Riley Gaines Smacks Down ‘Deranged’ Keith Olbermann After He Tries to Slam Her Swimming Skills

Leave it to Keith Olbermann, the perpetually unemployed basement-dweller, to pick a fight with a champion like Riley Gaines, host of Gaines for Girls on OutKick.com. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well for the guy who’s been fired more times than a circus cannon.

Olbermann, who seems to think tweeting snark from his mom’s basement qualifies as a personality, decided to take a swing at Gaines’ athletic record after Education Secretary Linda McMahon pointed out that Gaines might’ve clinched a race if not for a biological male competing. Olbermann, ever the keyboard warrior, fired off this gem:

“She finished 85th in the Olympic Trials,” the loser sneered. “She finished tied for 5th in the only race including a transgendered athlete. If there had been none, she MIGHT have finished tied for 4th, or had 5th place to herself.”

Then, because he can’t resist stepping on his own rake, he added: “[Gaines] was, somehow, a worse swimmer than she is a MAGA stooge.”

What a dork.

Big mistake, Keith. You don’t poke a lioness with a stick and expect to walk away unscathed. Gaines, a former NCAA swimming star, clapped back with the kind of precision that’d make a sniper jealous. She pointed out she was 15 during those Olympic trials.

“And I placed 5th in the nation in a sport measured in .01s of a second without going a best. Would you say the 5th-best college football player is objectively bad at their sport?” she fired back. Then came the knockout: “No. You’re just a misogynistic pig [and] an old, deranged man with a terminal case of TDS who can’t hold down a job.”

Boom! That’s gonna leave a mark. 

And she’s totally on the money about him. Olbermann’s resume reads like a rap sheet of terminations like Fox Sports, Current TV, ESPN (twice, because once wasn’t enough), and MSNBC/NBC. The man’s been canned so often he probably lists “professional firing victim” on his LinkedIn.

Not content to let him slink away, Gaines upped the ante, telling Fox News Digital she’d race Olbermann for charity. At first, she hesitated, and for good reason: “I’d challenge [Keith] to a race where the loser puts up $ to the charity of the winner’s choice, but no one wants to see him in a Speedo.”

Fair point because the mental image alone is enough to make you want to bleach your brain. But Gaines, being the class act she is, threw down the gauntlet anyway—a 200-yard freestyle for a good cause. Olbermann, predictably, scurried back to his cave, dusted the Cheeto crumbs off his keyboard, and tweeted this pathetic dodge:

“This is a brilliant idea [Riley]! A 66-year-old man with an arthritic left knee and chronic stress fractures in the right foot,” he whined. “Somebody you could finally beat!”

So shut up, Keith. Nice try. Even in your glory days, if you ever had any, you’d have been lapped by Gaines before you could say “unemployment check.” Let’s talk credentials. Gaines? A decorated NCAA swimmer with a trophy case full of accolades: 2021 and 2022 All-SEC First Team, 2022 SEC Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year, and one of the most accomplished swimmers in Kentucky’s history. Olbermann? His greatest athletic achievement was reportedly smacking his head on a subway pole at Shea Stadium in 1980, leaving him too dazed to drive. True story.

This isn’t Olbermann’s first time getting schooled by a strong woman. He once tried to tangle with Megyn Kelly over her NBC exit, and she mopped the floor with him. “But the record is very clear that I left voluntarily because I wanted to raise my family,” Kelly shot back. “Something you don’t know anything about because no one would marry you.” She didn’t stop there: “And you have no children. You have a cold, lonely life in which you’ve become a bitter, bitter man.”

He probably went back to the basement and cried quietly into his cat-pissed sofa.

And now, here’s Olbermann, still bitter, still deranged, shouting into the void, desperate for clout by attacking a woman with more talent in her pinky than he’s got in his entire rant-filled existence. Riley Gaines isn’t just a better athlete—she’s a better human. And Keith? He’s just a sad, jobless troll who keeps picking fights he can’t win. Keep swinging, buddy. You’re only knocking yourself out.

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Trump team to audit $9,000,000,000 in Harvard grants, contracting anti-Semitism

Harvard University, once a towering beacon of intellectual rigor, now stands trembling at the edge of a self-inflicted abyss, its prestige unraveling like a cheap suit in a storm, or falling away like toilet paper on a shoe.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a figure whose steely resolve could make even the most sanctimonious progressive squirm, has laid down the gauntlet with devastating precision: “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.” 

And so it has. 

The Trump administration, never one to mince words or dawdle in the face of moral rot, declared on a crisp Monday that it would launch a “comprehensive review” of the $9 billion in federal grants and contracts propping up this faltering Ivy League titan—all because Harvard couldn’t muster the spine to shield its Jewish students from a rising tide of bigotry.

The machinery of accountability is already in motion. A joint task force—comprising the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, alongside the U.S. General Services Administration—has pledged to dissect “more than $255.6 million in contracts between Harvard University, its affiliates and the federal government,” not to mention “more than $8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments.” These are numbers so astronomical they could fund a small nation, yet they’ve been squandered on an institution that seems more enamored with ideological posturing than safeguarding its own. 

McMahon, with a clarity that cuts through the fog of academic self-delusion, reflected on Harvard’s legacy: “Harvard has served as a symbol of the American dream for generations—the pinnacle aspiration for students all over the world to work hard and earn admission to the storied institution.” But then came the hammer blow: “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.”

Yet, ever the pragmatist, she offered a lifeline: “Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.” A noble sentiment, though one wonders if Harvard’s leadership—steeped in the pieties of the age—has the stomach for such a return to first principles. 

Meanwhile, the announcement pointed to Columbia University, where a similar federal reckoning forced a list of nine Trump administration demands, including a ban on masked protests—an absurdity that should never have needed banning. Columbia’s interim president, caught in the crosshairs of this mess, fled the scene on a Friday, perhaps retreating to ponder the wreckage over a consolatory cup of latte.

The U.S. agencies are not playing games. They’ve signaled they could slap stop-work orders on Harvard’s contracts or, if the university’s noncompliance with federal rules is laid bare, sever the financial umbilical cord entirely. Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, put it with a firmness that brooks no dissent: “This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester. We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.” Here is a rare instance of government speaking plainly, without the usual varnish of equivocation.

So Harvard stands at a precipice, its fate dangling like a condemned man awaiting the noose. Will it summon the courage to confront its failures, or will it sink further into the morass of cowardice and conformity? The answer lies not in the stars, but in the choices of those who roam its ivy-clad corridors—choices that, for now, seem woefully out of reach.

Especially out of reach for the moral cowards.

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President Trump to sign EO to dismantle the Dept. of Education

While COVID basically ended the education of students for several years so that teachers could catch a break from teaching, TRUMP is expected to sign an executive order ending the Department of Education that supported the teachers over the kids. This is a move that will fulfill one of his main promises made on the campaign trail.

A summary of the order in USA Today shows that it directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States.”

But make no. mistake; the order clearly directs the “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

McMahon was confirmed as Education Secretary earlier this month, but Trump previously said he hoped she would put herself “out of a job.” The good news is she doesn't need the money.

A number of Republican governors, advocates for parental rights in education, and others are expected to be at the signing on Thursday. Trump's promise to close the DoE was met with cheers when he campaigned on the issue.

“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”

No longer will children face learning loss over the cowardice of the DoE nor will gender identity changes and Critical Race Theory be pushed into their developing minds. Parents will no longer be kept in the dark about their child's education.

The department has already thus far eliminated about half its staff and recently terminated more than $600,000,000 in grants for training teachers in "divisive ideologies" such as anti-racism, social justice activism, and hiring teachers based on race rather than merit.

What a concept.

The order “will empower parents, states, and communities to take control and improve outcomes for all students,” Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement, adding that recent test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam “reveal a national crisis ‒ our children are falling behind.”

The U.S. ranked 34th in mathematics with an average score of 465 (on a scale from 0 to 1,000), which is below the OECD average of 472. Top performers like Singapore (575), Hong Kong (540), and Japan (536) significantly outpace the U.S., representing a gap of roughly two to three years of schooling. Notably, about 30% of U.S. students scored below Level 2, considered the baseline for basic proficiency, compared to just 8% in Singapore.

Reading scores placed our students in 12th position, somewhat better than math, but not so great when it comes to "bang of our buck" spent on American education.

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President Jimmy Carter established the useless Department of Education in 1979, and while it would require an act of Congress to totally eliminate it, Trump's executive order is slated to dismantle the department for now.

Trump’s order will certainly face legal challenges from critics like teachers’ unions, who are more concerned about themselves rather than the children, and have been clear that they want the DoE to stay so they can play at being educators of the American young.

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Trump administration starts anti-Semitism investigations into 55 universities

Linda McMahon, US Education Secretary

The United States Department of Education (DOE) has unleashed a fusillade against the festering sore of campus anti-Semitism, adding dozens of colleges and universities to its list of institutions facing investigation for civil rights violations. 

This is no mere bureaucratic shuffle, but a reckoning for those elite bastions of learning that have allowed the poison of Jew-hatred to seep into their not so hallowed halls.

“The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless anti-Semitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” declared Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday, her words cutting through the fog of moral equivocation like a blade. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws.” 

One can almost hear the echoes of a bygone era when such plain speaking was the norm, not the exception.

McMahon named 55 institutions—public and private—in this latest salvo, a roster that includes the likes of Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University. These are not new names to those who have tracked the rising tide of anti-Semitic filth lapping at the shores of American academia. 

At Harvard, the rot runs deep. 

Since Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, the university has become a grotesque carnival of anti-Semitic excess. Its law school student government issued a resolution falsely accusing Israel of genocide—a libel as old as it is vicious. Students quoted terrorists during an “Apartheid Week” event in April, while dozens of students and faculty joined an illegal pro-Hamas encampment, rubbing shoulders with a group that peddled an anti-Semitic cartoon straight out of Der Stürmer’s playbook. Many openly cheered Hamas’s atrocities—sexual assault, child abduction, the full medieval panoply—while a mob, led by the president of the Harvard Law Review no less, hounded a Jewish student, shrieking “Shame! Shame! Shame!” into his ears. 

Harvard fought like a cornered rat to discredit lawsuits alleging its complicity in this discriminatory cesspit, eventually settling some out of court. But Shabbos Kestenbaum, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity and with a backbone of steel, refused to let the university slink away from accountability. 

Swarthmore College offers its own tableau of disgrace. There, Students for Justice in Palestine stormed Parrish Hall garbed as Hamas fighters, their faces swathed in keffiyehs like latter-day bandits. They bellowed slogans through bullhorns, battered locked doors, and tried to breach offices barricaded against their fury. Their comrades smuggled food past security’s lockdown, while others sparked a physical clash with guards, hurling expletives like shrapnel. The administration finally barred SJP from campus, but only after the damage was done—a belated gesture that reeks of cowardice.

Drexel University in Philadelphia saw its own “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in May, a spectacle so overrun with outsiders that the campus had to be locked down. Weeks earlier, the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life was defaced by cowardly masked vandals who tore away letters spelling out Perelman’s name—an act of petty spite amid a broader surge of antisemitic hate crimes across the nation.

Then there’s Princeton, where the Department of Near Eastern Studies peddles a book accusing the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs. This is not scholarship; it is blood libel dressed up as academic inquiry, a sinister echo of medieval anti-Semitic tropes. The International Legal Forum rightly called it out for what it is: a conspiratorial smear designed to inflame hatred.

The Trump administration, since taking office in January, has moved with a speed and decisiveness that shames its predecessors. On Friday, it yanked $400 million in funding from Columbia University, a sharp rebuke to a school accused of sheltering antisemitic faculty, students, and staff. Before that, President Trump issued an executive order that promises to wield “all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” 

One provision targets “alien” student extremists for deportation—those who have lent intellectual and material succor to groups like Hamas, fueling the campus chaos. A federal judge in Manhattan has stalled this in one case, involving a Columbia alumnus nabbed by ICE for orchestrating the Hamilton Hall takeover last spring. 

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Trump, unbowed, took to Truth Social: “This is the first of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitism, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

Here is a government that grasps what the chattering classes refuse to see: that this is not a matter of hurt feelings or academic squabbles, but a civilizational struggle against those who would cheer the slaughter of innocents and call it justice. The universities, bloated with taxpayer largesse, have had their day of reckoning deferred too long. Let it come now, and let it be thorough.

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Pres. Trump cuts over $400 million in grants to Columbia over anti-Semitism worries: more to follow

Useful Idiots Incognito

The Trump administration has unsheathed its blade, and on Friday it fell with a satisfying thud. More than $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University will be rescinded. The charge? A festering anti-Semitism on campus that the institution has either failed or refused to cauterize. This is no mere bureaucratic shuffle—it’s a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of an elite academy that has long cloaked itself in moral superiority while its corridors echo with the oldest hatred.

Not anymore, boys and girls.

Just four days prior, the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Education (DoED), and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) declared a “comprehensive review” of the $5 billion in federal largesse Columbia has grown accustomed to suckling from the government's teat. The stated reason: “ongoing investigations for potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act” tied to the university’s apparent indulgence of Jew-hatred. 

That review barely had time to gather dust before the axe swung—sources, who prefer the shadows to the spotlight, confirm that $400 million from HHS and DoED is already forfeit, with more potentially to follow. Columbia’s sin, it seems, is not merely inaction but a stubborn persistence in letting antisemitism metastasize.

The campus itself offers a grim tableau. This week, anti-Israel/anti-Semitic protests—those rancid echoes of the student encampments that swept Columbia and beyond after Hamas’s slaughter of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023—reared their head again. 

Students, drunk on self-righteous fury, stormed a library, resulting in nine arrests on Wednesday, per the New York Post. This is not dissent; it is thuggery masquerading as principle, a spectacle that would be laughable if it weren’t so malign.

Enter Linda McMahon, Trump’s Secretary of Education, who descended upon Columbia on Friday to confront its leaders. Her words earlier this week cut through the fog of academic equivocation: “Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses—repeatedly overrun by anti-Semitic students and agitators. Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled.” 

She is not wrong. What we have witnessed is a betrayal of the university’s supposed mission—a descent into a playground for bigots, where Jewish students are not merely inconvenienced but hunted.

McMahon’s verdict is damning: 

“Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination. Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.” 

This is not hyperbole; it is a statement of fact, grounded in the reality of an institution that has traded its duty for cowardice or, worse, complicity.

The move aligns with President Trump’s executive orders, which have long demanded a reckoning with anti-Semitism—particularly on campuses where progressive pieties too often provide cover for prejudice. A multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, born of those orders, has now flexed its muscle, and Columbia is its first scalp. 

The university’s response is predictably weak: “We are reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and pledge to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding,” a spokesperson bleated, adding, “We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and well-being of our students, faculty, and staff.” One wonders if they truly grasp the gravity—or if this is just another exercise in platitudes from an institution that has lost its nerve.

This is not merely about money; it is about principle. 

For too long, universities like Columbia have dined out on their reputations while tolerating—or tacitly encouraging—a venom that would shame any society claiming to value civilization. 

The Trump administration has called their bluff. Whether Columbia can muster the balls to confront its demons, or whether it will simply whimper for its lost millions, remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the days of consequence-free cowardice are numbered.

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