Chiefs’ Harrison Butker criticized for graduation speech, but this quote came from satirical account

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker kicked a hornet’s nest at a commencement speech at a Catholic college in which he told women graduates that most of them are probably more excited about marriage and motherhood than their careers.

The speech, although praised by some Catholics, garnered widespread criticism. On social media, one person said Butker later made things worse while trying to defend the speech.

A May 16 Threads post shared a quote purportedly by Butker on "setting the record straight."

"Everyone is taking what I said out of context," the quote read. "All I said was that we should go back to a better time, like the 50’s & 60s. When men were men, and women had more babies than thoughts. When the only ‘Me Too’ movement was one woman saying she was ready for her 4th child, and another woman agreeing."

We found other social media posts sharing the same quote.

The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

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Butker faced significant social media backlash  for his May 11 speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. During his remarks, he also criticized Pride Month and President Joe Biden. 

The National Football League distanced itself from the kicker’s speech in a statement to People, saying it was given in a "personal capacity" and that "his views are not those of the NFL as an organization." A Change.org petition demanding the Super Bowl champion Chiefs release Butker had more than 180,000 signatures as of May 17. And Chiefs’ division rival the Los Angeles Chargers mocked him in a video, showing an animated version of Butker toiling in a kitchen.

But did Butker really double down on his speech by making the statement shared in the Threads post? No, the quote is not real. It originated as a meme on a satirical Instagram account, thesportsmemery, which calls itself "The Fakest Fake News on the Internets" and "Original Memes / Satire / Parody."

(Threads screenshot)

The account shared an image of the fake quote in a May 15 post, adding a caption that said, "Harrison Butker sets the record straight after the biased media twisted his words using unfair verbatim quotes of things he said."

The Threads post did not include the context that it originated on a satirical site and presented it as a real quote. It is not. The claim is False.