Fergie's Pub Bans Conservative Columnist

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

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

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

The Theological Battle of the Sexes

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

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

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

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

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

Ileana who?

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

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

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

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

HALLOWEEN and the RELUCTANT NEWTOWN, PA. WITCH

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

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

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

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

PHILLY CEMETERY BEER TOURS

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

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

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

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

Thom Nickels: Political violence is increasingly one-sided

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

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

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

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

Meet the Editors

Thom Nickels: Junipero Serra and the new iconoclasts

In early September, I participated in a “Feast of Reason” dinner at Carpenters’ Hall. The model for the dinner was Thomas Jefferson’s own “Feast of Reason” dinners where guests gathered at Monticello to discuss controversial issues of the day in a polite manner. Potential guests were asked to state where they stood on the political spectrum: Right, left, or somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four people would then be selected to participate in the ‘Jeffersonian’ meal, a moderately priced ticketed event. The topic of the dinner I was chosen to attend was: How should communities decide what monuments should stand and what should be taken down? An official briefing included the following reminder: “In the mid-2010s, there was a growing movement to tear down monuments to Confederate heroes. Many of these monuments had been erected in the early twentieth century to commemorate the ‘lost cause’ of the Civil War. Debates continue about monuments to people with controversial legacies, i.e., Columbus and Jefferson. ‘ To my surprise, the conversations around monuments at the meal were not very contentious. Many attendees seemed to agree that the emotions surrounding controversial monuments are time and issue-bound. This implies that monuments should not be destroyed or moved based on the revolutionary heat of the moment.

The 24 diners broke up into small groups of four or five. This tranquilized and “hid” disagreement to some degree. In my own group there was little disagreement. Overall, a lot of time was also wasted on Monument Lab’s somewhat didactic presentation. The event was heavily structured; at times it had the feel of an eighth-grade classroom. There was not enough time for general discussion, but that’s another story. The Virginia wine served by the Carpenters’ Hall staff was terrific. A few days following the dinner, I had thoughts of the statue of St. Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Catholic saint canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. The social justice warriors who defaced and then pulled down a statue of Serra (who believed in self-mortification) at Mission San Rafael Arcangel in San Rafael, California on October 12, 2020, would have a hard time understanding the concepts of “harsh asceticism” and the mortifying of the flesh in the name of a Supreme Being. Leftists, after all, don’t do things for God; they do things to advance a revolutionary social agenda. Serra, the first saint of the Catholic Church to be canonized on American soil, was a professor of philosophy before taking up the crusade of evangelization (“Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature”) and founding five (Franciscan) Catholic missions in southern California. The Philadelphia essayist Agnes Repplier, in her biography of Serra, wrote that the missionary had “the qualities of those emotional, penitential, and migratory years, when endurance was the keynote of existence, and when the love of life was balanced by the honor paid to death. His harsh asceticism, the boards on which he slept, his meager diet, the cruel mortifying of his flesh, all savored of the Middle Ages; and so, too, did his habit of putting his mind and soul into his work.” The San Rafael statue wasn’t the only image of Serra that was destroyed in 2020.

On June 19, a statue of Serra was torn down in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Then on July 4, rioters dismantled a statue of Serra in Sacramento. Serra’s “crime” was “imperialistic colonialism” or “cultural genocide,” both labels for the “forced” imposition of Catholicism and European culture on Native Americans. That imposition, rioters claimed, involved the “problematic” introduction of foreign animals and plants by European conquerors into the southern California ecosystem, an activist analysis that has more to do with a contemporary understanding of science than what was known in the 18th century. The Serra statue destroyers also condemned the saint’s method of dealing with Roman Catholic converts/natives who may have changed their minds about their conversion and then made attempts to leave the missions. Serra, the extreme ascetic who slept on boards and denied himself food, might be described as someone who was as hard on himself as he was on the natives under his charge. Leftist critics like to point out how he once worked as a field agent for the Spanish Inquisition, an association that looks worse on paper than how it played out in reality. While Serra’s halo in the leftist media is referred to as a “halo stained with blood,” the saint’s strictness never involved outright cruelty. In fact, his “medieval” way of dealing with issues like runaway convert natives was considered normal by 18th century standards, yet when viewed through a contemporary lens that behavior appears skewed, unreasonable, and “bloodstained.” Maureen Tilley, Professor of Theology at Fordham University (known as a Catholic woke thinktank), writes that once the natives were baptized, they were confined to mission territory, even though their families may have lived outside the mission. “If they tried to run away, they were brought back and punished. Serra tried to mitigate punishments, tried to keep the Spanish soldiers from preying on Native Americans.” Again, by 18th-century standards, the habit of restricting newly baptized natives to a confined territory implies a catechumen-like state that may have had more to do with ongoing religious instruction, a protection against the influence of pagan families (Pachamama) on the outside. While this “lockdown missionary mentality” would never fly in the 21st century, it still does not merit the scorn and contempt that has been heaped on this saint as if he alone were responsible for the multiple atrocities that occurred in the missions after his death in 1784. Of course, the notion that a newly baptized person should be sheltered against persuasive outside pagan sources may appear to be quite insane to secular leftists who are clueless when it comes to the concept of souls being saved for eternity. “Saved from what?” they would surely ask.

Tilley and other Serra scholars also agree that what abuses did occur in the California missions happened post-Serra and were government-imposed penalties unrelated to Serra’s original mission to bring the natives to Christ. The leftists’ real beef with Serra comes down to the saint’s zeal for evangelization, or his daring to presume that the jimsonweed-hallucinogenic cult practiced by the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of southern California was inferior to Christianity. When Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015, the leftist media reported that many Native Americans felt his canonization was an affront to their culture and history. “Their culture” in this case means a pagan culture since Christianity is viewed by leftists as a European import item on a par with foreign animals and plants. “Who’s a Saint, anyway?” The Atlantic magazine asked in 2015, while Vox upped the ante and declared that Serra was a “brutal colonialist,” and then went on to ask, “So why did the Pope make him a saint?” These 2015 progressive media hits against Serra made the soil ripe for the string of Serra statue attacks in 2020. First, you print distortions and lies, then you double down on character smears, and then you go out and tear his statue down. Thom Nickels

THE POPE OF VANITY FAIR AND ISLAM - Frontpage - Thom Nickels

Traditionally, a religious leader should stand outside the orbit of worldly spheres. He should represent a set of values apart from Hollywood, the talking points of the DNC, and the philosophical swagger of New York icons like Patti Smith, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Robert Prevost, or Pope Leo, is full of empty, blabbering swagger. He has declared that for Christians, “Islam is not the enemy.” He has put these words into action with his regular meetings with Islamic leaders in order to thank them for their peace-building efforts. In April 2026, he visited the Great Mosque of Algiers during his tour of African nations. He has stated that people who are fearful of Islam tend to be people who are against immigration (like the left, he dignifies illegal migration as ‘immigration’). And yet he utters not a word about the thousands of Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria but instead calls for “communion with Muslims.”

More blabbering swagger surfaced when Patti Smith visited Pope Leo XIV in July 2026. During that visit, Smith was as giddy as a high school girl on her first date. Here she was, an artist who lived with Robert Mapplethorpe, cavorted with poet Allen Ginsberg — and even prayed Buddhist prayers for him as he lay dying in New York City — here she was, a great lover of a certain school of French literature, mainly the novels of Jean Genet, being received in Rome for a 40-minute chat with Leo as if she were the First Lady of a small empire. Now, Patti Smith is probably the one artist who achieved fame for being at the right place at the right time. It’s not her talent necessarily that got her there, but the manner in which she made connections and used them to her advantage. She made the New York art scene her own, thanks to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and today she’s a regular visitor at the Vatican. She met Pope Francis in 2013 and performed for him in the Vatican. She’s a genius at self-promotion. It’s ironic in many ways that the first lady of punk and Jean Genet — Genet’s homoerotic novels of male prostitution, anal intercourse and criminality, like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, still command a wide literary audience — should be welcomed into the papal apartments while traditionalist Catholic organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, are refused entry.

Why did Robert Prevost, who also has a thing for the earth goddess, Pachamama, give 40 minutes of his time to a woman who once said, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” but not to a traditionalist wing of his own Church? A cautionary note about Patti Smith: She was not always so “cool” and “liberated.” A documentary on Tubi on the life of Robert Mapplethorpe shows the two of them meeting in New York as young artist-wannabes. Mapplethorpe, unsure of his sexuality at that point, has an affair with Smith but he is soon attracted to New York City’s gay leather bars. When Smith discovers Mapplethorpe’s secret life, she reacts much like any housewife in the 1950s: she’s hurt, scandalized, and spends an inordinate amount of time crying. She walks out on Mapplethorpe in an angry huff. Smith’s visceral reaction to Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality brought out the superficiality of her bohemianism: Her idea of being a rebel did not include breaking society’s standards when it came to the rules of coupledom. With Pope Leo, it is understood that “meeting people where they are” is an important part of the papacy. The pope is also a head of state. But meeting pagans, witches, communists, feminists, Father James Martin and Democrats who venerate abortion or drag queens who may have sold their soul to Satan, doesn’t mean that he necessarily agrees with these people. This is what Vatican officials say, anyway. But when he constantly meets with people like this, you begin to sense lies. You begin to sense an agenda. Something is truly rotten in Rome.

If he were really a true representative of Jesus Christ, he wouldn’t be afraid to use “strong arm” methods in attempting to convert the assorted lot of celebrities who cross his path. But Robert Prevost is afraid to do that because it would only upset the secular media, who would then cancel culture him. There would be no Vogue or Vanity Fair articles on his fashion sense. His wearing of Nike sneakers under his cassock (what happened to the standard fashion rule that one should never wear sneakers with dress pants?), or his casual love of American baseball caps (“So cool,” say Chicagoans, unmindful of the fact that Leo considers himself first a citizen of Peru and lastly, an American citizen) would no longer be idolized. Robert Prevost smiles that wide, crooked smile of his and lets Patti Smith be Patti Smith; he lets an atheist stay an atheist and a pagan, a pagan. One word of recrimination, a plea to change your ways — like Christ did to the Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery — will get you in trouble with the world. Vanity Fair will cancel your photo ops. With the “coolness” dead, you will be known as the mean pope who is too rigid. Readers surely remember the media fuss over Pope Benedict XVI’s red shoes, called Ruby Red Slippers in some circles, which did not tickle the fancy of Vogue or Vanity Fair editors if only because the red shoes came to symbolize inflexible Catholic dogma and Pope Benedict’s holding the line regarding traditional Catholic morality. Esquire magazine, however, was the notable exception when it listed Pope Benedict as “accessoriser of the year.” Esquire theorized that Benedict’s red shoes were probably made by a famous Italian fashion house. A lot has changed since 2008. Consider ABC News’s story on Pope Benedict’s shoes versus the media’s handling of Pope Leo’s fashion style. “While the Vatican had never confirmed or denied if the shoes were Prada,” ABC reported then, “continued chatter about the pope’s dress sense led the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano to print a condemnation of media stories it said trivialized the head of the church.” L’Osservatore Romano stated that the inclusion of the pope on its best-dressed men’s list was, “of a frivolity that is very characteristic of an era that tends to trivialize and does not understand.” “The pope’s shoes,” the article continued, “like his range of flamboyant hats, are nothing to do with vanity but all to do with tradition…The Pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said. So far, L’Osservatore Romano, run by Jesuits, has been silent on the “trivialization” of Pope Leo re his Nike sneakers and baseball hats. When Robert Prevost met and prayed with the female Archbishop of Canterbury, the secular photo-ops captured the moment in its most superficial glory: Here is the pope playing nice with the Church of England; being respectful, etc., so how can this be wrong? The meeting itself was not wrong, but what the secular observers did not realize was that Pope Leo’s namesake predecessor, Pope Leo XII, declared that Anglican orders are invalid, meaning that Church of England priests and bishops are not priests and bishops at all but more like costume wearers on Halloween, or outright imposters. This is still the doctrinal language of the Catholic Church, despite the handshaking and crooked smiles of the current Bishop of Rome, who seems to be working overtime to change the Catholic Church forever.

LInsday Clancy: The Heroic Male Juror Who Stood Up to Toxic Feminists

America has a new hero in the fight against radical feminism: the lone male juror who would not capitulate to the myth that Lindsay Clancy was not responsible for murdering her three children. One can only imagine the stress he was under during jury deliberations, as the nine women jurors, some of whom were wearing pink, turned on the heat and tried to get the last man standing to buckle and adhere to the tenets of their cult: women are not to blame. He was the only juror to understand that murder is criminal. As for the other two men on the jury who voted with the women, perhaps they were male feminists with soy boy accents. Massachusetts, after all, is an over-the-top woke Democratic state. So woke, in fact, it’s astounding why the prosecution allowed nine women to be on the jury. Those lawyers have obviously not been paying attention to how liberal women have changed the culture. Massachusetts was like this in 1971 when I couldn’t keep count of all the abortions filtering through the operating room where I worked. There were so many “therapeutic abortions” at Tufts New England Medical Center the discarded fetuses (babies) were stashed in a large medical waste dumpster behind the hospital.

Scandalous, to be sure, but this was the era of Gloria Steinem and the beginnings of feminism. (Almost a decade before, in 1963, Gloria Steinem went undercover at the Manhattan Playboy Club and then went on to write a scathing piece for ‘Show’ magazine on Hugh Hefner’s “misogynic” empire.) Feminism has come a long way since the 1970s. The Lindsay Clancy mistrial showed pretty clearly where that road has taken women. Many are now saying that what came out during the trial – the large numbers of women outside the courthouse demanding that Clancy go free – will have an adverse effect on women’s rights because of certain precedents set by the defense in the case, namely that Clancy was not responsible for her actions because of postpartum mental illness. She couldn’t help it; out-of-whack hormones made her do it. “Lindsay Clancy could have been me!” as the women outside the courthouse told reporters. If it becomes an established fact that women will be seen as not being responsible for their actions if they are hormonal, then women are in trouble. One can easily imagine an employer asking a female job applicant, “Are you currently hormonal?” As one woman on X stated: “One bad hot flash and boom!” This is more than disastrous for women, considering their own gender just established in court that hormones can make you kill three people. Down the line this could mean that women should not be judges, police officers, and they should certainly never be elected to the U.S. presidency. The first woman president argument has come up a lot since the Clancy trial. The argument is that a woman cannot be fully held accountable for her actions because hormones, postpartum psychoses or her biological condition can affect her judgment. Then why should we risk having a woman president?

The feminists supporting Clancy said as much: She’s not guilty of murder because she didn’t know what she was doing. Ironically, many of the women asking the “Can a woman be president?” question cannot be dismissed as rabid misogynists. In 2016, the Daily Mail quoted Cheryle Rios, founder and CEO of GO APE Marketing, who came out and said she could not vote for Hilary Clinton for president. “With the hormones we have, there is no way a woman should be able to start a war,” she stated, adding that she supports equal rights for men and women but cautioned that “There’s an old biblical sound reasoning why a woman shouldn’t be president.” Rios received so much flak for her view that she had to clarify things: “I didn’t say that women should be abused, or that they are stupid or can’t be lawyers, doctors or run successful businesses. I fully know and support that they can as I have done that. I mentioned one position only the Head of our government, the Head of State, the Commander in Chief, the President…” The Clancy trial has brought this old argument back into the public sphere. And when you review the comments on X, you’ll see that almost the majority of them are from women who believe as Rios does. Frankly, I was astonished at how many women were saying things like this: “Lindsay Clancy’s trial is exactly why we will never have a female president!” “If they let her walk, as a woman, I say repeal the 19th!” “If hormonal changes can cause a woman to kill her own children: can a woman be trusted as a police officer, or with owning a firearm?” Columnist Ann Coulter went further when she stated in 2021 that women should not have the right to vote “because women see the government as their husbands.”

Coulter then told Media Matters: “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.” It wasn’t until 1975 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Taylor v. Louisiana that systematically excluding women from juries violated the constitutional right to a fair cross section of the community. In 1972, TV talk show host David Susskind told feminist Germaine Greer that a woman cannot be president because of hormonal changes. Greer lambasted Susskind, telling him that hormonal changes “was not a mental illness.” A recent September 2026 Pew Research Center study announced that “Americans have grown more skeptical that a woman will be president in their lifetime.” The study concluded: “While Democrats and Republicans have similar views on the likelihood of a woman president, they differ widely in seeing this as personally important. Three-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say it’s extremely or very important to them that a woman is elected president in their lifetime. This compares with just 5% of Republicans and GOP leaners.” Feminists argue that no single woman who has run for president so far has been young enough to become pregnant. As in the abortion debate, the men are told to not enter into conversations about women’s bodies or hormones. The men are called “loud and opinionated.” On the other hand, if Lindsay Clancy is found not responsible for her actions because of hormones and prescription drugs, how can any woman argue she should be CEO, president, or in charge of anything at all? Full equality – a word the Left loves to abuse – means holding women accountable for their actions. Thom Nickels

Pope Leo and Patti Smith - but NOT the SSPX

Traditionally, a religious leader should stand outside the orbit of worldly spheres. He should represent a set of values apart from Hollywood, the talking points of the DNC, and the philosophical swagger of New York icons like Patti Smith, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. When Patti Smith visited Pope Leo XIV in July 2026, she was as giddy as a high school girl on her first date. Here she was, an artist who lived with Robert Mapplethorpe, cavorted with poet Allen Ginsberg — and even prayed Buddhist prayers for him as he lay dying in New York City — here she was, a great lover of a certain school of French literature, mainly the novels of Jean Genet, being received in Rome for a 40-minute chat with Leo as if she were the First Lady of a small empire.

Patti Smith is probably the one artist who achieved fame for being at the right place at the right time. It’s not her talent necessarily that got her there, but the manner in which she made connections and used them to her advantage. She made the New York art scene her own, thanks to Robert Mapplethorpe, and today she’s a regular visitor at the Vatican. She met Pope Francis in 2013 and performed for him in the Vatican. She’s a genius at self-promotion. It’s ironic in many ways that the first lady of punk and Jean Genet — Genet’s homoerotic novels of male prostitution and criminality, like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, still command a wide literary audience — should be welcomed into the papal apartments while traditionalist Catholic organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, are refused entry. Let me say upfront that I generally like Patti Smith and much of the bohemian culture she represents, but I think Pope Leo has his priorities wrong when he refused to meet with a traditionalist wing of his own Church but gave 40 minutes of his time to a woman who once said, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”

Yet even in the secular world, Patti Smith was not always so “cool” and “liberated.” A documentary on Tubi on the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe shows the two of them meeting in New York as young artist-wannabes. Mapplethorpe, unsure of his sexuality at that point, has an affair with Smith but he is soon attracted to the thrill of New York City’s gay leather bars. When Smith discovers Mapplethorpe’s secret life, she reacts much like any housewife in the 1950s: she’s hurt, scandalized, and spends an inordinate amount of time crying. She walks out on Mapplethorpe in a huff. Smith’s visceral reaction to Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality brought out the hypocrisy of bohemian life: Acting like a rebel does not include breaking society’s standards when it comes to the rules of coupledom. With Pope Leo, I understand that “meeting people where they are” is an important part of the papacy. The pope, one must remember, is also a head of state. But meeting pagans, witches, communists, feminists, and Democrats who venerate abortion or drag queens who may have sold their soul to Satan, doesn’t mean that he necessarily agrees with these people. If he were to use “strong arm” methods in attempting to convert the assorted lot of celebrities who cross his path, he would only upset the secular media, who would then cancel culture him. There would be no Vogue or Vanity Fair articles on his fashion sense. His wearing of Nike sneakers under his cassock (what happened to the standard fashion rule that one should never wear sneakers with dress pants?), or his casual love of American baseball caps (“So cool,” say Chicagoans, unmindful of the fact that Leo considers himself first a citizen of Peru and lastly, an American citizen) would no longer be idolized. Pope Leo’s job is to let Patti Smith be Patti Smith; to let an atheist be an atheist and a pagan, a pagan. One word of recrimination, a plea to change your ways — like Christ did to the Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery — will get you in trouble with the world. Vanity Fair will cancel your photo ops. With the “coolness” dead, you will be known as the mean pope who is too rigid.

Readers surely remember the media fuss over Pope Benedict XVI’s red shoes, called Ruby Red Slippers in some circles, which did not tickle the fancy of Vogue or Vanity Fair editors if only because the red shoes came to symbolize inflexible Catholic dogma and Pope Benedict’s holding the line regarding traditional Catholic morality. Esquire magazine, however, was the notable exception when it listed Pope Benedict as “accessoriser of the year.” Esquire theorized that Benedict’s red shoes were probably made by a famous Italian fashion house. A lot has changed since 2008. Consider ABC News’s story on Pope Benedict’s shoes versus the media’s handling of Pope Leo’s fashion style. “While the Vatican had never confirmed or denied if the shoes were Prada,” ABC reported then, “continued chatter about the pope’s dress sense led the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano to print a condemnation of media stories it said trivialized the head of the church.” L’Osservatore Romano stated that the inclusion of the pope on its best-dressed men’s list was, “of a frivolity that is very characteristic of an era that tends to trivialize and does not understand.” “The pope’s shoes,” the article continued, “like his range of flamboyant hats, are nothing to do with vanity but all to do with tradition…The Pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said. So far, L’Osservatore Romano, run by Jesuits, has been silent on the “trivialization” of Pope Leo re his Nike sneakers and baseball hats. What we have today in the Vatican is the politically expedient game of “nice”: Give even those who ruffle your spiritual feathers a pastoral blessing and send them on their way as they are – unchanged. When Pope Leo met and prayed with the female Archbishop of Canterbury, the secular photo-ops captured the moment in its most superficial glory: Here is the pope playing nice with the Church of England; being respectful, etc., so how can this be wrong? The meeting itself was not wrong, but what the secular observers did not realize was that Pope Leo’s namesake predecessor, Pope Leo XII, declared that Anglican orders are invalid, meaning that Church of England priests and bishops are not priests and bishops at all but more like costume wearers on Halloween, or outright imposters. If this language unsettles you, it is still the doctrinal language of the Roman Church, despite the handshaking and wide smiles of the current Bishop of Rome, who probably wishes these old rigid standards would go away.

The Problem with Orthodox Christianity

My spiritual journey to Orthodox Christianity had much to do with the liturgical changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Vatican II, despite good intentions attributed to “the Holy Spirit,” ruined a perfectly good Church in so many ways. Prior to the Council, Catholic convents and seminaries were filled to capacity; after the Council, thousands of priests and nuns left what they thought would be a permanent calling. This fact alone should be enough to damn the Council that was all the rage in the 1960s. As a boy at that time, I recall reading the Jesuit magazine America, where articles praising the Council promised a ‘new springtime’ for the Church. I felt only dread reading these pieces written by revolution-happy Jesuits who sanctioned everything in that revolution as “the work of the Holy Spirit.” How convenient: make a radical change, modernize to the extreme, and then call it the work of the Holy Spirit. I left the Church at 19 when the hybrid-transition Mass was in full swing. This was the era of quick changes, when each Sunday brought another liturgical revision or addition. The last straw was when they turned the altars around to have the priest face the people like a performer on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Years of agnosticism finally brought me to a spiritual crisis in my early 20s. I then gave Catholicism another try, and my first Mass after a long absence was in a new Norbertine church on Philadelphia’s Main Line where they had an altar-in-the-round and burlap banners in place of mosaics and statues. I knew instantly that this was not the same church I had been baptized into. I found comfort in the Traditional Latin Mass for a season, but these Masses in Philadelphia were never stationed in one parish for long, even though traditional parishes were established outside the city. In the city, Catholics were either too liberal or apathetic to liturgical abuse and innovation. They went with the flow, believing, as the Jesuits of America did in the 1960s, that all radical reform, was the work of the Holy Spirit. And to question the Holy Spirit was a sin. I had known about Orthodoxy since I was a teenager. The beauty of icons, the majesty of the liturgy of Saint Basil or St. John Chrosystom, the splendor of Mount Athos. In Orthodoxy, there was never any talk of revising the liturgy or making it more pleasing to Protestants. Orthodoxy was inflexible; a living “museum” with muscle, where liturgical tradition doesn’t change with the times. And so, I became Orthodox, although the priest who received me into his Philadelphia parish did so without any ceremonials. He was a former Roman Catholic, as was his wife, and as were many people in the parish. Nearly all had left Rome because of Vatican II. Was this exodus the work of the Holy Spirit? Yet Orthodoxy, despite its beauty, did not seal the deal for me. I came to realize Catholicism was in my DNA. Getting used to priests with wives and families (a house divided; personal attention split in multiples) was odd and off-putting; getting used to priests who worked part-time as lawyers or contractors - most Orthodox priests have dual careers – or priests who never went to seminary (they are not rare in Orthodoxy) were also disturbing factors. Since becoming Orthodox, I’ve noticed that many of the young men converting from Protestantism or agnosticism knew little about Catholicism when entering Orthodoxy. Many of them did a hop-skip-and-jump over Catholicism and went straight to Orthodoxy. Many of them, as I would learn, were afraid to consider Catholicism because of “the pope thing.” Years of childhood brainwashing perhaps had made the pope somewhat of a boogeyman. One young guy from a Mennonite background told me he would consider becoming Orthodox before Catholic because of all the negative things he heard about the pope growing up, and because he thought that Catholics “overdo” their veneration of the Blessed Virgin. “The Orthodox are way up there with the Catholics when it comes to the Virgin Mary, but they are not as bad,” he said. His comments made me want to return to the Catholic Church, bad liturgy notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s the twisted secular age we live in, but since I’ve been a member of this Orthodox Philadelphia parish, I have never heard a sermon on what constitutes a sin in the Orthodox Church. Our good priest will talk endlessly about the importance of going to confession, but he never talks about the heavy sins one may commit that need confession. I can only conclude that he assumes everybody in the parish knows them already, even the “rush through” Protestant converts, but is this really the case? I’m not talking about excessive, fanatical fire and brimstone sermons, but occasional loving reminders that might align to a specific gospel reading. One former priest I know said he never talked about serious sexual sins during sermons because of the possibility of confusing children in the congregation. What he did do, however, was add an occasional ‘Pastor’s Note’ essay to the parish bulletin reminding parishioners of the Church’s official stand on matters of morality. Catechesis should be an ongoing thing. (The priest I am referring to was not Orthodox but an Anglican Catholic priest who spent four years in seminary.) During the 12 or 13 years I’ve been attending this parish, the only sins I’ve heard mentioned from the altar have to do with slander and gossip. Okay, well and good.

But why not abortion? There’s been not one word about pornography, abortion, unmarried couples living together, homosexuality or divorce. Is this because these issues have all become political? Was our good priest told by a higher Church authority to avoid these topics because they have all become politically charged and it might make some liberal parishioners angry? To be woke and Orthodox seems like an outrageous oxymoron, but they do exist (cafeteria Orthodox). As my former Anglican Catholic priest friend did, why can’t a discussion of these matters – ongoing catechesis – be included in a pastor’s note inserted inside the parish bulletin when a particular gospel reading may warrant a reminder on the more serious sins everybody seems afraid to talk about?

As troubled as the Catholic Church is at the moment, there are still Catholic bishops who dare to deny Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion, but that almost never happens in the Orthodox Church. Or if it does, it is rarely reported. Ironically, the Orthodox Church can be intense on externals like the importance of fasting – there are more fasts in the Orthodox Church than in all of Christendom – but it seems to remain silent on the great sins of the age, at least on the parish level. The good priest at my parish likes to sermonize about converting the woke, far left millennial population surrounding the parish, but he never specifies how this is to be done. He thinks that by opening up the church grounds with festivals and neighborhood friendly church events, the agnostic neighborhood women with blue hair who have had 2 abortions and think God is any far-left Democrat candidate running for office, will want to become Orthodox. In a certain sense, people like this would be good conversion candidates, especially if they didn’t know about the sins that are never talked about when it comes to confession. Thom Nickels