NAILING BLACK TEEN TERRORISTS

The genesis of the so-called “teen riots” happening across the country began as “flash mobs” in cities like New York and Philadelphia. These flash mobs were composed of mainly black teenagers who organized through social media to meet at a certain location where they could then create their special brand of havoc: fights, window smashing, and large-scale shoplifting. This was especially true in 2003, the year when New York City’s first official flash mob ransacked Macy’s.

The year 2009 saw Philadelphia’s first flash mob on South Street, where crowds of rowdy black teens put the fear of God into local businesses, especially as gunshots were fired above the crowd. “A few dozen outliers in this adolescent crowd turned violent, ransacking a convenience store, pulling drivers from their cars and, in the most serious incident of the evening, assaulting a cyclist and leaving him unconscious and bleeding in the street,” researchers Christian DuComb and Jessica Benmen wrote about the Philly 2009 riot. It was local media, by the way, that coined the term flash mob. Philadelphia’s South Street had been a countercultural enclave of head, leather, New Age crystal and tarot card shops, restaurants and small theaters. By 2009, the street had been discovered and marked as a hangout by unsavory riffraff, which included disproportionate numbers of minority youth. In 2011, a smaller but more vicious flash mob on South Street attacked a group of whites, where they broke the leg of left-wing journalist, Emily Guendelsberger, and seriously injured a number of her male friends. In the days of Mayor Frank Rizzo, this sort of behavior would have been nipped in the bud. School kids, although minors, would have been hauled into jail and then turned over to their parents, or maybe the parents would have been arrested. The candy-coated, velvet glove “Ah, come on, they’re just kids” treatment would not have played out in Rizzo’s Philadelphia. In 2009, many left-wing voices made excuses for flash mob behavior. There were Op-Ed editorials calling for more “after school” programs. The assumption was that the government was responsible for keeping these kids busy so they wouldn’t turn into rabid animals. Voices calling for the arrest of the students or their parents were criticized as being “racist” and “cruel.” But where is it written that any kid, be they Asian, Italian, Irish, African American or Indian, can team up with ethnic or racial peers and hold a city hostage? The phenomenon of violence-prone black teens running wild through the city seemed to abate for a time, but in 2017 that flame reignited when hundreds of black teens caused a disruption along 15th Street and City Hall, where several people were injured. That same year a flash mob of over 500 black teens threw bottles at police and jumped on cars in the Germantown section of Philly. WHYY’s Billy Penn, reporting on the City Hall flash mob, stated the riot was the “fourth such flash mob in 2017.” The article raised the question of why these incidents continue to plague Philly. Billy Penn did not, however, use the term ‘black teens’ but referred to the rioters as “hundreds of teens,” making it seem like the rioters were an even match of white and black individuals. The term ‘teen takeover’ is now standard among the legacy media when describing the latest incarnation of flash mobs. The term is an exercise in blatant avoidance of the truth, as many of the people who comment on these stories in print or online make cryptic comments like, “the usual suspects are responsible.” Occasionally, photos will be published of the culprits which make it obvious that nearly 100% of the rioters are black. Matt Walsh, in a podcast titled, “Teen Takeover Unpacked,” quoted one black lawmaker defending the black teen rioters by comparing them to white skateboarder groups in the early 1990s, whose main offense was not creating riots or destroying massive amounts of property, unless you consider scratches to sidewalks and retaining walls as major social disruptions. The white skateboarders, while certainly annoying, didn’t attack people, jump on cars, vandalize stores or break the legs of left-wing journalists. In 2026, media headlines regarding ‘teen takeovers’ make no mention of what kind of teen we’re talking about here, although some news pieces will mention the race of the individuals involved towards the end of the report, perhaps to thwart serious inquiry regarding just who is behind this mess, because it’s surely not the white curly-haired stoner kid who is a fan of Kurt Cobain. A May 2026 edition of Newsweek had the following headline: “Map Shows US Cities Hit by ‘Teen Takeovers.”

Newsweek cited Orlando’s Icon Park, Tampa, Buford, Georgia, Edmond, Oklahoma, Henrico County, Virginia, Detroit, Chicago, and New Rochelle, New York. A headline in the Tampa Bay Times in June 2026 read: “1 Shot after teen takeover at Clearwater Beach.” The conspiracy to not use the word ‘black’ in any article describing these riots has been going on for so many years it has now become a normalized practice, which makes it much harder to criticize or undo. James Fishback, a fourth-generation Floridian running to succeed Ron DeSantis as Florida’s next Republican Governor, came down hard on the Clearwater riot, “…It’s quite fitting that members of the media…had no issue calling the events of January 6th a violent insurrection, when in fact no one was charged with insurrection. One thing we have to confront is that black youth violence is a problem in Florida. The truth of the matter is that the group here on Friday night was almost exclusively young and black. “ Fishback nailed it when he added, “There’s something to be said about the root causes that lead a 12-year-old who was arrested here on a Friday night to riot without parental supervision.” The question is: why are children—black children and not white children – coming together in swarms to attack and rob pedestrians, and trash downtown businesses? Conservative critics point to the high numbers of fatherless/single mother children in black urban communities as proof that liberal policies have never really served black families. The king of divisive black politics himself, Barack Obama, once even admitted that absent black fathers continue to be the number one problem in Black America. As Fishback pointed out, “72% of black kids born today will be born to an unmarried mother.” That’s a major part of the problem.

Thom Nickels: Euthanasia’s slippery slope is already here

I view a lot of YouTube videos, but when a friend sent me a You Tube of a grandmotherly type smoothing out what looked to be a large piece of clear plastic wrap to dorky game show music, I knew something perverse was up. Like a goal-inspired Martha Stewart, the smiling “grandmother” was precise in the way she folded over the plastic so that it came to resemble a hood. When she put a large adhesive tape along the border of the hood and inserted a nodule or a tube connector at the bottom of it, she flashed the camera an extra large smile. Finally she held the finished product in front of her face and told viewers to imagine the plastic hood over her head, with the tube connector hooked up to a helium tank. Let me say for starters that we’re not talking about deep-sea diving here. Our homey grandmother was making a do-it-yourself suicide kit, although she made certain to mention that those who wanted an already assembled “self-deliverance” kit could send a mere $80 to a mail order house in La Mesa, California. As writer Derek Humphry states in his best-selling book, “Final Exit”: “…Waiting 30 minutes to have the bag removed is not necessary – if anoxia (zero oxygen) is complete with a properly closed system and no leaks due to faulty tubing, the brain stem will have died in 15 minutes. The cause of death is severe brain damage, not suffocation….”

Mr. Humphry, who founded the Hemlock Society in 1980, died in January 2025 but not by suicide; he passed away peacefully from congestive heart failure while under hospice care in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 94. In his book, ‘Final Exit,’ he maintained that the hood system is a “legally, safe procedure.” The hood-helium system, in fact, has been responsible for hundreds of successful suicides. Humphry wrote that the procedure is absolutely painless. “The user simply falls into a deep sleep in about two minutes. Everybody has their own style of approaching death and the way of handling their own dying event. It’s called choice,” Mr. Humphry wrote. The “self deliverance” kit for the terminally ill is marketed as a device for those who do not wish to spend months or years withstanding the painful and sometimes devastating effects of medical treatments that often do nothing but cause more pain and agony while prolonging the inevitable—death—and making doctors and insurance companies rich. The kit contains a clear plastic hood with tubing sewn in an adaptable elastic collar. There’s also a vinyl T-junction to connect the two tunes to the helium tanks. Potential customers are advised to go to a toy store and ask for a “party balloon kit” in order to purchase the supply tanks. The truth is, once you normalize euthanasia, people will be put under social and cultural pressure to kill themselves. Most people know someone who has chosen to end their own life. Growing up, the father of a high school classmate of mine killed himself in his house garage with carbon monoxide. In the 1970s a college friend of my brother’s shot himself while a brilliant student at William and Mary College. Many years later, the same student’s mother committed suicide. In the 1950s an uncle on my mother’s side hung himself in a motel room. Even as euthanasia is legal in eleven countries in the world, and in thirteen states in the Union (all blue states, by the way), the stain of suicide continues to haunt the media and in most obituaries. ‘Died suddenly’ in obituaries is often an indirect reference to suicide. “Cause of death is unknown” can be another hint, especially when there are no medical follow-ups related to the death. This became especially apparent to me almost a decade ago when I wrote a story for the Huff Post about a suicide in Center City. A friend of mine was dining in XIX (Nineteen) atop the Bellevue when he told me there was a couple, a man and a woman, in their sixties. At some point the woman got up to go to the ladies’ room, and as soon as she left the man left the table, walked over to the restaurant’s huge balcony window, and jumped out onto Broad Street.

My friend told me that after the man jumped, a waitress fainted on the floor. “I’m a wreck,” he said. “I haven’t been able to sleep ever since.” At the time I checked all the local news venues and found nothing on the incident. A man jumps from a Center City restaurant shortly after Noon, on Broad Street nonetheless, and not a single bit of information about it in the media. How is this possible? Years ago, I had heard stories about the suppression of suicide stories because of their unpleasant nature. Some news outlets don’t want to upset readers but yet they think nothing of publishing stories about mass murders and serial killers. The Center City suicide was a very public event, however. The man in question chose a public venue in the middle of the day in a crowded, popular restaurant, and he chose to jump into Broad Street, which has thousands of people and vehicles moving up and down from north to south at any given time. The choice of Restaurant XIX was also a dangerous choice because of the possibility of pedestrians on the sidewalk. What if the man had fallen on top of someone? What if his suicide led to other deaths or permanent injury? No doubt this unfortunate man wanted to create a sensation of some kind.

At the time I called Restaurant XIX to see if management would confirm that a patron had jumped from one of their windows but I didn’t get very far. “We have no comment, sir,” I was told. When I made a second call to hotel management, I was told that a man was found dead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, but there was no mention of his having jumped from the restaurant. There can no doubt that for surviving loved ones a death by suicide generates more emotion than do so called ‘natural’ deaths. Ending one’s own life is a terrifying act. Granted, it might be foolish, rash and even sinful, considering that many of life’s problems have a way of disappearing over time. But what does one say to a terminally ill person who feels that he or she has no other way? “Life is meditated suicide,” Susan Sontag once wrote. If this is true, then the person who smokes, drinks or uses drugs against specific doctors’ orders is fashioning their own homespun helium hood. Is a suicide that takes five years any different from one that takes 20 minutes? A protracted suicide may not be as dramatic as the twenty-minute exit; it may even give the impression that the person in question is being “attacked” from exterior forces, rather than “harming” themselves. Meditated suicide is also socially acceptable. How many times have you heard a person with a whisky/cigarette laden voice say (between coughs), “Oh, nobody gets out of here alive, you gotta die some way!” I’m reminded of all the men I frequently observe at my neighborhood Wawa obsessed with buying chewing tobacco. Smokeless tobacco exposes one to 25 cancer-causing chemicals, according to the American Cancer Society. Chewing tobacco is also the direct cause of throat and esophageal cancer. This is a form of meditated suicide, for sure. Some religious people affirm that suicides go directly to hell or have to pay for their transgression in the afterlife in unusual ways, but no truly spiritual person would dare pretend to know the “mind” of God in each and every case. While I generally loathe the idea of suicide, for one terrifying day back in 1994 when my mother lay dying of lung cancer, our family had to decide whether or not to follow a doctor’s advice — to give her a huge dose of morphine so that she could pass quickly and painlessly, rather than endure more torturous days. As we debated this issue amongst ourselves and prayed that “this cup would pass,” we were spared making a decision when, six hours later, Mom died in her sleep.

GOD BLESS THE SSPX, the true Catholic Church

On the Holy Land (The Garden Tomb is a Protestant Invention)

When I was in Israel eight years ago, I traveled with a group of seven female health and wellness journalists. They wrote for spa and fitness magazines. I was approved for the trip despite the fact that my travel writing at the time had nothing to do with fitness or analyzing the attributes of body massages. Massages are something you do, not write about. I wanted to see the Holy Land, float in the Dead Sea, maybe bring back some rock salt from Sodom and Gomorrah, while imagining myself 2,000 years ago on the Sea of Galilee. I also wanted to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I never got the rock salt because our press bus whizzed past the site of Sodom. We were at least able to smell the scent of sulfur, which penetrates the Dead Sea area; sulfur is also known to be the scent of Lucifer. Our tour director didn’t dare guess as to where Lot’s wife may have stood when she was changed into a pillar of salt. Certain aspects of that Israel trip hit me as significant long after I returned home. This was the harmonious relationship between Israelis and Arabs we encountered as we traveled about the country. It seems no matter where we went – restaurants, roadside cafes, farms that doubled as hotels, and even in the Dead Sea spas where we received those mud massages – there always seemed to be an evenly mixed number of Jews and Arabs living together and getting along peacefully. We never asked one another after a visit to a particular spa, “Were you massaged by a Jew or an Arab?” Then there were the children of these mixed marriages: a large swath of the population identified as Israeli-Arab. This was especially noticeable in many of the restaurants we frequented, where the waitstaff generally came from this group. This pointed to tremendous possibilities for a permanent peace among the two groups. At least the scent of peace was in the air. At the time of the trip — 2018 — there were high tensions between Israel and Middle Eastern countries. The Israel-Palestine conflict of 2018, or the Land Day Protests, began on March 30. The clash resulted in the deaths of 32 Palestinians and thousands of injuries (Israelis included) at the Gaza border. Two years prior, in 2016, there were multiple-armed attacks in Tel Aviv, including shootings and stabbings. Our press group was briefed on possible international friction during our ten-day sojourn. Some journalists who originally signed on for the trip opted to cancel at the last minute. One woman from Dallas told the group she had to keep the trip a secret from her family. Had they known she was going to Israel they would have done an intervention along the lines of “handcuffing” her to a chair. We laughed when she told us the story, but we weren’t laughing when our tour bus traveled along the West Bank, then the location of a lot of violence. We were told to sit on the left side of the vehicle should somebody from the Arab settlements — these consisted of shacks on land dotted with broken machinery, bicycles and burnt automobile wreckage — throw rocks or bombs. Other tour buses had been hit in the past but, as our illustrious Jewish tour guide explained, “Our driver is p-a-c-k-i-n-g.” At the Western Wall, I donned a white skullcap and stood in the male line. Separation of the sexes at the Wall was implemented soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. I was there not as a worshiper but as an historian. I was fully aware that the Wall was not part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, a destruction that was prophesied by Christ when in Matthew 24:2, He said, “See ye not all these things? there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Even Josephus, the Jewish historian and eyewitness to the event, recorded that the Romans who destroyed the temple left so little behind that anyone who came to the spot afterwards would hardly know that the area had once been the site of a great city. The Western Wall, in reality, was a retaining wall, built as a landscaping and anti-erosion tool when King Herod expanded the complex that included the Temple. The retaining wall has nothing to do with the temple of Solomon. The holiest site in Judaism is really the Temple Mount, the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In my white skullcap (which looked more papal than Jewish), I went to the Wall without a note to slip into the cracks but studied the crevices in the rocks, thinking of the 17-year-old survivors of the Roman siege who were sent to Egypt as slaves. Confession: I’ve always thought of myself as Jewish in spirit. When I was 20 years old nearly everybody in Boston assumed I was Jewish. These comments were frequent enough that I eventually went to my German great-aunt and asked her if we had any Jewish relatives on the Nickels side. She hesitated, hesitated some more, and then admitted she didn’t know. After visiting the Wall, I returned to the large area where the tour guide was waiting for me. We chatted a few seconds when suddenly I noticed a pair of flailing arms behind me. Accompanying the arm motions were a series of grunts and frog-like sounds. For a second I assumed it was one of the women journalists playing a joke on me, but when I saw the worried look on the tour guide’s face, I knew it wasn’t. “Don’t turn around,” she whispered, cautiously. The flailing arms then twisted into snake-like patterns, coming very close to touching my body. I quickly turned to see a chubby Israeli schoolboy, probably 12 or 13, who reminded me of the original Spanky on The Little Rascals. He wore a school uniform of sorts and a small knapsack on his back. I humored him at first, smiling – a signal that I was cool and could take a joke – but then I saw that his smile had twisted into something else. He went on like this, dancing around me in circles, his arms now enveloping the air above me, ascending and descending in great swivels as if he was performing a ritual. I backed away from him, after muttering a few phrases like “What’s up?” or humoring him further with comments like, “I feel like dancing myself,” when the vibe changed to something vaguely threatening. Not for a second did I think a chubby schoolboy like this could be a danger to anybody, but when he would not stop and actually began body bumping me, the tour guide and I moved a good distance from him. Thinking Spanky had had his fill of harassing tourists, when he followed us with his little snake dance, the tour guide yelled at him and called security. Even this didn’t stop the little bugger, although when security arrived (in less than a minute), he retreated in fear. What caused this schoolboy to react to me the way he did? I’ve thought about that many times since the incident. Although I had a small gold Russian Orthodox cross around my neck at the time (the cross was hidden under my shirt), at best he could only see the back of the chain at the nape of my neck. For all he knew it could have been the Star of David. Or an Aleister Crowley pendant. I recently did a bit of research about strange occurrences at the Western Wall and came up with quite a number of so-called anti-Christian incidents. The bulk of them seem to have happened from 2023 onwards, and perhaps my 2018 experience was a precursor to them. What has come to be a common occurrence, according to an article in Christianity Today, are encounters between Jewish radicals and evangelical Christians at the Wall. These confrontations are usually accompanied by chants of “Go Home!” What struck me as interesting about these reports is that the “Go Home” chanters are usually very young people, some as young as 13. If I had a chance to talk to Spanky today – imagining him as a mature, intelligent adult – I would tell him that even I have a beef with evangelical Christians, rather than Christians in general. “They invent stuff,” I’d say. “They invented the Garden Tomb, which they say is the burial place of Jesus Christ. It is not. The only reason they invented the Garden Tomb is because they don’t like the fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ died and was buried, is on the site of a Catholic and Orthodox church. The evangelicals couldn’t stand this fact of history, and so they did what evangelicals do best: They make stuff up. “I’d tell people like that to go home too!”

The Low Tide of Pride

Things don’t look good for the future of Pride month. Not only has a new Gallup poll found that support for same-sex marriage and relationships in the US has fallen after two decades, it was also revealed that about 65 percent of US adults believe same-sex marriage should be legal, down from 71 percent in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, 39 percent of companies backtracked on supporting Pride compared to 2024. On the other hand, several San Francisco Giants baseball players were called out by the MLB for covering up their baseball rainbow-decorated Pride caps with Bible verses. The impetus behind the warning was that any writing on baseball uniforms was forbidden, but no one is buying that excuse, especially when the entire Giants team were forced to wear the rainbow caps for Pride Night. Why would anyone who is not gay be forced to wear a Pride cap?

Senator Josh Hawley asked the same question when he wrote to MLB, reminding them that the league in 2020 put up political slogans and created patches to be sewn on uniforms that read “Black Lives Matter” and “United For Change.” Hawley also wrote that the league “suspended its own equipment rules so that players could display progressive political slogans on their cleats.” Baseball, to its credit, has always maintained a degree of common sense when it comes to far-left talking points, unlike the NFL, which long ago fell into the woke cesspit. The Pride baseball cap controversy, however, promises to accelerate the downward spiral of LGBT acceptance not only among baseball fans but among Americans who answer Gallup polls. When the question of eroding LGBT acceptance in 2026 was posted on reddit, scores of gays and lesbians seemed to agree on the root causes.

“Kids doing puberty blockers, and boys in girls’ sports are 100 percent the cause of the push back,” one man posted. “Gays are just the accepted collateral damage. The movement has been hijacked by the 1 percent who demand attention at the detriment of everyone else. This has brought backlash to the community, causing a relatively large split. Gender ideologues + ‘queer’ straight people have ruined things.” A woman posted: “What the general society doesn’t understand is the whole non-binary, gender fluid weird sh-t. It freaks them out and makes them think there’s a movement to make everyone genderless. Calling people ‘they’ is awkward and strange. I believe in respecting everyone’s wishes, but it’s that part of movement that freaks people out. And it annoys me that simple gay rights are being re-evaluated because men in dresses get upset when you call them ‘sir.’” Most Americans feel some confusion when it comes to trans issues, despite the fact that transgenderism has taken over the gay and lesbian movement. The idea that one can become the opposite sex by getting hormone therapy and making an identification wish (“I identify as a woman”) is just bad science fiction. Biological sex is not a social construct, although you can say that every human being is a composite of male and female qualities and/or mannerisms that “surface” at different times. Perhaps the most famous sex change in modern history was Army vet George William Jorgensen’s transition in 1952. Jorgensen, after becoming Christine, became an instant celebrity. In interviews after her surgery, Jorgensen expressed concern that too many people were clamoring for sex-change operations in a fad-like way. She was adamant in cautioning prospective transsexuals to be very careful before taking this irreversible step. She also stated that there were very few “real” transsexuals. In today’s world, there’s far less caution than there was in Jorgensen’s time when it comes to trans issues. Jorgensen’s warning has been forgotten. Children as young as six or eight are coming out as transgender, and they are being encouraged to do so by parents who supply them with hormones, call them “they,” or send them off as teens to sex reassignment mutilation rooms. As a boy, I sometimes took bed sheets from the family laundry closet and dressed up as a nun. I enjoyed sneaking into the woods and fields behind our country home in a long flowing veil. Indulging in such behavior did not prevent me from dressing up as a Native American chief in a full war bonnet or pretending that I was Davy Crockett in a coonskin hat. But just because I fantasized about being a nun for 30 minutes twice a year when I was 8, didn’t mean that I wanted to become a girl. Yet suppose I was that same 8-year-old boy today with woke Democratic parents who saw my nun costume as proof that I was really a girl. It’s unlikely they would dismiss my indulgence as Kiddy Fun Theater; it is more likely they would search for a physician who would ask me if I felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body. A study at Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of Children, reported that 70 to 80 percent of children who come to identify with the opposite sex lose these feelings over time. The startling fact is that too many children in the throes of gender role-play are assumed to be transgender and then put on hormone therapy routines.

Since Jorgensen’s time, there’s been a major cultural shift, as evidenced by the San Francisco Giants being forced to wear rainbow baseball caps and four years of the Biden administration’s love affair with transgenderism. ‘Coming out’ today often means coming out as transgender, not gay or lesbian. The latter is old hat; the truth is that many so-called progressive parents would rather their child be trans than gay. A trans identity comes with conventional framing: a very pretty son who would otherwise come out as gay in 1969 can now suffer the delusion that “she” fits in as a “heterosexual” faux female. The parents can also entertain this fantasy without admitting they have a homosexual son. When I think about the general public’s acceptance of LGBT issues, I recall the now famous video with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and reporter trans activist Zoey Tur. The topic was a Courage Award given to Caitlyn Jenner. Shapiro, who maintained a gentlemanly demeanor throughout the discussion, stated that transgenderism was a mental disorder, while stating that he respects Zoey as a human being but his beef was with “the philosophy” of transgenderism in general. Yet Tur called Shapiro’s criticism of transgenderism hate speech and told him, “You can cut that out or you’re going home in an ambulance.” The general audiences in America hear this sort of rhetoric, and they take note. I have watched a fair number of online videos of FTM and MTF transitions. In the MTF videos the MTF speaker often seems captivated by the cosmetic glamour of being a woman. These young men in their 20s are generally more concerned about looking sexy, than they are about the more substantive aspects of being a “woman.” The looksmaxxing fixation on cosmetic beauty (blue hair, Vogue accents, etc.) is daunting, as if being a woman was only about fashion and beauty. The focus in most of these videos is superficial and narcissistic. Ordinary Americans watch these videos, take in the message, and silently draw their own conclusions. This is especially true when a video touches on the sensitive subject of whether one should ask a trans person whether they still have a penis or a vagina. Generally, the official woke canon states that questions like this are unacceptable. The question is immediately put down as being in bad taste or “gross,” as if having a penis or a vagina had nothing whatsoever with being a man or a woman. This is what America is finding it harder and harder to accept and support. Former University of the Arts professor and author Camille Paglia addressed this question when she wrote: “Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex…. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth.” Paglia added: “…. History is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.” Regarding cultural collapse, it might be wise to recall what St. Augustine said: “It was pride that changed angels into devils; It is humility that makes men as angels.”

Rome vs. SSPX, the true Catholic Church

The visionary Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the traditional Catholic priestly fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX) in 1970, saw the future of the Catholic Church and was inspired by the Holy Spirit to do something. The Society he founded was dedicated to the preservation of the Latin Mass, and opposition to some of the Protestant innovations of Vatican II. By 1970, the pastoral Second Vatican Council (it was not an Ecumenical, dogmatic Council), had already unleashed a terrible revolution in Catholicism. Some today compare that revolution to the French Revolution in its destructive power that was not immediately apparent, although at that time anyone with “eyes” to see could have predicted what lay ahead. What happened after the closure of the Council on December 8, 1965, was tantamount to an atom bomb: Catholic seminaries, monasteries, and convents emptied out. The nuns that stayed in the Church ditched traditional habits and adopted secular dress as well as the social gospel of “inclusion” and “equity.” Liturgical life became a hodge podge of traditional and Protestant elements; church architecture was transformed as high altars morphed into Ikea kitchen tables; the Sacrifice of the Mass lost its mystical character and became a communal meal; from this concept, Communion in the hand developed.

Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ became a manufactured assembly – line process with lay people handing out the “meal” as if passing out peanut butter crackers. Some years passed, and then surveys revealed how millions of Catholics no longer believed in the Real Presence. Big shock. When you dumb down the Mass to a McDonalds-like meal celebrating “the people of God,” what you get is a shared snack devoid of mystery and reverence. Archbishop Lefebre, a true prophet, saw all of this coming. The Modernism that Pope Pius X condemned but was now being hailed as something inspired by the Holy Spirit, but a different Spirit than the One that inspired Lefebvre: clown Masses, puppet Masses, jazz Masses, Argentine Tango Masses, eucharistic ministers, altar girls, the end of Gregorian chant and its replacement with cringe sappy and sentimental hymns like, “Mary Did You Know?” Then came a deeper but just as important crisis, encouraged by Pope Francis’s Synodal Church, which was and continues to be a further radicalization of Vatican II – a Council without end – currently being championed by Pope Leo XIV who promised, come hell or high water, that he was going to continue the work of Francis. The revolutionary Synodal Church continues to elevate and promote clerics who support Jesuit James Martin’s School of Theology, making pro-LGBT theology the new Synodal standard: blessing homosexual couples without “really” blessing the relationship but blessing the “aura” around the relationship, further confusing an already confused laity who no longer believe in the Real Presence or pre-Synodal teachings on abortion, marriage and divorce, premarital sex, contraception, etcetera. It’s also true the laity don’t believe because the priests and bishops don’t believe any of these things themselves. They’ve led the way while persecuting traditional Catholics who want to preserve 2,000-year-old teachings. Consider how casual Catholicism is nowadays. You can go to Mass and receive “the symbolic snack” from an overweight lay woman with exposed cleavage the synodal Church calls a minister. Come to think of it, who needs a priest?

That old time joke, “Is the pope Catholic?” now has real meaning. The pope is Synodal, meaning he wants a new Church to supplant the old, when attitudes change. That is not Catholic according to tradition. Archbishop Lefebvre “saw” all of this coming down the pike. Perhaps he even had an inkling that the future Church under the direction of a quasi-Marxist pope (Robert Prevost) would attempt to blend with the world and its globalist robotics while championing criminal migrants and the overrunning of Europe with Islamists who would eventually seduce Catholic bishops into calling mosques sacred places and even to make room for Islamists in their churches and then call them holy spaces. Pope Leo will meet and cavort with Bad Bunny, Robert De Niro or Spike Lee and even go so far as to call the Hollywood film industry “a workshop of hope,” but he won’t meet with the SSPX. Instead, he has his Vatican henchman, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and author of the booklet “Heal Me With Your Mouth” (which sexual organ His Eminence wants to heal is anybody’s guess), issue a formal statement regarding SSPX’s plan to consecrate four bishops on July 1, 2026, and indicating that such an action would be schismatic because it defied Rome. As CRISIS magazine noted recently, “If defying Rome is all you need for schism, then parts of the Church have been in schism for decades. In large, metropolitan cities in the United States, ‘LGBTQ+’ parishes have been openly flouting Church and papal teaching on sexuality for decades – without interference. The German Synodal Way has promoted heresy and radical forms of governance that are closer to schism than anything the SSPX has indulged in – without being disciplined. The Potemkin ‘Patriotic Church’ of the PRC appoints bishops without any regard to Rome whatsoever or public protest from the Vatican.”

Meanwhile, the SSPX continues to grow. The Society’s magnificent cathedral, The Immaculata in Kansas, was built with contributions from 40 countries and 50 states. Its religious orders, seminaries, and convents are booming, all of them traditional (no nuns on the bus; no nuns in hoop earrings and pant suits, and no priests who preform stunts around the altar). CRISIS concludes, “The SSPX keeps growing not because its priests and their lay adherents are horrible monsters lusting to foment schism but because they practice a recognizable form of the Catholic Faith as it has been known historically in the West…. More to the point, the late Hans Küng published a book denying papal infallibility but still died in communion with the Church. It is difficult to see how consecrating bishops without the Holy Father’s permission is worse than denying a solemnly defined dogma concerning papal authority.” In a famous 1969 radio broadcast, Pope Benedict XVI (years before becoming Pope), predicted that the Catholic Church would undergo a massive crisis and shrink significantly. He stated, “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.”

The Church that will become small is not the new Synodal Church, but the SSPX, the true Catholic Church under siege. Thom Nickels