—ideas that would have sounded “out there” on the neo-Nazi Stormfront site a decade ago—you are hearing the “trads” wanting their own twisted, fascistic version of that All-American bogeyman known as “big government.” When Trump talks about rooting out “the enemy within,” he is being influenced by these Christo-fascist ideas that float in and out of his ears like a green mist. They are backed by billions of dollars in dark money and some of the trad beliefs—particularly the ones related to eugenics and “white genocide” population fears—are catnip to oligarch tech-lords with open wallets and designs on power, like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Current Issue
Butker wants in on this gravy train. He has already garnered headlines for endorsing the insurrectionist cheerer and running enthusiast Senator Josh Hawley, who looks at Butker like Ingrid Bergman stared at Humphrey Bogart. Now, with that friendship in his pocket, he has started a political action committee to encourage Christians to vote for “traditional values.” Its name is UPRIGHT PAC.
Its website reads:
We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government. But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great.… We are working to mobilize Christians across this country to make sure we protect these values at the ballot box.
Kansas City Chiefs franchise owner Clark Hunt praised Butker for starting the PAC. Hunt’s family has existed in the shadowy right-wing margins of this nation’s politics for generations. (His grandfather the billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt was a white supremacist, and his half-brother Lamar Hunt Jr. is helping to fund the opposition to abortion in Missouri.)
NFL bosses like Clark Hunt are now politically laundering the tax dollars we spend on publicly funded stadiums and spending it on Butker’s shared ideological agenda. But players, like quarterback Colin Kaepernick or safety Eric Reid, who protested racism and police violence during the National Anthem find themselves banned from the sport. In the political and financial realities of Roger Goodell’s National Football League, Kaepernick and Reid hit the pavement while Harrison Butker, this kicker, hits the jackpot. The privilege of being white. The privilege of being on the far right.
It’s because of Kaepernick’s legacy—and the desire to bury it—that the MAGA GOP is so besotted with Butker. The NFL has traditionally been a cultural space where the right has found comfort, commonality, and votes. Yet there was Donald Trump in 2016 and 2017 calling for NFL boycotts and saying in a Huntsville, Alabama, speech that kneeling players are “sons of bitches” who should be fired. This created confusion among that All-American cross section of men who are NFL fans but also have their nose up Trump’s orange ass. Meanwhile, here is Tim Walz, Mr. Football, running out to the 50-yard-line.
In Butker, the hard right—the Christian Zionists braying for the Rapture, the January 6 insurrectionists crying for the freedom to seize the Capitol—finally has a foothold among the NFL players, not just their bosses. Yes, there have always been right-wing players, generations of right-wing Christian quarterbacks, and even more than a few GOP politicians that have come out of the National Football League. But Butker is not just a part of the fellowship of Christian athletes wanting to do Bible study after Wednesday lifts. He sees himself as being in an ideological battle. I have to wonder, though, if he understands the unintended consequences of his political stances so supported by his boss.
One of those unforeseen impacts is that Butker’s being a kicker really does matter to this story. The more public he is with his belief that A Handmaid’s Tale is a how-to-manual, the more he becomes a distraction. If there is one player on any NFL team who is absolutely forbidden from being a distraction, it is the kicker. You can have five defensive linemen caught running a cocaine-mandatory drag-racing ring, and they would get a five-game suspension. You can even have your goofy tight end dating the most famous woman on earth. But if Patrick Mahomes has to answer too many questions about his kicker’s political beliefs, then that will get mighty old, mighty fast. And if there is one person more powerful than Clark Hunt on the Kansas City pecking order, it’s Mahomes. Butker could get kicked right off the team for being a distraction. Then he’ll be remembered less for his Super Bowl rings than as the kicker with the ego too big for, as Adam Sandler memorably put it, his special kicking shoe that he uses in the snow.
Can we count on you?
In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.
We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.
Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.
Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.
Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation
Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.
More from The Nation
A Plot to Legalize Abortion Travel Bans Takes Root in Texas
A Plot to Legalize Abortion Travel Bans Takes Root in Texas
This November, Amarillo will vote on an ordinance that could turn the city into a “sanctuary for the unborn” —and tee up a legal case with the Trumpiest of Trump judges.
The Story of the Hurricanes
The Story of the Hurricanes
How Floridians struggled through the successive traumas of Helene and Milton
How Abortion Bans Created a Crisis in Medical Education
How Abortion Bans Created a Crisis in Medical Education
The post-Dobbs system for residents’ training in abortion care may not be adequate to meet the needs of pregnant patients.
A Study Reveals CNN and MSNBC’s Glaring Gaza Double Standard
A Study Reveals CNN and MSNBC’s Glaring Gaza Double Standard
Palestinians received far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis or Ukrainians, a Nation analysis has found.
The American Jewish Consensus Is Fracturing—and That’s a Blessing
The American Jewish Consensus Is Fracturing—and That’s a Blessing
While the Jewish establishment bemoans divisions around Israel, younger Jews are demonstrating that the real crisis is that so many support a state engaging in mass murder.
AI Is Taking Over College Admissions
AI Is Taking Over College Admissions
For many high school students, artificial intelligence only heightens the anxieties around applying to college. How much of their application will be read by a human?