Culpable Mothers and the Trans Delusion (From Frontpage Magazine, Thom Nickels)

The 1965 Motown hit, First I Look at the Purse by the Contours, can be rewritten to frame the tragedy at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis with the title: First I Look at the Mother. Mary Grace Westman, who looks a lot like her son, Robert Westman, the deranged trans woman who killed 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski and wounded countless other children and three adults, was described by the legacy media as having worked at the school as an administrative assistant until her retirement in 2021. The mother — who has hired a criminal defense attorney and refuses to talk to police — was also described as a “devout Catholic” who opposed abortion and engaged in protests in front of Planned Parenthood. Yet this same mother and “devout Catholic” in 2019 petitioned the court to give Robert the legalized name “Robin.” She then encouraged friends and family to use “Robin’s” preferred pronouns. Here we have the heart of the problem: the gender ideology/pronoun movement has infected every strata of society, even infiltrating churches and changing traditional definitions of “devout.” How do you go from opposing abortion to approving and even celebrating your minor child’s wish to change his biological sex? It was mom, after all, who greased the engines to have her minor son legally identify as a female. She may have had reservations about his trans identity later on, but once the name change became legal, son Robert was well on his way to violent manifesto-land where he began to feel more and more confused and even regretted becoming trans, admitting in his “kill the children” manifesto that he should not have allowed himself to become brainwashed. Even a mentally ill killer could plainly see that he had been brainwashed. And who brainwashed him? The media, CNN, the Biden-Harris administration, the Human Rights Campaign, slogans like “Trans Rights are Human Rights,” and the false glamour attributed to men who think they can become women just by claiming they are. Add to this the fact that so many Democrats have stated publicly they cannot define what a woman is, and you have a culture resembling a southern California landslide. The Left normalizes mental illness and tries to make it look cool. In Minnesota, a so-called trans refuge state, a child can be taken away from a parent if that child — influenced by the “trans is cool” culture — announces to parents that he/she is transgender and wants treatment but the parents refuse. The state of Minnesota can also be blamed for this tragedy. As one social media commenter observed, “What do you expect when you have a lunatic kid raised in a die-hard, Democrat, progressive and liberal state? It was a disaster waiting to happen.”

Let’s also look at the complicit attitudes of clergy, both Catholic and Protestant, for not taking a stronger stand against gender ideology in the pulpit. Milquetoast clergy err on the side of caution, afraid to offend or alienate liberal members of their congregations, so they leave crucial issues like gender ideology untouched in homilies while concentrating on “benign” sins like gossip without ever mentioning serious sins that carry a heavy weight. These priests and ministers don’t mention big sins like bowing before the transgender cult’s catechism, which states children can be born into the wrong body. Clergy don’t mention these big sins because they have been normalized and politicized by Democrats. For a devout Catholic to think that helping to transition your minor child is a show of love and not a sin suggests that Catholicism is failing its believers. It’s also an indicator of how menacing and far-reaching gender ideology infiltration has become. I recently had a short conversation in my parish church with the mother of three sons. When the subject turned to politics, she announced that while she was neither right nor left, she didn’t want the government telling her — or women in general — what to do with their bodies, and she had no trouble with the use of pronouns. I backed up in disbelief. Did I hear what I had just heard? Ironically, just twenty minutes prior to our conversation and in the spot where we were standing, the air was filled with incense and chants to the Virgin Mary. Yet here was a supposedly “devout” woman defending abortion, the use of pronouns, and presumably trans surgeries. How does the smoke of worship become the smoke of feminism? If ordinary church-going women like this can become this confused about matters of faith and morals, what happens to a mentally ill 23-year-old who is told by the liberal media that Donald Trump is Hitler, a threat to democracy, and that the United States is on the threshold of fascism with concentration camps around the corner? In March of this year a number of Catholic clergy jumped on the “equality” bandwagon and released a letter with the Human Rights Campaign condemning violence against transgender people. While the condemnation of violence is always praiseworthy and the Christian thing to do, there was a larger, more obvious message in the script, since it was released and published on the Transgender Day of Visibility, a day set aside for the celebration of all things trans. In other words, the text condemning violence was hidden among the larger text that celebrated transgender identity and the freedom to be trans, whether one is an adult or a minor. Speaking at a press conference following the school attack, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said those attacking transgender people had “lost their sense of common humanity.” This is the same mayor who scoffed at praying for the murdered and the wounded at Annunciation Catholic because, in his mind, prayers really don’t mean anything. And how could they mean anything, given that the absence of religious theology is primarily responsible for the creation of far-left woke culture. Far-left woke culture has become its own established faith. This is why Mayor Frey, as observed by Bruce Bawer at FrontpageMag.com several years ago, “Abased himself at a memorial service for George Floyd, sobbing hysterically for over a minute, his entire body trembling and heaving, as he knelt by the creep’s casket…” You might call Mr. Frey’s tears far-Left theater, but they definitely were not prayers. Posturing for political gain is a more apt description.

“I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community,” Mr. Frey continued, not even two hours after the tragedy occurred. “Anybody who is using this … as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.” Maybe it’s not hate the way you understand it, Mr. Frey. Maybe what is being villainized is a sickness that is being masked as something worthy of celebration. Meanwhile on Reddit, some trans activists were celebrating the attack with comments like, “More dead Christians, lol,” and, “The trans community will not die laying down without a fight.”

One trans activist on social media even stated that there shouldn’t have been any children in that school in the first place because “we all know what priests and the Catholic Church do to children.”

Thomas Merton, Thailand, December 10, 1968

Photo from Irish American News re the article 'Was Thomas Merton Murdered? Looking into His Strange Death' by Sabina Clarke. Merton died on December 10, 1968 from an 'accidential electrocution.' (AP)

Pearl S. Buck (Broad + Liberty, Thom Nickels)

In 1988, The Washington Post reported that the Swedish Academy shocked the American literary establishment by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pearl S. Buck. “The Nobel Committee had not only passed over such obvious candidates as Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson; it had given the world's highest accolade to a former missionary and a woman. As Robert Frost remarked, “If she can get it, anybody can.”

The Post also maintained that she never again wrote anything as good as the biographies of her parents and "The Good Earth." It was also suggested that Buck wrote too much for a "serious" artist, that meaning more than 100 works of fiction and nonfiction. The Post claimed that she “wrote primarily as a secular missionary, using her Nobel status to reach as wide a public as possible.” Buck had to keep writing, The Post stated, so that “she could pay the institutional bills for her retarded child, Carol, for her dozen adopted and foster children, for the often shaky publishing house of her second husband -- and especially for her pioneering charitable enterprises.” The words “mentally retarded” were not used when I revisited the Buck house a couple of years ago. The able tour guide simply said that Carol had the mentality of a four and half year old. (The term ‘mental retardation’ is used less frequently today. For some years it was replaced by the rather cumbersome, ‘developmentally disabled’ although that term is rarely used anymore either. )

Long before the women’s rights crusader, philanthropist, humanitarian and author moved to the 60-acre estate (or Green Hills Farm) in Bucks County she lived at 2019 Delancey Street in Center City. The Delancey Street house, despite its having been occupied by the author of over 70 books and the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature for “The Good Earth,” is registered with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission as the Richard Cadwalader house. Built in 1860 for Cadwalader in the Federal style, the multiple dwelling row house was later recast in the Beaux Arts style in 1918 by the Philadelphia architectural firm of DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley. DeArmond, Ashmead & Bickley (1911-1938), all University of Pennsylvania graduates, were famous for their colonial revival residences and English-influenced style buildings. The 9,000 square foot, 5-floor townhouse was purchased in 1964 as the home of Pearl Buck and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. While the basement and first floor was renovated for use as Foundation space, the second floor was designed to house the dining room, a formal drawing room and a solarium or Sun Room, where Buck had large numbers of plants.

With the famous Rosenbach Museum and Library just a few doors away at 2010 Delancey Street, it’s no wonder that Pearl Buck saw this area as a special part of Center City. It may have been the beginning of the tumultuous sixties, but in those days Pearl Buck was referred to as “Miss Buck” and it is said that she dressed like a society matron, while in her Bucks County home she was far more informal. The octagonal-shaped dining room was lavishly decorated with a Ming screen with inlaid ivory figures. A long Chinese buffet table was also situated under a smoked glass mirror. Since the dining room also doubled as a place for dancing, the octagonal table could be rolled into a closet and the chandelier could be raised or lowered as needed. “Why did I choose Center City, you ask?” Pearl S. Buck once wrote. “Because there was a street, there was the house, there were the people. There, too, was the tradition of brotherly love…” Buck also wrote that no matter where she lived there were always elements of the Chinese. “Sooner or later into every room in any house I own the Chinese influence creeps.” At 2019 Delancey Street the 3rd floor library contained a baby grand piano, the famous “Good Earth Desk,” an ancient Chinese drum on a pedestal which acted as a coffee table, as well as leather bound editions of her books given her as gifts by her publisher. Much of the furniture was imported from the Buck house in China, namely the rose and tan Peking rugs, the blackwood chairs, and a daybed. The 3rd floor Master Bedroom had a small sitting room and a writing table. One walked through the 1st Floor entryway into a vestibule that exploded with red lacquered doors, stained glass and a large statue of the Chinese goddess of Mercy. Beyond the foyer, near the fireplace with its flanking Mandarin Chinese chairs, was an altar table flanked by two antique candelabra.

During the renovation of the townhouse in 1964-65, the first floor kitchen was moved to the basement and the former kitchen became the Foundation’s conference room. In the center of the conference room was a six foot round table made of walnut and yellow marble. Many of Buck’s Delancey Street townhouse treasures were moved to the Bucks County home when the townhouse was sold. . When Pearl S. Buck submitted ‘The Good Earth’ to one publisher in 1931 she was told that it could not be published because “the American public is not interested in anything on China.” ‘The Good Earth,’ though not the author’s first book, became a critical and popular success despite the conviction of the critic who thought the book would bore American readers. Buck wrote The Good Earth in three months after the birth of Carol, because she wanted to have enough money to support her. In 1932, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth; the Nobel Prize for Literature followed in 1938 for her genuine portrayals of Chinese life. The Nobel Prize announcement shocked writers like Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway because they felt that they were more deserving of the honor. The Good Earth went on to become the second all time best seller of the 20th Century, second to Gone With the Wind. The post-Nobel Buck also had to contend with choruses of critics pointing fingers: “Mrs. Buck is unrepresentative of American letters,” they said. “Her work in no way reflects the literary and ideological ferment of 20th Century.” The high handed insult stung, but Buck seemed to take it in stride. “Like the Chinese,” she said in her Nobel Prize address, “I have been taught to write for these people.” She meant “these people” as opposed to an intellectual elite. She was not, as some might have wished, an early Presbyterian version of the New York writer Susan Sontag. “’The Good Earth,’” said journalist Edgar Snow, “was the first book that made western countries conscious of the Far East.” Born Pearl Sydenstricker Buck in 1892 in West Virginia to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents, at 3 months old she was taken to China where she would spend the next 40 years, barring a sojourn in the United States when she went to a women’s college in Lynchburg, Virginia. She returned to China in 1914 after graduation and met John Lossing Buck. The two were married in 1917, and had a daughter, Carol. In 1925, she returned to the United States to obtain a master’s degree in English at Cornell University.

But it was the situation with Carol that plunged Pearl into a depression, and for a time she consulted specialists and doctors in the hopes that Carol could be helped. Buck wrote in her autobiography, For Spacious Skies, that she achieved a sense of peace when a specialist told her that her daughter’s condition would never change. “Listen to what I tell you! I tell you, Madame, the child can never be normal. Do not deceive yourself. You will wear out your life and beggar your family unless you give up hope and face the truth. She will never be well….She will never be able to speak properly. She will never be more than about four years old, at best. Prepare yourself….I tell you the truth for you own sake” After Pearl found an institution for Carol, she and John began adopting children in 1925. Their 18 year marriage was not a happy one although it was during this period that she began to amass the material she would use in The Good Earth. She had already published her first book, East Wind, West Wind in 1930 and was writing stories in Asia Magazine and Atlantic Monthly. Her marital unhappiness would end after the 1931 publication of The Good Earth when the book’s publisher, William Walsh of Paul Dry Books, and she became close friends. In 1934, she and Walsh would move to the U.S. and marry the following year. With Carol safely institutionalized in New Jersey, she was now free to adopt 6 more children with her new husband. Buck then bought a large old farmhouse in Bucks County and went on to write 70 books, including novels, collections of stories, poetry, and children’s literature. After The Good Earth, she wrote Sons, a tale of sons rising against their fathers as revolutionary winds swept through China. The book was viewed as a critical success; many, in fact, saw it as superior to The Good Earth. Several other novels in The Good Earth trilogy would follow. But after years of working and living in obscurity, Buck found her new found fame difficult to handle. As Peter J. Conn notes in his study on the author, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (1998): “Pearl had decidedly mixed feelings about her new found fame. She had spent too many years in the shadows to feel comfortable in the light. More to the point, she mistrusted her own talent. Although she pretended to be indifferent to hostile opinion, she was sensitive to condescension that she suffered at the hands of the serious quarterlies and advanced taste makers.” In a 1958 Mike Wallace television interview with the author, Wallace starts the questioning in true 1950s fashion by announcing, “The battle between the sexes is a major social problem.” “Yes,” Pearl Buck answered, “Most women make their home their graves.” Wallace was perplexed, even annoyed at the comment. “It’s difficult to understand how women make their home their graves,” Wallace said, to which Buck replied, “I think because they stop reading books that would enlarge their minds or their family’s minds.” “It’s also difficult to be an American,” Buck added, “We’re committed to loneliness.” “I don’t get it,” Wallace confessed. “Well, you know, the old countries have a tradition of family and church support, so there’s less choices there. Americans don’t have traditional support systems that Europeans have. They live in a country with no boundaries and no patterns.” When her autobiography, For Spacious Skies (1966), written in collaboration with Theodore F. Harris, was published, Buck appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and explained to the talk show host her feelings about Communism in China. Communism, she said, is “a curious impossible, impractical scheme of life; it’s not based on anything that’s sound psychologically….the Chinese are marvelous friends and frightful enemies.”

Pearl Buck died in Vermont in 1973 from lung cancer although she is buried on the grounds of her estate, now the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, an organization that the author founded in 1964. During my visit to the Bucks County estate, I was excited to find Andre Gide’s Journals in the massive Buck home library. I also spotted books by Morris L. West and Sloan Wilson. Thom Nickels

Gregory Tony, From Philly boy to Broward County Florida Sherriff (Broad + Liberty, Thom Nickels)

From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s Philadelphia saw a long succession of sensational murder cases and trials. Gary Heidick’s trial in 1988 ended with his execution by lethal injection in 1999. The Center City jogger murder in 1995 saw the shocking acquittal of suspects Richard Wise and Herbert Haak 3rd in 1997. Numerous other cases—the Lex Street massacre in 2000 and the Frankford slasher mystery (1985-1990)—turned the 1990s into a kind of Philadelphia Babylon. But there was another city murder at that time that seemed to slip beneath the cracks.

On May 3, 1993, 14 year old Gregory Tony, who lived at 2828 N. Hutchinson Street—ironically just 1.0 miles or a 6 minute walk from Gary Heidick’s house at 3520 N. Marshall Street—shot and killed a childhood friend, 18-year old Hector “Chino” Rodriquez with a .32 chrome-plated six shot Rossi revolver. The autopsy revealed that 6 bullet wounds had entered Rodriquez’s body: two in his chest, one in the upper left side of his back, two in the back of the head (execution style) as well as a slight grazing wound near the base of the neck. Tony was arrested on four counts: murder, possessing an instrument of crime, possession of an unlicensed firearm and carrying a firearm on a public street. Dan Christenten, the Florida Bulldog, reported that the arrest affidavits were signed by Philadelphia Homicide Detective Michael J. Gross and approved by then Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Arlene Frisk. Tony claimed he acted in self defense when he shot and killed Rodriquez on that fateful day. Eyewitnesses said a woman on crack happened to walk past them on Hutchinson Street and Rodriquez joked and said to Tony, “There goes your mom.” Other eyewitnesses stated that the person on crack passing in front of them was a man, with Rodriquez saying, “There go your uncles.” It doesn’t take a lifelong Philadelphian to know that among certain indigenous neighborhood types—rough and tough high school dropouts who tend to get in trouble with the police-- seemingly silly but insipid “insults” about somebody’s mom can lead to broken teeth, split skulls and sometimes even death. Two eyewitnesses told police that Tony, who was in the 8th grade at the time, wanted to fight Rodriquez but Rodrequez refused since he was over 5’11” tall and weighed 262 pounds, while Tony was a mere 5’9” and weighed 140. Tony claims that Rodrequez pulled a gun and threatened to shoot him, and in order to save his life he ran into his house and returned with his father’s gun and shot Rodrequez six times. “Hector, my brother and I were all in front of our house when we got into an argument,” Tony said in a statement. “At one point, he pulled his gun threatening us, saying he didn’t have any issues with shooting us there. I remember how scared I was when he chased me and my brother into our house, I ran to grab my father’s gun and fired it before Hector was able to shoot his gun.” The eyewitnesses who saw Tony shoot Rodrequez could not corroborate the latter’s self defense story.

Since juvenile offenses in Pennsylvania are considered acts of delinquency rather than a crime, the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. Gregory Tony was by law veiled in absolute secrecy for the next 27 years. Nevertheless, with the release of the eyewitness accounts about how and why Tony shot Rodriguez six times, not to mention the news about the autopsy findings and the recovery of the five of the slugs from Rodriguez’s body, the evidence against Tony seemed airtight. Why Tony was found not guilty of killing Rodriguez remains a mystery. The lack of juvenile court records about the case makes the answer unknowable. The court file was ordered sealed by the judge, and no court records about it are public. Another factor is that the eyewitnesses never got a chance to testify at the trial because the Philly DA’s Office was supposed to contact the family when it came time to testify at Tony’s trial but that never happened. As a result, there were no eyewitnesses at the trial and Tony was not charged. Fast forward to 2025 with Gregory Tony comfortably enshrined as the Sheriff of Broward County, Florida, a position he was appointed to in 2019 by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Reporter Christenten maintains that Tony, a lifelong Democrat, not only misled DeSantis to secure the position but lied on his employment application to the City of Coral Springs Police Department by failing to report unpaid traffic citations, his checkered drug history (LSD) as well as his arrest for the murder of “Chino” in 1993.

Since his appointment by DeSantis, Tony, with his gym-buff body and piercing eyes, became known as “Teflon Tony.” Many of his critics like to say he began to exude an air of black privilege as he posed for photos with his model-looking wife on social media while boasting of his time spent at swingers’ clubs. Photographs appeared of Tony and his wife laughing it up in bed with other singles and couples. Earlier this year, the Florida Bulldog reported how Tony gave each member of his executive staff a posh gold ring with diamonds and emeralds. Tony claims the rings were not paid for with taxpayer money but would not say how he funded them. Back in 2020, the Broward Sheriff's Office Deputies Association Union President Jeff Bell formally wrote a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis, asking that he remove Sheriff Gregory Tony. West Palm CW34 reported that the letter came after a public protest was held calling for the sheriff's firing. "In the past month,” Bell wrote to DeSantis, ”there have been numerous revelations about the character and sworn statements made by Gregory Tony that not only would have prevented him from being appointed sheriff, but would have prevented him from ever being a law enforcement for any agency in the state of Florida.” Bell then went on to say how Sheriff Tony never reported to any law enforcement about his arrest for a homicide when he was 14. He also mentioned how Tony lied on several applications for law enforcement positions, made no mention of his past felony drug use of LSD, unpaid traffic tickets, his criminal record for writing bad checks, and his false claims of rank and certifications that he never held. Bell added that Tony also knowingly provided false information on Florida Department of Law Enforcement applications as recently as January 2020.

Bell concluded that, "Gregory Tony could not successfully submit an application for a law enforcement job in 2004 and still could not qualify to be hired as a police officer by today’s standards.” Tony, however, weathered calls for his resignation but continued to ruffle feathers. According to NBC 6 South Florida and the Sun Sentinel, in 2005, Tony “forgot” to mention the LSD when applying to Coral Springs PD. FDLE later said he lied multiple times on official documents about drug use, citations, and arrest history. Statute of limitations saved him from prosecution. Known for his short temper—he once publicly cursed at deputies when they questioned his leadership at a police officer’s funeral—after Trump’s election he announced he would not cooperate with ICE in its crackdown on illegal immigration, stating that his only concern was crime. In June 2025, Tony announced, “We're not knocking on doors. We're not snatching kids from daycare.” This Philly boy who made it good in south Florida despite his hidden homicide record became part of a breaking news story a couple of weeks ago. In front of television cameras he attacked Deerfield Beach City Manager Rodney Brimlow, accusing him of playing politics and blocking a new contract Tony wanted to sign with the city for police and fire services. Tony wasted no words: “You tell me if I should go absolutely nuclear on this and destroy him [Brimlow] because I have the power of this office to do a lot of damage to individuals, but I have safeguarded and protected my personal temperament. Even when I was on the chopping ax and people attacked me, I kept my professional decorum, and I led this agency the right way.” Brimlow took this as a threat on his life and filed a police report to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement alleging that Tony threatened him and he feared for his life, however the FDLE examined the evidence and concluded that no threat was ever made. Once again, Tony survived what could have ended his career. The former Philly boy has also been courting the radical Muslim community. In May of this year he hosted and posed for photos with several radical Muslim clerics after he led a tour of the Broward County National Security Training Center. Among the men on tour was Imam-Sheik Ibrahim Dremali, a Muslim Brotherhood operative, and Rasheed Mahamad, Director of the Islamic Center of South Florida. Dremali is a cleric who has called for the eradication of Israel’s Jews. In June 2025 he posted photos of bombed out apartment buildings in Israel with the statement: “This destruction is not in Gaza, but this bombing is in Tel Aviv. O Allah, increase the bombing and destruction and take the lives of those in it." Who knows what Tony’s future holds, but with his track record it is unlikely that future will not be without ugly controversy. One thing is certain: He would certainly feel at home in Mayor Parker’s Philadelphia. Immediately after her election Mayor Parker established a special department in City Hall for Islam and then codified Muslim Day as an annual celebration at City Hall. Why do Muslims get a special day in City Hall and not Lutherans or Baptists? Perhaps the answer lies in some form of quid pro quo formed during the mayoral campaign when a group, Muslims for Parker, was formed. Now, as they say, the mayor is giving back. End-Note: The growth of Islam in Philadelphia can be traced to the 1970s, when missionaries from the Nation of Islam filled City Hall courtyard handing out a newspaper called Muhammad Speaks. The newspaper was noted for its black nationalist views and its chronic condemnation of the white man and the white race. Every day black men in meticulously tailored suits, sunglasses and short military haircuts distributed these broadsides of hate. Apathetic liberal white Philadelphians looked the other way, never dreaming that within fifty years you would have news outlets like the Israel Resource Review calling Philadelphia City Hall, “Caliphate Hall.” Thom Nickels

An Anti-Israeli Activist Posing as a NUN (Frontpage Magazine, Thom Nickels)

A few years ago a learned Russian Orthodox priest-acquaintance of mine told me what he thought of a certain nun who was making waves in Europe with her radical political views. The nun in question was located in Vienna, and her name was Sister Vassa, a Russian Orthodox sister educated at Fordham University, a Jesuit school noted for its progressive theological views. “You must be careful with nuns,” the priest said, ponderously. “Many of them drift into areas that are far away from anything having to do with their original religious vocation.”

It wasn’t long before Sister Vassa’s role as political activist eclipsed her vocation as a nun; as a result, she was defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church. Recently, another attention-seeking Orthodox nun kicked her religious vocation to the curb to become an anti-Israel political activist. She is a little nun with a mustache, Mother Agapia Stephanopoulus, who has lived in the Holy Land since 1996 and who created a firestorm of sorts as a result of her recent interview with Tucker Carlson on what life is like for Christians in the Holy Land. Mother Agapia’s message: life is horrible for Christians in the Holy Land, and it’s all Israel’s fault. Watching the show, my first thought was: who is this vintage troll doll dressed as a nun who makes controversial statements and lies with such a wide smile? Words poured out of her effortlessly, yet Tucker did not challenge or contradict her in any way. He barely asked her anything about her background, such as why she left the United States in the mid-nineties under suspicious circumstances. No questions about how, in 2000, when she was Sister Stephanopoulos, she barricaded herself inside a Russian Orthodox property in Jericho until she had to be forcibly removed. Writer Daniel Mael recapped that incident for The Geopolitical Maelstrom: “U.S. diplomats were forced to intervene after she allegedly leveraged her brother George’s White House connections. A local real-estate fight became an international incident. The method was clear even then: insert yourself into conflict, cloak it in religious language, and trust that drama and family connections would amplify the cause.”

Mael goes on to write that two years later, in 2002, Sister Stephanopoulos circulated a grotesque story claiming Israeli soldiers had raped Palestinian girls. “The source turned out to be a Palestinian schoolboy’s invention. Even the conspiracy-friendly WorldNetDaily, not known for pro-Israel sympathies, retracted it. This was no misunderstanding. It was a calculated smear intended to inflame hatred. She never apologized, never retracted, never admitted the damage that such a charge could inflict.” After the Tucker interview, journalists were calling Mother Agapia a Russian Orthodox nun, but Orthodoxy tends to cause confusion — even among those who think they know everything about Christianity. The woman is Greek Orthodox. Greek, as in Stephanopoulus. Her famous brother, the contentious George, the so-called Greek Orthodox media star (sued by Trump) who supported Kamala Harris and her party’s anti-Christian stand on abortion and gender ideology, seems to be cut from the same cloth as Mother Agapia. Their father, the now-deceased) Protopresbyter Father Robert Stepanopoulus (“Father Bob”), was the Dean of the GO Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York. Their paternal grandfather was yet another Greek Orthodox priest, Fr. George Stephanopoulus, the media star’s namesake. Tucker’s interview with Mother Agapia was a disaster from the start. How could anyone living in the Holy Land since 1996 not know that the Wailing Wall is not a part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD? As a first time tourist in Israel ten years ago, I encountered this “Israel for Dummies” fact blurted out by our able tour guide. The Wailing Wall was not part of the temple itself, but rather a retaining wall for the Temple Mount upon which both the first and second temples stood. Tucker, perhaps mesmerized by the ‘talking’ movement of the nun’s mustache, let her ramble on. As the sister of George, the media star, it was only a matter of time before she brought up Trump. And it didn’t take long.

She said she was no fan of Trump, and Tucker let that comment slip by without jumping in and asking if she, as a person in religious life, favored the Democrats and their pagan agenda over the obviously more Christian Republican platform. How could he let that fly by? Then Mother Agapia referenced October 7 as “the October event,” and that Hamas was a resistance group. Traditionally, the phrase “resistance group” has a noble, romantic connotation; one tends to think of the French Resistance during WWII and martyrs dying for a worthwhile cause. And yet here was a person in religious life calling Hamas a resistance group — as if their cause is noble. “I don’t think it’s Islamic terror that’s taking place in the first place,” she said, justifying Hamas for the “October event”. “Hamas are people who have had their homes taken from them, who, if they live in Gaza, have…basically been in an open air prison for certainly the last 20 years going on…” I was certain at this point that everyone named Stephanopoulus must be Trump-hating contrarians, and that their lack of awareness about the state of the world can be detected in the thickness of their Neanderthal eyebrows. The pro-Palestinian activist nun then went on to claim that Israeli Defense Forces intentionally bombed the church of the Holy Family In Gaza. “You can’t make a mistake….nothing is an accident,” she said, despite a later investigation by Israeli authorities that termed the hit “a misfired munition.” Then she claimed that Israelis hate Americans — despite a recent Pew Research Center poll indicating that 83% of Israelis have favorable opinions of the United States. Another big claim she made was that Israel was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 — when in fact the opposite is true. Israeli leaders at that time wanted the Bush administration to focus on the Iranian nuclear threat, not Iraq. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even urged President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq in a meeting in Washington. When the Tucker interview was first published, it not only went viral, but created a slight sensation on Orthodox social media. On one Facebook feed the Orthodox administrator warned those making comments to not criticize the little nun’s looks, meaning of course that she had a mustache and even seemed to wear it with pride. “How can she not know she has a mustache?” one commenter wrote, while the Facebook page administrator warned it is never correct to make fun of a monastic person’s looks even though the monastic in question, as many have observed, proved to be a prime example of religious authority driven by political hatred.

The AIDS EPIDEMIC, A talk delivered at the Franklin Inn Club, 2015

When AIDS became a full blown epidemic in 1981-82, times were so frightening I sometimes wished that I could fall asleep and then, like Rip Van Winkle, wake up when it was over. Since that could never be, I had to deal with the fact that a mysterious virus was killing gay men, and that my own life was at risk. The fact that there were still more questions than answers regarding the virus meant that gay men had to question every form of intimacy, be it saliva exchange during a simple kiss to more complicated forms of personal interaction. I first heard of AIDS on a street in Center City from Henry, an RN who sometimes crusied city streets dressed as a drag queen or a Catholic nun. Henry, his eyes as big as saucers, said, “They just found out that gay sex causes the brain to rot.” The look in his eyes was one of sheer terror but I did not believe him. At the time we were looking into a shop window at 13th and Walnut Streets after celebrating a boy’s night out that ended with a sumptuous omlette at one of the local greasy spoons. I assumed the pronouncement was just another one of Henry’s sick jokes. Henry told me he read about the new disease in The New England Journal of Medicine. This was some weeks before the iconic New York Times article about a strange gay cancer. Those early days for most gay men were quite confusing. Many of us were still basking in the libertine shadow of the 1970s. It was a naughty and undisciplined time when the worst that could happen to a fellow was a case of the clap or syphillis, but even these misfortunes were easily fixed with a shot of penicillian—and a band-aid, of course, in case the test needle brusied the skin. The baths in those days had health clinic nights when medical personnel offered free blood tests for STD’s. It was standard procedure for customers to fly in and out of clinic nights, then don a towel and join in on the Satyricon fantasy. Some years before, in the city of Boston—where I came out at age 18—I found the alchemists cure for years of teenage sexual repression: the gay bar, then an institution often raided by the police but at the same time frequented, in Boston at least, by the likes of Neueue, Robert Mitchim and even a very drunk Judy Garland. In Boston I’d take occasional Greyhound bus trips to Manhattan to the ritzy Continental baths where a brassy woman entertainer—a young unknown by the name of Bette Midler—inrterrupted the action with a lounge act that would soon go viral. I remember Bette Midler as a blob-like figure with a micrcophone as Barry Manilow played the piano. Meanwhile, back in Boston in the Brahim townhouses of the well connected, there was the occasional public orgy, an after hours event that would be advertsied by loud calls just before the bars closed at 2 AM: “Orgy at 72 Pickney Street, Beacon Hill!” You can’t make this stuff up, as they say. These were not BYOB events but, as they say, living life to the fullest, tapping into what poet Arthur Rimbaud called the “derangement of the senses,” even if the one orgy I attended was only as an observer—today I would compare that observer status to being an interfaith guest at the Second Vatican Council. At this particular party, I was sitting off to the side on a sofa beside a young Alan Helms, then a twenty-six year old ex New York actor turned Boston University English progessor, who would go on to write a well known scandulous memoir of the period, Young Man from the Provinces, a book praised by Gore Vidal, Terrence McNally and Edmund White. On page 149 Helms relates how he met me at this orgy, referring to yours truly as a sweet young painter with a terrible, terrible case of acne. Ouch! As it happened, I left the orgy not at all impressed by the pile of twisted, discombobulated bodies, in which nobody apparently left satisfied or happy. When it was confirmed that the new disease was caused by sex, I cut and slashed abuses in my romantic life with the vehemence of a Milton Freedman or an Alan Greenspan offering cuts to federal programs. The discipline did me good; the problem, however, were reports that said the disease had a long latency period, meaning that what I did five years ago could conceivably come back to haunt. Marks of the new disease could appear overnight: while stepping out of the shower or putting on a pair of socks one might notice a pimple or a bruise with the medical name, Kapsi sacaramoa. These were dreadful, scary times.

My friend, Steve McPartland, was in his mid-twenties and on the verge of what probably would have been a successful ice skaing carrer when he broke his back on the ice. I met Steve while working at Chester County Hospital when I lived in West Chester, PA. Steve had just discovered that he was gay and wanted someone to talk to, so I introduced him to my partner and we three became friends. Not many years later, Steve became one of the first men in Philadelphia to contract AIDS. Reality hit home in a big way for me when I saw a picture of him in a hospital bed on the front page of the Philadelphia Gay News. The year was 1983, well before there was a test to detect the virus or even a drug to ward off secondary infections of the immune system. It took Steve about two years to die. Although he eventually left the hospital, he became a common sight on the streets of Center City, hobbling along on his crutches, an AIDS buddy by his side. His slow demise was difficult to process. I last saw him on Spruce Street one summer still on crutches eating a vanilla ice cream cone. Even then I had to wonder as I stood talking to him, “If I lean over and take a lick, will I become infected myself?” Almost immediately after Steve’s death, the names of the sick and deceased in the gay press seemed to quadruple. We were now in the grip of a plague, first known as Gay Cancer, then GRID (Gay Related Immune Defiency), and finally AIDS. Albert Camus’ novel The Plague had nothing on this thing. A disease caused by sex that eats the brain and that also puts ugly marks on your body was now causing some people to suggest that AIDS patients be quaranteened. What would this mean, I wondered: would all gay men be forced into medical camps? Fast forward thirty years or so when I found myself in a middle row seat on a U.S. Airways flight from Philadelphia to San Fransciso. I’m thinking of Steve while reviewing a program booklet entitle The Evolution of HIV/AIDS Therapies, a short panel disccusion due to take place at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California. The seminar focused on the progress achieved in HIV therapies, as well as the global challenges still to be met. I’m traveling with two representatives of the event’s co-sponsor, what was then known as the Philadelphia’s Chemical Heritage Foundation, an independent nonprofit dedicated to chemistry and to helping science find ways to help meet contemporary social challenges. I don’t know whether my two CHF colleagues on board had friends who died of HIV-AIDS. I didn’t ask them, my head being too full of the faces of other buddies who died of the disease, like Dr. William H. Miller who was a Harvard med student when I met him in Harvard Square’s Cambridge Common.

Bill Miller was from Ashville, North Carolina, birthplace of American novelist Thomas Wolfe. and attending Harvard Med with the aim of going into general practice. We met years before AIDS came on the scene when we were both twenty years old. Boys, basically. Later, Bill would fill me in on the life of a Harvard med student and tell me stories like how his personal lab dissection shark fell from a shelf into his lunch, ruining a good Liverwrust sandwich. He also told me how he was planning to move in with a heterosexual couple in Boston’s Roxbury section. A little later, he left for Tacoma, Washington, to do his residency program. I never saw him again although for years Bill and I kept in touch through letters and postcards. He’d send me pictures of his exotic travels to Vienna, Paris, or Central America. After that we lost touch, not an unusual situation when friends take divergent paths. But years later, in a Hitchockian twist, I met an edlerly Seattle physican through a friend of a friend and on a whim, asked him if he had ever heard of a North Carolina-born physiciam named Dr. Miller in the Tacoma area. The Seattle physician told me that he’d been a friend of Bill’s for years and had even gone to parties in Bill’s Washington state forest cabin, but that, tragically, Bill had died of AIDS some nine years before. Gay but in the closet, the Seattle MD was a sort of society physican, tall with white hair, very patrician-like whose company women found especially compelling. He told me more about Bill than I needed to know after which he went on to explain a few things about himself, one of them being the time he gave a physical examination to Robert F. Kennedy—father of RFK Jr.-- when the latter campaigned for president. Kennedy took sick in Seattle and needed a doctor. “Robert Kennedy was the nastiest patient I’ve ever examined,” my physician friend told me. “A nasty man, however when he took off his shirt I noticed that he had pure white chest hair while not a single strand of the hair on his head was white. That’s when I knew that he would not live long” Although there’s zero medical logic to such an equation, the Seattle doc insisted that every patient he’d examined who had white chest hair but normal head hair had died shortly after he gave them a physicial examination. Kennedy, in fact, was killed in Los Angele’s Ambassasor Hotel three weeks later. I thought that I had processed the deaths of Bill and Steve long ago, but here I was at 3 0,000 feet going through an emotional rolodex of sorts, as if the word ‘evolution’ in the program title had somehow got me thinking about the past. Whatever it was, I knew there would be more memories once I was front and center at the Moore Foundation to hear Gregg H. Alton and Norbert W. Bischofberger, both from Gilead Sciences, and Sir Richard G.A. Feachem and Paul A. Volberding, from the University of California. At the conference, Volberding jolted the audience with recollections about walking around San Francisco General Hospital in the early days and seeing the first person with Kaposi Sarcoma. “It was literally the start of the epidemic,” he says. “It took a while before we realized it was an infectious disease, but once we did there was terror because we didn’t know how it was transmitted. So there was a sense of personal risk in dealing with the patients.”

It was a common pratice for men with AIDS to cover their KS spots with Clearasil tubes or Cover Girl maleup sticks but often the blemish scabs were so pronounced, it was impossible to cover them. In the grainy, gamey world of pornopgraphic films of the period, the reality of AIDS hit hard: Popular Adonis actor Eric Stryker, for instance, failed to hide the KS spots on his body despite a heavy application of makeup. Viral infections like pneumonia, herpes and KS were secondary infections and they could only be treated with drugs that addresed these secondary symptons, but treating the immune system as a whole went unattended, meaning that the infections came back until they killed the patient. KS was particularily devastating in that it was external, a blatant Scarlet Letter that told the world that you had the plague. Prior to AIDS, KS was mostly a skin condition seen in the very old Eastern European or Mediteraran men. First described in 1872 by a Hungarian dermatologist named Moritz Kaposi, non-AIDS related KS was seen as being caused or affected by infrequent bathing, or as a condition that hit people with a history of asthma and allergies. To date, AIDS-related KS is rarely seen in children and is most prominent in Africa and other underdeveloped countries. In the early days of the epidemic, health paranoia affected familes and destroyed relationships. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, many straight people no longer invited their gay friends to dinner, and some stopped seeing them altogether. Relatives stopped kissing their gay sons or siblings on the mouth, and even had worried looks on their faces when they kissed them on the cheeks, as if the virus hibernated in pores or blew out of the nostrils in the nose. City dentists began to be wary of their gay patients and imagined weight loss when there was none. “You look awfully thin,” my dentist said to me several times, “Are you sure you are alright? Are you sure? Really? Are you sure?” This Q and A went on for several years. Many times I felt he wanted me to say, “No, I am not alright, I am dying right before your eyes,” so that he could tell me to go find another dentist. Because relatives and straight friends were always imagining weight loss when there was none, even these simple questions led to nights of unnecessary worry and panic because of the ‘What If’ factor. Then there was the mosquito factor. One summer, the woman instructor of my evening aerobics class, agonzied for weeks over whether mosquitos can transfer the tainted blood of AIDS patients into the bloodstreams of healthy people as they fly from person to person. Not an unreasonable fear, I suppose, but her fear was so profound that she stopped going out dancing with me in the gay discos, where there were no mosquitos but where dance floor perspiration might be a cause for concern. Discrimination and fear even reached into the corridors of hospitals, especially Ward 54 in San Francisco General, the so called AIDS wing, where so many young men died. Volberding recalls: “We heard horrible stories of patients who had to get up and change their own beds during the night, the night sweats, and would have to go beg for Tylenol from the nursing station. Not to say that that was common, but it happened often enough that we found ourselves doing a lot of work putting out those fliers. It just became clearer and clearer that this was a very complex disease, and we were going to see more of it.” “People went blind,” Volberding continued, “and were unable to care for themselves, while caught in the middle was the social issue and the fact that they were gay and families would often descend on the deathbed and try to take over the care from the lover.” How many times did I hear of familes preventing the partners of dying sons from visiting them in the hospital? The stories were endless, of men who had spent years together suddenly told that their relationships didn’t matter.

In an oral history interview that was not presented as part of the conference, Volberding recalls the general paranoia among physicans. “There was about a year and a half period where the anxiety was so great that AIDS was just not permitted as a discussion item at home. There was so much anxiety attached to it that if I'd say, "Gee, I'm worried about taking care of these patients. I'm worried I have a fever, maybe this is PCP," my wife, Molly, wouldn't let me talk about it. I got calls from other people. A physician friend (Jerry Groopman) when he was still at UCLA called me once and said, "I've got it." He had developed a hepatitis and a fever, and was absolutely convinced (incorrectly, of course) that he had caught AIDS. So I really do think that that period at the end of '82, and then all of '83, into '84 until we had the [HIV antibody] test available, was a high stress period for us, with a lot of anxiety.” In the 1980s I had a biweekly column in Philadelphia’s Welcomat, where I wrote about gay issuess, both personal and political, for a straight audience. When fellow Welcomat writer, Patrick Hazzard, wrote a piece suggesting that gay men brought the disease on themselves, ACT UP raided the offices of then editor Dan Rottenberg and demanded an editorial retraction or that Hazzard be fired. When none of those things happened—the philosophy of the Welcomat was to publish a variety of opinions on different issues---ACT UP called for a boycott of the newspaper and suggested that all gay Welcomat writers resign in protest. One food writer did resign but I did not. Because I did not resign, minor trouble followed, such as getting shoved by activists in the street, though little else—besides not getting invited to parties-- happened to me. Years later, Philadelphia ACT UP leader Scott Tucker personally apologized to me for his treatment of me at this time.

Steve McPartland died before the discovery of AZT in 1987, even if AZT was no panacea but a drug with a host of unwanted toxic side effects. “AZT was a troubled introduction,” Volberding adds, “it had to be given 4 hours around the clock.” He tells the assembly about a San Francisco community health seminar he attended at the time, and how the room erupted in beeps when 4, 8 and 12 o’clock rolled around because people had to take the drug in 4 hour intervals. “There were some benfits to AZT, but not many,” he adds. That’s an understatement. AZT, in fact, was developed by Burroughs Wellcome, a British Pharmaceutical firm, from on old compund they had sitting around on their shelves. AZT was developed from in 1964 from herring-sperm extract as a possible cancer treatment but was quickly discounted as too toxic. But it was given new life when it was packaged as a drug that would help delay the onset of AIDS in healthy people infected with the virus. When this happened, the Burroughs Wellcome stock surged to the heavens, in effect capturing the entire scientific community so that there were no scientists left to explore the possibility of other drug treatments. AZT at that time was the most expensive prescription drug manufactured, and the campaign supporting its useage was the biggest government medical research project in history. The drug itself was referred to by one AIDS activist, comedian Michael Callen, as “Drano in pill form.” Patients who took AZT had to have weekly blood transfusions and suffered from nausea and insominia while their bodies wasted away to skin and bones. When British scientists discovered that AZT could only provide 6 months of benefits before the treatment backfired and started killing the patient, the information was not only ignored by the American press but AZT continued to be encouraged by a government appointed physician, Margaret Fischl, who urged the 650,000 Americans infected with HIV to continue taking the drug despite yet another finding: a National Cancer Institute report that stated that at least one half of the people who had taken AZT for 3 years could expect to develop an aggressive form of lumphoma, a deadly cancer. According to an article in The Miami Herald in 1990, AIDS acitivts were onto the Burroughs-Wellcome stranglehold on the development of new AIDS drugs early in the game, and began calling Fischl a murderer. For years Fischl’s hospital answering machine waas flooded with messages from familes of the deceased accusing her of killing their sons. Panel member Paul Volberding worked with Dr. Fischl at this time, and spoke out in defense of AZT then on a number of occasions. This fact was not mentioned or alluded to at the conference, although Volberding continues to defend his early support of AZT. “I remember how the world changed when AZT arrived,” he said in the 1990s. “It was a potentially toxic drug, but it brought the first real light of hope back into people’s eyes. It had demonstrable activity against HIV, and, most important, some AIDS patients who took AZT actually got better. You could literally watch skeletal bodies flesh out to three-dimensional forms. In conjunction with therapies that helped prevent other infections, for the first time, patients began to live a little longer than the nine-to-11-month life span to which they had been destined before.” 1996 saw the first large trials of triple therapy, namely Protease inhibitors being combined with various side drugs, that turned the disease around. These were the infamous cocktail drugs, sometimes amounting to thirty pills a day, While AZT killed the virus quickly, it caused the viral strains it didn’t kill to multiply fast, thereby giving them immunity. The cocktails went after these strains and made sure they did not multiply, increasing a patient’s chances of getting down to a viral load of zero, or the eradication of killer strains. For many, like Steve McPartland and novelist Paul Monette (whom I once interviewed by phone as he lay dying of AIDS in his home in Los Angeles screaming through the receiver about the heartlesness of then President Ronald Reagan and the pharmaceutical industry in working to find a cure), this development came too late. ( Monette, incidentally, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1992 for his autobiography, “Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story.” The writing of this memoir, Monette claimed, “literally kept me alive after my AIDS diagnosis. Although he thought that “Becoming a Man” would be his last book, he went on to write “Last Watch of the Night,” before his death at age 49, while hooked up to three intravenous tubes. Monette, in fact, described his repressive middle class childhood in Massuchesstes this way: “Never lost my temper, never raised my voice. A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.” But thanks largely to ACT UP—which did some fine work aside from its misguided raid of the Welcomat--the pharmaceutical world was forced out its apathetic slumber. Steve McPartland and Monette would be shocked, were they able to come back to life today, on hearing Volberding say how managebale the disease has become: “With my patients now who are motivated and take the drug, it is as easy to treat as hypertension.” . THOM NICKELS ”

Where formalwear meets flip-flops, Broad + Liberty

Philadelphia is basically a “dress down” kind of town, where it’s not unusual to see theater and concert-going patrons in casual clothes bordering on the “rustic.” By “rustic” I mean torn or split jeans; corduroys with holes or stains, or shirts that resemble lumber yard work frocks.

I sometimes think the “dress down” style here has something to do with the city’s Quaker heritage. The original Quakers liked “plainness” over ornate or showy materials. New Yorkers have often observed Philadelphia’s penchant for “dress down” attire, especially when it comes to theater audiences. A long time ago I remember reading a New Yorker article about Philadelphia men wearing bib overalls to the theater. Bib overalls, of course, are what farmers in the country wear. You don’t expect to see men in bib overalls when attending opening night in one of the city’s major theaters. When it comes to dress, Philadelphia is also a city of extremes. Consider the class of men who like to wear bow ties. These fellows can be any age; they can be prep school grads, conservative Republicans (or even global elite Democrats), men from Old Money, rich suburban families or even men who aspire to attain something of what wearing a bow tie seems to suggest: sophistication beyond the pale. In some cases, a bow tie can looked affected, although wearing the right bow tie with a nice Seersucker suit is a sure way to suggest money and class. Suspenders are another specialty dress item. They can look like the Farmer in the Dell or just downright cool, depending on what they are holding up. I wore suspenders as a boy with white shirts and a small checkered bow tie. To get my attention sometimes or to make a point, my mother would snap my suspenders. Perhaps that’s why I opted to stop wearing them, although it may also have been because suspenders were sometimes known to come undone in violent recoil that had me holding up my trousers for dear life. To this day whenever I see somebody in suspenders I experience a slight urge to snap them. As for bowties, we wore them in parochial school as an alternative to the sometimes (boring) necktie.

I grew up when boys and men wore ties to school, church and work, when shirts were tucked into trousers in the classic Brooks Brother’s mode rather than left to hang over trousers like untailored drapery. Today it is fashionable among many twenty-something men to wear shirts--- dress, casual or grunge--- hanging over their trousers, a fashion trend started years ago by overweight designers who wanted to hide the huge expanse of their waist line. A tucked in shirt, after all, accentuates body image. Many, but not all, younger men go to extreme lengths to avoid wearing sports jackets and suits. I have seen these guys under dress at social and press events where almost everyone present is wearing a jacket and tie. What amazes me is how these guys don’t seem to care that they stand out like boiler room janitors or party crashers. Don’t get me wrong. I love old, sloppy clothes. Weather-beaten clothes are fun to wear around the house and to do work in. I tend to wear one work shirt, for instance—something I bought at the local thrift store—that is starting to sport holes, but because I like the shirt I have come to regard it as my work uniform. But I wouldn’t go to a museum exhibition opening in it.

When I was in my twenties I began to think of wearing suits and ties as the province of old men. You know the look: oversized sheen jackets, fat clown ties, neatly pressed baggy trousers and shiny black shoes that reflect up. My beloved old great aunt, who once corresponded with Clare Booth Luce and knew Connie Mack, expected me to dress in a tie whenever I visited her in Cathedral Village, a retirement/nursing home in Roxborough. Sometimes I complied, although I would only put the tie on when I entered the Village, and never wore it on the bus going there or returning home. There were other times when, out of stubbornness, I would decide, “NO tie for great aunt!” so I’d visit her with an open collar. At no time, however, did I visit her with my shirt hanging out of my pants like those hipster exhibition janitors. My great aunt, who was born in 1895, had no time for an open collar, while an open collar to me was a beautiful thing (like reading the poetry of Walt Whitman), especially in the summer. The prospect of having lunch with me with my open collar in the Cathedral Village dining room once drove her to tears. In her panic to make me look presentable she suggested that I wear one of her broaches in place of a tie. Of course, it not being Halloween, I did a double take. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring the tie,” I said. “I will next time, if it means that much to you, but I’m going nowhere near that broach.” We decided on a compromise: I would button the top button and leave it at that. Later, however, I saw that I was being unfair to her and so I made the decision that if a tie made her happy, why not wear one, especially if she’s paying for lunch? Through the years I’ve come to realize that when it comes to dressing for events, it’s always better to be over dressed than under. In some cases it’s actually possible to do both, as hybrid dress configurations like the sports jacket/ sweater/ jean combination manages to bypass any suggestion of janitorial influences.

Suits and jackets today have lost the Sponge Bob Square look of yesteryear, thanks to certain European influences like shorter, tighter jackets, slimmer trousers and slim ties. Of course, there are things I’d never wear, even if found myself (during a theoretical Apocalypse, say) crawling on all fours in the streets in a search for water and food rations. The items include: (1) sweat pants and sweat suits, which should never be worn outside a gym or the backyard. (2) Flip flops: No self respecting man should wear flip flops in the city (the beach is okay). There’s no sadder sight in contemporary life than watching a grown man in flip flops trying to descend the EL steps at Girard and Front after getting off the EL. Please don’t think of me as a fashion expert. I flunked a big test several years ago when I went to cover a Royal Oak Foundation lecture, The Day Parliament Burned Down, in the Grant Room of the Union League. As I entered the building, I stopped by a UL overseer who asked, “Do you have jeans on?” I might have been carrying zip lock weed from Colorado, judging from her full frontal lunge in the direction of my shoes. “No, mam,” I said, respectfully, “In fact, my natural tendency is to overdress. I am wearing dress Levi’s from the Port Richmond Plaza thrift store to match this very hard to find Calvin Klein corduroy jacket.” “You are wearing jeans,” she said, patently ignoring the Lauren sweater, Italian shoes and a dress belt from Helsinki. A fashion debate then ensued at which point the overseer mused, “So far this evening we’ve had to turn away 16 people.” “Sixteen?!” I exclaimed, happening to glance over at a man on a lobby bench in the act of removing his jacket, when like a flash of lightning the overseer pointed at the culprit and said for all to hear, “Please do not remove your jacket, sir!” Two men behind me, also wanting to know how and why Parliament burned down, wore skinny peg ties (think Pee Wee Herman), tight jackets and a hybrid version of hipster petite casual slacks. They were also waiting for the overseer’s green light. To my astonishment they were allowed to pass through without the overseer ever checking their trousers. Life is unfair sometimes. It was not a good day, and I did not like being number seventeen, but out on the sidewalk, in the sunlight of truth, I could plainly see that the Levis on my body were in fact denim (or black jeans) and not cotton. Thom Nickels

Philadelphia's MUSLIM DAY, from Frontpage Magazine

One of the most beautiful structures in Philadelphia is 30th Street Station, a 1934 building with soaring Corinthian columns and a 95-foot-high coffered ceiling. Now called William H. Gray III 30th Street Station (Gray was a black U.S. Congressman from the Philadelphia area), the station’s renaming was signed into law by President Obama in 2014. Of course, nobody but Amtrak and city officials call the station by its Obama-given name. For most Philadelphians it’s simply 30th Street Station.

Around the time of the station’s name change, there was a shady feeling that the city was looking for any excuse to put a black Democrat activist stamp on one of the city’s grandest structures. In fact, when I interviewed former Mayor Frank Rizzo before his death in the 1990s, he told me he was astonished that Gray, who went to Princeton Theological School, was able to maintain a lucrative political career while balancing a personal life that included “a string of mistresses.” But that’s another story. Walk from 30th Street Station into central Philadelphia and the real city comes into focus. You will notice empty and abandoned stores, a pronounced lack of causal eateries, the empty Wanamaker building that used to house Macy’s, the go-to department store with the Eagle sculpture that defined Center City for decades. Macy’s demise (closure was March 25) has rendered Center City a virtual desert. In another commercial assault, Center City’s Brooks Brothers store left town about two months ago after thirty-some years on Walnut Street. On Arch Street, the famed AIA architecture center recently announced its closing. The excuse given for the closure was low attendance at events since the lockdown. (Philadelphia took the lockdown to Democrat Orwellian proportions, even establishing a snitch telephone hotline where neighbors could report on neighbors hosting large private gatherings). Throughout the city you’ll see boarded up stores and businesses, closed Asian buffet eateries that once hosted scores of city office workers at lunchtime. Center City is now home to drug-addicted homeless people and people who bought condos there years ago when the city was good but who are now stuck in a declining metropolis. South Street, where all the hippies used to meet, is now home to rowdy crowds, namely the black hooligan version of West Side Story. Once a year or so somebody shoots a gun into the crowds there; it’s really the DEI version of Woodstock. Sadly, everywhere you go in the city there are signs of decay and decline. Hop the Market Street El or the Broad Street subway, and you’ll see hundreds of drug-addicted homeless in various comatose states. In 2020, Forbes named Philadelphia the dirtiest city in America. In 2024, the city was ranked among the top 10 cities with the rudest residents. The poverty rate at 23.3% in 2019 ranked the city as the nation’s poorest city. In 2025, the city ranked as the 5th worst-run city in the U.S. A city in decline, however, is the perfect place for an Islamic revolution. To that effect, in 2024 Mayor Cherelle Parker, created the position of Director of Muslim Engagement. Mayor Parker, who is not Muslim, stated on X: “We stand with the Muslim community, and vow to work together to restore balance and light to our communities.”

Parker appointed Quaiser D. Abdullah as Director of the new department. Abdullah, who has been called an Islamosupremacist by the Israel Resource Review, is a Temple University faculty member. He’s also an advisor to the Muslim Student Association (MSA). Temple University’s MSA members are also part of the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-funded campus jihad group. Given these facts, it appears that Mayor Parker appointed a pro-jihad Muslim to a major City Hall post. But it gets worse. In 2024, to celebrate the election of Parker as the city’s first black woman mayor, an Interfaith Inaugural Prayer Gathering was held at the Catholic cathedral basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. Archbishop Nelson Perez hosted the large ecumenical gathering which included “sacred scripture” readings from Jewish, Muslim and Christian faith leaders. But can the Qur’an really be called “sacred scripture”? It can, but only in the world of politicians out to get votes, or in the mind of a Catholic archbishop trying to play nicey-nice with the powers-that-be in a city as woke as Portland, Oregon. I don’t know what “sacred” Qur’an quotes were read aloud at the basilica that day, but I can assure you they did not include the following: “The Jews are those who Allah is wrath with, and the Christians have strayed.” “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other.” “And kill them (non-Muslims) wherever you find them … kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers (non-Muslims).” The Qur’an is really a flowery terrorist manifesto: it sizzles with violence and verses about battles, blood and swords. The Muslim clergyman for the basilica event was Imam Anwar Muhaimin, who was born in Philadelphia but who left the city at age 11 with his family to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a place where non-Muslims are forced to practice their religion in private and are subject to discrimination and arrest. Under Saudi law, any Muslim who converts to another religion commits a crime punishable by death. Mayor Parker’s fascination with Islam seems to be an outgrowth of the city’s growing black Muslim population as well as the Left’s alliance with Islam. It’s been said the Left is generally clueless when it comes to religion. That’s why Queers for Palestine and half-naked woke feminists in tattoos who march for Palestine can’t get it through their heads they’d be the first to be executed if sharia law were instituted in the United States. In the meantime, politicians like Parker tap into the world of make-believe when they insist all spiritual paths are equal because they all deliver the same messages of peace and love. The basilica, and not a mosque, was used for the 2024 prayer meeting because of its iconic status as a landmark structure and the importance the Archdiocese plays in the city. The selection of a mosque would have been more appropriate but it would have garnered much less publicity and legitimacy. No Catholic church should ever be used for an ecumenical prayer service involving readings from the Qur’an. The mayor’s obsession with Islam went even further when she instituted Muslim Day in the city shortly after her inauguration in 2024. In the 1970s, missionaries from the Nation of Islam filled City Hall courtyard handing out a newspaper called Muhammad Speaks. The newspaper was noted for its black nationalist views and its chronic condemnation of the white man and the white race. Every day black men in meticulously tailored suits, sunglasses and short military haircuts distributed these broadsides of hate. Apathetic liberal white Philadelphians looked the other way, never dreaming that within fifty years you would have news outlets like the Israel Resource Review calling Philadelphia City Hall, “Caliphate Hall.”

Of course, the constitutionality of a city-sponsored Muslim Day has never been addressed by the courts. Since the 1970s, Muslim activists have been given free reign in City Hall. Imagine the uproar from the Left if a city-sponsored Russian Orthodox Day had incense-swaying robed priests carrying icons in the same courtyard. Why does Islam get a special city-sanctioned day? Perhaps it was part of a deal Parker made to get the endorsement of the city’s Muslim community in 2023 during the mayoral campaign. At that time there mysteriously appeared a large group calling itself “Muslims for Cherelle Parker.” Philadelphia’s Muslim Day includes advocacy meetings with City Council members and other elected and appointed offices. One of the issues on the table was “sanctuary and safety for immigrant families.” Philadelphia is already a sanctuary city, but Muslim Day advocates for extra special protection for “immigrants” (they mean migrants) who happen to be Muslim. The more Muslims you have, the more Islamic a city becomes. Mayor Parker may well be the Trojan horse that helps Philadelphia become another version of Dearborn, Michigan. THOM NICKELS

New Neighbors on Mercer Street

Let’s consider the empty house on the street where I live. This house sat empty for months before a new owner purchased it. The former owner, Sammy (not his real name), about 30 years-old, moved out after living in the place for a good 3 years. I remember the day he moved in. He came with cars and bikes after his suburban parents bought the house for him. During his first weeks here some of the neighbors went out of their way to say hello but Sammy was aloof. He obviously didn’t want to be bothered to get to know the people on the block. What Sammy did for a living was a mystery, but his pattern was to leave the house everyday around noon and return in the early evening.

Sammy could have been living on a mountain top because he never made eye contact with neighbors. You could pass Sammy in the street and he’d have one of those Village of the Damned ‘straight on’ stares like he was sleepwalking. Sammy’s house was a large space with interesting room patterns. I know because I used to be friends with the couple, Walter and Betty (not their real names), who lived there before their move to Washington State. Walter, Betty and I didn’t become friends until their last two years on the street. Who knows why it took us so long to strike up a friendship. One day they invited me to dinner so I got to sample Walter’s gourmet cooking. On warm summer days, Walter would invite me over for a swim in his pool. The pool was a fairly deep above ground monstrosity with a sturdy wooden deck, set among very large trees. After a swim, we’d catch an iced tea during which Walter would talk about his favorite poet, Gary Snyder. I wasn’t happy when Walter and Betty announced they were moving west. I was getting used to going over there for dinner and swimming in their pool, and then inviting them over to my place for patio parties. Friendships like this don’t come easily. You can say hello to neighbors, even chat with them on the street for years and still never be invited over to their place. When Walter and Betty moved out, the house wasn’t empty for long. One day I spotted a suburban looking couple talking with the realtor. The couple had driven up in a Lexis, which spelled m-o-n-e-y. A week or two after that a big moving truck appeared, and Sammy appeared with his bushy black hair and an army of friends. The friends, all men, were scruffy in a hip way although they all had the same type of manufactured beard. They moved in quickly and within days held a massive outdoor party around Walter’s old pool. Sammy’s friends built a large bonfire and started a barbecue. The party lasted until the wee hours. Then at 4 or 5 AM I was awakened by a suburban girl, one of Sammy’s party guests, crying under my bedroom window. She was so drunk she found it hard to make sense of her sentences however I tried my best to make out what she was saying. In the end, I couldn’t decipher her drunken valley girl ‘up talk’ although it seemed some boy had dumped her. I was curious about Sammy for a short time but after a while I stopped caring. There was no reason to say hello, especially if his response was going to be something like a smug nod. Sammy’s outdoor parties were becoming more and more frequent. Party guests, driving in from the western Main Line were double parking on our tiny street. Sammy acquired strings of Japanese party lights and strung them along the tree branches so that from my house his yard looked like a massive house boat in New Orleans. The parties got progressively louder and wilder yet it was fascinating to see how every party began as low key events but as the night wore on, and as more alcohol was consumed, the voices got louder and louder. Eventually the voices became so pitched it sounded like twenty men screaming at one another.

If the screaming prevented me from falling asleep, I assumed many of my neighbors were experiencing the same thing. I’d turn on the AC or put fans in my bedroom window to muffle the noise but like the racket from a plague of locusts, the voices would always resurface. And among these voices there would always be the sound of a woman crying. “That makes 4 crying women in 30 days,” I’d tell friends. ‘What do they do to women over there?” Sammy acquired a succession of roommates to help pay the mortgage. Generally the roommates were in their twenties and never stayed long. At first the roommates were part of Sammy’s social circuit but then I noticed a change. They seemed to be living independently, especially the lost looking Irish guy who seemed to be terrified of strangers and whose large dog seemed to be his only friend. He would sit glum- faced on Sammy’s stoop staring into space. For a time I thought he was hearing impaired. Some of Sammy’s roommates moved out in the middle of the night although they were very quickly replaced with new roommates. At one of the parties, the invited guests double and triple parked on the sidewalk up and down the street, upsetting the neighbors. Somebody called the police, and ten of Sammy’s party guests got parking tickets. “These people have no idea how the city works,” I told a friend. Sammy acquired so many roommates I lost count of them. Prohibitive housing and rental costs were really impacting people in their twenties, and Sammy’s house was proof of this. Nobody could afford to live on their own. I called Walter and Betty and told them that their former home had become a gigantic hipster commune complete with dogs, motorcycles, bonfires, and beautiful white women in long dreadlocks. “It’s a sight to behold although nobody on the street has made friends with them because they don’t seem to want to get to know anybody.” I told Walter and Betty that Sammy had decided to get rid of the pool and chop down the oldest and grandest tree on the property. Walter and Betty were meticulous home owners, but very soon Sammy began to let things slip. After all, it really wasn’t his house. His parents found the house for him. They were the ones who appreciated the house but they probably had high hopes that Sammy would come to appreciate it himself one day. It wasn’t long before the house began to look shabby, although all the women who visited or lived there seemed to be the same type: tall and elegant looking with long beautiful hair. They also dressed like fashion models, mostly in long flowing dresses. Even if beautiful women are not your thing, no one could deny the astounding beauty of these creatures. They seemed to go in and out of Sammy’s house at all hours. The men, by contrast, were doughy looking with thick Clark Kent glasses and hairy necks. “This is proof,” a comedian friend of mine commented, “that many pretty women like money and power.” For a period of a year, especially in winter when there were no leaves on the trees, anyone walking on the sidewalk could look right into Sammy’s front window and see somebody watching Homer Simpson. The parties continued, the beer kept flowing, and the male chorus of voices kept getting louder and louder. Sometimes I could make out what was being said. There were stories about work but more often than not there was no smooth narrative at all, just discombobulated half sentences with long pauses as well as the overuse of the word ‘like’ and finally unexplained yells as if someone had inadvertently sat on a possum. “Like…I mean, but like….Yeah, you know. What the f-ck!” (Repeat 50 times and you have the party conservation).

A few neighbors, eager to build bridges, continued to attempt to make contact with Sammy, but to no avail. Two weeks ago in a bizarre replay of 3 years ago, the suburban parents returned in the same Lexis. Standing in front of the house they whispered to one another before knocking on Sammy’s door. The parents had to knock a long time before one of the roommates answered although he didn’t open the door but talked to them through an open slat. Some sort of negotiation seemed to be in progress, but what? The very next day at least two of the roommates moved out and six days after that it was Sammy’s turn. Sammy left on his bike, never to be seen again. Thom Nickels