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.

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.