South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham passed away suddenly on Saturday, June 11. In this episode of “Catholic League Report” president Bill Donohue and director of communications Mike McDonald discuss Graham’s morals and his defense of the rights of the unborn, marriage (properly understood), and religious liberty endeared him to people across faith lines.

To watch, click here.

Bill Donohue

Senator Lindsey Graham was an astute advocate of traditional moral values: his defense of the rights of the unborn, marriage (properly understood), and religious liberty endeared him to people across faith lines.

He was not a man to compromise his principles. He strongly disagreed with the position of President Trump on the Dobbs decision, saying that this elementary life issue should not be a matter for states to decide. As he put it, “the pro-life movement has always been about the wellbeing of the unborn child—not geography.”

Graham voted for the Defense of Marriage Act when he was a member of the House in 1996; it defined marriage as the union between a man and a woman. When the Respect for Marriage Act was up for a vote—it was written to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act—he voted against it. His support for a proposed constitutional amendment securing marriage as the exclusive union of a man and a woman showed how strongly he believed in the traditional understanding of marriage.

Unlike some education reformers, Graham was an advocate for school choice initiatives that included funding for parochial schools; he co-sponsored the Educational Choice for Children Act that covered Catholic schools.

When New York State Democrats sought to force Chick-fil-A, an evangelical-run company, to open its restaurants on Sundays along the New York State Thruway, the South Carolina senator pushed back, threatening to withhold federal funds from any state or city that demands that Chick-fil-A to open on Sundays.

When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a Catholic conservative, was unjustly trashed by Democrats—spurious accusations designed to destroy his character were floated with abandon—Graham proved to be his most ferocious defender. He pleaded with the American people to “see through this charade.” They did, and Kavanaugh was confirmed.

In 2019, I wrote to Senator Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging him to reject the Trump nomination of Michael Bogren for a federal district judge appointment. He had testified that there is no difference between Catholic farm owners who refuse to rent their property for the purpose of a gay wedding and the Ku Klux Klan’s right to discriminate against blacks. When he was asked to clarify his remarks, he stuck to his guns, holding that the teachings of Christianity on marriage are morally equivalent to the Klan’s racist ideology. Bogren was defeated.

In 2024, I wrote to Graham again, this time asking him to pursue the notorious FBI spying program that was launched against innocent Catholics. This Biden administration policy was one of the most egregious violations of religious liberty ever conducted by the federal government in the history of the United States. Graham was on the side of Catholics.

The people of South Carolina will eventually choose his replacement. One thing is for sure—Senator Lindsey Graham’s legacy as a champion of traditional moral values is uncontested.

If anyone has any doubt about just how radical New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is, consider the list of people whom he has embraced. In this episode of “Catholic League Report” director of communications Mike McDonald and senior policy analyst Nick Palczewski discuss the list of dangerous radical characters Mayor Mamdani has endorsed or added to his team.

To watch, click here.

Bill Donohue discusses his book, Christianity in the Crosshairs, on “The Front Line With Joe & Joe.” To listen, click here.

Michael P. McDonald

If anyone has any doubt about just how radical New York City Zohran Mamdani is, consider the following list of people whom he has embraced.

Darializa Avila Chevalier

Chevalier is the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13^th Congressional. Thanks to Mamdani’s endorsement, she was able to defeat Representative Adriano Espaillat.

• In 2019, Chevalier wrote “seize the means of production” in a social media post.
• In 2020, Chevalier posted online that most of her political philosophy she read was communist but “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
• In another 2020 post, Chevalier took umbrage with the phrase “defund the police” stating “F*** you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movement.”
• In another post, Chevalier rejected that abolishing the police meant only ending policing “as we know it.” Instead, she posited that “it means ending the police full stop. Period. No more police ever.”
• Chevalier argued that “A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.”
• Chevalier lambasted black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.”
• Chevalier founded the Columbia University Apartheid Divest organization, a group that is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”
• Chevalier boasted that “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”
• Chevalier called American military veterans “child murderers” guilty of “war crimes.”
• Chevalier proclaimed America to be “a f****** disgrace.”

Claire Valdez

Currently serving in the New York State Assembly, with Mamdani’s endorsement, Valdez secured the Democratic nomination for the New York 7^th Congressional District.

• Valdez describes herself as a “union organizer and a proud democratic socialist.”
• Valdez supports “unions for all,” forcing workers to give part of their paychecks to union bosses.
• Valdez has argued for nationalizing the airline industry.
• Valdez campaigned on the slogan “housing for all.”
• Valdez supports “Medicare for all,” effectively nationalizing healthcare.
• Valdez has called for the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
• Valdez received the endorsement of the anti-American streamer turned activist Hassan Piker, who described Valdez as one of the “brilliant fighters” championing a socialist revolution in America.
• Valdez has accused America of being “an empire” complicit in “genocide and apartheid.”

Brad Lander

Lander secured the Democratic nomination for New York’s 10^th Congressional District thanks to Mamdani’s endorsement.

• On the campaign trail, Lander described his brand of democratic socialism as focusing on core progressive values.
• Lander supports nationalizing healthcare through “Medicare for all.”
• Lander endorsed “universal child care.”
• Lander is a proponent of expanding public housing and supports a national rent control program.
• Lander wants to abolish ICE.
• Lander favors taking funds away from the police and investing in “non-police crisis intervention” teams.

Aber Kawas

Kawas won the Democratic primary for a New York State Senate seat thanks to Mamdani’s endorsement.

• In a 2017 podcast, Kawas said, “The system of capitalism and racism and White supremacy… and Islamophobia have all been used to colonize lands, to take resources from other people and so this is a long trajectory, and we’re just seeing the manifestations of that continuation with 9/11.”
• Kawas went on to say, “The idea we have to apologize for a terror attack that a couple of people did and then there is no apology or reparations for genocides and for slavery, et cetera, is something I find reprehensible.”
• In a 2025 interview, Kawas promotes the idea that Muslims were the real victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks by arguing that “I’ve always been outspoken about the wrongful scapegoating of Muslim Americans, both before and after 9/11.”
• Kawas reportedly has been affiliated with the Council of American Islamic Relations, which has been designated as a terrorist group.
• Kawas’ father overstayed a tourist visa in 1989 and went on to be convicted of real estate fraud. He was subsequently deported after a stint in prison for his crimes. However, the facts of the case have not prevented her from making her father’s legal troubles an important pillar of her campaign claiming it is the saga of a poor immigrant facing persecution.

Cea Weaver

Weaver currently serves as the Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

• Weaver urged supporters to “elect more communists.”
• Weaver once wrote that “private property including any kind of especially homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
• Weaver said, “We’ll transition from treating property as an individual good to a collective good—whites especially will be impacted.”
• Weaver posted online that she wanted to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” 

Afua Atta-Mensah 

Atta-Mensah currently serves in the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice as the Chief Equity Officer.

• Atta-Mensah endorsed the idea that there is “NO moderate way to black liberation.”
• Atta-Mensah wrote “Tax Them To The White Meat!!!”

Ramzi Kassem

Kassem currently serves as Mamdani’s Chief Counsel.

• Kassem provided the legal defense for an Al Qaeda terrorist.

These are the people Mamdani wants to run New York City. It is a lineup of lunatics, and if they get their way they will destroy the city.

Just prior to the festivities surrounding the 250 anniversary of the founding of America, President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released a draft of its final report. In this episode of “Catholic League Report” director of communications Mike McDonald and senior policy analyst Nick Palczewski discuss this broad ranging report highlighting the most appalling infringements of the rights of faithful Americans. The report offers suggestions on how to ensure that these abuses never happen again.

To watch, click here.

Michael P. McDonald

Just prior to the festivities surrounding the 250 anniversary of the founding of America, President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission released a draft of its final report.

For more than 270 pages, this broad ranging report highlights the most appalling infringements of the rights of faithful Americans. More importantly, the report offers suggestions on how to ensure that these abuses never happen again.

Some of these reforms are more procedural in nature, and while they might not be the most eye-catching, they will help officials working behind the scenes to defend religious liberty. For instance, the report calls on the Department of Justice to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state. Likewise, the report would make it less arbitrary for public officials to punish a person under their supervision who has allegedly engaged in improper religious expression.

Others are public facing. The report recommends a “Know Your Rights” campaign across multiple government agencies to ensure that people are aware of the protections they are afforded under the law. Similarly, these departments are urged to create religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals and promote public awareness of existing reporting channels.

The report also focuses on some more long term objectives to better protect religious liberty rights. It calls for the appointment of federal judges with the courage to decide religious liberty cases. It also suggests the creation of a religious liberty task force to track and prioritize litigation protecting religious liberty and to protect religious Americans from government-led litigation.

The report also wishes to honor the courage of religious liberty defenders by creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards.

Taken as a whole these are extremely promising developments, and if fully implemented, these will significantly improve the safeguards for the rights of faithful Americans. However, it is worrying that we would need a commission to outline these common sense strategies. Even more troubling are the tales of abuse that people of faith have endured in this country in the not too distant past. Unfortunately, the radical secularists have become so hostile that this needs to be written out to check their relentless assaults on religious liberty.

Our work has made us keenly aware of the abuses faced by Catholics and other people of faith across America. So when it was announced that this commission was being put together, we immediately sprung into action to assist in whatever way we could because we knew this would help lay the foundation to establish more permanent protections.

To this end, in March of 2025, Bill Donohue traveled to Washington to meet with officials in the Department of Justice about what the Catholic League could offer that would be most helpful to them. We drafted a report outlining grave infringements on religious liberty that we promptly shared with these officials. After Trump named the members of his religious liberty commission, we shared this report with them to assist their work.

We are pleased to say that when looking at the whole report, you can see the Catholic League’s finger prints in the documents. Our advocacy on these issues and the trove of documents we provided is apparent in the final product.

Further, we were stalwart defenders of the commission. Routinely when the radical secularists would launch attacks in the media we sprung into action to thwart their invectives. Judging by the boldness of the report, the “air cover” we provided helped to give the commission the room it needed to produce this document.

Needless to say, we are proud of the work we did to assist the commission’s efforts, but it is important to remember that this is just a draft report. Even if it is finalized, these suggestions are only that. It will require persistent and dedicated effort to enact these reforms. Unless they are codified the next administration staffed by radical secularists will completely disregard this report and trample the rights of faithful Americans. However, you can rest assured that we will boldly continue our work to tenaciously defend religious liberty, and we will do what we can to ensure these meaningful reforms are enacted.

Bill Donohue

The average New Yorker has no time to read New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 375-page report, “New York City Preliminary Racial Equity.” As a sociologist who has written extensively on racial issues, and as someone who has worked with racial and ethnic minorities for many years, reading this report was right up my alley.

What I uncovered was disturbing: Mamdani and his administration have a very warped, indeed dangerous, vision of race in America. The document is an extreme left-wing assessment of American history.

The report informs the reader that all of those immigrants who came to New York to seek a better life were wrong to do so. “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” Why the immigrants kept on coming it never explains.

“The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism.” In fact, the land never “belonged” to the Lenape anymore than it “belongs” to those who live in New York today. The Lenape migrated to New York from the west coast, and their ancestors migrated to North America from Asia. The Indians crossed through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the ice ages.

The report mentions that Wall Street was home to the slave trade. What it doesn’t mention is the origin of the term “Wall Street.” The Dutch built a wall downtown to protect their colony from Native Americans and the British, both of whom were attacking them.

The language used to describe conditions for the millions who migrated to New York City speaks volumes about the report’s politics. There are 103 mentions of “racism,” 91 of “bias,” 84 of “discrimination,” 24 of “slavery,” 14 of “enslaved,” 9 of “exploitation,” 6 of “oppression” and 5 of “colonization.”

There are two mentions in the entire report of “freedom” and two of “liberty,” and in three of the four citations, they are employed with derision and sarcasm.

It complains a lot about “pay equity.” It offers as an example the fact that whites are overrepresented as CEOs compared to African Americans and Hispanics. It offers no evidence that this outcome was achieved by illegitimate means. Hispanics are overrepresented in the landscaping industry, and as jockeys in the horse racing industry. Is that a problem?

In the real world pay disparities are mostly a function of market forces. Professional athletes, many of whom are black, are multimillionaires, and that is because the demand for sports is great and the revenue that is generated is a function of it.

The report says that “For many years, Black and Hispanic communities in New York City have been overrepresented in its jails.” There is a reason for this: they commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Just as important, they typically mug and kill their own people. But these inconvenient facts are never mentioned.

The report notes with horror “the introduction of punitive policing policies in the 1990s,” such as “stop and frisk,” and that this led to “mass incarceration” of blacks and Hispanics. What it doesn’t say is that these policies were a smashing success.

During the 1990s in New York City, the crime rate fell by more than 40 percent, so much so that the Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton, said “the decline in homicides and other violent crimes between 1990 and 2000 constitutes one of the great achievements in the history of urban America.”

The “stop and frisk” policies continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Contrary to what the Mamdani report suggests, not only did this not result in an uptick in police brutality, in 2012 the number of civilian complaints was the lowest it had been in the previous five years.

Turning to education, the report wants to eliminate “racial disparities that disproportionately affect Black and Brown learners.” It also wants to ensure that “Children and youth receive a quality public education that prepares them for college and/or career, regardless of zip code.”

Notice that it wants “quality public education,” not quality education. Yet the data show that for decades minorities want the opportunity to send their children to a private school, often a parochial one, yet cannot afford to do so. Mamdani, of course, is opposed to school choice.

It is also untrue to say he wants “quality public education.” The most effective public schools are charter schools, which he would like to crush. Minority parents want them but he won’t buckle. There is no mention of charter schools in the report, just as there is no mention of school choice, school vouchers or parochial schools.

There is also no mention of the high absentee rate among minority students. The report does talk about discipline problems, but not in the way most would think about them. It complains that too many black and Hispanic kids are being disciplined. Would Mamdani’s team feel better if more Asian kids were disciplined?

This report will do nothing to enhance the social mobility prospects of African Americans and Hispanics, but it will increase racial polarization. Is that an accident? Or is it the desired result?

The most common way to live, across the globe and from the beginning of time, is in a state of authoritarianism. In this episode of “Catholic League Report” president Bill Donohue and director of communications Mike McDonald discuss how, historically speaking, its a freak to live in a free society and even more of a freak to maintain one.

To watch, click here.

The report by the Trump administration’s Task Force on Anti-Christian Bias laid out the extent to which Christians had their First Amendment rights violated by the Biden administration, as well as by some states.

None of this is news to the Catholic League—we provided a trove of documents to the Task Force and Bill Donohue personally met with one of the top lawyers working in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ)—but it is important that the public learn just how malicious the Biden administration was in its treatment of Christians.

The report correctly notes that there was a different worldview between that of Christians and that of the operatives in the Biden team.

The Biden DOJ was not content to see its policies prevail; rather, it was driven by a desire to punish Christians with whom they disagreed with. Here are ten examples.

• When dossiers are prepared on pro-life Christians, and information is collected on their children, that is nefarious.
• When a judge is labeled a “very Catholic magistrate,” that is treacherous.
• When a Christian nurse is forced to participate in an abortion, that is malicious.
• When a Christian family is told it cannot be foster parents because they disagree with gender ideology, that is wicked.
• When Catholics are restricted from going to Mass because of unproven, and unevenly applied, restrictions due to a health scare, that is indefensible.
• When pro-life protesters are treated as if they were violent thugs, that is despicable.
• When gay pride flags are flown at the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, that is unconscionable.
• When Christians’ parental rights are violated by educators, that is reprehensible.
• When pro-life students are told to remove their religious symbols when they enter a federal building, that is outrageous.
• When the religious rights of Christians are put on the chopping block by secular zealots, that is pernicious.

The Catholic League was directly involved in 8 of these 10 instances.

The Biden administration targeted Christians in a way that is unprecedented.

The disinterest in reporting on this by the mainstream media was totally irresponsible. If it were some other demographic group that was being profiled by the federal government— one of the protected classes—all hell would break loose.

The Task Force did its job. But our job at the Catholic League is not over. When vigilance atrophies, so do our rights. It’s not in our DNA to let that happen.