A Howard University professor is under fire for blaming Austin Metcalf’s father for not teaching his son enough about black culture, which she seemed to insinuate resulted in his murder. Karmelo Anthony was convicted Tuesday of murdering Austin at a track meet in April 2025 and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Austin’s father, Jeff Metcalf, admonished Anthony for making the case about race and told him he’s been feeling “pure unfiltered rage” while grieving the loss of his son. “I said from day one, this was never about race, please don’t politicize it,” Jeff said. “But what did you choose to do, both. It’s about right and wrong. We’re all humans. We all bleed the same color.” “You failed your parents, you failed yourself, and you failed society. You don’t belong in this community,” he continued,  “You’re going to prison. You can’t even look me in the eyes right now, but you can stab my f*cking son in the heart.” Dr. Stacey Patton published an article on Substack on Wednesday titled, “Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries.” Patton responded to the grieving father’s heartbreaking victim’s impact statement by saying it was time to “talk about Jeff Metcalf’s failure as a father.” She said this was appropriate to do because it was the same treatment given to the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. “In your own memorial language, you told us about the kind of white boyhood Austin was raised inside. It was a boyhood steeped in conquest language, hunting rituals, warrior fantasies, masculine toughness, and the romance of force,” she wrote. “You told us about a child praised not just for being kind, curious, gentle, or careful, but for becoming a ‘leader’ and a ‘warrior’ in a racist culture where those words too often mean dominance.” She argued Austin Metcalf “learned early how to hold a weapon, how to aim, how to take down a living thing, how to be proud of the kill, how to have that moment folded into the mythology of father and son,” and that set him up to be a victim of violence. “YOU taught Austin what it meant to be a ‘warrior.’ YOU taught him that toughness was honorable. YOU taught him that taking up space was normal. YOU taught him that confrontation was courage. YOU socialized Austin into entitlement long before he ever reached that track meet,” Patton wrote in the lengthy essay. “YOU failed to teach your boy that black children have boundaries. YOU failed [to] teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person’s body is not your jurisdiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child’s space is not a challenge to be conquered. … YOU obviously failed to teach your son that touching, confronting, crowding, testing, or policing another person can have consequences. You failed, Jeff,” she added. The Howard professor ultimately concluded that “black children have good reason to be on guard around white bodies.” She went on to say she was glad Karmelo Anthony never looked the grieving father in the eye, as he had requested while he read his statement.  “There was power in him not looking at you,” Patton wrote. “There was refusal in it. There was survival in it. There was an ancient knowing in it. Because black people know what it means when a white man demands eye contact from a black child after already deciding what that child is. We know the old ritual. We know that sometimes ‘look at me’ is not a request for humanity. It is a demand for surrender. And Karmelo did not surrender.” Professor Patton’s Substack has nearly fifty thousand followers, and her open letter to Jeff Metcalf has received nearly two thousand likes. But not everyone was happy with it.  “Demonic,” one commenter replied. “This is pretty disgusting,” another person wrote. “They’re asserting a right to murder white people who aren’t docile, deferential, and subordinate. Who don’t ‘know their place.’ Some of them have become the racists they claim to hate.” “Black boys, and all boys for that matter, should have a boundary if not stabbing someone to death. That’s the boundary,” another wrote. “It’s an extremely easy boundary NOT to cross, billions of people live their whole lives without ever crossing it. If there’s ANY boundary, it’s that.”

The White House issued a response to pop singer Ariana Grande on Thursday after she slammed the Trump administration for using one of her songs in a social media video about ICE arrests. “We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital in a statement.  This was in response to the “Wicked” actress commenting on a TikTok video put out by the White House by saying, “please do not ever use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense. f*ck ice.” The music appears to be removed from the video as of Thursday, as the outlet noted. @whitehouse Bye-bye

At least one person was killed, and 11 victims were reported after a shooting in Midland, Texas, on Friday morning. Authorities say the suspect remains barricaded inside a building after officers responding to the scene encountered gunfire. BREAKING: Police are responding to an “active shooter event” in Midland, Texas pic.twitter.com/Kd7UXEOq68 — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 12, 2026 Nine victims were transported to Midland Memorial Hospital. Four were undergoing surgery, and five were listed in stable condition. Officials said a perimeter has been established around the suspect, who remains contained as “armored units … and partner agencies” work to resolve the standoff. This is a developing story; please refresh to check for updates.

Through the magic of sports, we have the following actual headline in Alabama media: The real star of Alabama’s World Cup match? Freddy from Germany and his 1 a.m. Buc-ee’s dinner My most requested topic this week is not this classic NBA Finals. Instead, it’s this sudden genre of “Awestruck Europeans traveling through the USA heartland.” Apparently, due to the World Cup, an event that arguably means less to Americans than the aforementioned Finals or even your standard NFL playoff game, we’ve been invaded by gawking Euros. These visitors see our land through a different lens, excitedly consuming flyover state bounties we often take for granted. This is like if a thousand Alexis de Tocquevilles applied their observations to Bass Pro Shops. Is this now viral commentary authentic? Flattering? Condescending? Is “Freddy from Germany” even real? Maybe not, but in a way, yes. With now-famous German fan FreddyLA7, who’s notable enough to receive tourism assistance from NFL great JJ Watt, there’s some mystery here: He apparently started his X account back in the days when it was known as Twitter in 2021. His X account states he’s based in Germany (according to X, “The country or region that an account is based can be impacted by recent travel or temporary relocation. This data may not be accurate and can change periodically.”). He’s got a verified account, but all that means is that he pays for it. He’s had four username changes since September 2024. Some cynics, including those who regularly visit this podcast, view the emergent onslaught of Freddys as plausibly part of some astroturfed campaign to raise pro-Murica sentiment during these festivities. The softer cynical theory is just that these Euros have found an easy template for positive Internet engagement. Maybe AleksanderGunner89 doesn’t really like Costco that much. Perhaps what he really likes is all the likes he gets from liking Costco. And why are we Americans so generously handing out that Internet engagement? Aren’t we infamously incurious about the broader world’s judgment? My take is, contrived or not, the America-loving visitors are tapping into an understandable want. I think these football tourists landed on a market inefficiency that I first noticed back in March, when the Twitter/X translation feature revealed an entire Japanese subculture of USA fetishization. Those Japanese X users were into the cowboy hats and BBQ, and Americans aware of this phenomenon were mostly tickled by it. Growing up, I associated the export of our brand with gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers. To many around the world, their America was the version Billy Crystal and his New York friends sought in “City Slickers.” The prevalent Japanese view of USA culture reminded me of that old 2004 election meme of describing the divide in our nation as between the United States of Canada vs. Jesusland. These Japanese America lovers betrayed little interest in the United States of Canada. It seems they preferred Jesusland, or perhaps more currently, Trumpland, a profound source of embarrassment to an American traveler type who craves an image of worldly sophistication. The Japanese Americana moment turned this sore subject on its head. Japan, a high-status travel destination for our coastal elites, contained people who saw high status in what many here regard as low culture. They saw something to be proud of in archetypes that my friends and neighbors view as intrinsically embarrassing. Now the visiting Euros are putting an additional spin on this. The Japanese were in love with an image, whereas the charmed Europeans are more like Boris Yeltsin at the Houston grocery store. Yes, France might have given the world “democracy, existentialism, and the ménage à trois.” But America invented the free refill. You arrive here and of course aren’t easily finding your way to a cattle drive. The real America isn’t necessarily the one spotlighted in the TV series “Yellowstone.” Instead, it’s a vast expanse of commercialized abundance. It’s the biggest Bass Pro Shops. It’s the Wisconsin Dells water parks. While our elites fetishize the “walkable” European city, World Cup Europeans are gobsmacked by the scale and splendor of the drivable USA safari. For whatever we lack, we also have a lot of space and stuff. It’s easy to see the flaw in a culture that revolves around consumption, but it’s also easy to take stuff, like air conditioning, for granted. We have poverty, of course. We have gun crime, infamously. We also have a middle class with access to wonders unimaginable to many around the planet. “Freedom” is a well-worn American cliché, but clichés exist for a reason. There’s so much negativity out there in high culture about our nation, from our own elites and elites abroad. We’re at a current low point in Gallup’s “Are You Proud to be an American?” question, with much of the decline driven by liberals during this Trump era. That makes some sense, but let’s take a 30,000-foot view of that historic bottom: A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020. This means that a solid majority of Americans are still “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. Where in the national news can they find feel-good stories that channel this sentiment? If you’re looking for smaller anecdotes, it’s not especially novel to see Murica-love voiced by a flag-waving Texan. It’s more fun to witness such positivity from the vantage of a cosplaying World Cup Brit. In conclusion, yes, there might be an aspect of contrivance to the current praise of our country from this influx of visitors. There’s also a real, mostly unmet yearning for that kind of admiration. Perhaps Buc-ee’s isn’t really the best we have to offer. But our country offers a whole lot to a great many, and there’s something glorious about the size and color of the American mundane. *** This is republished with permission from the author. The original essay appears here. Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.

In a historic address to Spain’s Parliament on June 8, Pope Leo XIV received a standing ovation after declaring that “the defense of human life is neither a partisan issue nor a confessional interest: it is a goal of civilization.” “If life ceases to be recognized as a fundamental value, what future can our societies have?” he asked lawmakers, many of whom support abortion and euthanasia. The Pope continued: “Can a community that casts into the shadows the unborn child, the elderly, the sick, those who suffer in silence, or those who depend entirely on the care of others be called fully just? Every human life must be recognized and safeguarded from conception to its natural end, in every circumstance of its existence.” Leo’s words, echoing themes in his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, cut to the heart of what sustains just societies. Yet they also expose a critical weakness in our public discourse: Most people do not know that we can answer the question of when a human life starts with an objective scientific fact. Without this foundational knowledge, we lack the intellectual equipment to fully defend individual human lives or the civilization built upon them. The biological science of human embryology, the specialized branch of biology that studies when human life begins and its early development, has been unequivocal for more than 80 years. Since 1942, the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development — the international gold standard, akin to the Periodic Table in chemistry — have documented this moment with precision. At Carnegie Stage 1, fertilization begins with first contact between sperm and oocyte, marking the beginning of a new, whole, individual, and living human being. This new organism directs its own continuous, coordinated development from that moment forward. Ronan O’Rahilly, one of the world’s authorities on human embryology, states it simply: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed.” Human embryologist C. Ward Kischer similarly affirms that from this initial contact, “all subsequent development to birth of a living newborn is a fait accompli.” In other words, we are talking about a seamless process in which stages overlap and blend, with no upgrade or second trigger required at implantation, the onset of the heartbeat, “viability,” birth, or any other milestone. Human embryology assigns no reduced status to the unborn (the disabled, the sick, or the elderly). The embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, and so on, is the same human organism progressing through the natural stages of development along the continuum of human life. Every human being is a human person by virtue of existing as a member of our species — not by achieving certain developmental milestones such as size, location, consciousness, sentience, or “independence.” This intrinsic reality applies equally from the tiny beginnings of one’s biological existence to natural death. The claim that biomarkers somehow change the essence of a human being (rendering someone “more fully human” later) is not science. It is a politically charged fabrication. Many people today nevertheless embrace this destructive myth, dehumanizing the vulnerable at every stage. The comedian Bill Maher captured this mindset in 2024 when he acknowledged that pro-lifers view abortion as murder “and it kind of is,” while admitting he is “OK with that,” a casual acceptance of ending what he and others frame as a less-than-fully-human life. (Maher is the most intellectually honest of today’s talk-show hosts, and it’s therefore all the more disturbing that he should hold these sinister views.) Our inhumanity is seen at its most stark and shameless in the case of abortion. Decades of treating the unborn as disposable “potential” humans, mere tissue, or “pre-embryos” have led to the deaths of more than 65 million unborn children in the United States alone since 1973. Many Americans shy away from the issue precisely because this dehumanization has made the unborn seem subhuman. Consider people with Down syndrome: In the United States, an estimated 67-74% of pregnancies prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome end in abortion. Rates climb even higher in Europe, with Iceland close to 100% and Denmark reaching 98%. The same flawed thinking underlies assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as IVF, in which millions of embryonic human beings are created, often frozen indefinitely, discarded as “surplus,” or used in research, further severing early human life from its rightful place among humankind. Not surprisingly, this horrifying, conditional view of humanity and personhood also extends to the elderly and disabled, fueling growing enthusiasm for euthanasia. This ideology of pre- and post-human personhood is not science. It is a narrative that justifies discarding the fragile. As Pope Leo warned, when this certainty is obscured, “the most vulnerable are the first victims, and the law loses its deepest meaning: to serve and protect every person.” How did we reach this grave place? Public perception lags badly behind scientific consensus. Many Americans still believe that the status of a human life is a subjective political, religious, or personal matter. Younger Americans are especially uninformed; nearly 40% think that a new human life begins at birth. But people cannot think about what they do not know. Our public policies and laws must be anchored in objective truth. Recognizing all human beings as human persons from the very beginning of their biological existence is not an imposition of ideology: it is the foundation of equality and justice. It aligns faith’s witness with reason’s clearest evidence, building the “civilization of love” the Pope offers us as an alternative to throwaway culture and technological reductionism. In an era of profound bioethical challenges, from chemical abortion to advances in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, Pope Leo XIV reminds us that protecting human life at every stage is civilization’s litmus test. Until we stop ignoring the objective scientific (embryological) reality of human reproduction and human development, we will fail. *** Brooke Stanton is the co-author of “The First 56 Days of You: How Your Human Journey Begins” and the chief executive officer of Contend Projects, a registered 501(c)(3) education organization spreading the basic, accurate scientific facts about when a human life starts and the biological science of human embryology.