Taylor Swift is officially off the market, and it’s no coincidence that America’s most beloved pop star didn’t say yes to another brooding actor, a melodramatic musician, or even some tortured poet. She ended up engaged to 6-foot-5, 250-pound Travis Kelce, a Super Bowl champ with a well-groomed mustache and a macho swagger. 

In other words, after years of dating men typically referred to as artsy “soy boys,” Swift said yes to the quintessential jock.

Swift may be an unapologetic lib, and Kelce may have shilled for Pfizer during the COVID pandemic, but this celebrity pairing actually bodes well for conservatives. Someone with her massive cultural influence over women is bound to start trends, and thanks to this latest development, old-school proposals and traditional marriage might be officially back in style. It’s only a matter of time before wedding-themed earworms start taking over the airwaves. 

Photos of the staged proposal were straight out of Swift’s wildest dreams. Kelce got down on one knee in a sun-dappled garden. The pop star is wearing a sundress and a soft smile. Swift posted a photo of the ring alongside the caption, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” 

For this particular Hollywood love story, there was no girl bossing, no modern twists, no glorification of living in sin forever. This viral moment had everyone swooning because it was – gasp! – traditional. That makes it a cultural win for conservatives, even if the main characters are leftists through and through.

And there’s something very significant about the man Swift chose to spend forever with. This wasn’t a petulant man-child or anti-hero with a guitar and endless pathos. This is a bruising, six-foot-five athlete who knows how to win and isn’t afraid to go after what he wants.

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Kelce took the lead from the very outset of their relationship. In 2023, during Swift’s Kansas City tour stop, he confessed on his “New Heights” podcast that he tried to give her a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it. When she didn’t get it, he joked about being “butt-hurt.”

Swift later said she thought his attempt was “metal as hell.” The nation’s biggest pop star admitted that confidence and directness are attractive. In an age when men are told to be sensitive, to cry, to ask permission before winking at a woman or sending a DM, Kelce came in strong with a solid attempt without any creepy overture. That’s the difference between being a man who leads and a boy who cries about not getting his way.

In so many ways, this isn’t just another celebrity love story. It’s a reminder of something our culture has tried to forget: women are biologically wired to be drawn to strength, confidence, and dominance. For centuries, and across cultures, overtly masculine traits like physical strength and the ability to protect and provide have been considered signs of a good partnership for women. These days, it’s written off as dated, old-fashioned, or, worse, “toxic.” But Swift’s decision to commit to Kelce speaks to the truth of women’s attraction to certain types of men on a deeper level.

Women are naturally drawn to a strong jawline, a muscular build, and height as cues of sound genetic fitness. This hasn’t changed for much of human history, despite so many current attempts to downplay it. 

It’s easy to see the difference when comparing her romance with Kelce to Swift’s ex-lovers. The “Shake It Off” singer has famously dated a lineup of artsy men, including indie actors and sensitive musicians who made more appearances in her lyrics than they did in the spotlight. This may have been a boon for fans craving the next great breakup song, but it wasn’t ideal for Swift herself. 

Joe Jonas. Jake Gyllenhaal. Lucas Till. John Mayer. Harry Styles. Joe Alwyn. Swift’s list of exes sounds like a who’s who list in the tortured soul competition she knows all too well. 

Kelce also doesn’t appear threatened by Swift’s fame or popularity. As a professional athlete, he’s accustomed to playing for tens of thousands of fans on any given Sunday. And even if Swift is on a different level in terms of fame and notoriety, so far, he hasn’t appeared phased by the newfound attention. The NFL star seems smitten, just like the rest of her fans. 

Underneath all the glitz and glamour, this story is simple. Taylor Swift, the most successful female artist of her generation, chose strength. She chose a man who could protect, provide, and lead. She chose someone who isn’t afraid of pressure. 

That’s not an accident. It’s not a coincidence. It’s biology at work. Real men, whether they’re referred to as jocks, providers, or alphas, are usually winners because they’re wired for it. Feminists can whine about “toxic masculinity,” but human nature is what it is. Women like Swift, at their core, seek strength that complements their own. As she sings in “So High School,” a song inspired by Kelce, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” 

It’s poetic. After so many artsy flings with overly sensitive men, she’s going home with the jock. Ladies, take note: nature always wins.

Staff at the African Development Foundation, a USAID-affiliated federal agency, have returned to work after a D.C. judge overturned the Trump administration’s abolition of the agency — even as a new inspector general’s report blasted the agency for misleading Congress.

A USAID inspector general’s report released Thursday lists Mathieu Zahui as one of the agency’s current top employees, even though the IG told a D.C. judge last year that it had seized Zahui’s phone and found evidence that he took secret payments from a company to which he steered suspicious contracts.

Early in the Trump administration, Zahui told the White House that the agency would not recognize Trump’s appointment of Peter Marocco, who successfully disbanded USAID, as acting chairman of the African agency. Staff subsequently locked the doors to physically prevent DOGE auditors from entering.

The Trump administration ultimately took control of the building with the assistance of U.S. Marshals and laid everyone off. But after an African company sued on the basis that all of its profits came from the U.S. agency, complaining that shutting down the agency would cause it irreparable harm, a D.C. judge granted an injunction temporarily invalidating Marocco’s moves. D.C.- and Africa-based staff and contractors were all immediately reinstated to their jobs and canceled grants were restored, despite the fact that a ban on new foreign grants remains in effect, significantly reducing the amount of work for them to do.

Thursday’s IG report made that reversal all the more remarkable, finding that the agency had only raised a quarter of the money from African partners that it publicly took credit for, that nearly half of its grants had insufficient documentation, and that the agency did not conduct any “due diligence” before entering into financial agreements with African entities.

The African Development Foundation is funded by about $50 million a year in taxpayer money, but it is supposed to leverage that with funds raised from African governments and other groups, giving them skin in the game. The agency never actually collected three-quarters of the money that it implied to Congress it had raised between 2022 and 2024, according to the IG probe.

In its 2023 Annual Report, the African Development Foundation, or USADF, reported that “$45.6 million in leveraged partner funds was secured,” but in reality, it only received $9 million that year, the IG report said. “Similarly, in its FY 2024 Congressional Budget Justification, USADF reported that it anticipated leveraging more than $15 million in external funding that year. Yet, by the end of FY 2024, USADF had received just $2.5 million in partnership funding.”

In all, records showed that “32 partners pledged up to $69 million between FYs 2022 and 2024. However, of these pledges, USADF only received $17 million,” the IG found. African governments only actually “provided about $8.2 million of $41 million (20 percent) pledged.”

The agency told the IG that it had no mechanism to force African governments and other groups to follow through on their commitments. The IG said this was because it drafted agreements that “were not legally binding,” and “did not conduct any pre-award assessments or due diligence on prospective partners.”

For some partnerships, it had no documentation at all, the report found: “Based on our reviews of USADF’s website, partner funding receipts, and other public reporting, we determined that USADF may have had up to 17 additional active partnerships. For example, USADF’s website identified a payment card company foundation, a clean energy investment company, and a development nonprofit as strategic partners. However, USADF could not provide MoUs or any other documentation to confirm the status of these partnerships.”

A Daily Wire investigation previously reported that one such partnership was with Herbalife, a multi-level marketing scheme whose then-CEO sat on the government agency’s board. The partnership involved providing Africans with “product donations, and Herbalife Nutrition staff as global volunteers in their businesses,” marketing materials said. It came two months after Herbalife paid $122 million to the Department of Justice to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Daily Wire’s investigation also showed that the agency misled Congress and the public about how much money went to Africa as opposed to administrative costs by having African grantees and contractors re-route money back to D.C.

The IG report said “we discovered that USADF officials knew of suspected misuse of Foundation funds and equipment purchased from Foundation grants but failed to report this information to OIG as required.” It said that the agency failed to keep track of where its money was going: Forty percent of grants had incomplete project development documentation and the same number lacked evidence that it had trained the grantee on keeping track of finances. The agency pays African “partners” to inspect grantees on the ground, but for most grants, the agency’s database was missing these site visit reports.

Thursday’s inspector general report was limited to certain aspects of the agency’s business and its methodology was established last year, before the dramatic changes at the agency. But USAID OIG confirmed that its investigations into matters relating to the foundation are active and ongoing. That raises the prospect that although CFO Zahui was reinstated after being laid off, the back-and-forth might end in his being hauled out of the office in handcuffs.

A November 2024 search warrant application unearthed by The Daily Wire laid bare a criminal probe involving the agency’s mysterious payments to Ganiam Ltd., a company owned by Zahui’s friend Maina Gakure. In February 2024, agents seized Zahui’s work phone and found “text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote. As of now, Zahui has not been charged with a crime.

The agency’s other top current employee, according to the report, is Elisabeth Feleke. Feleke was accused by former general counsel Mateo Dunne of ordering him to stop an investigation into rulebreaking at the agency. Dunne filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging retaliation and anti-white racial discrimination, but an EEO judge dismissed it, and he is appealing.

A former official with the USAID inspector general’s official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Wire that the African Development Foundation “treated federal dollars like Monopoly money… it was a culture of reckless indifference to accountability and oversight.”

Included in the report is an acknowledgment of the IG’s findings by the foundation.

“USADF appreciates the work of the USAID Office of Inspector General in conducting this evaluation of our strategic partnerships and grants administration,” says a management response to the findings. “We concur with the overall findings and recommendations and acknowledge the opportunities to strengthen our internal
policies, procedures, and reporting practices.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch (R-ID) said on X that the new report provides further evidence that the agency “is beyond repair” and should be abolished.

Related: This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.

PART ONE: Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend

PART TWO: African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff

PART THREE: Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans

PART FOUR: ‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says