Fergie's Pub Bans Conservative Columnist

News Philadelphia Bar Bans Conservative Columnist Over Offensive Comments People who post "all lives splatter" are apparently not welcome at Fergie's Pub. By Victor Fiorillo· 2/13/2026, 4:18 p.m. Left: Fergie's Pub owner Fergus "Fergie" Carey (photo by Steve Chris) | Right: Conservative columnist Thom Nickels, who posted "all lives splatter" among other memes on the Fergie's Pub Facebook page, earning him a ban from the bar (image via LaSalle TV) Left: Fergie’s Pub owner Fergus “Fergie” Carey (photo by Steve Chris) | Right: Conservative columnist Thom Nickels, who posted “all lives splatter” among other memes on the Fergie’s Pub Facebook page, earning him a ban from the bar (image via LaSalle TV video)

Late in January, in response to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis, protesters called for a general strike scheduled for January 30th. Business owners around the country were confronted with questions from their workers about whether they would participate, as was the case at Fergie’s Pub, the popular Irish bar in Philadelphia. Owner Fergus “Fergie” Carey considered the matter and decided to open that day, posting the following on social media: We remain open today. However, we are in support of the strike and want to make it clear that we believe that America is a diverse, beautiful patchwork and we are stronger together. Between Fergie’s and The Jim, we have donated thousands of dollars over various events to @vamos_juntos_ and will continue to support them – they are an excellent community resource and are doing amazing work. Please check out their page and support their efforts as well, if you like. #iceout Facebook being Facebook and 2026 being 2026, comments (many of which no longer appear) were swift to follow, some standing in solidarity with Fergie’s and the ICE protesters and some not so much. Falling decidedly into the latter category was longtime Philadelphia columnist Thom Nickels, who these days writes for the conservative Philadelphia outlet Broad & Liberty. Nickels posted a series of memes that made light of the situation in Minneapolis and the killings of Good and Pretti. Some examples that Philly Mag has reviewed, as provided by Carey from posts that his social media manager was quick to delete: A photo of Alex Pretti with the message “Staying Home Saves Lives” An image of a monkey labeled Renée Good approaching a sleeping lion labeled ICE with the message “Everything happens for a reason: Sometimes the reason is you’re stupid and make bad decisions.” A cartoon of an SUV hitting people on a road with the message “All Lives Splatter: Nobody Cares About Your Protest. Keep Your Ass Out of the Road.”

“I just very quickly tapped into my photo gallery and posted some conservative memes,” Nickels tells Philly Mag. “As I was doing it, I noticed that they kept disappearing. I thought, oh well, they don’t like them.” They sure didn’t. The social media manager alerted Carey to the Nickels comments, wondering who Nickels was. It turned out that Carey and Nickels met, as far as Carey remembers it, long ago when Nickels wrote for The Philadelphia Irish Edition and interviewed Carey for a story. He patronized the bar occasionally over the years, and was a regular for a bit. The name rung a bell to Carey, so he looked in his cell phone and, sure enough, “Thom Nickels – Philadelphia Irish Edition” was in there. Carey dialed the number but Nickels didn’t pick up. It went to voicemail, so Carey left him a message, which Nickels later deleted. Both men agree that the point of the message was: You’re not welcome at Fergie’s Pub anymore. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Nickels. “I always liked Fergie. But we’re so polarized as a society. People want to turn everything into a federal case, as if I committed a horrible sacrilege.” Nickels wrote about the conflict with Fergie’s – not naming the bar – at the bottom of a Broad & Liberty column he wrote on February 8th about the local conservative influencer Frank Scales: Last week I came across a Facebook post from a certain bar in the city, condemning ICE and calling for its abolition. I posted my opposition with a few colorful memes from my photo gallery, all in support of ICE. This is something a zillion people do on a daily basis when it comes to debates about ICE. Now, I’ve always liked this bar. I’ve read a few poems there at sponsored gatherings, and I’ve interviewed the owner for a number of publications over the years. He has always been a fine gentleman. A day after my post I received a phone voicemail message from the bar telling me the staff no longer wishes to serve me, and that I should not have posted such “hate.” Hate? I love the hamburgers there, yet I confess the pub’s interior has always made me think of Mary Queen of Scots imprisoned in the Tower of London. But “hate” in this day and age course is anything they – the left – doesn’t agree with. As Hitler said, “I want fanatics.” Earlier this week, Carey alerted me to the Nickels column and identified the bar in question as his own. “I don’t want him in my fucking bar,” Carey insists. “Things are too serious now for that kind of stuff. Unfollow, unfriend, fuck off.” I asked Nickels about the “All Lives Splatter” meme, clearly a takeoff on Black Lives Matter and the post that Carey told me had him the most riled up. “I think that’s taken out of context,” Nickels says of the reaction to the post. “All lives splatter when you put yourself in the face of ICE… The two people who were tragically killed, which was a, you know, horrible thing, um, they still interfered with ICE… It seems to me that if you interfere with ICE, if you go into the road and try to get in their face, you’re asking for the worst.” Nickels also wondered if Fergie’s was going to start interrogating customers when they show ID: Do you support ICE? Do you support Trump? But Carey insists that all sorts of people come into Fergie’s and that he doesn’t disrespect customers because they believe differently than he does. Posting offensive memes about dead people on his social media page, though, is different, he argues. “If Donald Trump posted that image of the Obamas as apes on my Facebook page, I would call him and tell him to fuck off too,” Carey says. “I’m sick of all this.”

The Theological Battle of the Sexes

For the past two years, the liberal New York Times has been reporting on the cultural phenomenon of young men converting to traditional forms of Christianity, namely Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The keywords here are “young men,” not young women. That’s because young women are not converting to traditional Christianity en masse. Young women, in fact, are not converting to anything labeled “traditional” because most of them are steeped in the secular culture’s embrace of feminism and political wokeism. This sad state of affairs is reflected in the relations between the sexes. Relations between young men and women have been on the decline for a while, but they’ve reached new lows in 2026. Some of that division can be blamed on the abuses of the #MeToo movement, but the big split can be traced to the fact that young single men have been moving to the political right, while young women have moved to the left. This impossible divide has created major compatibility issues. From Reddit to the most innocuous Facebook post, liberal women exclaim with pride: “I will not date a Trump supporter or any Republican man.” In other words, “I’ve opted to cancel out the sexiest men on the planet.” A 2024 Newsweek report found that, “Roughly 77 percent of female users [of dating apps] said they wouldn’t date someone who supports Trump.” The report continues: “Generally, left-leaning singles were more likely to prioritize political alignment than conservatives. Roughly 89 percent of left-leaning users said political alignment is at least ‘somewhat important,’ while 68 percent of right-leaning singles felt the same.” This raises the question: Why are conservatives more open-minded than left-leaning singles whose views border on fanaticism? Trump Derangement Syndrome, plus the fact that leftists, who generally have no religious beliefs, have turned progressive politics into a kind of replacement church (orthodoxy) where wokeism is dogma and any deviation from that dogma is considered apostasy. Liberal women, preoccupied as they are with “reproductive rights” (abortion) have become the foot soldiers in the movement to transform the United States into an Islamist-socialist empire. Whether it is challenging ICE agents in the street, attending every No Kings protest known to man, or campaigning for Islamist candidates in Michigan, sometimes the fanaticism they demonstrate borders on mental illness. The corruption of the female sex can be traced to gender studies in universities. City Journal’s Heather MacDonald notes this fact and termed this corruption, “the Great Feminization of the American university.” She argued that this “traumification of everyday life, like other academic trends, is fast spreading outside the campus.” It has already spread to cultural institutions like art museums, philosophical societies, the theater world and even the way your local Barnes and Noble bookstore arranges author events (no conservative author need apply). MacDonald goes on to explain that women account for 80 percent of gender studies graduates in the U.S., and that gender studies programs are essentially “boot camps on gender ideology.” This is the reason why women disproportionately “end up as DEI administrators in universities.” In 2024, Ann Coulter did a podcast interview with UPenn law professor Amy Wax (please also see the current Thom Nickels Curious Culture podcast #4 interview with Amy Wax) where the conservative, persecuted Penn Law professor stated that the Republican Party will vanish if something isn’t done to correct the nation’s educational system from grades K through 12, because the system is nothing but a leftwing propaganda machine.

Meanwhile, on the heterosexual dating front, new research has revealed that 63% of women say they prefer a partner who is supportive and emotionally available who will allow them to take the lead in relationships. Why the lead? Somehow this taps into that old stereotype: “She wears the pants in the family!” Softer, empathetic men who listen are preferred over men who embody more traditional masculine roles. This certainly goes against that infamous Sylvia Plath quote, “Every woman loves a fascist,” meaning women want a strong masculine (sexy) patriarchal type as opposed to a soft soy boy vegan who agrees with James Talarico that “God is non-binary.” Of course, masculine men are capable of being emotionally supportive and “emotionally available” without giving up wearing the trousers. To a certain extent, the stay-at-home husband currently in vogue is certainly indicative of the effects of toxic feminism. While the alpha male has been demonized by feminists as products of toxic masculinity, the toxic, woke female has caused armies of men to bow out of the dating game altogether. They’ve simply had it. The Survey Center on American Life published a research piece in 2023 on why young men are turning against feminism. One of the reasons: woke culture is feminist culture.

This is not hyperbole, as a 2024 Newsweek survey discovered that the majority of American women won’t date a Trump supporter. If this is truly the case, where do these men go? Do they disappear into the world of multiple hookups? Do they suppress their desires and funnel them into workouts at Planet Fitness? Do they find some sort of down-low refuge in LGBT communities? There was a time when periodicals like Psychology Today were publishing articles like, “Feminists Think Sexist Men Are Sexier Than ‘Woke’ Men: Women like bad boys.” (Psychology Today, 2018). Even the Objectivist philosopher and novelist, Ayn Rand, made it a point to condemn the dangers of feminism in a 1971 essay, “The Age of Envy,” in which she trashed the Women’s Liberation movement. Rand was hero-oriented in her fiction and in her personal love life. She found glory and satisfaction in obeisance to strong, masculine men. Rand’s hostility to the feminist movement inspired her to declare that she would never vote for a woman president. Some conservatives fear what might happen if all the gender studies women get every woman on the planet to think as they do.

This is unlikely to happen. While today’s politics is a powerful motivator in keeping many men and women apart, it will prove to be a temporary dividing line. The more powerful motivator, human passion, will eventually triumph unless, in a sci-fi way, all woke women opt to become lesbians, or find soy boy husband lovers with man buns who want to keep house. The American Enterprise Institute summed it up this way: “People are getting married at the lowest rate in American history and the birth rate remains depressed. The longer people stay single, and perhaps never marry, the better things will be for the Democrats.”

ILEANA WHO? A new book rediscovers a remarkable woman by Bruce Bawer (from Substack)

Ileana who?

A new book rediscovers a remarkable woman. Bruce Bawer Don’t judge every book by its cover – or by its title. The title of Thom Nickels’s new book, Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile, and Mother Superior, might whet the appetites of some academics who specialize in certain subgenres of history, but the ordinary reader in search of a fun time might pass it by. Who the hell was Ileana? Who cares about Romania? That would be a dumb move – because this is a fascinating read. Indeed, there’s more riveting material in the introduction – in which Nickels limns the life stories of a variety of people who belong in roughly the same category as his protagonist – than there is in the main text of most books. For example, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia (1864-1918), daughter-in-law of Tsar Alexander II and sister of the last tsarina, Alexandra, became a nun to repent for her husband’s expulsion of 200,000 Jews from Russia, and was beaten to death by the Bolsheviks the day after they murdered the royal family in Yekaterinburg. Unceremoniously, her remains were thrown down a mine shaft. Born in France and educated in England before he settled in America – at first as a student at Columbia University and a bohemian living on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, Thomas Merton (1915-68) later converted to Catholicism and became a Trappist monk at a monastery in Kentucky. His bestselling 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, described by Fulton J. Sheen as “a twentieth-century form of The Confessions of St. Augustine,” made him a celebrity and caused the number of young Catholic men choosing the monastic life to soar. As with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, his death was inglorious: during a stay in Samutprakarn, 20 miles from Bangkok,he stepped out of his shower and was somehow electrocuted by an electric fan, which was found lying on top of his dead body.

Then there’s Bruce Chatwin (1940-89), the travel writer, who concealed from the public both that he was gay and that he had AIDS (his marriage to one Elizabeth Chanler was celibate), and who, when he wasn’t globetrotting to gather material for his books, hobnobbed with the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Edmund White, Jacqueline Onassis, Susan Sontag, and Jasper Johns. “Chatwin,” writes Nickels, called himself a nomad, writing that a nomad never has to worry about finding God or the finality of death, because the act of moving wards off all such concerns. He was planning to convert to Orthodox Christianity, and to give up nomadism for monasticism, when he succumbed to a horrible death at the hands of AIDS. Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Thomas Merton, Bruce Chatwin: each of these life stories is engaging in and of itself, and taken together with the other material in the introduction (yes, there’s more, including a detour into Harry and Meghan), they do a surprisingly fine job of preparing us for Nickels’s portrait of someone whom we never heard of but who would have made a perfect fourth at a dinner party with them. Ileana (1909-91), the daughter of Marie of Romania (yes, the one who was immortalized in a four-line poem by Dorothy Parker), had six children with her first husband, Anton, the Archduke of Austria, and after being ordered to leave Romania after the Communist takeover, spent time in Switzerland and Argentina before settling down with her children in Massachusetts, where her visa issues were taken care of by Senator John F. Kennedy and where, with the proceeds from the sale of her crown, she was able to pay her debts, educate her children, and buy a house. In the ensuing years, she divorced Archduke Anton; had an 11-year marriage to a Romanian doctor and lawyer, which also ended in divorce; published a memoir; and went on lecture tours around the U.S. in which she made the case against Communism. Then came the dramatic change. In 1961, Ileana entered an Orthodox monastery in France. Taking the name Mother Alexandra in 1967, she returned to the U.S., where she founded a monastery in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. She remained there until her death in 1991. Which raises the question: why did she do it? What was it about her that led her to join that small company of men and women, such as Grand Duchess Elizabeth, Thomas Merton, and Bruce Chatwin, who, having experienced fame and wealth and seen a good deal more of the world than most, felt motivated to turn their backs on it all and lead lives of ascetic contemplation? Which is another way of expressing the question at the heart of all biographies: what made her tick?

Not that this is a straightforward biography – for which relief, much thanks. Monastic life may have much to be said for it, but the lack of a social life, combined with the rigid daily routines of group prayer and private contemplation, tends not to make for a riveting comprehensive biography. Instead of recounting Ileana’s life week by week or month by month, Nickels, in an attempt to gain as good as possible a sense of who she was and what led her into the monastic life, investigates the people and settings that made up her life – much in the way that the reporters in Citizen Kane seek out the key to the meaning of “Rosebud.” He visits the monastery in Ellwood City and speaks about Ileana with the nuns there. He talks to the monks at a monastery in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to which Ileana frequently went on retreats. He discusses Ileana at length with the woman who became her “soul mate,” and who claims that Ileana’s real father was Tsar Nicholas II. (Which, if history had turned out differently, could have raised major problems, given that Ileana “was a favorite playmate of the tsar’s son, Alexei, so much so that many at the time assumed the two would eventually marry.”) Nickels digs out the report, in a 1930 issue of Time, of Ileana’s engagement to a sensitive, handsome young German-Polish count which was broken off because of his “effeminate practices” (as Time put it) – although it would appear that she really loved him, unlike either of the men whom she really married. And Nickels meets at length with Ileana’s only surviving son, who is extraordinarily willing to open up about his mother and the rest of his family. What, then, to make of what Nickels calls Ileana’s “miracle of personal transfiguration” – her “reinvention of herself as a monastic after two marriages, the raising of a family, and an earlier life as a Romanian royal among the courts of Europe”? One thing of which this book reminds us quite powerfully – as, indeed, Citizen Kane does – is that other people’s lives, especially the lives of complex, accomplished people who are no longer among us, are mysteries. They’re collections of stories told by relatives, lovers, friends, enemies, colleagues, and acquaintances – and, often, in documents and recordings, by the people in question themselves. Many of those stories are surely apocryphal, most of them contradict others in important ways, and one or two of them, with any luck, may hold tantalizing clues to revealing secrets.

No, Nickels doesn’t presume to have worked out all the answers about Ileana. But he has done his research, placed his results before us, and given us no small amount of illuminating historical data. In short, he’s led us on a journey that’s well worth taking. For Ileana of Romania proves to have been an exemplary woman – and an enigma well worth pondering.

HALLOWEEN and the RELUCTANT NEWTOWN, PA. WITCH

That tiresome holiday, Halloween, is approaching again. Halloween is a child’s idea of what is scary, and it will be shoved in our faces on every door and lamppost in the city. As a young boy, I knew that a screaming face with bloodshot eyes is not scary; that a witch’s face with whiskers and warts on her chin is not scary, and that hanging miniature skeletons on your front door is anything but scary. What is really scary would be prohibited from public display: Photos of late-term abortions, murder victims from police files or decapitation scenes from the Middle East. These images constitute real horror – or the real Halloween we live with all year long. This is why we no longer need Halloween: We’ve seen witches at work in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy; we’ve seen ghouls in Palestinian scarves and head coverings turn Dilworth Plaza around City Hall into a den of horror; we’ve heard shrieks from the ghouls who protest ICE or who climb on rooftops to assassinate spiritual prophets like Charlie Kirk. The disease of Leftism is the world’s ‘forever’ Halloween: Young women walking around town with their boobs hanging out. Sloppily dressed men in t-shirts and baseball hats; yes, it’s always the baseball cap, old or young, unimaginative Philly men have become slaves to baseball cap wonkery.

There was a time when I was a fan of Halloween, but no more. As leftist activists used to say, “the personal is political.” This quote led me to a Copilot search that revealed that Democrats show a modestly higher preference for Halloween than Republicans — 32% of Democrats say they like Halloween more than the Fourth of July, compared to 15% of Republicans. Additionally, a YouGov America survey found that about one in four U.S. adults say Halloween is one of their favorite holidays. While overall popularity is similar across party lines, there is a stark partisan difference when comparing Halloween to the Fourth of July: 32% of Democrats prefer Halloween over the Fourth of July. 15% of Republicans prefer Halloween over the Fourth of July. No big surprise, really. Back in 2008, ‘Barack-O’-lanterns’ spiced up Democrats’ Halloween. This was the year when Obama and John McCain masks, and even Sarah Palin masks, were popular. I recall the big witches’ hat a 70-something Democrat female friend of mine wore when she hosted a Halloween party in her home in Bucks County several years ago. While the costume itself was out of central casting, the scene unraveled into the absurd when my friend was photographed over her stove stirring a stew of pretend victuals: bat’s heads, chicken hearts, and bull’s balls. When the photographer asked her to smile, she let out a series of Kamala Harris-like cackles. It was neither funny nor scary. As the host of this suburban Halloween party, she was playing a part. I was also playing my part because I was pretending to be amused because she was a friend of mine – although within ten months she would turn into a real witch and end the friendship I thought was lifelong. Yes, I was in for a real shock when her fanatically woke Democrat husband got her to defriend me in every way.

For some reason, the silly Halloween party was her idea of fun; she had talked about the event for months: how she would lead her photography group, all of them in costume, around the neighborhood with everybody in the end winding up at her house, watching her make the victual stew that really contained meat balls. When adults do Halloween like this, the “fun” is forced like a bowel movement with laxatives. As columnist Dave Infante noted, “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Halloween, and adults.” Years ago, I wrote a piece for the Huff Post on Henri David, Philadelphia’s “Mr. Halloween,” and the history of his annual Halloween ball: Henri’s house has the air of ruined aristocracy. In fact, you expect Madame Blavatsky and her crystal ball to walk in at any moment and take a seat. Forty-five years ago, Henri David, or Mr. Halloween, was a bearded, long-haired hippie who liked to hang out with female impersonators. The impersonators took him under their wing and brought him to New York City, where they showed him auditorium-sized drag balls. There were no large-scale drag balls like this in Philadelphia. Worse, when Halloween came around, there were only private Philadelphia house parties and bars to frequent, but no glamorous Halloween balls. The year 1968 was when Henri, all dressed up for Halloween but with no place to go, decided that it was time to do something big on his own. He wanted to start his own Halloween ball tradition, so he went to the Philadelphia Hotel at Broad and Race Streets and initiated the first big city ball. He printed flyers and pasted them himself to poles all over the city, in stark contrast to then-popular counterculture posters calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. He had no money but still managed to pull it off.

I’d attend Henri’s annual Halloween balls every year with a friend who made me promise I would never scratch his name from my plus-one list. That friend, a Halloween super-fanatic, would ask me months in advance if I was going to the ball, but one year when I couldn’t attend (and told him so), he went as me and gave my name at the door. He managed to get in, but the charade did not escape Henri’s expert eyes who let me know later what had occurred. His sneaky antics didn’t help our friendship, but that’s another story. By that point, Henri’s Halloween balls had gotten so large it was hard to move in the grand assembly rooms of the various Sheraton hotels where he held them. Uncomfortably crowded, doesn’t even begin to describe the pushing and shoving and lack of breathing room those hundreds of people in costume generated. Something unpleasant happens when you join multitudes of people in costume. There are just too many costumes for any one costume to stand out. Your costume and everyone else’s begin to seem redundant and unexciting. It’s when the person dressed up in only a simple eye patch becomes a fascinating winner. Feeding these Halloween revelers was also an issue. Hot dogs went for six dollars apiece. My friend would come to the ball with a bottle of vodka stashed under his sweater: “No way am I paying those drink prices,” he’d exclaim. I’d always leave Henri’s balls early, disappointed once again in the false promises of Halloween, and a ball that was supposed to bring an element of fantasy into your life but that always left you feeling more than empty and wanting to run away from the silliness of it all. Thom Nickels

PHILLY CEMETERY BEER TOURS

Thom Nickels: Grave concerns about tipsy tourists September 25, 2026 | 5:55 AM EDTThom Nickels Is a cemetery a sacred space? In today’s world, the answer to that question would be yes and no. Yes, because the cemetery grounds contain the remains of people who used to walk the earth, and no, because to many people who describe themselves as atheist, a cemetery is just a collection of tombstones that sometimes resemble works of art. In other words, a memorial to those who have died but who are presently “nowhere.” As one reader commented on a Reddit thread labeled, ‘Visiting graves as an atheist’: “No, I don’t think my sister who died is in some afterlife. She just isn’t around anymore. Her broken body is buried in the ground, and that’s all that’s left of her.”

Fantastic, now let’s have a party, meaning let’s raise a glass — “You might as well live,” as Dorothy Parker once stated — among some of Philadelphia’s most famous graves when Brew N’ History returns to Christ Church Burial Ground Oct. 2-4, 2026. The Christ Church walking tour advertises five stops “with local craft beer samples paired with the historical figures and stories featured at each gravesite.” When did the penchant for drinking beer in cemeteries align itself with the historic walking tour industry (HWTI)? The HWTI has always been popular in the city: there are ghost tours, architectural tours, LGBT tours, colonial house tours, black history tours, garden tours, photography tours; in short, there’s a tour for every interest except, perhaps, tours of Kensington through drug-infested K and A. As far back as October of 2015, Philadelphia Magazine published a story about a West Laurel Hill Cemetery event, “Beer barons to Homebrewers tour and tasting” under the title, “Hey, Wanna Get Drunk in the Cemetery?” You might say, West Laurel Hill started this madness; this historic, beautiful cemetery (the extension of the original Laurel Hill, across the Schuylkill) has built a small money and publishing empire on the backs of its deceased citizens. You might call it a cemetery that has become obsessed with itself and its own fame: a cemetery that’s become lucrative cottage industry with a gift shop selling Halloween-style items like spider webs and human skull pillows to put on tombstones. The Wildwood boardwalk comes to the cemetery!

How can one even begin to count the multiple books written about Laurel Hill? Every five years or so, another tome is published with a new twist on the same old theme. This is ingenious marketing, if nothing else. In the meantime, another Bala Cynwyd cemetery, Westminster, has failed to reach cult-marketing status, despite its being the burial place of Charles Hires, the inventor of Hires Root Beer, as well as James A. Bland (1854-1911), black minstrel show performer/songwriter who wrote “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” the theme of the Mummers Parade. Many Civil War commanders and Congressional Medal of Honor Awardees are also buried here. I grew up near Memorial Park Cemetery in Frazer, Pennsylvania, a beautiful stretch of landscaped land, a cemetery without tombstones, that could double for a miniature Valley Forge Park. As children we were careful never to step on top of a grave there although when there are multiple graves crammed together that is sometimes impossible to do. As a teen, I learned to drive in that cemetery. I regularly brought flowers to the grave of a family friend, an old woman with white hair my parents employed as a housekeeper and who converted to Catholicism in part because I showed her a long manuscript letter I received from Pope Pius XII in reply to a schoolboy scribble I mailed to Rome. Memorial Park was a sacred space, although teens being teens it was sometimes used for untoward purposes, especially at night. In 2024, I wrote a piece for Broad + Liberty about Har Jehuda Cemetery, a 27-acre Jewish cemetery on Lansdowne Avenue in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. The cemetery was founded by Julius Moskowitz, a Russian Jew, in the 1890s as a burial ground for Eastern European Jews. A large portion of Har Jehuda borders the backyards of about fifteen row houses on Bond Avenue, the street where my father and mother began their married life.

In that piece, I mentioned how during one walk along the cemetery wall that bordered my house, I spotted an old woman kneeling by a tombstone: “Her face was close to the earth; she wore a black scarf on her head and she was weeping copious tears. Curious, I studied her for a moment then walked away so as not to be noticed but when I returned a few minutes later, she was still sobbing. Not being able to feel or relate to that kind of pain at age five, I still felt a nagging, mild distress inside. The image of that old woman kneeling by a tombstone has stayed with me all my life.” This basically sums up what cemeteries mean to me. They are sacred spaces, not party, picnic or beer hall venues for people in the prime of life who pay $25 to $40 in order to enjoy feeling sorry for the dead because they are unable to share in a cold brew because they’ve all turned to ashes or bones. The dead should not be viewed as morbid curiosities like a trip to Center City’s Mütter Museum. So, you can keep your brew and suds graveyard walking tours, something that even AI takes a dim view of: AI: You should avoid walking directly on top of graves, making loud noises, and littering when you visit a cemetery. Keep quiet: Avoid shouting, loud laughing, or playing loud music from your car. The dead, I believe, ought to be prayed for, not used as party favors in the name of “history.”

Thom Nickels: Political violence is increasingly one-sided

The National Constitution Center recently hosted a discussion with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, to reject politicians from the left or the right who encourage contempt for their opponents. The theme of the discussion was that hostile rhetoric was contributing to political violence. The actual physical event took place at the Kimmel Center, not far from Philadelphia's Academy of Music. While I did not attend the Kimmel simulcast, I was present in the Center when the lines of ticket holders began to assemble. Looking over the crowd, I noticed many familiar faces, for the most part Center City Democrats, the same people who voted for Kamala Harris, who participated in No Kings protests, who support the policies of Planned Parenthood. In short, dyed-in-the-wool Philly liberals who probably wouldn’t vote for a Republican if you held a gun to their heads.

The very people, you can bet, who really believe that political violence in 2026 is split down the middle between the left and the right. Or that the greatest threat to democracy is from the right and from white supremacists. Perhaps the one incident clearly identifiable as an example of right-wing violence, and that no true conservative could in conscience deny, is the Charlottesville tragedy of 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at a “Unite the Right” rally in Virginia, killing one and injuring dozens. During the Cox and Shapiro discussion, an apparently sincere acknowledgement was made of the Charlie Kirk assassination one year ago as an example of political violence from the left. Shapiro also mentioned the attack on the Governor’s Mansion in April 2025 by an unemployed mechanic who had no political affiliation. According to the Center for Strategic & International Studies, “The first half of 2025 was marked by an increase in left-wing terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, which continues a trend noticeable over the last decade. In absolute terms, left-wing incidents are on track in 2025 to reach historically high levels in the last 30 years….From 1994 through 2000, there was an average of 0.6 left-wing incidents annually; in the following decade, that figure doubled to 1.3 a year.” Generally, leftist terrorists operate as loosely affiliated networks or as lone individuals, although that can happen on the right, such as when Paul Pelosi was attacked by a man with a hammer in his home in San Francisco.

Lone left-wing assassin Luigi Mangione, who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 on a Manhattan street, is considered a hero by at least 21% of Americans, according to a 2024 poll conducted by Economist/YouGov. Mangione’s good looks (his “killer” Groucho Marx eyebrows) have created fan pods of men and women across the nation. In some circles, Luigi Mangione is made out as “non-partisan,” but that is clearly untrue, especially when the alleged killer stated in one of his manifestos: “When all forms of other communications fail, violence is necessary to survive.” Statistics prove that the bulk of rightwing violence occurred before the Trump presidency. There was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995; the Olympic Park Bombing and Abortion Clinic attacks in the 1990s; a shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh Temple in 2012; and the Holocaust Museum shooting in 2009. But here’s the rub: No Democratic president in the history of the United States can match the ten assassination attempts on the life of Donald Trump since he entered presidential politics in 2015. Additionally, the 2020 leftwing BLM riots, occurring between May 26 and June 8, alone caused $2 billion worth of damages across the nation. The city of Minneapolis alone suffered $55 million in damages. The riots and assault of ICE officers by leftists have been an ongoing moving picture-show of leftwing violence. In July 2025, USA Today reported that ICE agents were getting hurt amid “ramp-up.” The agents were getting hurt because of rhetoric from Democratic politicians. The report stated that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries implored people to “fight” the Trump Administration “in the streets” and declared ICE agents “will be unsuccessful” in protecting their identities “no matter what it takes.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal called ICE agents “deranged” and said it is “inspiring” to obstruct immigration enforcement. Rep. LaMonica McIver — who was charged with “forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers” — incited her supporters to “shut down the city” because “we are at war.” Gov. Tim Walz smeared ICE agents as the “modern-day Gestapo.” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu compared ICE agents to the neo-Nazi group NSC-131. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson accused “secret police” of “terrorizing our communities.” The list goes on, proving incontrovertibly that violent rhetoric from the left has not only increased since 2016, but that it often leads to violent or irrational acts, like crazed liberal white women driving their cars into ICE agents. The White House reported that in July 2025, members of an Antifa cell ambushed officers at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas: “After defacing vehicles with anti-ICE graffiti — including ‘ICE pig’ and ‘F— you pigs’ — the assailants lured officers out of the building and opened fire, shooting one officer in the neck.” Just this week, on September 13, two unknown leftist activists defaced the statue of Charlie Kirk at the Turning Point USA Headquarters in Phoenix in the middle of the night. Just as they did with the statue of Frank Rizzo near City Hall, the terrorists threw red paint on Kirk’s face, neck and torso. (Rizzo’s statue was defaced multiple times during the 2020 riots; it was spray-painted and graffitied, and at one point women’s clothing, namely a bra, was placed on Rizzo’s chest; that gesture was high irony in my book, since I thought leftists would never use “holy” transgenderism as an insult. The Rizzo statue was removed from its pedestal on orders of then-Mayor Jim Kenney on June 3, 2020.) At the Phoenix Turning Point Headquarters, the monument terrorists also went after a nearby Christian memorial to Kirk when they crossed out the word “Jesus” and scrawled in the word “Satan” in its place. Meanwhile, in the high-vaulted ceilings of the Rafael Vinoly-designed Kimmel Center, Shapiro and Cox talked politely about how to mend fences and stem political violence in today’s Trump-hating culture. While sweet talk can provide the illusion that change is possible, the real question remains: How many Philly Democrats in the audience took this message to heart? Thom Nickels

Barnes + Noble Bryn Mawr Book signing: 'Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior.' Sept. 5, 2026