Chris Butler

Energy Law | Corporate M&A | Catholic

[Chris Butler @ChrisButler716]

@SellersCounsel Work experience between undergrad and law school is a better way to go. Less debt, similar options, more flexibility later.

Not in T14, ranked toward top of class, and relevant work experience landed big law roles.

[Kristan Hawkins @KristanHawkins]

John Oliver really thinks he found a “gotcha” for the pro-life movement:

If life begins at conception, what about the embryos created and destroyed through IVF?

Yes, John. Them too.

Being pro-life means EVERY human life deserves protection.

That's kind of the whole point.

https://t.co/0K6C72Pd6B

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

When I was still an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, I attended with my brother bishops from California an ad limina visit with Pope Francis. At the conclusion of the meeting, as we were rising to leave, the Pope stopped us and said, “I want you all to battle the gender ideology that is sweeping your country. It is opposed to the Bible and to our Catholic anthropology.” In his later declaration “Dignitas infinita,” Pope Francis strongly reiterated this position, arguing that gender ideology is deeply harmful to the dignity of young people.

This is why I was so pleased to see Secretary Robert Kennedy’s announcement this morning that he is endeavoring to ban so-called gender re-assignment surgery and the use of puberty blockers that halt natural sexual development. The Catholic Church agrees with Secretary Kennedy that these procedures result in irreparable physical harm and typically increase the psychological distress of those who undergo them.  

Anyone with a pastor’s heart sympathizes with those who suffer from gender dysphoria and insists that all people must be treated with love, compassion, respect, and dignity. But interventions that result in the mutilation of our young people are neither compassionate nor respectful. I’m grateful to Secretary Kennedy and the department of Health and Human Services for this action.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.

[Secretary Linda McMahon @EDSecMcMahon]

Dear @Harvard:

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Crazy idea: let’s simplify the tax code 🤷‍♂️

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

Trump said he'd put a libertarian in the cabinet.

He also said he'd abolish the Department of Education.

He can check both of those boxes at the same time if he hires me.

I'd shut it down and then fire myself.

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

JD Vance: "One of the ways to solve this is to give scholarships/vouchers to every single parent, every grandparent who is caring for a child, so that they can choose the educational choice that makes the most sense for their families."

This is the way, @JDVance 🔥

[Chris Butler @ChrisButler716]

@Maloney Brother, I lived in Erie for many years (as a Catholic who knows many of the Benedictine Sisters). I appreciate your intention to weed out voter fraud. BUT, this post is misleading.

The sisters do live here. It is their official address. This math works out.

[Chris Butler @ChrisButler716]

Please just stop killing the unborn

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

[Sara Gonzales @SaraGonzalesTX]

Holy sh*t. This is a must watch 👇🏽

[SweetPeaBelle @SweetPeaBell326]

Wow…just wow.

Look at the faces on the CNN panel as a huge truth bomb is dropped.

“Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the last 16 years, and somehow, it’s still all Trump’s fault.”

[Ryan James Girdusky @RyanGirdusky]

Brilliant

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

🧵 Under the Constitution, only Congress may make federal law.
1/

[Chris Butler @ChrisButler716]

It is absolutely wild to me that term limits for the Supreme Court are being proposed by a president before term limits for Congress.

[Shane Schaetzel †☧ @ShaneSchaetzel]

Most of my followers already know this. But for those who don’t, here’s a review…

Protestantism is rejection of Catholic DOCTRINE, while refusing to submit to (or even acknowledge) Catholic authority. At the heart of Protestantism is refusal to believe what the Church has always taught. So that when Catholic authority rebukes them, they simply refuse to acknowledge the doctrine (apostolic succession) that gives them authority in the first place. At its heart, Protestantism is salad-bar Christianity. Everyone’s salad tends to look different because people have different tastes, opinions and cravings. This is why Protestantism has so many denominations, affiliations and sects.

Just criticizing the pope, or a bishop, is not Protestantism. Telling people to stop listening to them (when they’re so obviously in error) is not Protestantism either. As a former Protestant teacher, I ought to know a thing or two about Protestantism. Criticizing the pope, doesn’t make you Protestant, but rejecting the office of the papacy itself does.

[Carol Roth @caroljsroth]

Our so-called economic growth has been window-dressed using lots of very expensive debt- both on the government side and the consumer side.

This is not something to celebrate and yes, there will be more consequences.