LIPSTICK ON WOKE: NANCY PELOSI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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