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

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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

Liberal Women Ruin Museums

In 2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job. But…. There seems to be a troubling common denominator here. The vast majority of the women in these positions fit a certain mold. They come pre-stamped and processed. They are monochrome, feminist, left-leaning women schooled in the progressive agenda.

That agenda might be summed up this way: they are the products of left-leaning universities where life is seen through a lens of oppressor and the oppressed. Feminist and gender ideology is also a big part of the mix, and so suddenly you have heretofore great cultural institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia bowing before the latest left-wing craze to come down the pike. The Athenaeum used to be a unique place. Once an institution of great cultural impact, it has now been “democratized” in a weedy grassroots way — thanks to the death of many of the classically educated old white men on the board and the institution’s takeover by a board of political progressives, all inspired by female leadership. What happened to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia reminds me very much of what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has turned into: a museum too focused on “oppressors and the oppressed.” The Athenaeum’s cultural offerings — lectures and receptions — has a largely woke focus. An author like Lionel Shriver, who wrote “A Better Life,” a novel about migrants who destroy a New York American family, would never be invited to speak there. That’s because there’s an ideological test every author and speaker must pass before being given the chance to appear before an audience there. This is cancel culture hiding behind a polite female smile; it’s censorship in the name of programming. One Athenaeum offering slated for December is a talk by Bench Ansfield, an Assistant History Professor at Temple University who uses “they” pronouns. On videos Ansfield appears to be of indeterminate sex — the slanted little bun on the top of “they’s” head and “they’s” choice of intricately designed shirts suggest female, but the voice suggests otherwise.

Now, I am no enemy of androgyny. The hyper-masculine male culture in the 1970s needed a huge dose of David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Lou Reed theatricality, but that’s not what is happening today. Today, the fun theater of Bowie has been exchanged for gender polemics as serious as Marxism. By leftist standards, I’m sure the quality of Ansfield’s work is noteworthy. (Ansfield’s book won the Athenaeum’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.)

One must not forget that these prize-winning works are all judged by leftist literary standards, so if you are on the wrong editorial page, you’ll never be on their list to win an award. (Ansfield’s area of expertise in “their” latest book, “Born in Flames,” is a look into “late-twentieth-century transformations in race and capitalism.”) While progressive, white liberal women are having their moment in the sun, the damage they often do in the institutions they control has negative consequences. This brings us to the 162-page report issued on July 4 by the White House Domestic Policy Council, which accused the Smithsonian museum of being “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.” The council faulted the National Museum of American History with downplaying the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history. It also charged that the museum engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien,” and transgender activism, and accused the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming, and teaching resources. This is what progressive museums under the direction of leftist female academicians do, and it should come as no surprise to anybody. During a heated House DOGE subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Nancy Mace pressed Smithsonian Director Dr. Anthea Hartig on whether men can become women, what defines a woman, and how many genders there are. Like most progressive women when they are asked such questions, Hartig refused to answer Mace when pressed on these questions. Throughout it all, Hartig was amazingly poker-faced and kept repeating the all-too familiar lie that the Smithsonian is a non-partisan institution, while neglecting to explain why a 2020–2023 exhibit there included a diary from a 13-year-old girl exploring issues including gender identity. Gender identity, along with ICE and immigration, are the two chandelier issues of the left. For her part, Hartig seemed to have no knowledge of the gender exhibit and stated that she’d have to check into that. Shortly after the Capitol Hill hearing, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, wrote a letter in support of Hartig: We stand with Dr. Hartig…. The Berks remain steadfast in its commitment to inclusive feminist historical scholarship and the collaborative networks that make this work possible. If only it were possible to bring the House DOGE subcommittee hearings on Capitol Hill to Philadelphia to get institutions like the Athenaeum of Philadelphia to answer a few questions.

NAILING BLACK TEEN TERRORISTS

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

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

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

Thom Nickels: Euthanasia’s slippery slope is already here

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

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

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

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

GOD BLESS THE SSPX, the true Catholic Church

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

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

The Low Tide of Pride

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

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

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

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