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placent. They don't allow themselves to be steamrolled. They don't just roll over, they continue on with full steam ahead. But hear me when I say, this war on woke, if that's what you want to call it. It has not been won.”
During her address, Gaines spoke on a number of topics, such as her time with late activist Charlie Kirk, her experience competing against a transgender female, her perspective change since becoming a mother, and her thoughts on the current political atmosphere in America.
She began by sharing that this event was the first event that she had spoken at since her friend Charlie Kirk’s assassination. “Charlie was a friend, my mentor, [and] technically, he was my boss at Turning Point USA. I credit so much of the platform that I have today to Charlie and to Turning Point USA,” she remarked.
Gaines continued, “Tonight is my first event back on a stage like this since the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. And to be totally honest with you, I've been reluctant. I had to put myself back in this position again. I've seen in the past few years, with the violence and the hatred, and the censorship. I mean, you name it, I would imagine many of you have seen it as well through social media, maybe in your career setting – whatever it is. I've been reluctant [and] hesitant to put myself back in this position, especially now having a daughter of my own. But that has only reinforced that it is needed now more than ever,” Gaines explained. “His microphone – Charlie's microphone –was silenced. Again, by hatred, by violence, by an ideology that hates the truth. I went through all the emotions, as I would imagine many of you did following his assassination – his murder – anger, disbelief, shock, rage, sorrow, tearfulness, but I'll tell you now I feel hopeful, and I feel inspired.”
She told the audience that her first journey into political activism began during her senior year of her collegiate swimming career at the University of Kentucky, during which she found herself competing against a biological male.
“I concluded my junior season by placing seventh in the country, which I was proud to be top eight in all America. It's a pretty high honor, but I knew I was capable of more – even go for my best time. I set a goal for my senior year to win a national title, which would, of course, mean becoming the fastest woman in the country in my respective event. And so, senior year rolls around on, and I’m right on pace to achieve this goal about midway through my senior season. I was running third in the nation in the 200-meter freestyle, trailing a girl I knew very well. She was ranked second, and I was trailing her by a few hundreds for a second – very small margin. Our sport is one that's measured in very small margins – hundredths of a second. Now, but the swimmer who was leading the nation by body links, might I add, was the swimmer that none of us had ever heard of before, and this was the first time that we became aware of a swimmer named Lia Thomas,” she said.
Gaines added, “This brought lots of red flags at the time. Bear in mind, had we necessarily seen a photo of this person at the time, I think things would have been a little more clear. But for all we knew at the time, this was a senior for University of Pennsylvania, who was ringed first in the nation in the 100 Freestyle, which is a sprint event…None of it made sense. I'm scratching my head, I'm talking to my coach, saying, ‘who is this?’ We had no idea. And we continued to stay in the dark until an article came out disclosing that Lia Thomas is actually Will Thomas, and swam three years on the men's team at University of Pennsylvania before deciding to switch to the women's team.”
She told the audience that this discovery shocked her and her entire team, and that all felt a sense of relief when they realized that Thomas ranked in the 400s and 500s nationally when swimming with the men, as they believed everyone would infer the same reasoning which they had thought: Thomas changed to swimming with women to win.
“Lo and behold, the NCAA did not see it this way. They saw absolutely nothing wrong with it. So, about three weeks before the national championship in March 2022, they announced that Thomas’s participation in the Women’s category was a nonnegotiable, meaning, there was nothing we could do about it. No questions that we could ask, no concerns, that we could raise. We were quite literally told we had to accept this with a smile on our face,” Gaines recalled. “So, I watched that first day. It was a 500-meter freestyle, which is not something that I typically do. I watched that first day on the side of the pool as Thomas swam to a national title, beating out Olympians, beating out American record holders – again, these aren't scrubs. They're the most impressive and accomplished female swimmers this world has ever seen. And he beat them all by body lengths.”
Gaines continued, “But the next day was the 200-meter freestyle, which is the day that he and I raced each other. It’s the top eight women in the entire country and I'm standing on the block; I look over at the lane next to me, and there was what was very visibly a man standing at six foot four – I mean, he has like size 15 feet – taking up the entire diving block. We dove off, we swim eight laps of freestyle. I touched the wall at the end. I look up at the scoreboard, and almost impossibly enough, we'd go on the exact same time down to the hundredth of a second, meaning then we had tied, which is pretty rare, right? When you're racing for a minute and 40 seconds, not even one 100th of a second separated us. Which now, looking back, I mean, you can't tell me that's not divine intervention. But anyways, we get out of the water, we go behind the awards podium, and the NCAA official walks to both Thomas and myself – again him towering over me. This official says, ‘Great job, you two, but you tied. We don't account for ties. We only have one trophy, so we're going to give the trophy to him. Sorry, Riley, you just don't get one.”
She told the audience that the decision had left her very taken aback. “The culmination of my career – the capping off of 18 years – I started swimming when I was 4, graduated when I was 22. It was 18 years of swimming. My last meet. Finishing my collegiate career. And you're going to give the trophy to a man which, let me be very clear: I could not have cared less about the tangible object of the trophy. Being a 12time All-American, I had a lot of those at home. Like it's probably a $5 production little trophy. That didn't matter to me. Of course, it was the principle behind why they were doing what they were doing. And so I asked the dreaded question, the question no one dared ask all season, and I said, ‘Why? Why are you giving the trophy to him’ To which, they didn't have an answer. They weren't given a script of what to say when someone asked the question of why. And so I appreciate his honesty. The official looks at me and says, ‘Riley, I'm so sorry, but we have been advised as an organization that when photos are being taken, it's crucial that the trophy is in his hands. You can pose with this one, but you have to give yours back. He takes the trophy home, you go home empty handed – end of story.’ And let me tell you: that was the moment when I was done waiting for someone else.”
Gaines said that she realized that she had been waiting for someone else to step up against the situation because she truly thought someone would, whether it be a coach, an NCAA official, another swimmer, or someone’s father. “But standing there on that podium, sharing my placement with a man standing eight or nine inches taller than me, holding this trophy, I knew I had to fight back. That's when I knew, that this would come from me and my teammates – that's the unfair competition side of things,” she explained. “Couple that with the locker room. It's impossible to put into words the feelings of just violation when you're an intimate area of undressing, such as a locker room, and a six-foot four man walks in, takes off his women's swimsuit, and he's fully naked, fully intact, fully exposing himself, inches away from where you were simultaneously, fully undressed. It's awkward. It's embarrassing, it's uncomfortable, it's humiliating. Really, it felt like betrayal.”
She added, “I think that, again, all of these things combined – the emotional blackmail – I think that's the best way to put it, that we faced as women, as female athletes, to stay quiet. How are universities told us we would be punished? We would lose our scholarship. [They said,] ‘You'll lose your friends. You know, you'll never get a job. Your employer's going to look you up if you speak up about this, and they're going to see that you're a transphobe. No one will ever hire you. Is this worth it to you participating in?’ We learned how we were the oppressors? How he was the victim? He just wanted to be happy. And we were impeding on his happiness, how could we live with ourselves?”
Gaines told the audience that the university would have outside professionals come speak to athletes, telling them how dangerous their rhetoric was, and how fighting against this transgender swimmer was comparable to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists fighting for segregation. These individuals stressed the importance of being inclusive and kind to the athletes, leaving many of them afraid to boldly fight against this injustice.
“I think a far more important question to ask ourselves, and I would imagine a question that many of you have asked yourselves over the past few years, especially, is why? Why is this happening? Why are we living in a time, in a nation that has found itself in a chokehold to the progressive causes? I would imagine many people in this room feel confident in answering that question of why because the Bible tells us why. We're told we warned, right? Paul warns us. We’re told in Isaiah 5:20 of these times where the spiritual battles will intensify, where darkness will be seen as light, when bitter will be seen as sweet and more evil will be seen as moral. And it's undeniable that that's where we're at now,” she emphasized. “And look, that’s not saying that I think Lia Thomas is evil. Hear me loud and clear: I don't think that. But you know what is? Deception, manipulation – that line to affirm something that is neither biblically nor objectively true. And who does that sound like? Sounds a lot like Satan. That's his go-to tactics. It's playbook, right? He deceives, he discourages, he destroys. We've seen it all the time, especially within the gender ideology movement.”
Gaines commented that in her perspective, the most effective way that she has seen Satan work within the world is through deception of language. “[Satan] repackages sin and the terminology that we use to make it a little more palatable, a little more acceptable – rolls off the tongue a little easier. Things like abortion…No, that's just you're reproductive freedom. Where was that healthcare freedom in 2021 and 2020, by the way? These were the same tyrants who fired healthcare workers, who fired U.S. military members, who fired our school teachers for not complying with their autocratic mandates, okay? Things like living together before marriage – you know, that's just taking the car out for a test drive. That's all you're doing there. [Satan has] rewritten these things; but let me tell you, you can change, I guess, the label on the bottle, but if you drink poison, it will still kill you.”
She added, “We've seen how he discourages, again. Even the verbiage of gender affirming care – it's so harmful. Think about that. It's telling people that they're correct to feel as if they're born in the wrong body. They're correct to feel as if they were born wrong. What an awful message to be sending to anyone. We should be telling people that they were perfect, just the way God created that intentionally and uniquely in His perfect image. We see these healthcare providers, so what they call themselves, I prefer the term ‘unregulated butchery,’ [or] ‘child butchers,’ really. They say, ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?’ That's how he discourages and of course, we've seen how he destroys. There's nothing that Satan hates more than life, that human beings are the creation of life because guess what? That's the thing he cannot do. He cannot create. He can only destroy.”
She explained that the surgical and chemical castration of minors and abortions also fell into the category of works of Satan, as she believes many of these things will be looked back on as the biggest medical scandal the world has ever seen.
Gaines stated that a fundamental issue within society is the belief of individual truths rather than basing everything on what God states is the truth: Jesus’s truth. She encouraged the audience that it was their duty to share this truth, as many throughout society may not know the reality.
“It's been made very evident that there is a war on truth, there is a war on women, the war on children, the most vulnerable, and hear me when I say, there is not a group more vulnerable or more defenseless than the unborn,” Gaines said. “Having a daughter now, this feels deeply personal to me. The thought, the practice of abortion – it hurts deeply and it's visceral. It's not just an issue of politics or policy. I remember going to that first ultrasound appointment when she was eight weeks old. And you hear that heartbeat for the first time, and then you go to the anatomy scan at 20 weeks, and you find out, you're having a baby girl. You see her little hands, and you see her little feet, and you see on the 4D picture, which is amazing, by the way, the innovation that we have seen. You see her features, like her nose; they were able to tell me she'll have a lot of hair, which she absolutely does. The undeniable humanity that was growing inside of me – it totally took my beliefs from a sense of, I guess, intellectual and moral belief to an immovable obligation to defend the right to life.”
Gaines also spoke about her recent social media exchange with U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), where Gaines invited Cortez to debate her positions. During the exchange, AOC commented on a Gaines’s social media post about her outrage of something occurring, and told Gaines, “Imagine if you channel all this anger towards swimming, maybe you’d be a little faster.” Gaines commented back to Cortez, inviting her to join her on a Fox News show that she was scheduled to appear on for a debate.
“I told her, ‘I'd love to debate. You can defend socialism; I'll defend capicontinued from page
talism. You can defend removing God from public and private life. I can defend embracing a Biblical worldview. You can defend a child sacrifice. I can defend the sanctity of life.’ To which she takes the clip off the news last night, comments back and says, ‘Why don't you get a job?’ Which the hubris of AOC telling me to get a job, when the government is literally shut down right now is quite funny,” Gaines remarked. But my response to her was, ‘I have a job, and it's the most purposeful, fulfilling, and rewarding job I could possibly have and it's being a mom.’ All that, again, to just reiterate the point, they will continue to double down. They will continue to push forward with their harmful and dangerous radical policies that affect you, that affect your kids, and more importantly, will affect the country which your kids inherit in the future.”
Yet, even amongst these quarrels and issues, Gaines is hopeful for the future because she has seen immense progress within the nation. She discussed the governmental “wins” of defunding planned parenthood, barring taxpayerfunded surgical and chemical castrations of minors, several states legally defining what a “woman” is, and the religious revival that has spread through America after Charlie Kirk’s death.
She concluded with a call to action for attendees, saying, “How do we impact change? We do that by speaking the truth, both in an objective sense and from the standpoint, of course, a biological reality, but the standpoint of our Bible, what the Bible tells us to be true, and it's very, very clear, especially on this topic made male and female, Charlie showed us how we affect change. He did that in his very last moment, actually. He doesn't step back. He stepped up, and it's up to all of us to do the exact same.”
Following her address, State Senator Blake Tillery joined Vidalia Heritage Academy Headmaster Jeff McCormick onstage to pray for Gaines and her continuation to stand up for the truth. During the night, Vidalia Heritage Academy lower school students also performed several songs, leading the audience in worship and giving them a glimpse into life at the school.
PRAYING FOR RILEY – State Senator Blake Tillery (left) and Vidalia Heritage Academy Headmaster Jeff McCormick (right) prayed for Riley Gaines (center) at the end of the event.
