LIPSTICK ON WOKE: NANCY PELOSI

Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s retirement marks the end of a stunning career, complete with a million photo ops that show her in 4-inch stilettos while on official government business. To wit, the time she held the House floor for 8 hours-in heels-while advocating for Dreamers; the press at that time remarked, “What man could ever hope to match such an athletic fete!” (In today’s Democrat Party, there could be quite a few.) Search the Web for shots of Pelosi in heels and you’ll find many dedicated to the topic: Pelosi playing darts in heels; Pelosi showing up for work, in heels; Pelosi returning to Congress in 2025 after hip surgery without her trademark 4-inch stilettos. In 2018, The Washington Post featured a story about Pelosi with the headline: “What is it about women and power and shoes?” Then there’s the lipstick. There are articles devoted to her fashion and lipstick. In a New York Times interview with Pelosi right after Harris’ loss to Trump, there are numerous bracketed references [Pelosi bangs on the table] indicating her emotional response to certain questions. During that interview, Pelosi said, “When the candidate for president [Trump] is saying that these people coming in [illegally] are murderers, rapists, thieves and all the rest of that. He made that a cultural issue….He said they were criminals. And they weren’t. They weren’t. I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump.” This is nothing but lipstick on a lie. Politico, summing up Pelosi’s political style as a “realpolitk approach,” went into detail about why she “stands alone” and why “Mike Johnson will never have that level of [4-inch heel] name recognition.”

In an October 2025, Harvard Institute of Politics interview, Pelosi answered questions about her career and the future of the Democrat Party. After stating that her main concerns had always been working families, social justice and reproductive freedom, she was asked if the Democrats had drifted too far to the Left. Her answer was that the Democrat Party was a reflection of the country (never mind the nation’s sweeping rejection of Democrat values in the 2024 election). Then she U-turned and said, “Most elected official govern from the center,” while calling herself a leftwing liberal. She didn’t stop there. She accelerated gears and slipped into a stream of consciousness rant, going from one topic to another, rambling at times while waving her hands and then extending her arms in great sweeping motions as if conducting an orchestra. She slurred some words while mispronouncing others. Her face seemed to move in a big choreographed spasm. The journalist, afraid to interrupt, let her proceed. At one point Pelosi even stood up and walked out near the audience, waving to people she recognized. She praised Ronald Reagan. “What a great communicator,” she said, commenting on the last speech he gave before switching to Republicans who criticize her views. “Oh you’re too walk!” they say. She blinked harshly and corrected herself. “I mean woke!” She talked about social policies that have come to be associated with Democrats like “affordability,” and paired this with a phrase that took me by surprise: “When Christ came down from Heaven He enabled us to partake in His divinity.” Suddenly she was Bishop Fulton F. Sheen. Do leftwing liberals really talk like this? The juxtaposition of a 2nd grade catechism lesson with Democrat policies advocating abortion, transgender and gender insanity left me spellbound. A friend told me to watch Pelosi’s interviews for facial movements and mannerisms reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. I did that and concurred this was sometimes the case. Pelosi’s look of wide-eyed astonishment accelerates when she talks politics; her tongue rolls around inside her mouth and then seems to push out her upper lip, while her lipstick adds a surrealist touch. Recorded before Mamdani’s victory in New York City, the Harvard interview gave her the opportunity to comment on whether the communist represented the future of the Democrat Party. “It’s up to the people of New York,” she said, “but Republicans will tattoo Mamdani on every Democrat running for office.” Obviously, she doesn’t have a good feeling about Mamdani because she refused to comment further. One wonders what her thoughts will be when New York City is no longer the nation’s chief financial hub because of a Mamdani-driven mass exodus to Texas. Pelosi prefers political brawling on lighter issues, especially when it comes to the art of winning elections. This became obvious when she flipped the interviewer’s question to say how Republicans have demonized her, leading to how, “Somebody came in my house and hurt my husband with a hammer.” Yet not a single word about how Democrats and their ilk have demonized Donald Trump. She’s been called the ‘Queen of Stock Trading’ and an alcoholic, though there are claims that she doesn’t drink at all while other claims and posts on X “document” how at 84 years of age she’ll have 7 alcoholic drinks on a 4 hour airline flight. The truth is hard to discern. In March 2018, she appeared on Ru Paul’s ‘Drag Race’ where she posed with Paul in a power-to-the people salute. The photo of the two of them together has become a Democrat “icon” representing all the ways in which “Christ’s coming down from Heaven enables us to partake in His [woke] divinity.” In 2020, CNN reported how she felt “liberated” when she ripped up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address on camera. Her face wasn’t moving or shaking then, and her lipstick wasn’t all that bright red, but the action constituted a sort of soft insurrection that should have had severe consequences. She should have been censured, but wasn’t. Republicans denounced her actions and introduced a resolution calling the speaker’s conduct at the State of the Union “a breach of decorum” that “degraded the proceedings of the joint session,” but it fell on deaf ears. She did it, she said, because she felt Trump was “shredding the truth” and so she would shred his speech. She claimed the move was largely unplanned; it was spontaneous, like the movement of the muscles on her face. Susan Page, the author of a new book, “Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power,” explained that Pelosi tore the speech up because she couldn’t find a pen. “So she made a tiny tear in the margin of the paper so that she could find this untruth. Then she found another thing she thought was untrue, and another, and another. She said by the time he was through speaking, the whole speech had little tears along the margins of things he had said that she said she thought were false. That’s when she decided, ‘I might as well tear this up.” All in all, the process was a little bit like applying make-up, Pelosi-style. Put it on and take it off and gloss over the truth until its time to walk off-stage in your 4-inch heels. Thom Nickels (Frontpage Magazine)

CHAOS AT THE PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM Thom Nickels (Frontpage Magazine)

Museum culture in the United States has been subject to progressive ideology on a grand scale. The Philadelphia Art Museum is a case study in how progressivism nearly destroyed a venerable institution known for its outstanding collections and international exhibitions. In January 2022, then director and CEO Timothy Rub stepped down after a number of abuse allegations concerning the behavior of some museum managers. Despite this unfortunate development, the Rub administration did not attempt to tilt the museum into a Marxist cultural orbit. What accelerated that tilt, especially after Rub’s tenure, was fallout from national political events like the George Floyd riots and the #MeToo movement. This created a progressive pandemic in the city, especially in Philadelphia’s museum culture. With Rub gone, the museum’s board eventually decided on a new pick for its director and chief executive officer, the progressive female head of the National Gallery in Canada, Sasha Suda. The selection seemed to fit the political mood of the moment, although in retrospect the choice was blind-sighted and not very well thought out. The board apparently never suspected they were hiring a social revolutionary even though the writing was clearly on the wall. At the National Gallery, Suda had a reputation for firing curators and canceling exhibitions if she felt they violated woke canons. As reported in the Canadian press, she also had a strained relationship with donors and was on record as not liking rich people. National Gallery director Marc Mayer, who held the position from 2008 to 2019, dubbed Suda’s reign as “The Russian Revolution…when ‘decolonization’ became a popular term in the museum’s vernacular.” The National Post (Canada) reported that days after Sasha Suda abruptly resigned as director of the National Gallery, “16 prominent Canadians wrote Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez detailing the qualifications they felt were required of the next director. The implication was that Suda had few of them.” Ironically, Timothy Rub was on the search committee that chose Suda. This begs the question: Why didn’t anyone on the committee detect the red flags around Suda before she was hired? This failure seems to suggest the board was initially influenced, and impressed, by Suda’s woke credentials. Suda, after all, represented equity, diversity and inclusion. She seemed to fit blue-city Philadelphia like a glove. Unfortunately, the board wasn’t prescient enough to realize that white liberal females who tout their progressivism can be unpredictable loaded missiles. But karma would soon kick the door in: On November 4, 2025, the board of trustees of the Philadelphia Art Museum, fired Suda following a 12-0 vote. The Daily Mail reported that Suda had been fired “following mounting concerns from board members that her focus on inclusive exhibits was overshadowing other priorities.” The board also objected to the narrow focus of new exhibitions. Suda, in the meantime, sued the museum, contending her dismissal was baseless. She pointed to a “corrupt and unethical faction” of the board that opposed her modernization efforts. ‘Modernization’ in Suda’s world, meant DEI-based goals such as hiring 40 percent of employees from diverse backgrounds by 2025, a so called “35 percent supplier diversity by 2025” as well as the raising of $5 million for African American art by 2025. Suda claims the board knew of the DEI and equity changes she was about to make but offered no objections. That may very well be true, since Philly is saturated in this kind of ideology, from City Hall on down to the lowest Pep Boys operation in Kensington.

Suda then made a bold move: she changed the name of the museum from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the Art Museum of Philadelphia, the latter a much more colloquial sounding “street” branding in line with modernist minimalism. With the name change there was a logo change: a huge unsubtle black imprint of a dragon with its mouth open, a “hungry” metaphor maybe for what Suda, almost 3 years into her term, had “eaten up” and planned to “eat up.” In December 2023, the museum under Suda’s direction, went into high DEI mode and hired Latasha Harling as ‘Chief People and diversity officer,’ a communist-sounding position Suda was known for creating at the National Gallery.

The board apparently had no objections to this, or if they had objections they were voiced quietly behind the scenes. I can imagine some board members mumbling, “While the name of this DEI position sounds socialist… why don’t we go ahead and let Sasha do her thing.” DEI-hire Latasha Harling certainly did her thing when she was charged with theft. It was reported that Harling put $58,000 in personal expenses on company cards. Harling was fired for this infraction, while Suda continued on her merry way and changed the name of the museum (at a cost of $200,000) to the consternation of a majority of Philadelphians. Time will tell how Suda’s law suit progresses, although as The New York Times reported: “According to the lawsuit, the investigation concluded that she [Suda] had been financially irresponsible and recommended that she be given the opportunity to resign.”

Suda’s lawyer, Luke Nikas, was quick to come to the Canadian’s rescue when he remarked that, “She is proud of her work and looks forward to presenting the truth.” Of course she’s proud of her work. She’s an unrepentant, progressive white (woke) woman who wanted to continue the destructive mission she started at the National Gallery of Canada.

Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior, early 2026

UPENDING PETER'S CHAIR (Frontpage Magazine) Nickels

While walking past Philadelphia’s Immigration and Naturalization Services building a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a sizeable group of prayer warriors on the sidewalk with signs reading, “We are all brothers and sisters.”

A closer look revealed many of the people appeared to be Catholic religious, mainly women or ‘nuns on the bus’ types in secular clothing. “Figures,” I thought. “You’d never see a nun in a traditional or even a modified habit taking part in something like this.” These secular dress sisters were mainly older-hippie-boomer types: white hair, long skirts and pantsuits predominated. Overall, they seemed composed and respectful. I found it ironic that in some sense they still retained a stereotypical nun-like composure. The men among them were few, although I did spot an ashen faced Methodist minister in a rainbow stole. Watching these people, it occurred to me that a seismic shift had occurred in the Catholic social justice sphere. Catholic pro-life protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the years had almost zero secular or mainline Protestant support. Yet at this ICE facility-in the age of Trump hatred-legacy or woke Christianity was out in spades. Newsflash: Catholic opposition to abortion has been demoted in favor of a new cause: advocating for the “rights” of illegal aliens to do whatever they want in a country they entered illegally. These might include the right to a driver’s license and even voting privileges, depending on the latest social gospel dictates coming out of Rome.

Vigils like the one in Philadelphia are taking place in multiple cities across the nation since Pope Leo’s exhortation to Catholic faithful to fight against Donald Trump’s war on the deportation of migrants. On October 8, 2025, Pope Leo XIV told US bishops that they should address how immigrants are being treated by Donald Trump’s hard-line policies. The pope’s remarks came after a contingent of bishops visited the Vatican with letters from illegal aliens in Catholic communities detailing the hardships they were suffering because of threatened (or real) deportations. The letters were stacked in a small neat pile and tied with twine, so the little package resembled a found object on Robinson Crusoe’s mythical island. Talk about a photo- op spectacular! One of the bishops at the presentation ceremony, Bishop Mark J. Slitz, said he saw the pope’s “eyes watering up a bit” when he was presented with the letters. It was, as they say, a Hallmark Card moment, equal perhaps to most of the banal quotes from Pope Leo himself published almost daily on social media. These generic sayings about “God,” “life,” and “love” are almost always syrupy two or three liners that could have been lifted out of a popular Art Linkletter book from the 1960s.

Not long after the presentation of illegal alien letters, social justice Catholics-the same Catholics who want to rewrite the catechism to reflect the new mores of the secular world-instituted prayer vigils throughout the country. Obedient to Leo’s directive – “You stand with me. And I stand with you” – they took up a woke-shaped cross and began appearing at ICE centers across the country. At the Philadelphia vigil, there were 90 liberal activists including Buddhists, Mennonites, Unitarians, Methodists and Jews. They stood alongside the (secular dressed) boomer Sisters of St. Joseph. A Protestant minister set up an altar composed of a plastic folding table and miniature Doric column theater props. The makeshift sidewalk altar became a toilet for ecumenical offerings to gods and goddesses: Tibetan prayer flags, apples, tangerine and somewhere in the mix a miniature carving of Christ with arms outstretched. The poor Christ image was lost among the other images, reminiscent of Pope Francis’ admonition that all religions lead to God. The protestors cited a January directive by President Trump to eliminate houses of worship as “off-limits” places for ICE arrests. Yet the move by the president was a necessary one mainly because of the leftward tilt of so many Christian denominations. As mainstream Christianity sinks into the pothole of woke-ism, it loses the attributes and blessings that made it ‘Christian’ in the first place. Furthermore, the venerable ‘sacred space’ or church in which runaway criminals used to hide-depicted in old Hollywood movies as shelters for innocent men accused falsely-has been replaced by criminals intentionally breaking the law and then expecting the church to bless their transgressions without ever mentioning that that they may have committed a sin. (Note: As Christianity sheds more and more of its traditional teachings, it needn’t worry about being conquered by Islam, for if present trends continue, it will have destroyed itself long before that happens.) The US anti-ICE deportation initiative responsible for the Philadelphia vigil, was spearheaded by the Jesuits West province, the Maryknoll Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Pax Christi USA, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services and several orders of women religious (those tired boomer ladies who eschew traditional or modified habits). “We defend the sacred, not ICE, not Trump,” New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia co-director Peter Pedemonti told that crowd of 90 gathered before the plastic folding table altar filled with pagan food gifts. Ironically, after the slew of nationwide Catholic prayer vigils there appeared on X multiple “Catholic” posts about how Pope Leo should excommunicate all of the Catholic Supreme Court justices. Calls for their excommunication were based on Supreme Court decisions on abortion, and its willingness to take another look at its landmark case ruling on June 26, 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges) legalizing same sex marriage. The number of these posts was disturbing and indicated a new form of Catholicism rising within the United States: Social justice/non-theological Catholicism where abortion and all the old traditional Catholic taboos don’t matter. Meanwhile, the so called shepherds of the Church, the bishops, seem to be joining forces with these social justice Catholics who are calling for a total re-making of the Church. As Timothy Flanders on One Peter 5 remarked: I am willing to hazard that there are many orthodox bishops out there. But it seems to me that most of those orthodox bishops are cowardly. They think of themselves as ‘vicars of the Roman Pontiff’ (a concept that Vatican II condemned in Lumen Gentium 27), and they are afraid to excommunicate and issue the anathema, as did the saintly bishops of old. But the saintly bishops of old are slowly being snuffed out and replaced by rainbow stoles and the Sisters of St. Joseph. Avatar photo Thom Nickels Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.

Announcement

Special Announcement Fideri News Network Welcomes Thom Nickels as new Editor-At-Large of Arts & Culture If you’ve been reading Broad + Liberty for any length of time, you already know Thom’s work — the intellectual curiosity, literary craftsmanship, and unflinching honesty that make him one of Philadelphia’s most compelling cultural storytellers. A prolific, award-winning author, historian, and chronicler of the city’s architectural soul, Thom has spent decades capturing the character, contradictions, and quirks that make our region what it is, in a way few writers can. We’re thrilled to share that Thom is now officially joining our team as Editor-at-Large of Arts & Culture. Here’s to bold ideas, bigger conversations, and an exciting new era for Broad + Liberty and the entire Fideri News Network. Thom Nickels: Renamed, rebranded, and reduced — What happened to the Philadelphia Museum of Art? "The Philadelphia Museum of Art, now the Art Museum of Philadelphia, has been in decline for a number of years. Director Timothy Rub attempted to hold the line and keep up appearances for a good while. To a large extent, he succeeded. Exhibition openings (for the press) were well-organized and still special events with speeches and tables of breakfast delicacies for journalists on assignment. The old guard at the museum took the press seriously, a tradition going back to Anne d’Harnoncourt’s tenure when press events were actual sit-down diners (white table cloths and wine), where a Philadelphia journalist might find him or herself seated beside someone from the Wall Street Journal. Under Rub’s tenure, most press events were held in the Grand Court, something of a scale-down from the d’Harnoncourt era but still respectable and something to look forward to..." Read Article Here About Thom Nickels: Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.

The Radical Rainbow Abduction of the Catholic Church (Frontpage Magazine, Thom Nickels)

A recent online debate between Eastern Orthodox podcaster Jay Dyer and Catholic apologist Timothy Gordon focused on the roots of papal authority, as in: What did Jesus really mean when He said, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church?” Pundits gave the debate win to Gordon mostly because he put Dyer on the defensive. Other Catholic apologists praised Gordon’s performance, after which they bemoaned the state of Peter’s Church: its wrecked, Protestant-style liturgy; its globalist Francis 2.0 new pope (Leo), and its gradual descent into LGBTQ rainbow land.

Ironically, while none of the apostasy-like aberrations listed above are happening with any real force in the Orthodox Church, no mention was made during the Dyer-Gordon debate of the countless Catholics who have gone over to Orthodoxy because of the corruption of the Catholic Mass versus the ancient unchanging liturgy of the East. Indeed, why would any serious Orthodox Christian trade the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom for the bland Novus Ordo Mass, in which women in yoga pants distribute communion? In an interview with Art Bell before his death in 1999, author Malachi Martin stated that Christ had withdrawn His grace from the Roman Church because of the liturgical and theological abuses that arose from Vatican II.

Since Vatican II’s suppression of many Catholic traditions, apologists like Timothy Gordon spend 99% of their time bemoaning the dismantling of authentic Catholicism. They bemoan altar girls while nearly every Catholic parish in the U.S. utilizes them. They criticize communion-in-hand which has now become the Catholic norm. They decry newer and bolder forms of liturgical abuse, such as when priests and bishops defy Rome and concelebrate with Anglican priestesses. Such an event occurred on August 26 when a retired Mexican bishop concelebrated the Mass with an Anglican priestess at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Bishop Emeritus Raul Vera Lopez presided at the Mass with the Rev. Emilie Teresa Smith. The Anglican priestess wore a simple stole, but she was a full participant, even participating in the words of Consecration. The bishop defended his actions with the following statement: “Not only does she [Rev. Smith] work with the poor, she has a parish, has a theological background, she is a writer, she is ready to participate in a meeting of the United Nations and with God’s people around the defence of our Mother Earth.” This, in a nutshell, describes the Church of Leo XIV. Leo XIV allows bishops like Lopez to do what they want while simultaneously ignoring the pleas of Latin Mass communities all over the world for greater freedom in accessing the traditional Mass. A kind of mafia-like aura has surrounded the papacy since the close of Vatican II. At the top of the “mafia’s” list is the canonization of every pope since 1965. This is their way of legitimatizing and “sanctifying” Vatican II. While Pope John Paul I’s cause for sainthood is already gaining traction, how many months will it be before that most anti-Catholic of all modern popes, Francis, is declared a saint? Not long. Not only that, but after Pope Leo’s death he will also be declared a saint. The canonization process in the Roman Church has become a joke, but it is a joke with a purpose: to render null and void any serious reform of the reform. Paradoxically, many of these same Catholic podcasters — Timothy Gordon and Taylor Marshall, to name two — have switched to one of the Catholic Eastern rites in their personal lives in order to participate in a dignified liturgy while simultaneously defending papal authority, even as that authority reconfigures the mainstream Catholic Church into another variation of the Protestant Episcopal Church. In the meantime, Leo XIV is busy at work canonizing the legacy of his predecessor Francis with the appointment of liberal bishops, especially when it comes to LGBTQ issues. Leo’s recent official Vatican meeting with America magazine editor and Jesuit priest, James Martin, was nothing less than a confirmation of his approval of Martin’s ministry to rewrite the Catholic catechism. Martin came away from that meeting with an ecstatic smile on his face. That smile reminded me of news reports before the election of Prevost that Martin had put his early bets on Prevost as the perfect Francis 2.0 pope. What did Martin know about Prevost at that time? I have my theories. What they used to call the ‘gay sensibility’ in the old gay liberation movement might be a helpful reference here. Let me explain: what unites Catholic male clergy “suffering” from same sex attraction is an unspoken but tight fraternal bond, a kind of psychic radar. It matters little whether the SSA is realized in physical acts or presents as an asexual attraction (held in abeyance because of priestly vows). What matters is this: it is still operative. This “soul” fraternity reminds me of the secret hand signals of freemasons. The brotherhood of SSA is an insoluble bond that sadly often slips into the orbit of liberal-political advocacy for open borders, the ordination of women and praise for more James Martin-style priests and bishops. This was on full display in the Vatican on September 5 during an international meeting called “Listening to the Experiences of LGBTQ Catholics,” organized by Outreach, a U.S. organization founded by James Martin. The event included a prayer vigil inside Rome’s Church of the Gesu with LGBTQ Catholics and their families. The vigil ended with a procession of some 1300 people, led by someone holding a rainbow cross, that marched into Saint Peter’s Basilica. The event — which included men in shorts, many holding hands and even patting one another on the ass — was blessed by Pope Leo. Now, something like a rainbow-colored crucifix in an official Vatican procession would have sent pre-Vatican II popes — even John Paul II and certainly Benedict XVI — into paroxysms of disbelief leading to a heart attack or stroke.

Bob Prevost (Leo), is the Joe Biden of popes. He is a weak, milquetoast blank slate or puppet for the controlling radical forces that now steer the Vatican. He cherishes celebrity and the limelight; he autographs motorcycles and holds babies to thunderous applause while refusing to meet with the new U.S. ambassador to the Vatican (because he loathes Trump’s immigration policies), instead filtering that meeting off to an assistant, breaking a long-standing papal tradition. Before he met with Martin, he met with a heretical nun, Sister Lucia Karam, who publicly denies the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary, supports abortion and gay marriage while making statements like, “The Church needs to bless any kind of love and not interfere in the desires of those who have abortions.” What kind of Catholic Church is this? Sister Karam even says it is inevitable that gay marriage will be regarded as a sacrament in the Church. Rather than correct Sister Karam — who wears a religious habit, unlike those flamboyant radical nuns on a bus — Prevost as Leo smiled his goofy welcoming smile that suggested acceptance of her heretical views. He let her go without a slap on the wrist, and then he embraced his fraternal soul brother, Jimmy, who has always claimed Prevost as his own.

How Wokeness Killed a Philly Art School (From Frontpage Magazine, Thom Nickels)

When the news hit in late May 2024 that Philadelphia’s esteemed University of the Arts would be closing its doors permanently on June 7, 2024, I wasn’t all that surprised. The University of the Arts (UArts) was created in 1987 after the merger of two century-old institutions, the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA)—established in 1876 as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art– and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (PCPA). UArts has been dying a slow, agonizing death for at least ten years. The first hint of trouble surfaced in 2018, the peak year of the excesses of the #MeToo movement, when UArts photography Professor Harris Fogel—an award-winning international photographer who had been with the school for over 20 years—was accused of an unwanted kiss by a female professor from California when they both attended a Las Vegas photography conference. The California professor was somebody Fogel (pictured above) knew well, so when they met in a hotel lobby at the beginning of the conference, Fogel thought nothing of greeting his west coast friend with a kiss. That kiss—so Fogel later told Philadelphia Magazine— was a standard UArts form of greeting among professors and colleagues. The kiss was accepted by University of the Pacific, Professor Jennifer Little as a nothing burger, yet twenty months later Little wrote a letter to UArts administration claiming that Fogel had greeted her with an unwelcome and forced kiss in the lobby of the hotel. Ironically, the professor’s letter was followed one day later by another allegation against Fogel, this one from a female photography student who claimed that when Fogel went to hand her his business card at a photography conference in Houston, he offered her his hotel room key instead. Fogel later admitted that he was embarrassed about the mix-up—life was easier when hotel keys looked like hotel keys—and that the young Annie Leibovitz wannabe—Anne- Laurie Autin– laughed the mistake off as a joke. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but apparently when nothing happens in Vegas (or Houston) it’s your duty to make something up. When UArts received the California professor’s complaint almost two years after the fact, as well as the additional complaint from the student photographer who now saw the mistaken hotel room key exchange in a sinister light—it was later revalued that Little and Autin were in fact chums—the school initiated a Title IX investigation that determined that the kiss between Fogel and Little was not consensual at all but forced in the manner of a date rape prelude or a noir horror film. As a result of the investigation, on March 8, 2018 Professor Fogel was terminated by Dean Mark Campbell. In August of the same year, the University Board of Trustees upheld the termination. Fogel then sued UArts—Harris Fogel v. University of the Arts, et al—claiming that the university’s investigator failed to interview his exculpatory witnesses and did not investigate leads on possible collusion. Fogel charged that UArts violated his civil rights in terminating him based on “an erroneous outcome theory.” Fogel suspected collusion between Ms. Autin and Professor Little and stated that the “University failed to obtain the emails between the women to investigate his collusion defense.” The UArts Title IX Coordinator, Fogel said, failed to investigate all available evidence, including an unwillingness to objectively evaluate Professor Little’s credibility, and UArts failed to “provide adequate notice of the charges against him, including the date, time, and location of the incidents alleged.” Fogel said the Title IX Coordinator also failed to interview groups of women from the Las Vegas FotoFest conference to whom Professor Little reported the kiss. The coordinator also failed to consider Ms. Autin’s confession to a Houston conference representative that she thought it entirely possible that Fogel’s room key remark was a ‘joke’ and not intentionally malicious.

Fogel filed a lawsuit against UArts in federal court in Philadelphia—and won. According to a friend of mine who worked in UArts administration at the time, Fogel won a lot of money, so much money in fact that my friend asked me then to be very careful about writing about the settlement, which as far as she knew was not made public because it was such an embarrassment to the school. Apparently only those in UArts administration knew about the settlement and the amount. This friend, whom I’ll call RR, lived in my neighborhood so she was somebody I saw her frequently on local buses. As an avid 2016 Trump supporter– and someone who had issues with woke trends consuming colleges and universities–she always had an update about how UArts was changing. She talked about school policies regarding sexual harassment, the forced use of pronouns, racial identity hiring practices, and more. The school was becoming more “Stalinesque” than the University of Pennsylvania, and as a conservative she said she had to keep quiet about her political beliefs because the staff and students were not tolerant of divergent political views. The scandalous new policies at the school became an ongoing joke between us: “What when down this week?” I’d ask her. Nine out of ten times, RR had a depressing story. When UArts announced its closure, it blamed it on financial reasons. One official termed it, “an unexpected budget crunch,” despite the school’s endowment which is worth upwards of $61 million. Did the Fogel case play a part in the school’s closure because of financial reasons? Was it a case of “get woke, go broke”? 2019 was a big year for UArts because another story was making the rounds at that time. This was the attempted firing of noted UArts professor and author Camille Paglia who writes about contemporary culture, art and archaeology and who describes herself as “queer and trans” although she’s enough of a real intellectual and historian to know that transgenderism—when it is adopted and celebrated by a culture en masse—leads to the destruction of that culture or nation. Paglia pointed out this fact in a video that went viral and then promised to expand on her views on gender in a speech set to be delivered at the school, which aroused the ire of some students who began a fierce campaign to fire her. The “fire Camille Paglia” petition garnered over 1,300 signatures, at that time pretty much the population of the entire student body.

“Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color,” the petition stated. “If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” Paglia registered her disapproval of women who waited months to report a sexual assault. She also let it be known that any female student who agrees to go to a man’s dorm room at 2 AM—especially after a night of drinking and heavy partying– pretty much knows what that “invite” is all about. It’s certainly not about playing chess or reading Susan Sontag. Unlike the persecution that Fogel experienced, Paglia had the support of President and CEO David Yager, so student protesters were relegated to catcalling and setting off fire alarms and generally behaving like spoiled liberal brats who believe they have a right to have a say in who the university should hire or fire. But they were not successful in their efforts to either fire Paglia or cancel her talk. The fact that a good portion of the student body ganged up on Paglia suggested to me that the education offered at UArts has been sub-par and riddled with woke bulletholes all along.

This fact does not exactly inspire an excess of sorrow over the school’s closing.