Considering crime rates under Soros DA Gascon, I didn't think any special motive was needed to explain the attempted assault on Dave Chappelle. There are any number of crazies wandering around Los Angeles and the internet. And as&nbsp;attack plots go, this one didn't seem too well thought out.


	But it looks like the motive <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10843403/Dave-Chappelles-attacker-speaks-time-says-triggered-comedians-jokes.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus">was political after all</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		The Los Angeles man&nbsp;accused of attacking Dave Chappelle&nbsp;said he was “triggered” by the comedian’s jokes about the LGBTQ community and homelessness — as he insisted he never wanted to harm the funnyman.

	
		In an exclusive jailhouse interview, Isaiah Lee told The Post that Chappelle should be more “sensitive” when it comes to the jokes he cracks.

	
		“I identify as bisexual … and I wanted him to know what he said was triggering,” Lee said Saturday at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, dressed in brown jail garb and sporting a sling on his broken right arm.

	
		“I wanted him to know that next time, he should consider first running his material by people it could affect.”
</blockquote>


	I'm sure that next time Chappelle will run his bits past random assailants before taking it on stage.


	Obviously the story would be very different if Lee had been a white male conservative offended by jokes. We would be having a loud, vocal, and very different conversaion. Instead it took the New York Post to find out his motive. Not because he was holding it back, but because the media didn't want to know.

Dave Chappelle Attacker Was Triggered By Him

Considering crime rates under Soros DA Gascon, I didn't think any special motive was needed to explain the attempted assault on Dave Chappelle. There are any

Dave Chappelle Attacker Was Triggered By Him

This is why his own people keep <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2022/05/22/bidens-logistical-man-extraordinaire-00034257">cutting off </a>his microphone.

<blockquote>
	
		CNN’s&nbsp;KAITLAN COLLINS&nbsp;asked Biden a follow-up question Sunday about if he had a message to North Korean leader&nbsp;KIM JONG-UN. “Hello,” Biden said, before pausing a bit and adding: “Period.”

	
		While reporters were able to hear the president, clear audio and video were almost lost because the U.S. government cut off Biden’s microphone feed prematurely. Some of the mics still caught the response in a way that was usable with subtitles. But the government cutting off the audio early has been a frequent source of frustration for reporters.
</blockquote>


	Apparently, they didn't cut it off <a href="https://thehill.com/news/administration/3497693-biden-us-would-defend-taiwan-militarily-if-china-invaded/">soon enough</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		President&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;on Monday said the U.S. would be willing to defend Taiwan militarily if China were to try and take it by force.

	
		“Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” Biden was asked at a press conference in Tokyo alongside the Japanese prime minsiter.

	
		“Yes,” Biden responded. “That’s the commitment we made. That’s the commitment we made.

	
		“Look, here’s the situation. We agree with the one China policy… but the idea that to be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not appropriate,” Biden continued. “It will dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.”
</blockquote>


	I don't necessarily object to the content of the answer so much as the fact that this is the latest in a series of <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/08/biden-commits-defending-taiwan-quickly-takes-it-daniel-greenfield/">back and forths on Taiwan</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		A senior Biden administration official said on Thursday (Aug 19) that US policy on Taiwan had not changed after President Joe Biden appeared to suggest that the United States would defend the island if it were attacked, a deviation from a long-held US position of "strategic ambiguity"...

	
		"They are...entities we've made agreements with based on not a civil war they're having on that island or in South Korea, but on an agreement where they have a unity government that, in fact, is trying to keep bad guys from doing bad things to them," Mr Biden said.

	
		"We have made (and) kept every commitment. We made a sacred commitment to Article 5 that if, in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our Nato allies, we would respond. Same with Japan, same with South Korea, same with Taiwan. It's not even comparable to talk about that."

	
		A senior Biden administration official said US "policy with regard to Taiwan has not changed" and analysts said it appeared that Mr Biden had misspoken.
</blockquote>


	Article 5 obviously <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/10/biden-says-dont-worry-about-taiwan-based-daniel-greenfield/">does not</a> apply to Taiwan.


	Biden asserting that the United States would fight in defense of Taiwan is a pretty aggressive position. If you take that kind of position, you have to be willing to back it up. Putting all that credibility on the line and then having a staffer pull it back again makes it obvious that Biden is not mentally functioning and that American military deterrence has no credibility.

Biden is Back to Flip-Flopping on Taiwan

This is why his own people keep cutting off his microphone.


	
		CNN’s&nbsp;KAITLAN COLLINS&nbsp;asked Biden a follow-up question Sunday about if he had a

Biden is Back to Flip-Flopping on Taiwan

There's good reason for being suspicious about this Washington Post poll because it has black people echoing woke lefty talking points even when they clearly contradict previous polls, for example having black people dismiss more police in favor of lefty holistic solutions to crime.


	But let's zero in on this <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3496738-75-percent-of-black-americans-fear-physical-attack-based-on-their-race-poll/">absurd and racist</a> result.

<blockquote>
	
		A new&nbsp;Washington Post-Ipsos poll&nbsp;found that 75 percent of Black Americans polled are worried that they or someone they care about will be physically harmed because they are black...
</blockquote>


	How often does that happen?


	We're not talking about staged white supremacist terror attacks like Buffalo or Charleston.

<blockquote>
	
		Seventy percent of Black Americans polled said they believed half or more white Americans hold white supremacist beliefs compared to 19 percent who believed fewer than half white Americans do.
</blockquote>


	That would be a widespread conviction that most white people are not only racist but white supremacists.


	In the breakdown, 35% believe that most white people hold white supremacist views, while another 27% say that half of white people do.


	Only 8% say very few.


	That's not a survey of racism, it's a racist survey.

A Very Racist Poll About Racism

There's good reason for being suspicious about this Washington Post poll because it has black people echoing woke lefty talking points even when they clearly

A Very Racist Poll About Racism

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has one shtick and it's touting the future of warfare. And while considering the influence of tech on the battlefield is important, the two key military events of the last few years have a common lesson.


	1. Afghanistan


	2. Ukraine


	The lesson is that a determined insurgency can overcome less motivated forces despite wide discrepancies in technology and numbers.


	Putin's regime has been obsessed with touting high-tech future weapons. Some of those have been deployed in Ukraine with few results. The U.S. meanwhile gave the Afghan government the technological edge with little to show for it.


	Technology counts. The Ukrainians were apparently able to effectively make use of Javelins and similar weapons (though considering the propaganda coming out of the region, it's hard to know what's true). But both wars have been fought in fairly familiar ways. A general from WW2 or the 70s would be able to take a look at both Ukraine and Afghanistan and have a fairly good idea of what happened and what's going on.


	With that in mind here's&nbsp;Gen. Mark Milley&nbsp;with more of the same <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/gen-milley-warns-west-point-graduates-of-increasing-risk-of-global-war-robotic-tanks/ar-AAXzERK?ocid=BingNews">old military retrofuturism</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Weapons technology will also change dramatically in future decades, Milley said, and the shift will be as radical as the change from musket to the rifle, the rifle to the machine gun or from sailing to steam ships. And the technological edge is no longer automatically in America's favor.

	
		"You'll be fighting with&nbsp;robotic tanks&nbsp;and ships and airplanes," Milley said. "We've witnessed a revolution in lethality and precision munitions. What was once the exclusive province of the United States military is now available to most nation states with the money will to acquire them."

	
		Artificial intelligence is "resulting in that profound change, the most profound change ever in human history," Milley said. "Whatever overmatch we the United States enjoyed militarily for the last 70 years is closing quickly. And the United States will be, in fact, we already are challenged in every domain of warfare in space and cyber, maritime air and, of course, land."
</blockquote>


	This is the same sort of thing that Milley has been saying forever, but he doesn't seem to have thought the metaphors through.


	What would the shift from muskets to rifles or sails to steam really be like in the modern context? And what does that have to do with obsessing over AI, a concept that I&nbsp;suspect Milley doesn't grasp, let alone robot tanks, which we could build and deploy no, if there were some actual use for them in anything except a major land war in which we wanted to reduce casualties while spending a lot of money for worse battlefield performance.


	The future of war may yet arrive, but for now it looks a whole lot like somewhat better tools and a few remote options.

Gen. Mark Milley Informs West Point Grads That He's Learned Nothing

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has one shtick and it's touting the future of warfare. And while considering the influence of tech on the battlefield is

Gen. Mark Milley Informs West Point Grads That He's Learned Nothing

Georgia's voter suppression bill is an assault on our democracy - Brookings, Apr 2021


	Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad - Vox, Apr 2021


	Voting is surging in Georgia despite controversial new election law -&nbsp;Washington Post:&nbsp;May 2022


	It's a little awkward when reality inconveniently fails <a href="https://sos.ga.gov/news/record-early-voting-turnout-continues-4">to match up</a> with your political narrative.

<blockquote>
	
		Through Wednesday, May 19th, over 565,000 people have early voted in Georgia—a 189% increase from the same point in the early voting period in the 2018 primary election and a 153% increase in the same point in the early voting period in the 2020 primary election. Georgia has had record early voting turnout since the first day of early voting this year, surging to nearly three times the number on the first day of primary voting in 2018 and double that of 2020, and has continued on that path since.
</blockquote>


	So much<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/video/georgia-early-voting-shatters-records-213543834.html"> for Jim Crow</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		But the law was widely panned by critics, with&nbsp;President Biden calling the legislation&nbsp;the return to the days of "Jim Crow."

	
		"At a time when parts of our country are backsliding,"&nbsp;Biden said at the time.&nbsp;"The days of Jim Crow, passing laws that harken back to the era of poll taxes, when Black people were made to guess how many beans&nbsp;—&nbsp;how many jelly beans in a jar,&nbsp;or count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap before they could cast their ballot."

	
		The new law caught the attention of Major League Baseball, which pulled the 2021&nbsp;All-Star Game from Atlanta&nbsp;in response to the law, arguing that it restricted access to voting.

	
		"I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft," MLB Commissioner&nbsp;Rob Manfred said in a statement at the time.
</blockquote>


	There might <a href="https://www.ajc.com/politics/turnout-surges-in-georgia-primary-led-by-resurgent-republicans/AWMAIU2PFVHR5OKMZWZ55GOJB4/">even be signs</a> of Democrats going Republican.

<blockquote>
	
		About&nbsp;7% of Republican ballots&nbsp;so far have come from voters who cast Democratic ballots in the 2020 primary. Georgia is an open primary state, meaning voters can choose which party’s ballot they want.
</blockquote>


	Clearly, voter suppression at its finest.

Media Claimed Georgia's Voting Law Would Suppress Vote. It's Up 189%.

Georgia's voter suppression bill is an assault on our democracy - Brookings, Apr 2021


	Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad - Vox, Apr 2021

Media Claimed Georgia's Voting Law Would Suppress Vote. It's Up 189%.

Nina Jankowicz, 33, a striking figure with long hair and lipstick, has become a national personality since her selection to head the Disinformation Governance Board of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The extroverted, saucy-looking, sometime singer and Bryn Mawr grad -- check out her Mary Poppins disinformation “song” on the Web -- is no empty-headed Barbie doll despite her manner of speaking which is vaguely reminiscent of what they used to call Valley Girl speak.


	This Valley Girl, however, comes with a dangerous knockout punch. Not only is she every lover of free speech’s worst nightmare, but Jankowicz’s sudden thrust into the national limelight has a Sci-Fi&nbsp; element to it as if she was artificially created by a Left-progressive rebot lab somewhere in the subterranean hallways of DHS. &nbsp;


	The news that DHS set about creating a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) and then selected Ms. Jankowicz to mastermind it, generated two sets of reactions: Leftists shrugged it off as “common sense” or “just another government bureaucracy,” while conservatives and lovers of free speech rightly maintained that the new department sounds like something inspired by the government of North Korea or (as has been noted) George Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ in his dystopian novel, 1984. &nbsp;


	The basic premise underlying the creation of the new agency is simple: Let’s give the government total control over information so that we don’t have to think. The fact that this agency has been allowed to be created at all indicates how low the Biden administration has fallen and how dangerous it has become.


	The creation of DGB is really a watershed moment and should stand as a wake-up call for all Americans.


	New governmental departments are rarely created in a vacuum, but come about because they are perceived as being useful for something else down the line (President Biden has requested $56.7 Billion for DHS in his 2023 budget). This is why, when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (who is generally seen as responsible for hiring Ms. Jankowicz) says that, “We in the DHS don’t monitor American citizens,” you can feel the pulsating lie lurking <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/mayorkas-says-disinformation-board-wont-track-us-citizens/">beneath the con</a>.


	DHS was founded in 2003 as an outgrowth of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Today the agency boasts some 240,000 employees. The Department is far from ‘stagnant’ in what it chooses to investigate because that changes depending on who is president. During the Biden administration, DHS has extended its tentacles into investigating reports of “white supremacy,” also known as the myth invented by leftists to try to convince Americans that there are large and unruly KKK covens in every town or city in the nation, and that organizations like The Lion’s Club, Kiwanis, and even the Knights of Columbus are being infiltrated by men and women in white hoods who burn crosses during the Blue Moon. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Under Biden, DHS published a National Advisory System bulletin labeling those who spread “misleading narratives” about Covid-19 as “a terrorist threat.”


	What is this if not North Korean-style authoritarianism?&nbsp;


	Take a look at the DHS official government website and you’ll see that September 25 has been designated as national “If You See Something, Say Something®” Awareness Day:

<blockquote>
	
		The campaign works with partners year-round to inspire, empower and educate the public on suspicious activity reporting. If You See Something, Say Something®. Report suspicious activity to local law enforcement or call 911. The National Terrorism Advisory System provides Americans with alert information on homeland security threats. 
</blockquote>


	The Left’s sudden obsession with “disinformation” is ironic considering the chronic disinformation Americans have been (and are still) subject to from Left-leaning MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC and from the craven oracles of the Biden administration itself. Mainstream media robots like Katie Couric and liberal news script readers of her ilk seem to forget that it was Donald Trump who first called out “fake news” in the legacy media. Somewhere along the line that term was co-opted by the Left to refer to Fox News and other conservative media outlets, including pundits like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6RnXaIcA5Y%20">Tucker Carlson</a> (whom The New York Times recently branded as “racist”).


	This wasn’t always the case. The high priest of the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, had little-to-no interest in so-called disinformation when one year before the 2016 election he ordered the closure of the only office in the country devoted to [as reported by The Washington Examiner] “countering and debunking Russian disinformation.”


	We can thank President George ‘Baby’ Bush, of course, for the creation of DHS, perhaps his worst accomplishment as president. Bush planted the seeds for the creation of Mayorkas, sworn in by Biden in February 2021, and for Jankowicz, who has some impressive academic credentials and who speaks fluent Russian, Polish and Ukrainian. But Jankowicz is merely the latest building block in the Left progressive Tower of Babel that DHS has become.&nbsp;


	Conservatives have criticized the creation of the disinformation agency and the appointment of Jankowicz as its head with welcoming vitriol. Jankowicz has never made an attempt to hide her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yidXQlIM34M%20">blatantly partisan</a> bias. To expect “neutrality” from her in her new position is to tap into a (pre-woke) Disneyland fantasy. Listen to Jankowicz on You Tube, or read her political Tweets, and you’ll get a snapshot of all the woke garbage that’s been flooding the country since 2016.


	For starters, there’s Jankowicz (in bright red lipstick) lecturing viewers on the use of proper pronouns, gender issues, and the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation,” itself a red flag as big as planet earth indicating this woman’s partisan allegiance and stupidity, academic degrees notwithstanding.


	Jankowicz has published a few essays in The Atlantic, a magazine that used to be fairly respectable before its disintegration into leftist psychobabble. One of her pieces is titled Trump’s Version of Poll Watching Sounds Like Thuggery.


	After E. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Jankowicz called Musk a ‘free speech absolutist” and warned that his control would “have negative consequences for marginalized communities on social media platforms” without ever explaining how and why this would happen.


	DHS’s new “disinformation czar” once made the claim that "free spirited" Americans would not comply with social distancing recommendations "unless they’re forced upon" them.&nbsp;


	"So force away! Lock us down. People are not taking this seriously," the fake free speech advocate wrote. &nbsp;


	In yet another tweet (reported by Fox News), Jankowicz claimed that "there are many non-binary people who give birth.” Adding insult to injury, she used the term "pregnant people" rather than "women".&nbsp;


	Jankowicz has a habit of spewing comments into the air—she talks fast in run-on sentences without ever seeming to take a breath—when she’s not camping it up in raunchy videos, like the one she recorded in 1998, “My Simple Christmas Wish (Rich, Famous, and Powerful”) In this sultry video, she whips out her desire to be famous, at any cost, even if that means stifling legally protected speech.&nbsp;


	The New York Post reported on Jankowicz’s randy side:

<blockquote>
	
		&nbsp;President Biden’s new disinformation czar Nina Jankowicz once belted out a raunchy parody version of a Christmas song — changing the lyrics to ask who she needed to “f–k” to be “famous and powerful,” according to resurfaced YouTube footage.

	
		“I want to be rich, famous, and powerful! Step on all my enemies and never do a thing,” Jankowicz sang in the clip from 2015. “Who do I f—k to be famous and powerful? I’ve done everything I can and now the rest is up to you.”
</blockquote>


	&nbsp;“Never do a thing” except to follow the partisan line are the key words here.


	Watch any serious video of Jankowicz with a panel of like-minded progressives and you’ll notice how she seems to hypnotize leftist men. Notice how their faces light up in beatific smiles as she goes on one of her breathless lipstick rants.


	Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in responding to the pushback around the creation of the new agency, stated that the “concerns were misplaced,” while admitting that perhaps DHS “should have defined the board’s role more clearly.” He added a caveat: “We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens,” which definitely falls into the He Said What Rabbit hole-category.&nbsp;


	Donald Trump went to the heart of the matter when he called Jankowicz, “A highly partisan leftwing lunatic,” and called for the defunding of “this leftwing propaganda board.” &nbsp;


	The new department needs to be de-funded, and quickly.


	In trying to learn more about Jankowicz, I stumbled upon a curious <a href="https://ontrend.news/is-nina-jankowicz-jewish-her-religion-parents-ethnicity-and-husband">article</a> in “Ontrend,” about Jankowicz’s religion. While religion is a highly personal matter, it is no secret that many Left Progressives don’t have any religion at all, or if they do it is the religion of Leftism, which has its own orthodox canons of do’s and don’t’s. A Google search will reveal that Nina Jankowicz's religion is still basically unknown.


	&nbsp;“She hasn't specified whether she is Jewish or not. She is, however, Russian, and Russians are predominantly Jewish. Her religion has yet to be determined; however, she may be Jewish,” Ontrend states.


	Of course, we know that Russians are not predominantly Jewish and so Jankowicz may also be Russian Orthodox, although I cannot imagine Nina Jankowicz venerating an icon. What she is most likely to venerate is the fact that, as two professors writing in The Wall Street Journal noted, the abbreviation for the Disinformation Governance Board was just “one letter off from K.G.B.” &nbsp;


	As Louisiana State <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZrDHGDa474%20">Senator John Kennedy</a> said to Alejandro Mayorkas about Jankowicz at the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing:&nbsp; “I would call in as soon as I got back to the office, and I would ask that person who recommended Ms. Jankowicz to you and I would fire him on the spot.”


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters Behind the Walls.&nbsp;

Nina Jankowicz: Putting Red Lipstick on Censorship

Nina Jankowicz, 33, a striking figure with long hair and lipstick, has become a national personality since her selection to head the Disinformation Governance

A decade ago I attended a Memorial Mass for a woman friend of mine who ran a Catholic Worker house in Philadelphia. Karen was involved in the Roman Catholic women priest movement. Her progressive views included support for ‘open’ liturgies (celebrated at the Catholic Worker house) which allowed celebrants other than priests to officiate. She was a radical, feminist Catholic, as were most of the people at her memorial service.


	This fact became evident to me at the luncheon following the service when I was seated beside a well groomed fifty something woman in a plaid skirt and sweater who introduced herself as a Sister of Saint Joseph. The Sisters of St. Joseph were among the first orders of Catholic nuns to ditch their religious habit after Vatican II.


	&nbsp;During the luncheon I explained to the well coiffed (and perfumed) Sister that I had fond memories of Saint Joe nuns in their unique box veils that made them resemble Orthodox patriarchs. I also told her that what I found most ironic was that in the days before Vatican II, Saint Joe nuns were noted for their strictness and cruelty (pinching the earlobes of students; using large wooden rulers as “swords” to discipline unruly boys), whereas after Vatican II almost all of them, sans their box veils and weighty crucifixes, had as their chrism social justice issues (Nuns on the Bus), etc.


	I took things a step further with the Saint Joe nun when I said, “Today, it seems your Order is all about using your rulers on society.”


	Fast forward to 2022 and to a Catholic landscape practically devoid of nuns in traditional habits except for cloistered women squirreled away in obscure convents. The sad fact is, contemplative orders of nuns were almost liquated after Vatican, but even the few “conservative” monasteries that survived became saddled with the new Mass and the revised, politically correct breviary, with its psalms that would bring joy to fans of the Southern Poverty Law Project.


	In Philadelphia, one can visit the <a href="https://adorationsisters.org/">Convent of Divine Love</a> where the cloistered Holy Adoration Sisters or ‘Pink Sisters’ reside. The nuns’ chapel with its grill work and rood screen is an impressive sight, as are the nuns themselves. These human relics of a lost era-- nuns not in pant suits who blabber about voting rights-- never fail to capture the imaginations of a fascinated public. The sight of a traditional nun in public always generates a buzz. In a supermarket near my home whenever an order of Eastern Rite Ukrainian nuns comes in to shop, shoppers look for any excuse to go up to them and say, “Finally, real nuns!”


	Pope Francis, a liturgical modernist, has made no secret of his dislike for tradition in the Roman Rite despite his professed admiration for the (always traditional) Orthodox Divine Liturgy. Francis’ goal is the stripping down of the Roman Rite to a Bauhaus like austerity.


	Francis, the iconoclast, is well on his way to relegating the Traditional Latin Mass to an archival footnote in Church history, and now it seems he has taken aim at a little congregation of <a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/traditional-carmelites-in-pennsylvania-announce-apostolic-visitation/">traditionalist nuns</a> in Fairfield, Pennsylvania.


	The Discalced Carmelites Sisters of <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/11/20/the-discalced-carmelite-sisters-of-fairfield-and-vatican-document-cor-orans/">Fairfield</a> were established in 2018, an outgrowth of a Carmel convent in Nebraska. The Carmelites were founded by Teresa of Avila (1515-82), the only woman to be declared a ‘Doctor of the Church.’ Carmelite convents are designed to be small (convents are not to exceed 30 nuns). The Fairfield convent currently has 25 nuns with two additional women scheduled to enter. Unlike the nearly empty Sisters of Saint Joseph convents throughout the nation (religious orders of nuns who wear secular dress are not gaining new members), the attraction of Fairfield Carmelites and other traditionalist communities continues to mystify—and anger-- the defenders of modernism.


	The Fairfield community is almost ‘Amish’ in its rigorous lifestyle. &nbsp;There is no indoor heating and plumbing, no air conditioning or electricity. The nuns, who wear traditional habits, pray 8 hours a day, sleep 5 ½ hours a night, attend the Traditional Latin Mass, eat no meat and practice intense fasting. The Carmelite tradition is one of autonomy, a 500 year old tradition established by St. Teresa of Avila.


	Enter Pope Francis, who in 2016 authored a document, Vultum Dei quaerere, a design plan to overhaul cloistered women’s communities. Francis’ revolutionary screed was followed by 2018 document released by the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, titled&nbsp; Cor Orans (‘praying heart’), which would give control of a monastery to a religious federation outside the community.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccscrlife/documents/rc_con_ccscrlife_doc_20180401_cor-orans_en.html">Cor Orans</a> grants Vatican henchmen generous oversight into the daily life of the Carmelites, which of course would spell doom for the 25 nuns (soon to be 27) and their Traditionalist lifestyle.


	The ‘mainstreaming’ aspects of a federation conjures a Saint Joe nun mentality—social justice seminars, feminist haircuts in exchange for religious habits, minimal to zero fasts, no Latin Mass, 8 hours of prayer cut down to one hour in a rehabbed convent chapel (out with the grill and fancy altar; in with a butcher block table altar.)


	“The global Church’s centuries of tradition are not akin to a container for preserved objects,” Francis has stated. As for traditionalist Catholics, he considers them mere pantywaists whose only purpose is to “safeguard the ashes of the past.” &nbsp;


	Before the release of Cor Orans, The Remnant quoted one fully professed Carmelite nun and a senior member of the monastery’s council.


	“The Cor Orans document is the death-knell of Carmel. It signals the end of the contemplative monastic life. Not only does it destroy the autonomy of the Monasteries, something Our Holy Mother St. Teresa was extremely insistent about, but it also removes the Superior, dissolves her authority and power…”


	Last year the Fairfield convent became the object of an Apostolic Visitation from Rome. According to LifeSiteNews, a Visitation consists of interviews of each sister and a detailed scrutiny of the Nuns’ daily life. It includes an evaluation of their application of the Carmelite charism and their monastic customs.


	Three “Apostolic” visitors spent a few days at the Fairfield convent, after which they assured the nuns that they were living a very good life, that all was in order and they had nothing to worry about.


	How many lies are hidden beneath smiley faces, behind warm handshakes and a hug? The devil clothed as an angel!


	In 2012, when the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI announced that several orders of liberal activist nuns like the <a href="https://sssla.org/">Sisters of Social Service</a> (whose charism includes gender matters, poverty and the ordination of women) would be receiving an Apostolic Visitation because of “serious doctrinal problems,” the legacy media went berserk. People accused Benedict XVI of conducting an Inquisition and branded him a draconian medievalist and a Nazi. In the end, the American liberal nuns (in feminist haircuts) got a pass to continue their work.


	Compare Benedict XVI’s graciousness towards these liberal nuns to the current Vatican ruling for the Fairfield Carmelites under Jorge of the Pachamamas. 


	The Fairfield convent was given one year to decide whether to join the federation of activist nuns or suffer the consequences. The consequences, of course, could mean the closure of the convent.


	If the convent opts to join the federation, the Vatican will take control of the financial assets of the nuns and their properties. All of this is a form of persecution because many in Rome believe that contemplative orders serve no purpose in the Church anymore. Many prelates want to liquidate the convent’s assets and give the money to the poor.


	Hilary White of One Peter asks,

<blockquote>
	
		Why the Fairfield Carmel? Obviously because they are successful. But most especially that they are successful&nbsp;as traditionalists. They have grown and prospered and are building their beautiful stone monastery. They are popular and have immense support from the laity. All this while very firmly rejecting the Modernist “reforms” of religious life and liturgy, that in Rome are considered the litmus test for acceptance by the contemporary Church. All of this put together is virtually a death sentence in the current Vatican. 
</blockquote>


	The attack on the Fairfield convent has the support of the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Nelson Perez, who happens to be a friend of Pope Francis. Perez is a <a href="https://gloria.tv/post/nwP8VdJeGdCU1Aop3YGpFf2fr">company man</a>, an easy going modernist who banned kneeling at Mass in the Diocese of Cleveland when he was Bishop there.&nbsp; LifeSite News reported that Nelson J. Perez has been telling his brother bishops in the USCCB that “the nuns in Valparaiso, Nebraska and Fairfield are a cult.”


	And there you have it: A cult. What was once normal Catholic life in the 1950s and for hundreds of years throughout history is now being categorized as disordered. 


	Archbishop Perez has kept a low profile in Philadelphia since his installation in 2020. He has proven to be a quiet presence in the city, practically a non-entity in terms of newsworthy comments although in April 2021, he arranged a virtual event called Journey of Hope in which he featured several nuns in feminist haircuts, the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and James Martin, editor of America Magazine. The event drew some protests outside the city’s Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.


	As for the Fairfield Carmelites, they were told that by no means will they receive a dispensation from the Cor Orans document, something they were hoping and praying for.


	Cults must be squashed, after all, so that the New Order can be Triumphant.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters Behind the Walls.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Pope Francis’ Unholy War on Traditionalist Carmelite Nuns

A decade ago I attended a Memorial Mass for a woman friend of mine who ran a Catholic Worker house in Philadelphia. Karen was involved in the Roman Catholic

The city has traditionally been portrayed as the place to be if you want the best in arts and culture, while the suburbs tend to be viewed as a monochrome, uncultured wasteland.&nbsp;


	Then was then, and now is now, as they say.


	An example of "then" would be my home city of Philadelphia, especially in the 1970s and ‘80s, when city streets were far safer in terms of gun violence. Although a city of uninspiring mini skyscrapers then (it wasn’t until 1986 that buildings were permitted to be taller than the statue of William Penn atop City Hall), it was an historic place still basking in the mystique of classic films like The Philadelphia Story and the bizarre existentialist art epic, David and Lisa, filmed on the Main Line and on the steps of the Museum of Art.


	The relatively un-modern, even homely, aspects of Philadelphia in those days belied the fact that the city’s downtown area overflowed with fascinating places to go and plenty of small eateries and bars, as well as an annual Mummer’s Parade that had not yet been sanitized into a politically correct mobile theme park. By comparison, today’s Philadelphia falls flat on almost every front—from its pithy offering of casual eateries to its fame as a "go to" place for homelessness and <a href="https://www.banyantreatmentcenter.com/2021/06/24/drugs-in-kensington-update-philadelphia/">Fentanyl-heroin</a> users. Not only is the city different from how it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, it is so different that it is no longer touted for its utopian possibilities by city-based real estate and style magazines.


	So what went wrong?


	The pandemic brought an economy-destroying lockdown that stopped the daily flow of commuters into the city. Suddenly everybody was working at home as the city became a sterile no-man’s land. Arts and cultural institutions halted exhibitions and lectures; restaurants tried to weather the storm until the fantasy of outdoor dining became a reality. When the George Floyd riots hit, the city became a war zone with destroyed properties and nightly curfews.


	The riots were a wakeup call for city residents, many of whom witnessed Social Justice Warrior mobs and their thug allies blow up ATMs, burn and overturn police cars, and torch multiple businesses. These atrocities occurred as the police ran for cover, in effect handing the rioters a pass. For multiple nights the people in my neighborhood went to bed to the sound of explosions, wondering when (not if) the mobs would be at their front door.


	Overnight, the city became a Dante-esque lockdown hell. The mayor, Jim Kenney, had abdicated, cowering somewhere in City Hall unseen and unheard. When the man finally broke his silence it wasn’t to condemn the bomb throwers and property burners but to lash out at a group of Fishtown men armed with baseball bats who’d taken to the streets in front of their local police station because it was rumored that the mob was headed into the neighborhood.


	Left progressive <a href="https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/philly-leaders-dont-want-vigilante-justice-on-streets-during-unrest/2416936/">media outlets</a> like The Philadelphia Inquirer and its legion of like-minded writers wrote about the hateful Fishtown white supremacist vigilantes with a vengeance. &nbsp;


	The gap between reality and the narrative being promoted by the press was alarming since there was hardly a neighbor I talked to then (most of whom were Democrats) who didn’t fear that the mob would begin burning houses. Since the police were nowhere to be found as the mob advanced throughout the city, the "rednecks" with baseball bats had little choice but to rise to the occasion. &nbsp;


	If 2020 was a preview of how the city handled multiple disasters at once, many began to wonder what might happen in the future when another social justice crisis fanned the flames of violent wokeism. &nbsp;


	Hence the birth of a new movement: the exodus of people from blue cities and states.


	This exodus from blue cities is a national phenomenon (952,000 people moved out of New York City alone between 2011 and 2015). While this exodus began before the pandemic and the riots, the numbers of citizen migrants increased significantly in 2021. Name your city—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit—and you’ll find the unflattering shocking statistics. The four cities mentioned above lost 700,000 people from July 2020 to July 2021 for smaller places like Boise, Idaho; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Phoenix, Arizona. Last year The New York Times noted increased migrations from so called “star” cities due to draconian pandemic lockdowns and restraints from municipal governments (the lockdowns did not come from red cities).&nbsp;


	The reasons given for the migrant citizen exodus pretty much depend on the politics of the publication.


	Deseret News, for instance, posited that “Many Americans moved from larger cities to smaller ones during the <a href="https://www.deseret.com/2022/3/24/22994957/americans-leaving-big-cities-covid-pandemic-new-york-california-texas-idaho-los-angeles-houston">pandemic</a>,” while Slate had its own clever spin: “Cities Aren’t Shrinking because everyone’s moving out, but because no one’s moving in.” Slate reminded readers that millennials are leaving big cities and going to Denver (a big blue city); Seattle (a big blue city); Cary, NC; and Henderson, Nevada.


	The Times kept its report on citizen migration focused on pandemic-related issues with no mention of crime or the 2020 riots. It took Forbes to upstage and out-truth the Grey Lady when it reported that cities were seeing decreased populations because citizens feared continued riots and the reemergence of COVID-19.


	Forbes dared to mention riots, a word that leftists would rather relegate to the dustbin because it’s perceived as being charged with the smoke of racism. The word, in the world we live in now, is charged with an incendiary subtext, evoking woke responses like, “What riots? They were legitimate protests! The rioters were only a few troublemakers!”


	“Americans are moving away from built-up urban areas,” NPR declared in 2020. “Americans are leaving big cities due to the cost of living.” The cost of living might be one factor, as is the cost of housing, but this is tip of the iceberg stuff. The record shows that big blue cities with left progressive DAs and whose mayors hinted at defunding the police in 2020 comprise the majority of cities people are fleeing, &nbsp;


	A Bloomberg City Lab report in 2021 named the two biggest loser cities of them all, San Francisco and San Jose:

<blockquote>
	
		The San Francisco Bay Area tells a more dramatic story. The regions around San Francisco and San Jose, two of the country’s most expensive housing markets, saw the rates of permanent moves increase the most, by more than 23% and 17% respectively, compared to 3% nationally. Moves that were considered temporary—changes of address for six months or less—more than doubled in the San Francisco region, compared to 17% nationally.

	
		As in the rest of the U.S., most people moved within their own region. But compared to other metro areas, a far greater percentage of people left the Bay Area entirely. Many of them moved to other parts of California including Los Angeles, but also smaller and less expensive cities like Stockton and, in Goodman’s case, Sacramento.
</blockquote>


	Statewide, big blue Molochs like California and New York are losing residents to red states. The "move to a red state" movement is growing exponentially, from Facebook pages like <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/365994177231836">Conservatives Moving to Texas</a> to the world of the Catholic podcast where lay apostate evangelizers like Timothy Gordon regularly advise blue state listeners to consider moving to a red state, pronto! After all, blue cities and states are getting worse (crime, shootings, sanctuary city policies, and the undermining of law enforcement) while conditions in red states are significantly better, including the preponderance of right-to-work laws.


	Philadelphia’s fall from grace was cemented with the election of DA Larry Krasner and the appointment in 2020 of Danielle Outlaw as Commissioner for the PPD. Outlaw, formerly Chief of Police for the Portland Police Bureau and before that deputy chief of the Oakland Police Department, illustrates to a large degree how Mayor Kenney has become a prisoner of the city’s leftist ruling class.


	Kenney’s appointment of Outlaw was a clear indication that the PPD would change radically going forward. The first thing Outlaw did as Police Commissioner was to end the ban on colored nail polish for female officers, who were previously only permitted to wear clear nail polish.


	While Outlaw’s cosmetic coup may be an accomplishment for the nail polish industry, what about the city’s real problems, like the hordes of ATV and dirt bike riders who travel city streets by the hundreds, weaving in and out of traffic, driving on the sidewalks as they circle City Hall or head up and down the Art Museum steps—all while the police stand by and observe because it would be <a href="https://6abc.com/dirt-bike-riders-philadelphia-atv-task-force-city-council/11663207/">dangerous</a> to apprehend them?


	What about the Fentanyl-Opioid crisis, and the numbers of the drug-addicted homeless that have taken over many parts of the city?


	Consider the Market-Frankford El and the numbers of homeless riders, some of whom can be observed shooting up in the train; or the infamous Kensington and Allegheny stop along the El route which has become the nation’s first Opioid Village, where hundreds or thousands of addicts live on the street. Legitimate businesses have long vacated the area unless you consider pawn shops, wig stores, and a lone Walgreen’s that has more security than products on the shelves to be viable businesses.


	Every facet of city life has been impacted since the pandemic and the riots, including the wait time for 911 calls which have increased to 20 minutes, something that Outlaw says is the result of increased calls for service.


	“If we expect the same level of service or output given that we have fewer people or more work, you know, we’re going to see some disparities there. So we have to prioritize the calls and how we dispatch,” she said.


	Perhaps Philadelphians need to prioritize how they “dispatch” and begin to think seriously about heading out to those uncultured, suburban wastelands.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters Behind the Walls. &nbsp;

Leaving Blue Cities for Red Cities

The city has traditionally been portrayed as the place to be if you want the best in arts and culture, while the suburbs tend to be viewed as a monochrome,

In October 2021, The Nation’s John Nichols gleefully reported that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had a double-digit lead over Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli in that state’s governor’s race. In the same month, The New York Intelligencer noted that Murphy’s double-digit lead had been cut in half. What caused the seemingly instantaneous numbers change?


	The Intelligencer theorized that politically liberal-to-moderate parents in the state were tired of their children being forced to stay home from school. There were other issues as well, namely Murphy’s forced mask mandates and vaccination orders for school employees. The Intelligencer also quoted Ciattarelli on Murphy’s progressive agenda: “We’re not teaching gender ID to kindergartners.”


	Ciattarelli didn’t stop there. He also pointed out the Democrats’ plan to teach students about white Americans’ role in racial oppression. “There is systemic racism, but I don’t think we should be teaching our children that white people perpetuate systemic racism,” he stated.


	The people of New Jersey obviously paid attention because Phil Murphy nearly lost his 2021 bid for re-election. Four years earlier, in 2017, he sailed to an easy14-point victory margin over Republican challenger Kim Guadagno.


	The trajectory of Murphy’s rise to Left Progressive stardom started with the pandemic, when he constructed a full TV studio in his home in Red Bank, modeling it after Joe Biden’s covid-19 hideaway bunker in Delaware. Murphy and the pandemic seemed to be a match made in political heaven. In September 2020, three years after becoming the state’s 56th governor, Politico was publishing pieces with headlines like, ‘How Covid-19 made New Jersey’s Phil Murphy the most powerful governor in America.’


	Murphy’s season in the sun was short lived, however.


	Despite a glowing first term report card from state Democrats lauding him for creating one of the most diverse cabinets in the nation—the nation’s first Sikh Attorney General, the state’s first Muslim Health Commissioner and the appointment of six women—Murphy won re-election by 50 to 49.2%, a percentage point so fragile it took a day to determine the winner. In its post election analysis, The New York Times wondered if Murphy would move to the middle when it came to issues like <a href="https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2022/approved/20220113a.shtml">abortion</a> (Murphy put that question to rest when he signed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act --S49/A6260--, perhaps the most liberal abortion law in the country.)


	&nbsp;The Governor, whose distinctive toothy grin is somehow reminiscent of a shark’s external gill, hails from a working class suburb of Boston and was the first Democrat to hold the office in 8 years, succeeding Governor Chris Christie. The Harvard-Wharton School grad and former Goldman Sachs CEO spent 21.7 million on the primary in 2017, leading some to speculate that he bought the election.


	His progressive liberal platform included Pre-K (a favorite cause among progressives because it provides fertile introductory ground for gender studies and critical race theory), free community college and legalized recreational weed. Murphy often mentioned the state of California as a role model for New Jersey’s progressive policies.


	That there is a far-left agitprop for Pre-K Tots is no longer disputed, as The New York Post pointed out in January 2020 when it reported that “at one taxpayer-funded Brooklyn nursery, it isn’t numbers, letters or nap time — but ­racism and victimhood, plus transgender rights, with a heavy dose of political indoctrination in the mix.” &nbsp;As far back as 2016, former Governor Chris Christie was quick to attack Murphy’s support for Pre-K, when he called it “Babysitting” and added that it was an unfair intrusion of government into public education.


	“No child in this state is worth more state aid than another,” Christie stated then. “Every child has potential. Every child has goals. Every child has dreams. No child’s dreams are less worthy than any others.”


	Since becoming governor of Cali-Jersey, Murphy has transformed Pre-K&nbsp; into what President Biden has hailed as a model for the nation. It took some time for Murphy to do this, but once NJ Pre-K got on its feet, he was quick to sign a new law in March 2021 mandating that state schools must begin age-appropriate lessons about diversity and inclusion as early as kindergarten.


	Murphy’s Law (what could go wrong) called on schools to promote “economic diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, and belonging in connection with gender, race and ethnicity, disabilities, and religious tolerance.”


	Of course, protecting the health of toddlers is essential when you’re feeding them propaganda. Toddlers must be well to learn well, and so the governor-- with a grin reminiscent of a shark’s external gill-- signed the most woke executive order of them all: a proclamation stating that two to five-year-olds must wear masks in day care centers. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Murphy rolled out this <a href="https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2380765318908/gov-phil-murphy-defends-the-nj-toddler-mask-mandate">directive</a> despite guidelines from the World Health Organization stating that children aged 5 and younger should not be required to wear masks “based on the safety and overall interest of the child and the capacity to appropriately use a mask with minimal assistance.”


	His order was called “a heinous act” and a form of “child abuse” by many, including Senator Michael J. Doherty of New Jersey’s 23rd Legislative District. Many others echoed Senator Doherty’s concerns but the protests did no good. The toddlers continued to wear masks like the trapped children in a bad version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1996 thriller, The City of Lost Children.


	From day care centers, Murphy then set his gaze on prisons when he took the most radical action possible when it was revealed that New Jersey had one of the highest pandemic-related deaths in the country. What to do? Well, release as many prisoners as possible, of course.


	The decision was made to cut 8 months off many prisoners’ sentences to relive crowding and to keep the pandemic at bay. The Department of Corrections public relations people got to work assuring the press and citizenry that the prisoners being released were not convicted murderers or repeat sexual offenders. They were, in most instances, harmless parole violators. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	In April 2020 Murphy signed Executive Order No. 124, <a href="https://nj.gov/infobank/eo/056murphy/pdf/EO-124.pdf">Executive Order</a> establishing the Emergency Medical Review Committee to make recommendations on which inmates should be placed on temporary home confinement.


	“My Administration’s top priority is the health and safety of all nine million New Jerseyans, including those who are currently incarcerated,”&nbsp;the Governor said. &nbsp;“The correctional setting presents unique challenges to social distancing, particularly for vulnerable populations. Allowing some of our most vulnerable individuals who do not pose a public safety threat to temporarily leave prison will protect both their health, and the health and safety of the men and women working in our correctional facilities….”


	On the West coast during the same time period, the state of California, New Jersey’s golden calf role model, was doing the same thing. Nearly 9,500 inmates were released from California state prisons from July 1 through Aug. 6, 2020.


	Much like Murphy’s management of PRE-K, the idea behind emptying prisons was to introduce the idea gently at first (with many facts left out), and then when the ball got rolling to accelerate the motion significantly. With PRE-K, this meant the later addition of <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/introducing-new-jerseys-equity-in-education-initiative-learning-ally-partners-with-the-state-of-new-jersey-to-support-literacy-for-all-301298494.html">diversity and equity</a> instruction; with early prison releases it meant upping the numbers of released prisoners as well as using less of a filter when it came to decisions about which prisoners to let go. &nbsp;


	1,000 people were released from New Jersey jails in the spring of 2020. By the end of 2021, more than 5,300 prisoners were home free in a liberation exercise that New Jersey Corrections spokesperson Liz Velez called “a seamless reentry process balancing public health and public safety.”


	Now, in what sounds like a bad Saturday Night Live skit, Velez also stated that the released prisoners “are COVID tested before release and provided a COVID KIT with essentials such as sanitizer and masks.”


	Are we to believe that criminals who wear masks and use hand sanitizer somehow pose no risk to the general population? You may be burglarized but at least you won’t catch COVID. 


	The first 11 months of Murphy’s program reduced the prison population in New Jersey by 40% (down to about 10,800 individuals.) Yet the vastness of the enterprise and the speed at which it was implemented pretty much guaranteed some kind of <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/us/nj-inmate-freed-early-due-to-covid-is-charged-with-murder-2-days-later">disaster</a>


	That disaster happened in August 2021 when New Jersey 101.5 broke the following news,


	“NJ Inmate Accused of Murder Days After NJ Law Ordered His Release.” 


	&nbsp;“..Two days after his release, Jerry Crawford, 25, of Atlantic City, doing time for burglary, was allowed to leave South Woods State Prison on November 4, 2020. On November 6 he and another man shot David Scarbrough. Scarbrough’s body was found riddled with bullets and dumped in a field.”


	&nbsp;After charges were filed against Crawford, Republican state Sen. Michael Testa said, “A member of the public is now dead as a direct result of the Murphy administration’s dangerous early release policy….We warned Governor Murphy that he was putting the public at risk, but he disagreed, with tragic results…”


	Testa believes that the Governor has another motive for the early prison release. To bolster his view, he cites conversations he’s had with corrections officers and union leaders who say that because the Department of Corrections has failed to repair the infrastructure at Southern State and Bayside State prisons that the governor’s intention is to close sections of those facilities.


	Yet the ever persistent Phil Murphy just won’t quit.


	In early February 2022, the NJ Dept. of Corrections released another 852 inmates when Murphy re-declared a public health emergency due to the omicron variant. Ironically, almost a month later the governor ended the mask mandate for students and school employees. “This is not a declaration of victory as much as an acknowledgment that we can responsibly live with this thing,” he said, echoing what many experts were saying over a year ago.


	It’s strange and suspicious (and indicative of yet another agenda) that while Murphy is announcing the end of the pandemic health emergency, he’s still allowing serious offenders an early release from prison.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters Behind the Walls. &nbsp;

Murphy’s Law and the Road to Perdition

In October 2021, The Nation’s John Nichols gleefully reported that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had a double-digit lead over Republican challenger Jack

As a member of a Russian Orthodox parish in Philadelphia, I can attest that the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine has a special significance for the congregation there.


	Some members hail from third or fourth generation Russian families, while others consider themselves both Ukrainian and Russian. Converts from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—Irish, Italian and English members—can also be seen at Divine Liturgy on Sundays and feast days. Mixed marriages are also not uncommon. One spouse may be Orthodox, the other Catholic. A former pastor of the parish, Archpriest Father Vincent Saverino, who died in 2018, once boasted that he had “not one ounce of Russian blood.”&nbsp;


	You will not find the word "Russian" listed in front of the word "Orthodox" on the signage in front of the church. I’m not sure why the word was left out but several years ago some in the parish discussed whether to include "Russian" or to insert “Eastern" in front of "Orthodox." Since no action was taken on the signage, to the average passerby the church is just Orthodox, which can mean anything—Serbian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Albanian, etc., although the three-bar cross on top of the towering steeple (the church was built as a German Reformed church in 1874) might identity the church as Russian to those in the know.


	My parish sits in a multi-block complex of Orthodox churches in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood settled by Eastern European immigrants in the early 1900s. Saint Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, two blocks from my parish, is recognizable by its impressive blue onion domes. Construction on St. Andrew’s began in 1897 when 1,200 Russian naval officers were sent as builders by the Czar. Nearly 600,000 immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe migrated to the city between 1890 and 1914, and many settled in the Northern Liberties area so that very quickly the area began to be known as "Slavic Europe in microcosm."


	Saint Andrew’s cathedral makes no attempt to hide its Russian identification, although during the years of the Cold War the pastor there, the Rev. Mark Shinn, told me that the church was frequently vandalized or viewed as "the enemy" because of the word "Russian."


	Two blocks from St. Andrew’s is Saint Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church, perhaps the most beautiful Orthodox Church in the city. Across the street from St. Nicholas is the gold-domed Ukrainian Catholic cathedral, part of the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church with its distinctive "Orthodox" liturgy and customs (married priests). A Romanian Orthodox church and a Slovakian Catholic church of the Latin rite complete this interesting neighborhood of churches.


	Several years prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there was a schism in the Orthodox world when, on January 5, 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a separate body with zero ties to Russia, was granted self-governing status by the head of Orthodox Church in Constantinople. This “new” Church now stood in “opposition” to The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate, UOC-MP), which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church.&nbsp;


	The creation of this new Orthodox body created a division between the Moscow and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who some regard as “the first among equals in the Orthodox Church.” While Constantinople (the city is never referred to as Istanbul in Orthodoxy) may have played an important part in the early history of Christianity, the Islamic majority city today has few Christian residents, causing many over the years to proclaim Russia as the real future of Orthodoxy.


	The Russian Church’s refusal to acknowledge the “new” Ukrainian Church resulted in the Moscow Patriarchate’s decision to end communion with the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Greek Orthodox Church. On the local parish level, this meant that Russian Orthodox congregations were informed that communing in a Greek Church or a Ukrainian Church with ties to the newly created OCU, was forbidden on canonical grounds.


	I saw this new rule play out when Greek priests who formerly concelebrated with the priests in our parish were suddenly told they could no longer do so. Greeks who would occasionally visit our parish for Divine Liturgy and receive communion, were no longer welcome to participate in the sacrament unless they did not identify as Greek Orthodox.


	A majority of parishioners in my parish viewed this ruling as merely a manifestation of hurt egos in a political war between two patriarchs. Many chose to ignore the sanction of inter-communion, feeling that "Orthodox" is "Orthodox," the same sacraments, belief and theology and worlds away from any espousal of heterodox theology which traditionally has always been the cause of schism.&nbsp;


	Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko, who served as Ukraine’s fifth president from 2014 to 2019, praised Constantinople’s move when he referred to it as "an issue of Ukrainian national security,” as well as "a great victory for the devout Ukrainian nation over the Moscow demons, a victory of good over evil, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46575548">light over darkness</a>."


	The Moscow Patriarchate in turn stated that it has always had legal authority over the Ukrainian Church, and that Kyiv was the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox Church.


	My experience as an Orthodox Christian (I made the switch from Roman Catholicism about ten years ago), is that many Orthodox laypeople--the people in the pews--have radically different views from the hierarchy when it comes to canonical squabbles. Orthodox lay people, for instance, are highly likely to attend services in any Orthodox Church regardless of its canonical (political) status. This is certainly true in my parish, where members sometimes openly proclaim that they communed in a Greek Church while on vacation or that they paid a visit to the magnificent church of Saint Nicholas, a mere 4 blocks away, which is no longer a part of the Moscow Patriarchate but affiliated with the OCU.


	In a way, the 2018 Moscow-Constantinople Schism might be described as a prescient event foreshadowing the bloody tragedy now occurring in Ukraine. In 2019, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill <a href="https://international.la-croix.com/news/religion/kirill-the-extremely-political-russian-orthodox-patriarch/15716">announced</a> at a plenary meeting entitled ‘Saving the Nation is the Present and Future of Russia’ at Christ the Savior cathedral in Moscow, that,

<blockquote>
	
		God forbid that the present political states in fraternal Ukraine so close to us should be aimed at making the evil forces that have always strived against the unity of Russia and the Russian Church, gain the upper hand. 
</blockquote>


	Patriarch Kirill, speaking about the Ukrainian Church schism, also noted,

<blockquote>
	
		We have certain reliable information that everything that is happening in the global Orthodox Church today is not accidental. It’s not just a whim of this or that religious figure. This is an implementation of a very definite plan—first, to separate Russia from the Greek world and the Greek world from Russia. 
</blockquote>


	Part of the blame for the current disunity in the Orthodox world can be laid at the feet of the Russian Patriarch who insisted that Russian Orthodox people and members of the Ukrainian-Moscow affiliated Church OUC disavow relations (inter-communion) with Churches affiliated with the Patriarch of Constantinople. Decisions like this only contribute to the splintering of Orthodox unity and in so doing decrease the effectiveness of the Church in a world increasingly threatened by <a href="https://www.indiafacts.org.in/unfinished-agendas-of-radical-islam-case-2-armenia-and-turkey/">Islam</a>.


	How much better it would have been if the Russian Patriarch had deferred to Constantinople in this one instance and let matters stand for the health of the Church.


	In some Russian Orthodox circles there’s a belief that secular (global) powers fear the conservatism of the Orthodox Church -- a Church that for the most part has remained unchanged in its theology and liturgy throughout the centuries, unlike the Roman Catholic Church which has constantly adopted new forms, new liturgies and many other innovations in order to “synchronize” with the times (consider the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and its dance with the progressive left ideologies of the Democrat Party.) &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The first two Sundays following Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, I was careful to check the mood of fellow parishioners and to be on the lookout for possible reactions when the presiding priest commemorated Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in the prayers before Communion. I noticed no reaction among the congregation at the mention of the Patriarch’s name, although when prayers were offered for the people of Ukraine, most in the congregation bowed their heads profoundly. Later, at coffee hour, I spoke with women who identify with both countries; several of whom who have family and friends in St. Petersburg and Kyiv, and who had always talked about Russia and Ukraine as if it was one country.


	The coffee hour comments exploded exponentially on the second Sunday. Some parishioners were discouraged, even angered, that there was not a word on the devastation in Ukraine (or a call for special prayers for that country) on any of the Russian Patriarchal Church sponsored web sites, while other parishioners wondered how long it would be before the parish encountered protests outside the church once it became widely known that the church was “Russian.”


	Protest in the tightly knotted world of Russian Orthodoxy is beginning to occur. Some Ukrainian Churches aligned with the Moscow Patriarchate are systemically withdrawing their prayers for Patriarch Kirill (who is seen as the shadow power behind Vladimir Putin) during the Divine Liturgy. In another development, Russian Orthodox priests throughout Russia are rising up and asking—demanding—that Patriarch Kirill make a bold statement distancing himself from Putin.


	Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Philadelphia, Borys Gudziak, in an &nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqeT_lgWCTM%20">interview</a> with Raymond Arroyo on EWTN’s the ‘World Over,’ said that,

<blockquote>
	
		Patriarch Kirill came up with this ideological concept called ‘the Russian World,’ where there was a Russian Empire, a foot print, we [Russia] want it back. This is an ecclesial term that Putin has been using. There is great sympathy between the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin. 
</blockquote>


	Archbishop Gudziak also mentioned that Russians are bombing their own Moscow Patriarchate churches in Ukraine and that many of the people injured or killed so far have been Russian members of the Moscow-affiliated Church.


	It should be noted that in my Russian Orthodox parish, the pronounced political viewpoint of most members is politically conservative. There is, however, a small band of soft leftists who have always been vocal about their hatred for anything labeled Republican. During the 2020 George Floyd riots, one parishioner decorated himself with “I Can’t Breathe” buttons while bragging to another parishioner that he missed services one Sunday because he took his children to a BLM protest. Another parishioner is adamantly Pro-Choice, which is not the "Orthodox Way" at all. &nbsp;


	The fact is, the slight right-left divide in my parish has pretty well dissolved at this point thanks to the apocalyptic nature of the Ukraine crisis.


	Ten years ago, when I became a member of this venerable church, I would never have imagined that the people in the pews here would be sitting around at coffee hour talking about how Putin should be taken out.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and&nbsp;From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

Russia-Ukraine: Religious Wars and Patriarchal Egos       

As a member of a Russian Orthodox parish in Philadelphia, I can attest that the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine has a special significance for the congregation

It seems that the transgender revolution sweeping the globe has finally caught the eye of merchandisers.


	Consider the Bitty Bug Soft <a href="https://stitchbugstudio.com/product/bittybug/">Packer</a>, a custom made prosthetic for your (gender ambiguous) toddler. Vaguely reminiscent of a knitted glove, the Bitty Bug is actually a miniature knitted penis that parents can pin to their female child’s underwear to give a life-like impression of the male gender. The crocheted device is manufactured by Stitchbug Studio for just $6 a pair and guarantees that your biological female child will never be mistaken as female. Bitty Bug penises come in a variety of colors like pink, hummus, brown, black, white, blue, and purple. There are also a variety of sizes: 1 inch, 1.5 inches, 2 inches, and 2.5 inches.


	&nbsp;Daily Mail.com reported,

<blockquote>
	
		The controversial £4.20 item is available in multiple colors and was even advertised on the company's website using a photo of a teddy bear with a bulge protruding from his children's underpants. Similar adult 'packers' have become popular in the trans community to help reduce gender dysphoria and anxiety, however this range were noticeably smaller than usual.
</blockquote>


	At first glance, the Bitty Bug Packer looks like unhinged satire, but it as real as UPenn swimmer Lia Thomas, aka Will Thomas, a tall transgender woman with big hands and feet who regularly crushes biological female competitors while making many of them feel uncomfortable in the shower.


	Lia Thomas, who has retained her essential male body parts, is on record as being attracted to women, which in effect makes him/her a lesbian according to old school definitions.


	Similarly, Amy Schneider, the transgender Jeopardy! super champion, was referred to as a manly man until his transition in 2016. Schneider currently lives with a girlfriend, in effect making him a lesbian too. Of course, I am in no way denigrating Lia Thomas’ or Amy Schneider’s humanity because they chose to become transgender. Both deserve to live in peace, free from harm and discrimination.


	Why Thomas and Schneider became transgender is another story, perhaps too complicated for this piece. No matter the reason, this fact still stands: underneath the costuming -- the pearls, the female swimsuits, and light touches of lipstick -- both are still biological men and will remain biological men for the rest of their lives.


	This means that when it comes to athletics, transgender men like Thomas and Schneider will have huge advantages, although trans activists would like the world to shelve biological reality in favor of a narrative that states that you are whom you identify with.


	UPenn, an Ivy League school located in the Woke stratosphere, initially issued a warning to Thomas’ female teammates to refrain from any references to Thomas’ so-called unfair biological advantage. Thomas’ teammates kept quiet for months but then 16 members of the team <a href="https://www.si.com/college/2022/02/04/penn-swim-team-lia-thomas-barred-competition">signed a letter</a> that was sent to the University requesting that it not pursue legal action to challenge the NCAA’s new transgender policies. That policy states that transgender athletes’ participation for each sport will be determined by the policy set by each sport’s governing body. The new policy was seen as potentially banning Thomas from participating in March’s NCAA championships, but on February 10, the NCAA ruled that Thomas could compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Championship and that the new policy would not take effect until next season. &nbsp;


	The letter to the University was an heroic act on the part of Thomas’ teammates, given the political orthodoxy of UPenn and ferociousness of transgender activists at the first hint of what they perceive to be transphobia or transmisogyny.


	Transgender activist retaliation for perceived transphobia can border on the psychotic and comes in many forms: boycotts, threats, letter-writing campaigns, personal attacks. I speak from personal experience. Years ago I offended a group of trans activists when I unwittingly used the wrong pronouns when reviewing the book, Balancing on the Mechitza, Transgender in the Jewish Community for a Washington, D.C. magazine. The piece generated a tsunami of hateful pushback lasting for weeks, as if I was discovered to be a sort of Ted Bundy transgender serial killer rather than someone who had misgendered a person or two in the article. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The trans activist cabal (TAC) has succeeded in hoodwinking corporate America, academe, arts and cultural institutions, as well as the media to believe that whatever comes out of a trans leftist "think tank" is infallible dogma that cannot be questioned. TAC has done its fair share of damage, especially in its assault on the English language with its insistence that biological men and women be known as "cisgender," and that persons who identify with multiple genders be addressed as "they" or "them."


	Leftists, in order to show solidarity with trans people, will insert their own preferred pronouns in parentheses after their printed name on press releases, city documents, and other official papers. To refuse to cooperate in this manner is to stand out and be noticed (and possibly be subject to criticism later). A leftist trans ally is always on guard to use the correct terminology lest he, she, or they slip and commit a political sin for which there is no forgiveness.


	When Lia Thomas’ teammates at Upenn went public with their concerns, many news sources referred to the event as “controversial” while other media outlets, especially the LGBT media, categorized the 16 swimmers as insensitive and transphobic. The LGBT media, of course, is fairly robotic in its adherence to the latest transgender dogma. Whether the issue is puberty blockers for small children (those Bitty Bug Soft Packers), or the preponderance of very tall, strong biological men competing in women’s sports, the LGBT media will never object to the newest trans insanity to come down the pike. &nbsp;


	Yet even in this airtight monochrome world, there’s been a backlash, which now seems to be spreading – finally – into the larger society as well. Facebook groups with the header LGB without the "T" are gaining in popularity although these groups are constantly subject to threats and intimidation from trans ideologues. Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner, for instance, has been consistent in speaking out against biological men competing in women’s sports. The price Jenner has paid for her unorthodoxy is being labeled a self-hating transphobe.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Finally, we come to President Biden’s full embrace of the transgender agenda when he signed an executive order allowing transgender women who have gone through male puberty to compete in women's sports. The best one can say about this travesty is that one day in the future -- when the White House is not occupied by the ringleader of a Fellini circus -- this executive order can be rescinded and forgotten.


	In the meantime, Biden’s trans erreur volontaire created some pushback when in 2021, West Virginia’s governor Jim Justice signed House Bill 3293 into law, which bans trans girls and women from girls sports in elementary, secondary or post-secondary level schools.


	The governor’s approval did not sit well with the ever-vigilant Human Rights <a href="https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/west-virginia-senate-passes-anti-trans-athlete-bill">Campaign</a> which stated, &nbsp;&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		By letting this cruel and discriminatory legislation become law, Gov. Jim Justice is not only hurting the health and safety of transgender children, but also West Virginians who will suffer the consequences of this law — including economic harm, expensive taxpayer-funded legal battles, and a tarnished reputation.
</blockquote>


	What’s wrong with this statement?


	Why don’t we start with the ludicrously corrupt assumption that there’s such a thing as transgender children that need lawful protection?


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005);&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and&nbsp;From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.&nbsp;

The Bitty Bug Transgender Circus

It seems that the transgender revolution sweeping the globe has finally caught the eye of merchandisers.


	Consider the Bitty Bug Soft Packer, a custom

A friend who works at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts told me that the atmosphere there regarding freedom of speech is so repressive that expressing her political opinions at work would be asking to be fired. The grip of Progressive Leftism at UArts is so strong she made me promise not to write anything about our conversations concerning the school.


	For several years now students at UArts have been trying to remove tenured professor and renowned critic Camille Paglia from the University. Paglia, who has been teaching at UArts since 1989, came under fire in May 2019 when she delivered a lecture on sexual issues and western art despite threats and a petition from Leftist students not to do so. When Paglia refused to cancel the lecture, the leftist students demanded a post-lecture talk-back with themselves acting as <a href="(https:/www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/camille-paglia-uarts-left-deplatform/587125/)">Grand Inquistors.</a>


	Paglia’s refusal to agree to a talk-back caused the students to demand that UArts fire her and find “a queer person of color” as a replacement. The militant lefties also had another surprise. Forty minutes into Paglia’s lecture, they set off a fire alarm, in effect killing the remainder of the program and forcing the evacuation of the building. While UArts administrators refused student demands that Paglia be fired, since that incident Paglia has kept a low profile and has refrained from any further public talks on school property.&nbsp;


	By now their names are legion: Candace Owens, Patrick Buchanan, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz, Anne Coulter, and a host of other conservative speakers have all been targets of leftist students whose only wish is to silence divergent voices. The worst part of this phenomenon, besides the obvious free speech violations, is the intimidation factor that may cause intellectually curious students to opt out of attending a talk by a conservative because of the ugly atmosphere generated by the progressive brown shirts.


	David Bernstein in his 2004 book, You Can’t Say That, describes how leftist activists begin the vivisection of their victim: first come the social-media call-outs, after which they strong arm authority figures [university administrators] to impose an outcome—censorship—in their favor.


	While Camille Paglia seems to be enjoying a peaceful sabbatical from her persecutors, things are not so good over at the academic metropolis known as the University of Pennsylvania, the school that owns half of West Philadelphia and never seems to stop growing. UPenn is a giant in the City of Philadelphia, powerful enough to influence City Council and make Mayor James Kenney bow in obeisance as if venerating a golden calf.


	Penn was all over the news recently when it’s most controversial and well-known law professor, Amy Wax, was castigated by Penn faculty and some students for promoting "hate" against Asians. Wax, a tenured professor who’s been teaching at the school since 2001, has had a number of bumpy collisions with her employer going back to 2006, when the faculty of Penn Law rebuked her for her stand against same-sex marriage. The latest brouhaha concerned Wax’s contention that the United States is better off with less Asian immigration.


	During a Dec. 20&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1vQFMxPk54">interview</a>&nbsp;with Brown Professor Glenn Loury on his web show, Bloggingheads.tv, Wax criticized Asian immigration to the United States, warning of the “danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country.”


	Wax, who happens to be Jewish, stated: “If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they’re sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now.”


	In explaining her comments on Loury’s show, Wax stated that Asians tend “to conform to whatever the dominant ethos is,” and since "Wokeness is now the luxury belief of the upper class [in institutions and academia], this is what Asians now feel they have to ape." Wax also stated that that the immigration of "Asian elites" to the United States is a problem because they tend to support the Democratic Party.


	Whether you agree with Wax about “Asian elites” is beside the point. The essential thing to remember here is that Wax has a right to hold such beliefs and still be permitted to teach at Penn if one is going to honor the principles of academic freedom. But with the dominance of wokeness in nearly every segment of American society, but most especially in academe, after Wax’s comments to Glenn Loury, a black man, went viral, there were calls at UPenn for her removal despite her tenured status. These calls came from faculty and student activists who have been <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/05/us/amy-wax-penn-law-anti-asian-comments-trnd/index.html">monitoring</a> Wax since 2006.


	So great was the backlash this time that the Philadelphia City Council condemned Wax and called for UPenn to put its foot down (meaning, of course, expel her from the University).&nbsp; A bipartisan letter signed by 16 out of 17 City Council members and Mayor Jim Kenney was sent to Penn president Amy Gutmann. Among the signers were two Asian Council members: Helen Gym, a progressive leftist who has aspirations to become the city’s next mayor, and David Oh, a milquetoast Republican with RINO tendencies.&nbsp;


	Gym, who has a tendency to outshine and outdo her fellow Council members when it comes to radical chic views, took a swipe at UPenn when she said, “Penn’s lack of public attention demonstrates tolerance and complicity.” Gym also vowed that if Penn does not respond to the letter that City Council would continue to pressure the school to do something about Wax.


	The Daily Pennsylvanian (DP), UPenn’s campus newspaper that has been waging war against Wax since 2006, stated that her latest comments amount to a “cumulation and increasing promotion of white supremacy.”


	Wax was also vilified on the city’s local <a href="https://6abc.com/amy-wax-penn-professor-anti-asian-comments-university-of-pennsylvania-school-law-upenn/11464878/">news stations</a> where her "Asian elite" comment was reported as if were breaking news on the same level as updates on the Russia-Ukraine situation.


	Conversely, Princeton University professor Keith Whittington of the Academic Freedom Alliance addressed a&nbsp;<a href="https://academicfreedom.org/afa-sends-letter-to-penn-on-amy-wax-case/" target="_blank">letter</a> to Gutmann stating that Wax should not face formal consequences for her comments. Whittington wrote that he found it “disturbing” that Penn folded to pressure from students and Philadelphia lawmakers by invoking a formal sanctions process against Wax.


	While the current sanctions process is being worked out, Wax’s enemies are busy compiling lists of the Law Professor’s “sins” going back to 2016. These transgressions include a 2017 claim by leftist students that Wax made racist comments about Black students at Penn Law in a video she made with Loury. Wax stated in that video that, "I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the [Penn Law School] class and rarely, rarely in the top half.” Wax explained that she was commenting on the downside of affirmative action in academe, when the purpose is just to fill a quota, and when underqualified students are being paired with students who outperform. "I can think of one or two students who've graduated in the top half of my required first-year course,” she told Loury.


	That comment had her officially labeled a racist by UPenn’s Left Guard. There were also calls for the Dean of the Law School, Theodore Ruger, to discipline her in some way. The discipline came in the form of her removal by Ruger from teaching first-year curriculum courses. &nbsp;


	The incident put Wax high up on the Progressive Left’s "watch list" even though she was speaking about her personal experiences at Penn and not surmising what happens—or would happen—at other law schools. In 2019, Wax earned the triple tiara-label of racist-xenophobe-hater when she co-authored an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer arguing for a U.S. immigration policy favoring people from Western countries over non-Western countries. “On Bourgeois Values" posited that all cultures are not <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-americans-need-bourgeois-norms-1507763403">created equal</a> and that some are superior to others.


	The DP, which tracks Wax’s public statements with Stalinesque scrutiny, made special note of the op-ed but offered Wax an opportunity to defend herself.


	“I noted that global migrants flock to European countries. They don’t risk their lives in rickety boats to go to Venezuela or Zimbabwe,” Wax said, sounding much like Ann Coulter in her immigration classic, Adios America.


	Wax further explained that migrants from non-Western countries have a harder time assimilating and emphasized that this thought has always been a tenet of the Right. She added that an immigration policy like this would undoubtedly result in

<blockquote>
	
		a shift in the racial profile of people coming in…obviously you’d have fewer people from Africa, from people from some parts of Asia…it will be more white…not that white people want to come to the U.S.
</blockquote>


	These comments gave birth to the news headline, "Amy Wax Advocates for Excluding People of Color from Immigration.”


	“But that’s not what I said at all,” she says. “I said, this might be the result and therefore conservatives might be nervous about it.” &nbsp;


	"That Wax’s speech may be protected does not permit this Law School to ignore the real harms such speech causes," Dean Ruger stated in a January 3rd statement. "As we have previously emphasized, Wax’s views are diametrically opposed to the policies and ethos of this institution."


	UPenn’s sanctions process may spell trouble for Wax and for the cause of academic freedom, but Wax says she is in for the fight.

<blockquote>
	
		I have seen my students change over even 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 years … They have become these cowed, benighted sheeples. It’s just unbelievable. So not only are they thoroughly intimidated as they should be, but they are ignorant . . . My case is on some level not about me. I’m just roadkill, I’m a casualty in the culture wars.
</blockquote>


	But that’s not all. “Defund the Ivy League,” she says. “People just keep pouring money into it. They have enough money. They have more than enough.”


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and&nbsp;From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest&nbsp;will be published in 2022.

Defunding the Ivy League in the Name of Freedom of Speech?

A friend who works at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts told me that the atmosphere there regarding freedom of speech is so repressive that expressing her

Make sure to order David Horowitz's book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America: <a href="https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/books/products/dark-agenda">HERE. </a>


	In my twenties I worked as an operating room technician. One of my tasks then was to take bodily tissues in jars of formaldehyde to the pathology department for biopsies. This particular New England hospital also specialized in therapeutic abortions, so my tray of specimens also included jars of “fetuses.”


	In those days I didn’t know what I believed about abortion: When does life begin; were the fetuses I was carrying really dead babies? What I was aware of was that many of the women who came into the OR for abortions were young single women who seemed to be using abortion as a form of birth control. Probably not in all cases, but my sense at the time was that many of them fit into this category.&nbsp;


	It was also plainly obvious to me that the sight of so many fetuses floating in jars of formaldehyde disturbed many of the nurses. I could tell because of the abortion jars were hidden away from the other specimens. Only one nurse -- a Russian Orthodox woman who wore a three bar cross necklace -- out of the 15 or so scrub nurses on duty refused to participate in abortion procedures. This was certainly not the case with the Irish Catholic nurses -- all of whom seemed to happily acquiesce to the abortion status quo, just like “Catholic” President Biden whose views on the topic have grown more problematic over the years.


	Abortion advocates in the 1970s preached that men had no say when it came to women’s bodies. This was the golden age of feminism, when books like&nbsp;Our Bodies; Ourselves&nbsp;were riding high on best seller lists. It was a time when political progressives were taught that men should shut up when it came to a woman’s right to choose. After all, weren’t (legal) abortions better than bloody coat hanger abortions in back alleys?


	By late 1972, the state of Massachusetts allowed abortion only in cases where the health of a woman was&nbsp;seriously endangered. One year later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women had the right to decide for themselves whether to carry a pregnancy to term. Decades later, in December 2020, the Massachusetts state legislature went even further and passed the ROE Act, in anticipation of legal challenges to Roe v. Wade.&nbsp; Bill S. 1209, titled “An Act to Remove Obstacles and Expand Abortion Access” broadened access to abortion by permitting it beyond 24 weeks to protect the health of the woman. The ROE Act also lowered the age of ‘abortion consent’ from 18 to 16.


	Fast forward to January 2022 when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Roman Catholic, signed that state’s Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act, a bill that Murphy had announced his support for at its inception back in October 2020, just one day after announcing that he was running for reelection. The bill’s passage into law occurred during an outdoor ceremony in Teaneck with speeches by a representative from the ACLU and retired State Senator Loretta Weinberg, a longtime abortion advocate. In his speech, Murphy confessed that signing the bill wasn’t an easy matter for him and that the process included some serious soul searching.


	“I hope that we can come together in the greater calling of our faiths to make parenthood an easier, safer and healthier choice for anyone or any family in search of support,” Murphy said.


	Because Murphy claims to be Roman Catholic, the soul searching reference in his comments has an element of science fiction about it. The new law permits abortion for any reason for up to nine months and allows people besides physicians—nurses and midwives-- to perform abortions. Like Massachusetts’ Bill S. 1209, the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act was radicalized and pushed for passage shortly after the New Year in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s possible reset of Roe v. Wade.


	Some abortion supporters argue that New Jersey’s bill doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t require health insurance companies to pay for abortions and makes no provisions for poor people who have no health insurance, or for people who cannot afford to pay insurance co-pays. The New Jersey legislature intends to discuss these abortion insurance options as the year progresses.


	Reaction to the New Jersey abortion bill—termed the “Freedom to Kill Act” by the Catholic network, EWTN—has been swift and vehement by conservatives in the Church, with many commenting that Murphy’s Catholic mentor, Father Pat Conroy, is a Jesuit (hence, a radical progressive) who once served as chaplain for the House of Representatives. Jesuits, of course, are masters at flipping traditional Catholicism on its head, as witnessed by Conroy’s statement that:

<blockquote>
	
		A good Catholic in our system could be saying… women in our system have this constitutional right… our task as fellow Christians or as Catholics is to make it possible for her to optimize her ability to make the choice.
</blockquote>


	President Biden, who poses as a Catholic, will undoubtedly be checking the numbers of people who participated in January’s March for Life-- the first March for Life of his presidency. At the same time, you can be sure that he will not mention the March in a positive way in any public address going forward. As The National Catholic Register noted earlier this month:

<blockquote>
	
		{Biden} has positioned himself &nbsp;<a href="file:///C:/Users/Christine/Desktop/(https:/www.ncregister.com/blog/catholic-president-biden-holds-his-most-pro-abortion-stance-ever-as-2022-march-for-life-gets-underway">the farthest</a> from the pro-life position that he has been his whole political career….With the Dobbs v. Jackson Health case before the Supreme Court that holds the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade, Biden and his administration have fully committed themselves to defending and expanding abortion access.
</blockquote>


	Biden, in other words, has exchanged the traditional tenets of his religion for the secular agenda of the progressive Left. Some might argue that he has sold his soul to Mephistopheles; that the Faustian bargain has been made.


	The Jesuits and the progressive radical priests giving Biden and Phil Murphy advice on ‘soul searching matters’ are largely modernists in the ‘new’ Catholic faith established after the Second Vatican Council. These are the same sorts of priests who told a Catholic priest friend of mine that, “Of course we don’t believe in all the old stuff, like the Real presence.”


	These priests, like their new age Catholic flocks, live for bolder and more expressive innovations, be they liturgical, such as creative Masses with fireworks and liturgical dancers in spandex body suits, or the advancement of leftist beliefs like puberty blockers for children, open borders, and a commitment to fight for a woman’s right to choose-- above and beyond the old fogy theological rants of people like Church Father Saint Basil who rejected the distinction between a formed and unformed fetus, and St. John Chrysostom’s condemnation of married men who encouraged prostitutes and mistresses in the year 400 to abort an unwanted child. “You do not let a harlot remain only a harlot, but make her a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oca.org/the-hub/the-church-on-current-issues/orthodox-christians-and-abortion" target="_blank">murderess</a>&nbsp;as well, the saint wrote.


	&nbsp;One wonders if Democrat Catholic politicians like Murphy and Biden will become even more radicalized in the coming years.


	Will they, for instance, come to understand and accept the ancient Roman law that children are the property of the father? In the name of equity, they would of course change the word ‘father’ to birth-givers and then proceed to copy the old Roman law in full: the birth-givers could choose not to accept a newborn, in which case the newborn would be left outside to die or be taken in by a stranger.


	Abortion, of course, goes from one slippery slope to another. Far into the future, might we then see not only the exoneration but the “sanctification” of bad abortion people in history like doctor-abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who was arrested in 2011 for operating an illegal abortion clinic in West Philadelphia? &nbsp;When police raided Dr. Gosnell’s <a href="https://whyy.org/articles/kermit-gosnells-west-philly-house-of-horrors-could-be-bought-by-anti-abortion-group/then">clinic</a> they found blood on the walls and floors, rooms filled with feral cats and infant body parts in cabinets, refrigerators and near the clinic garbage disposal.


	Yes, one can easily imagine a heavily radicalized future Democrat president freeing Dr. Gosnell, who in 2013 was convicted on 3 counts of 1st&nbsp;degree murder and forced to serve three consecutive life sentences. The archived reports of how Dr. Gosnell’s staff stuck scissors into the necks of three babies after failed abortions would be stricken from the record, Cancel Culture style.


	As for Gosnell’s former 2,700 square-foot abortionist factory in West Philadelphia that’s been boarded up and on the real estate market since the doctor’s arrest, the building would be rehabbed into a Sanctuary-Abortion monument, while its official dedication would include a blessing by a Jesuit priest. &nbsp;


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the <st1:stockticker w:st="on">AIA</st1:stockticker> Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including&nbsp;Literary Philadelphia&nbsp;and&nbsp;From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest&nbsp;will be published in 2022.

Were the Fetuses I Was Carrying Really Dead Babies?

Make sure to order David Horowitz's book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America: HERE. 


	In my twenties I worked as an operating room

The Walt Disney owned Hulu film company premiered a new one hour <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7bO0tWcN1s">documentary</a> on December 21, 2021 entitled “No Good Deed—A crowdfunding Holiday Heist.” The film, produced in Philadelphia by two 6ABC news reporters, explored one of the greatest scams to hit the world of GoFundMe fundraising: How three people, Mark D’Amico, Kate McClure and a homeless veteran named Johnny Bobbitt concocted a heartwarming tale to get the public to donate to a GoFundMe in Bobbitt’s honor as a reward for Bobbitt’s giving up his last twenty dollars to help McClure when she ran out of gas in Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood.


	“Driving into Philly one night,” McClure said in a statement,

<blockquote>
	
		I made the mistake of thinking that I would be able to make it all the way down I-95 with my gas light on. Needless to say, I was wrong. I never ran out of gas before, and my heart was beating out of my chest. I pulled over as far as I could, and got out of the car to head to the nearest gas station. That’s when I met Johnny. Johnny sits on the side of the road every day, holding a sign. He saw me pull over and knew something was wrong. He told me to get back in the car and lock the doors…
</blockquote>


	Bobbitt, who just happened to have a little red gas can handy, gets fuel for McClure. The two then say their good-byes but later on McClure begins to obsess on the homeless man’s good deed. On numerous talk shows like Megan Kelly Today, long after the story went viral, McClure would <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdUCUFd-YH8">explain</a> how she and D’Amico drove back to the I-95 exit ramp to check on Bobbitt the following day.&nbsp;Miraculously, they found him panhandling in the same spot. As a thank you for saving McClure, they tell Bobbitt that they are setting up a GoFundMe for him with a goal of $10,000 to help get him back on his feet.&nbsp;


	As someone who knew Bobbitt very well -- I befriended him more than a year before the gas fable went viral, having met him when he sat with a plastic cup outside a Dollar Tree in the Port Richmond Shopping Center -- I knew that Bobbitt didn’t believe that the area around the I-95 exit was dangerous. In fact, the only danger in that area is the traffic. As for McClure and D’Amico going back and finding Bobbitt in the same spot, that was unlikely since Bobbitt’s regular station was in front of Dollar Tree. Otherwise, he was bobbing around the neighborhood like a fast moving gazelle, racing from the shopping center to his two favorite pit stops -- the public ash trays at WAWA and Rite Aid where he’d salvage cigarette butts -- before heading into Kensington near the Huntingdon Frankford Market Septa station to score heroin.


	When news of Bobbitt’s $20.00 good gas deed hit the Philadelphia local news circuit, the GoFundMe donation information was published so that people could contribute. The acceleration of this ‘feel good’ story was fast and furious. Soon it was all over the world with Bobbitt’s bearded face -- a face I knew so well -- taking center stage. In multiple stories, but especially in stories about the GoFundMe in largely liberal or leftist news outlets like The Philadelphia Inquirer, there were no questions posted by any reporter on the real reason why this homeless vet was living a life on the streets.


	This part of the narrative was left out or for readers to draw their own conclusions. Bobbitt, in fact, had once told me that the reason he couldn’t go back home to North Carolina (his sign at Dollar Tree read: Homeless Vet looking to go home) was because his family never told him that his “granddaddy” had died. He was also in Philadelphia because of the easy drug (heroin) market here, especially in the Kensington neighborhood which attracts users, who are usually homeless, from al over the country.&nbsp;


	Bobbitt denied being a heroin addict, insisting that he was hooked on Xanax (alprazolam) or some other prescription drug for anxiety and panic disorders. When I’d bring up the subject of his heroin addiction he would become quite angry. He did let it slip once that when he came to Philadelphia from North Carolina he couldn’t find a doctor to renew his Xanax prescription, so he was forced to use street drugs. He also said he came to Philadelphia to start a job but when he arrived the job was no longer available. He often talked about his ex-fiancé, a beautiful blonde, and about his <st1:stockticker w:st="on">EMT</st1:stockticker> experiences in North Carolina and Montana.


	I was aware that every one of Bobbitt’s “friends” on the street had an addiction to heroin, but that many of them lied and said they had a prescription drug problem.


	When the Bobbitt GoFundMe campaign was well over the $100,000 mark, the media continued to refer to him as a homeless man who had been the victim of hard times and only wanted to get his life together. But all I could think of were the times I’d see him rushing into Kensington to buy drugs, or the times when he’d frantically knock on my door asking, begging, for a loan of ten dollars (at that time the going price for a small bag of heroin). I did not understand how reporters from the mainstream media covering the story didn’t seem to know or care that every one of Bobbitt’s friends who lived together in the small homeless encampments under I-95 near the shopping center (where the ground was littered with used needles), lived that way because they were addicts.


	How could these journalists not see that Bobbitt was also a part of these encampments, and that the GoFundMe money being raised for him was being done without any stipulation that he spend 6 months to a year in rehab before getting any cash?


	The addicted homeless near the shopping center slept in large construction pipes, cardboard slats or on fly and mosquito infested throw-away mattresses. Bobbitt was usually the ringleader of these small groups, mostly because of his charisma and intelligence. When he worked the Dollar Tree circuit he had women driving to his spot and offering to do his laundry, while others dropped off groceries and various “treat bags.”&nbsp; Many people wanted to do more for him, and almost all of them told him. “Thank you for your service.”&nbsp;&nbsp;


	When I raised the question of Bobbitt’s drug addiction in columns in Philadelphia’s Free Press and elsewhere, I was accused of defaming Bobbitt and stereotyping homeless people as drug addicts. Even though my message was simple: Giving to this GoFundMe fundraiser is about as sensible as throwing your money into the Delaware River, the Bobbitt fundraiser by now had become a Cause Célèbre something untouchable and&nbsp; scared, especially among leftist millennials. If you referred to Bobbitt as a ‘junkie’ or a ‘drug addict’ on social media, you were called out as a “heartless” Trump supporter.&nbsp;


	Even people who expressed doubts about the prevailing Walt Disney gas can narrative were scolded by <st1:stockticker w:st="on">SJW</st1:stockticker> types and told that, “they are the reason why so many addicted to drugs cannot get help.” The prevailing belief was that giving Bobbitt thousands of dollars would be a good thing because it would change his life. The gullibility and stupidity of the 14,000 people who gave to Bobbitt’s GoFundMe had me thinking of the poor saps who followed Jim Jones to Jonestown and who drank the Flavor Aid at Jones’ command.&nbsp;


	Soon, McClure, D’Amico and Bobbitt were being chauffeured to New York City for television interviews, lunches, and book contract meetings. A photo of Bobbitt on Facebook showed him jumping in the air, announcing, “I’m an author!” At Easter time the three friends were photographed in McClure and D’Amico’s living room with Bobbitt dressed as the Easter Bunny. The GoFundMe campaign by now had reached its $400,000 peak. It was reported that Bobbitt shut it off -- no doubt the high amount was beginning to make him nervous. Appearing too greedy would also not be a good public relations move.


	At the fundraiser’s height- - about the time when Bobbitt was living in a camper on McClure and D’Amico’s property -- a local source (and former friend of Bobbitt’s) told me that Bobbitt was coming into the Kensington neighborhood on a regular basis via Uber in order to score drugs, in effect using up the money donated by the 14,000 who believed that Bobbitt didn’t have a heroin problem -- because, of course, the media wasn’t writing about it. (A couple months prior, the same source revealed to me that Bobbitt had informed him that the gas can story had been made up). On my end, I’d occasionally send The Inquirer my <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Do-Bad-Thing-Well/dp/1726749088">local columns</a> on what these sources were telling me, but I might as well have been dumping these columns down George Orwell’s Memory Hole.&nbsp; Confirmation of the validity of my source’s information would come out much later on Meghan Kelly Today when D’Amico announced that he and McClure had to restrict Bobbitt’s access to the GoFundMe because he’d spent $25,000 of it on drugs. D’Amico revealed that Bobbitt had used the couple’s Uber account to travel to Aramingo Avenue to purchase heroin and other drugs.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;


	At this point, Bobbitt’s relationship with McClure and D’Amico had turned sour. Bobbitt had already accused the couple of mismanaging (and spending) the funds raised for him, and were lying to him about how much of the GoFundMe money remained in the account. Bobbitt’s lawyer also announced that Bobbitt was preparing for his civil law suit against McClue and D’Amico.


	I did, finally, get a response from an Inquirer reporter who was just beginning to realize what I had realized long ago: that the GoFundMe was a fraud, concocted by all three to get money, and that Bobbitt had spent a large part of his share of the cash on drugs while D’Amico and McClure had stolen vast amounts for trips, cars and shopping sprees.


	The reporter and I had long talks on the phone, although in the end she did not quote me in her feature story. She made no mention of the fact that we had agreed to meet after I offered to show her Bobbitt’s various hang-outs, as well as introduce her to my source who told me that Bobbitt was using the GoFundMe money to buy drugs. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, she kept postponing her visit to the neighborhood and finally requested that I just give her my source’s phone number, which I did do. In the end, The Inquirer reporter never contacted my source. (In the Hulu film description, a special thanks is given to “the team of journalists” who worked to uncover the facts behind the GoFundMe scam, all Inquirer journalists, of course).


	When the case blew up and the three culprits were exposed and charged with various crimes, the shocked corporate media went into a tailspin. Concurrently, the same progressive millennials on social media who had condemned anyone who questioned the gas can narrative were calling the revelation a tragedy and asking, “How were we fooled?”


	The Inquirer and other liberal media outlets proceeded as if they’d never received any hints of the truth, but of course there were plenty of hints all along, if only they had chosen to look beneath the surface, and read stories not produced in their armchair reporters’ bubble.&nbsp;


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the <st1:stockticker w:st="on">AIA</st1:stockticker> Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia&nbsp; and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest will be published in 2022.

The GoFundMe Scam of the Century and the Leftist Press

The Walt Disney owned Hulu film company premiered a new one hour documentary on December 21, 2021 entitled “No Good Deed—A crowdfunding Holiday Heist.” The

As the New Year approaches, Philadelphians are now pretty much numb when it comes to gun violence fatalities. They may react emotionally to the latest murder statistic and say how awful the city has become, but when it comes to doing something about it -- like voting DA Larry Krasner out of office, which the city failed to do this past November -- they slip into a blindfold state of mind. The reason for this inertia can be attributed to partisan Philadelphia Democrats realizing that unplugging Krasner would set the stage for unplugging the city’s entire woke super structure that’s been building steadily since the days of former ‘law and order’ Mayor Frank Rizzo.&nbsp;


	DA Krasner’s easy reelection victory in November 2021 was a confidence vote on his progressive, anti-mass-incarceration policies. Krasner, despite unrelenting criticism from city Democrats and Republicans, sailed to reelection, and that’s a bad sign for a city that has seen 509 homicide deaths (and counting) in 2021. Nothing, it seems, will convince average Philadelphians that real change begins at the top, and if you want to end the gun violence that everybody says they hate, then you have to change the leadership in City Hall.


	Not even the November 28 killing of 21-year-old Temple student, Samuel Collington, who was shot twice in the chest and killed during an attempted robbery after returning home from his parents’ house for the Thanksgiving holiday, will change things in Philadelphia. While the emotional outrage expressed on local media over Collington’s death was profound, and the handwringing from <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-mayor-jim-kenney-thom-nickels/">Mayor Jim Kenney</a> intense, all the city got in the way of assurance that it was going to find a practical solution for gun violence was a heartfelt public relations statement from the mayor describing Collington’s death as an “unimaginable loss.” The mayor also went on to say that, “Reducing gun violence remains the City of Philadelphia’s top priority. We will continue to work tirelessly with our community partners in response to the national public health emergency that gun violence presents.”


	These are basically empty words that describe no program, no practical course of action, no mention of the possible return of stop-and-frisk, no concrete plan to combat the problem. Abstract sentiments like this have been sent out over the media airwaves a million times before, and can be summed up as: First we see the tears, then we hear the talk, but in the end it’s always a U-turn back to business as usual.


	"This is a true tragedy in every sense of the word,” wrote Temple’s Executive Director of Public Safety Charlie Leone about the Collington tragedy.

<blockquote>
	
		As a father, this truly breaks my heart and is incomprehensible. Gun violence continues to affect local communities, and especially young lives, across our city and our nation. We fully understand concerns about individual safety, especially at a time when Philadelphia, like so many other U.S. cities, has experienced a sharp increase in violent crime over the past year.
</blockquote>


	This is the same Temple University that in 2020 voted that it would no longer provide financial support to the Philadelphia Police Foundation. At that time, then Temple president Richard Englert stated, "Upon review and community input, we have decided that the university will no longer provide this support. Instead, Temple will reallocate these funds to support social justice programs at the university.”


	Was Englert talking about courses in how to burn down a McDonald’s restaurant near Rittenhouse Square, or how to get the city to remove a Christopher Columbus statue that is in a neighborhood crammed with Columbus admirers? 
	 
	Not only did leftist Temple students in 2020 raise concerns about Temple’s relationship with the Philadelphia Police Department, they also encouraged the university <a href="https://temple-news.com/temple-university-to-stop-funding-philadelphia-police-foundation/">to review the funding of the Temple [campus] Police Department</a>, a sick irony when one considers where and how Collington was killed. Collington’s murder also caused the university to reexamine its campus police policies. Just this month, current Temple president Dr. Jason Wingard announced a police protection upgrade for students on campus. The change includes a 50% increase in the size of Temple’s campus safety force, a move that throws a wrench into the university’s former views on defunding the police.&nbsp; 
	 
	While the Collington case made national news, it was one of several recent homicides in the city. In the Feltonville neighborhood on November 29, a 14-year-old boy, Samir Jefferson, was killed execution-style while waiting for a bus when multiple gunmen alighted from a car and shot him 18 times. What makes the Collington case so important, however, is its use as a prime X-ray of Krasner’s reckless dismissal of criminals in the name of ending mass incarceration.


	Collington’s killer, 17-year-old Latif Williams, has been on Krasner’s radar since July 2019 when Williams was booked for selling drugs. These charges were withdrawn by Krasner one year later. During the George Floyd riots in May 2020, Williams was arrested for burglary, rioting and looting. He was also cited for spitting on police and breaking a police car window. These charges were dismissed by Krasner in September 2020. Then, on August 14, 2021, three months before the murder of Collington, Williams was arrested for carjacking, aggravated assault, robbery and possession of an unlicensed gun. The judge set a $200,000 monetary bail and a week later lowered the bail to $200,000 unsecured, meaning Williams could forget posting bail and rest easy under house arrest. These <a href="https://www.bigtrial.net/2021/12/krasner-strikes-again-suspect-in-murder.html">charges were withdrawn</a> by Krasner on September 30.&nbsp;


	The timeline of Williams’ crimes and their erasure by Krasner in the name of social justice, is just one example of what Philadelphia’s DA has done many times over since he became Philadelphia’s DA in 2017. It was Krasner, after all, who benefited from George Soros’ gift of $1.7 million to assure his victory in 2017. Krasner is but one of many DA’s across the country (all of them plugged in, like recharging cell phones, to the same social justice program) that Soros helped elect.


	Mayor Kenney has only offered Hallmark Card-style platitudes about the city’s gun violence epidemic. His inability to move forward when it comes to offering solutions points to his not having a solution. Obtaining a practical solution would involve going against the ideological forces currently holding Philadelphia hostage. Finding a credible solution should mean using part of the $1.4 billion given by the federal government to the city under the American Rescue Plan.&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; 
	 
	Possible practical solutions to the gun violence problem might include ‘overfunding’ the police department until the crisis is under control, or the implementation of wide-scale stop-and-frisk policies, or maybe even putting the city on a crime lockdown until the inhabitants of the asylum get their act together. But solutions like this would risk alienating Kenney from Krasner and the political forces on the left. In Philadelphia, any solution to the problem must first be worked through a woke network that doesn’t leave much wiggle room for ideas that negatively impact the emerging victim criminal class.&nbsp;&nbsp; 
	 
	Mayor Kenney has become a prisoner of his own leftist ideology. Wringing your hands at the latest gun fatality or writing statements that are not solutions but blather is not an answer; it’s a personal catharsis. 
	 
	Perhaps the strangest thing about the Collington case -- I write this only to illustrate how entrenched leftist politics is in Philadelphia and in all of its universities and schools of higher education—is that immediately after Collington’s death, the victim’s friends announced on social media that Collington was a Marxist, and as such would not want people using his death to tinge or condemn the social reform program of DA’s like Larry Krasner.&nbsp; 
	 
	While there might be hope for Philadelphia at some point in time, at this date it’s certainly hidden from the horizon and nowhere on the radar.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest will be published in 2022.

Philadelphia, Gun Violence - and Ignoring Solutions

As the New Year approaches, Philadelphians are now pretty much numb when it comes to gun violence fatalities. They may react emotionally to the latest murder

On December 6, 1969, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones looked out over the massive crowd at California’s Altamont Speedway and saw the concert security staff, the Hell’s Angels, beating up an audience member. The Angels, who were paid in beer rather than cash to act as security that day, had apprehended a man named Meredith Hunter, 27, who attempted to approach the stage. When Hunter attempted to approach the stage again, this time with a revolver, he was beaten by the Angels and then stabbed to death by Angel Alan Passaro. The melee, which was captured on film, caused a nervous Jagger to announce, “People, people, let’s be cool!”


	The murder of Hunter would come to be known as Rock’n Roll’s Darkest Day, officially marking the end of the 1960’s peace and love era which had its peak expression only months before at Woodstock.


	The 1969 tragedy at Altamont has arguably been superseded in darkness by the troubling developments at <a href="https://www.livenationentertainment.com/">Live Nation Entertainment</a> – which bills itself as “the world’s leading live entertainment company.” The company’s recent production of the <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/astroworld-tragedy-victims-identified-deadly-houston-music-festival">Astroworld Festival in Houston</a> on November 2 saw 13 people killed and 300 injured when <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/astroworld-tragedy-victims-identified-deadly-houston-music-festival">a crowd surge during the concert</a> caused concertgoers to trample one another. Live Nation has a history of safety violations over the past decade. The massive concert enterprise also seems to thrive best in large Democrat-controlled cities where the urban landscape cultivates its own style of rough and tumble audiences and artists (Christian conservative rappers like <a href="https://twitter.com/realbrysongray?lang=en">Bryson Gray</a> need not apply), especially artists who not so long ago specialized in<a href="https://www.rap-up.com/2016/11/15/meek-mill-raps-about-kanye-west-donald-trump-in-freestyle/"> ‘F—k Trump’ lyrics</a>.


	Consider my own city of Philadelphia.


	Philadelphia’s annual 2-day Labor Day concert on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, sponsored by Live Nation, has been drawing thousands of people since its inception 8 seasons ago. Called "Made in America" (MIA), when the festival began it was briefly criticized for being “too white” and not diverse enough. Since the first concert, organizers have gone to extreme lengths to “diversify.” Rap and hip hop became an essential part of the Parkway concerts but it was (and is) the rap and hip hop of the woke variety that is promoted by CNN. Live Nation’s contention that the MIA festival also includes pop and electronic music was a slight exaggeration. While this latter category of music is given cursory acknowledgment on stage, the bulk of MIA concerts (curated by Jay-Z) feature such artists as Meek Mill, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Lil Baby and a host of other rappers.


	Proceeds for Philadelphia’s 2021 MIA festival went to the ACLU with other proceeds going to The Reform Alliance -- a left progressive organization intent on eliminating “oppressive” probation, parole and bail issues. While some of the Alliance’s concerns might need looking into, the bulk of the organization’s focus is aligned with the progressive policies of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner.&nbsp;


	The goal of The Reform Alliance is the replacement of America’s justice system “with a restorative system that is fair, accountable and invested in rehabilitation, support and wellbeing.” All of this sounds quite benign but it is also very vague. Under the surface, there’s the suggestion that these grand “restorative systems” are still being worked out, with the finished plan ending up anywhere -- perhaps on the most extreme end -- of the Radical Left Speedometer.


	As of this writing, The Reform Alliance has certainly failed in one of its main goals: to “make communities safer and stronger.” Keep in mind that MIA organizers boasted that they were able to collect thousands of signatures in support of the Alliance during the 2021 festival.


	There was a time when the <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/american-civil-liberties-union-aclu">ACLU</a> did some good things, but that "do good" era is certainly over. The ACLU in 2021 mirrors Marxist/Communist models with a social agenda reflecting the beliefs and convictions of <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/alexandria-ocasio-cortez">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a>, <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/ilhan-omar">Ilhan Omar</a> and the <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/southern-poverty-law-center-splc">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>, and champions positions and causes that are clearly antithetical to what’s come to be known as the American Way. One aim of the ACLU seems to be the total remake of American society -- as explained quite powerfully in Mark Levin’s book, <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/American-Marxism-Mark-R-Levin/dp/150113597X/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=CjwKCAiA4veMBhAMEiwAU4XRr8ixQTmwv2UfL0LDY0OhNLOJVg9WS7PsYscIIBr1vR1ssLENAwkZ4hoCnEAQAvD_BwE&amp;hvadid=507568747412&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocint=9060777&amp;hvlocphy=9031201&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=54428643167803231&amp;hvtargid=kwd-1246590556055&amp;hydadcr=2835_10309403&amp;keywords=american+marxism&amp;qid=1637745221&amp;sr=8-1">American Marxism</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp; 


	Live Nation’s MIA concerts transform Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a street version of Astroworld with overflow crowds that often spill out into the surrounding neighborhoods. At one MIA concert several years ago, neighbors in the Art Museum area complained of drunk and drugged-out MIA attendees urinating or vomiting on their cars and property. <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-mayor-jim-kenney-thom-nickels/">Mayor Jim Kenney</a>, who loves these outdoor city extravaganzas because (among other reasons) of the money they bring to the city, turns a deaf ear to the residents of high-rise condos along the Parkway who have complained about the mayhem and noise created by MIA.


	Many Parkway residents leave the city every Labor Day weekend as Live Nation moves into town. The city bends over backwards to accommodate MIA, rearranging or canceling bus routes, restricting parking and blocking off streets. It’s a case of Live Nation and MIA holding the city hostage for two days.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The tragedy at Astroworld highlights the lethal mix of dark woke rap with Live Nation’s insatiable hunger for bigger and better concerts. It was Astroworld’s star performer, Travis Scott, after all, who announced at one of his concerts in 2015 for fans to jump the security barricades.


	“There’s not enough security to stop them all from hopping the fence,” he said. For that stunt, Scott, aka Jacques Bermon Webster, was sentenced to 1 year of court supervision after pleading guilty to reckless conduct charges. The rapper also made headlines that same year for kicking a cameraman off his stage.


	At the ill-fated 2021 Houston concert, Politifact reported that Scott preformed for 37 minutes “as a mass causality unfolded.” In 1969, Mick Jagger, claiming he never knew the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter was taking place, kept on singing “Under My Thumb.” Scott’s Astroworld concert, or a trip to its theatrical stage name, Utopia Mountain, cost fans $350 a ticket (resellers got $993.00 per ticket). At this year’s Astroworld event, fans rushed the security barricades, knocking them over in a mad rush. Some saw this as evidence that Scott’s concert was "Satanic," but that was later lampooned in the press as absurd.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Scott has offered his condolences to the loved ones of the people who died. “I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night,” he’s on record as saying. “My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival.” Scott then offered to cover the victims’ funeral expenses. Live Nation stated that it was "heartbroken for those lost and impacted at Astroworld.”


	Meanwhile, Philadelphia has its eyes set on the 2022 MIA Parkway concert when residents of the Parkway and the Museum area will either leave town or weather the two-day musical lockdown. You can be sure that the ACLU and The Reform Alliance will be there with their petitions and sign-in sheets, bringing in the masses -- while from behind the microphone audiences will hear the latest woke rap sounds of "F—k Trump" or whoever else happens to be on the Left’s current enemies list.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest will be published in 2022.

The Lethal Mix of Woke Rap and Live Nation

On December 6, 1969, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones looked out over the massive crowd at California’s Altamont Speedway and saw the concert security staff,

The gap between liberal and conservative Catholic news outlets in the U.S. intensified significantly after President Biden’s jocular meeting with Pope Francis in Rome on October 29. &nbsp;The 75-minute meeting barring reporters and live streaming was purportedly about climate change although what emerged as the big news afterwards was Biden’s middle finger metaphorical ‘f---u’ to those U.S. Catholic bishops who would bar him from receiving Communion over the abortion issue.


	“He [meaning the pope] said to keep receiving Communion,” a victorious Biden announced after the two were photographed laughing and joking together. (A real pope, of course, would have handed the president his excommunication papers.)


	“If the pope said I can receive, then those who say I can’t can go to hell,” is what the permanently ashen faced president seemed to be suggesting. Biden’s boasting (“the pope says I can”) seemed to dare U.S, bishops to move forward with censure. First Lady Jill Biden, beaming in her mini mantilla (worlds away from Jacqueline Kennedy’s dramatic shoulder length mantilla at her meeting with Pope John XXIII in 1962) also seemed to be basking in pope’s seal of approval. &nbsp;


	The American Catholic Church has come a long way since 1960 when some Protestants were so terrified of electing the first Catholic president that they spawned the myth that if elected John Kennedy would build an underground tunnel from Washington to Rome. &nbsp;While the secret tunnel rhetoric is long gone (it’s been swapped for a photo of the pope in the Biden Oval Office), so has the “existential” distance between Rome and the White House because in many ways Francis and Joe Biden are one.


	Biden’s visit to Rome was just one of the many stories covered in the pages of the two major mainstream U.S. Catholic newspapers, The National Catholic Reporter (progressive) and The National Catholic Register (conservative). Editorially, these publications are so different from one anther they seem to confirm what a priest told me some time ago that, “The Catholic Church is really two Churches now.” &nbsp;The Reporter, based in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded in 1964 by a man named Robert Hoyt for “Catholics who struggle with the complex moral and societal issues of the day.” While Hoyt’s description sounds like healthy inquiry and a forum for intellectual debate, what’s usually printed in The Reporter’s pages are attack pieces on long held Catholic beliefs and articles friendly to the left progressive agenda of radical Democrats. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The Reporter’s slogan in the 1960s was, “Published by and for the People,” a suspect socialist moniker that covers a lot of ideological territory. In 1968, the Bishop of Kansas City, Charles H. Helmsing, demanded that The Reporter remove the word ‘Catholic’ from its name and added that the publication had “a poisonous character that watered down Church teaching.” The Reporter was criticized by another Kansas City Bishop, Robert Finn, in 2013. “From my perspective,” Bishop Finn said,&nbsp;“NCR's positions against authentic Church teaching and leadership have not changed trajectory in the intervening decades.” &nbsp;Bishop Finn considered the newspaper to be an "independent newspaper which commented on 'things Catholic.”


	The National Catholic Register, founded in 1927 by Matthew J. Smith, is part of the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN) and the Catholic News Agency. It boasts a larger circulation than its leftist counterpart and has never had to defend the use of the word ‘Catholic’ in its name. The two newspapers haven’t had much to do with one another until recently when Pope Francis referred to EWTN indirectly to a group of Jesuits in Slovakia.


	"There is, for example,” Francis said, “a large Catholic television channel that has no hesitation in continually speaking ill of the pope. I personally deserve attacks and insults because I am a sinner, but the church does not deserve them. They are the work of the devil. I have also said this to some of them.” &nbsp;


	Coming to EWTN’s defense in a piece in the October issue of First Things was the former Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput. Chaput, a New York Times best selling author, is a man of keen theological intellect. A stickler for Church doctrine, he has refused communion for Catholic politicians who support abortion and euthanasia and he roused the anger of the Philadelphia gay community after his refusal to compromise on the issue of same sex marriage. As Archbishop of Philadelphia, he inherited the financial disasters necessitating school and church closures. He also had to deal with the leftist Philadelphia media that began demonizing him the moment he was appointed archbishop in 2011.


	When Chaput’s term as Philadelphia archbishop ended in January 2020, the Rev. Nelson Jesus Perez was chosen to head the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The rejoicing in Philadelphia and in national media over Chaput’s retirement was tantamount to the roar of Stanley Cup- celebrating hockey fans. The Guardian, while describing Chaput as an “ultra traditionalist,” went on to sing the praises of Perez. The Washington Post praised Perez as “a Cuban American moderate” while reminding readers that Chaput criticized Pope Francis as being “too liberal” and stating that “mass shootings are caused by a culture of sexual anarchy and perverted freedom.’&nbsp; Chaput was made out to sound like the Catholic version of Jerry Falwell or a spokesman for the Westboro Baptist Church.


	The moderately progressive Perez is not a confrontational sort; his style is more aligned to those milquetoast U.S. Catholic bishops who’d rather not press the Biden-Communion issue. &nbsp;Some in Philadelphia have already taken to calling Perez The Marshmallow Archbishop, so expect Pope Francis to make him a Cardinal at some future date.&nbsp; On topics like immigration, Perez plays by the Democrat playbook. In 2018, the prelate told Cleveland station WKSU, “Churches Have No Borders,” then added that he prays for “immigration reform,” despite the radical reform of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, a change that Kennedy promised would “not flood our cities with immigrants” or “upset the ethnic mix of our society.”


	That all changed of course when Kennedy’s bill morphed into the Hart-Celler Act (Senator Philip Hart, D-Michigan and Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-New York), a change that put an end to immigration quotas from western Europe. What resulted from the change was an ‘anything goes’ Jackson Pollak-style immigration canvass (read, a mess) with results aptly covered in Ann Coulter’s classic immigration book, “Adios, America.”&nbsp; 


	&nbsp;Chaput, a prolific author, has not allowed retirement to retire his thoughts when it comes to the state of the Catholic Church. In his ‘First Things’ article (“A Little Wisdom from Bernard”) on the pope’s comments about EWTN, he wrote:


	“As an EWTN board member for many years before retiring, I’m well acquainted with the network's shortcomings. It can always improve. But it has managed to serve the gospel for decades now with skill and endurance where many others have failed. Thus, it’s hard to read critics of the network without also sniffing their peculiar cologne of faux piety, jealousy, and resentment. “


	In response, The Reporter stated that Chaput was calling the pope a liar then went on to critique Chaput’s record when he was Archbishop of Philadelphia. This included Chaput’s and EWTN’s “demonization of immigrants in Trumpian fashion.”&nbsp; &nbsp;[EWTN and Chaput, however, were addressing illegal immigration.). The newspaper also scolded Chaput for writing that, “the Democratic party has effectively sacramentalized abortion and exterminated pro-life Catholic witness in its ranks,” and had a particular dislike for Chaput’s assertion that “our ‘Catholic’ president has signed on fully to the party’s slash and burn campaign.”


	The Reporter, of course, seems to be on a crusade to crush the back of EWTN. A September 27th column in the paper called on U.S. Bishops to “reconsider their relationship with EWTN.” And yet, despite the Pope’s recent crackdown on the Traditional Latin Mass, the conservative Catholic movement is gaining strength and becoming more vocal. Issues are about to come to a head, especially with the upcoming ‘Enough is Enough’ Church Militant-sponsored conference, scheduled to take place in Baltimore on November 16, directly across from the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel at the same time that U.S. Bishops will be gathering for their annual fall Assembly (and where they will inevitably discuss the Biden- Communion issue. )


	Speakers at the one day ‘Prayer rally and conference’ include emcee Milo Yiannopoulos, Michele Malkin, Steve Bannon, Fr. James Altman, Michael Voris and the American Spectator’s George Neumayer. &nbsp;


	News of the Church Militant even sent the City of Baltimore into a tailspin. The city then did what any blue left radical city would do under the circumstances: it tried to cancel culture the event although a federal appeals court upheld another judge's ruling that Baltimore city officials had no power to prevent Church Militant from gathering at a city-owned pavilion during the U.S. bishops’ Fall Assembly meeting.


	Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott voiced his disappointment with the decision and stated that the city had concerns “about the potential public safety threat to Baltimore City property posed by the rally."


	The so-called safety threat, according to city attorneys, has to do with Milo Yiannopoulos’ past speaking engagements “that have attracted counterprotesters and led to violence,” as well as the presence of Steve Bannon, who “regularly calls for violence against government officials.”&nbsp;


	In its report on the Church Militant event, The Reporter seemed to take a special delight in describing Yiannopoulos as “a far-right agitator.”


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia&nbsp; and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia. Death at Dawn: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest will be published in 2022.

Unholy Alliance: Pope Francis and President Biden

The gap between liberal and conservative Catholic news outlets in the U.S. intensified significantly after President Biden’s jocular meeting with Pope Francis

Philadelphia’s Market Frankford El might be compared to a circus freak show on the move. The 45-minute ride from the Frankford Terminal to the 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby takes about 45 minutes. The innumerable station stops along the way include the drug-infested neighborhoods of Kensington, where slumped over Fentanyl and Synthetic Cannabinoid (K2/Spice) addicts enter the train in great numbers, often nodding out in their seats, spilling coffee or soft drinks and sometimes vomiting or urinating when fellow passengers aren’t looking. During the worst of the pandemic in 2020 when ridership was low, large numbers of homeless took to sleeping on the trains. Now that ridership is up to par, the sleepers are less obvious but the homeless keep coming, attracting all sorts of hucksters who roam from car to car selling candy, incense or beef jerky, no doubt shoplifted from stores. Despite recorded warnings from the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (Septa) that passengers should not move between cars while the train is in motion, few obey the rule.


	If you want proof that Philadelphia is the “poorest” of the largest U.S. cities, ride the Market-Frankford El and forget tony Rittenhouse Square or the lush Bacchanal $12,000 ticketed galas at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: the El is the real Philadelphia as are the neighborhoods it passes through. The sad fact is, the so-called ‘nicer” areas of the city like Chestnut Hill seem to be getting smaller and more vulnerable to the sleazier elements in the city that seem to be expanding like an invading army.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	In many ways, the El’s freak-show environs was the perfect place for a homeless, illegal immigrant named Fiston Ngoy to force himself on a homeless woman who spent her days riding the train because she had no place to go.&nbsp; Ngoy, who came to the United States in 2012 on a student visa, did not return to his own country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when his visa expired in 2015, but chose to stay in the United States illegally.&nbsp;


	During that time, Ngoy chalked up a sex abuse-and-drugs rap sheet which should have been the green light for his deportation. In D.C., for instance, Ngoy pleaded guilty to misdemeanor sexual abuse in 2017 after groping two women on the street. Ngoy was never deported because an immigration judge, clearly under the spell of the Left’s open borders mania, granted him “withholding of removal” in March 2019. Ngoy was then arrested in June 2020 and again in May 2021 before his arrest on October 13, when he was charged with rape and sexually assaulting the woman he sat beside on the Market Street El.


	Ngoy, who told police that he knew the woman in question (as if knowing someone constitutes a permission slip for rape) began harassing her sexually almost as soon as he sat next to her. About ten minutes from the 69th Street terminal, he tore off her pants and began to rape her in the open as passengers in the train videotaped the action on their phones. Reports indicate that the passengers who filmed the crime were not adults but minors riding the El late at night. There was a time when this fact alone was a cause for alarm -- what kinds of families allow their children to ride a big city train late at night? -- but in today’s progressive world a question like that would only bring out accusations of racism.


	As for Ngoy’s brazen sexual assault in such a public place, in many ways it is to be expected in a city up to its neck in lawlessness, shootings and murders since Larry Krasner became DA in 2017, and since the George Floyd riots in 2020. These events have left something stupefying in the air here, so much so that in many ways Philadelphia feels like a different city than it was just fifteen years ago.


	If one were to measure Ngoy’s rape and assault charges on a crime seriousness scale, it would only be a notch or two above the anarchy of ATVs and dirt bikes being given the freedom to run rampant on busy downtown streets in a city where -- let’s not forget this fact -- little children get shot in front of their homes. Why not throw a little rape into the mix of lawlessness?&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The fact that Ngoy, an illegal, was not deported by that federal judge who allowed him to remain in the United States despite his long rap sheet of crimes, speaks to the breakdown in common sense and decency we find everywhere in society now, due in large part from the myriad influences of leftism. This breakdown, of course, is most evident in cities like Philadelphia -- where it’s more important to implement a ban on plastic bags and remove “offensive” Christopher Columbus and Frank Rizzo statues rather than question or revise DA Larry Krasner’s mission to let criminals out of jail early or to reduce penalties for violent crime because the accused comes from an agreed-upon victim class.


	The arrest of Ngoy occurred as the train approached the 69th Street Terminal while (according to police) he was “in the middle of the rape” (the actual rape lasted from 6 to 8 minutes). This horrifying crime is a forceful reminder of what could happen in the United States on a grander scale if the patterns set in migrant-friendly Europe, especially in German cities immediately after the 2015 “open borders” migrant rush, were to become established here. On January 1, 2016, 1,000 migrant men sexually assaulted and mugged 80 women in Cologne. Similar attacks were noted in other German cities like Hamburg, Stuttgart and elsewhere in Europe. Ngoy hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where most of the population is Roman Catholic, a lesser percentage Protestant but a fast-growing minority, Muslim. A 2011 study by the American Journal of Public Health found that in the DR Congo there are 45 rapes every hour. A follow up study by Insecurity Insight in 2020 found little change since the 2011 report.


	Rape on trains is a curious phenomenon that seems particularity prevalent in the UK where, according to the National World, there was at least one rape a week on Britain’s rail network in 2020, “including at least two gang rapes and eight attacks on children.”&nbsp;


	The World also reported that 40 rapes took place during 2020. but it did not attempt to profile those responsible for the crimes. Could they be migrants, for instance, who in many cases have come to be associated with gang rape? Of course, reporting that the culprits were migrants and from the Middle East (implying that they are Muslim) would go against the unwritten code of protecting the reputation of migrants at all costs lest one be drawn into charges of xenophobia and Islamophobia.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Ngoy lists his address as the Broad Street Ministry (“We Practice Radical Hospitality”) on Philadelphia’s South Broad Street, a homeless shelter with leftist connections. In June 2020, the Ministry proclaimed,

<blockquote>
	
		Radical hospitality means that our doors are open to everyone; regardless of race, religion, gender, orientation or ability.&nbsp;We believe that&nbsp;Black Lives Matter&nbsp;and share in the heartache and anger of protestors across the country.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Of course, what gave Ngoy a comfortable cushion in which to operate is Philadelphia’s sanctuary city status. Philadelphia became a sanctuary city in 2014 under Mayor Michael Nutter. Mayor Jim Kenney reinstated that executive order in January 2016 at his inauguration. In 2019, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in a 3-0 vote said that the Trump administration could not cut off grants to the city for its refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities seeking to deport illegal immigrants. At that announcement, Mayor Kenney danced an Irish victory jig with his secretary in City Hall. Ngoy, of course, should have been the one dancing with Kenney rather than the secretary.


	There’s a curious "end’" to this story, at least for the passengers who videotaped Ngoy raping the woman on the train:

<blockquote>
	
		After news outlets reported that passengers filmed the rape without reporting it to the police, there was talk of arresting those passengers. Because Pennsylvania does not have a Good Samaritan law, authorities were quoted as saying that pushing for prosecution would be difficult but not impossible. Ultimately that decision would be the Upper Darby District Attorney’s to make, which meant of course not charging the passengers because that’s what Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner would do. Upper Darby, it should be noted, is Philadelphia in miniature.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Upper Darby DA Jack Stollsteimer, a Democrat, who was elected in 2019 with George Soros’ money (a $90,049 super PAC gift) announced that there would be no prosecution of the passengers who filmed the crime. Stollsteimer’s decision put him at odds with Upper Darby Township Police Department superintendent Timothy Bernhardt, who stated emphatically,

<blockquote>
	
		I’m appalled by those who did nothing to help this woman. Anybody that was on that train has to look in the mirror and ask why they didn’t intervene or why they didn’t do something.
</blockquote>


	The Upper Darby DA then preformed a hat trick, possibly outdoing any of DA Krasner’s Philadelphia maneuvers when he affirmed that the groups of passengers “callously sitting there filming and didn’t act” during the Oct. 13 attack in Upper Darby was inaccurate.”


	&nbsp;“People get off and on at every single stop,” Stollsteimer said.

<blockquote>
	
		That doesn’t mean when they get on and they see people interacting that they know a rape is occurring … The picture that people have gotten, that this crowd of people sitting there were filming and not doing anything, isn’t true.
</blockquote>


	But if it isn’t true why did nearly every media outlet in the world report that the passengers on the train recorded the incident on their phones?


	George Soros’ money may be able to buy elections but at no point should it attempt to falsify reality.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	"There were other people on the train who witnessed this horrific act, and it may have been stopped sooner if a rider called 911,” Septa said in a statement.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

Rape on a Train

Philadelphia’s Market Frankford El might be compared to a circus freak show on the move. The 45-minute ride from the Frankford Terminal to the 69th Street

The clergy sex abuse scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council of 1963 seem to be the fulfillment of the prophecies of certain Catholic saints and seers who predicted that the Church would one day be reduced to a tiny remnant. The sex abuse cases, however, are only part of a much wider realignment (and partial disintegration) of a Church that once seemed “unchangeable.”&nbsp;


	Jesuit priest and writer Malachi Martin for many years maintained that because the Roman Catholic Church had strayed from tradition since the close of the Vatican Council that it was no longer being guided by divine hands but was firmly in the grip of corrupt bishops and dark forces. Martin mentioned Freemasonry and a Communist infiltration of the Church in the 1950s as contributing factors to the Church’s overall decline. Martin was also fond of saying that if a Catholic from the 1940s were to come back and attend a Catholic Mass today, they would not recognize it as Catholic.


	The Second Vatican Council was supposed to usher in a long springtime for the Church but instead it yielded a dark winter. After the Council, convents and seminaries emptied out and monks left monasteries. Many of the nuns who remained in religious life ditched their traditional religious habits for modern secular dress and adopted a new humanist, secular attitude. In some cases, venerable orders like the Sisters of Saint Joseph, once considered icons of tradition, were transformed into woke social justice feminist nuns, or Nuns on a Bus whose sole mission was to change the world. Their old mission of ‘saving souls’ was traded in for the golden calf gods of equality and diversity. &nbsp;


	The changes in Church ritual, attitude and practice continued into the decade of the late Sixties and 1970s, perhaps the most radical years in the Church’s long history. Suddenly priests were celebrating Mass with raisin oatmeal cookies while liturgical dancers in chiffon capes formed choruses of undulating hips, the mixed spectacle reminiscent of new age spirituality and slow motion pole dancing. The sacred spaces in which the dancers preformed had been deconstructed or minimized in “the spirit of Vatican II,” with an altar as bare as Julia Child’s dinner table because most of the religious iconography had been thrown out in the name of the modernist credo that stated ‘less is more.’


	The ‘strictness’ that came to define the Church in previous decades (and centuries) had been turned into an experimental theater where many priests realized that any innovation they could think up could be acted out with impunity. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Is it any wonder then that given this freewheeling atmosphere that much of the widespread clergy sexual abuse cases reported by The Boston Globe in 2001 occurred in the 1960s (the beginning of the Sexual Revolution), and then seemed to implode in the 1970s? &nbsp;While some sexual abuse cases can be traced back to the 1940s and 1950s—when the seeds of change and revolution were planted in the Church by German theologians and avant garde liturgists like Father Hans Ansgar&nbsp;Reinhold&nbsp;(1897–1968)---it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, after the Vatican Council had cleared the decks and made the Church “modern,” that the tsunami of abuse cases occurred.


	With dancing nuns in chiffon, the rollout of jazz, folk and rock ‘n roll Masses in physical churches stripped bare of centuries-old ornament, it should come as no surprise that a “Let my People Come” mentality began to seep into the consciousness of some priests. So persuasive was this new freedom that even legendary Trappist monk Thomas Merton, author of the bestselling book, The Seven Story Mountain, initiated a love affair with a 19-year old nurse in a hospital not far from his Kentucky monastery. The flag of experimentation was flying high. &nbsp;


	The post-Council fever also affected the parochial school I attended near Malvern, Pennsylvania. As an eighth grade student, I enrolled in a class of boys studying to become altar boys. A diocesan seminarian in his twenties who helped out at the parish was put in charge of the classes. The seminarian had an interest in his students that went beyond classroom instruction. When he appeared in the schoolyard one day in a slick cream colored convertible and took an altar boy with him for a ride into the country, I felt an alarm go off. &nbsp;The seminarian’s glamorous convertible seemed more like the vehicles I’d seen on TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip, not what you’d expect from a priest-to-be.


	Years later I discovered the truth about those schoolyard car rides when I spotted the seminarian in a local bar. He told me that he had dropped out of the seminary “around the time of the Council” and then boasted quite proudly that when I saw him in the schoolyard he was there to drive an altar boy (of his choosing) to the girls’ high school where he’d park the car as classes were letting out. As the girls streamed from the building, he said he’d “talk the boy up” and then had his way with him. &nbsp;When I asked him why he never invited me along for a ride, he said it was because we both had reddish hair and that he liked “opposite hair colors.”


	While this seminarian opted not to become a priest, many men like him did become priests.


	The clergy sex abuse numbers quoted by The Boston Globe doubled and tripled significantly when cases emerged in Ireland, Poland, Germany and Australia. These reports had a disastrous effect on the life of the average Catholic priest, the overwhelming majority not being abusers. Priests were less reluctant to wear their clerical garb in public where they were subject to catcalls and insults. Of course, there’s a wide range of difference between same sex attracted celibate priests (who honor their vows), a gay priest who secretly has affairs with men (but who is not an abuser), and the abusers in question who victimized children as young as 11.&nbsp;


	The Boston Globe report plagued Church authorities for years. Occasionally there’d be news reports of bishops failing to report abusers but overall there were no new reports of widespread clergy sex abuse along the lines of The Globe report until October of this year when the results from an independent study commissioned by the French Catholic Church in 2018 were released to the general public.


	The study, which took more than two and a half years to complete, is a staggering 2,500 pages long and makes the claim that 330,000 children were abused by priests in France from the 1950s into the 1980s. The report states that the number of abused children, most of whom were boys between the ages of 10 and 13, is expected to rise when the numbers of Catholic lay abusers are added to the list. The reports also states that the number of abusers may be as high as 3200. Most of the cases are too old to be prosecuted under French law and many of the victims and abusers have long since died. According to the BBC, 60% of the men and women who were abused had gone on to "encounter major problems in their emotional or sexual lives.”


	The French Church is being accused of failing to report abuse as well as putting children in harm’s way by putting them in contact with abusers. Ironically, the number of priests in France implicated in the scandal stands at a low 3%, meaning (according to one report by NPR) that each priest would have had something like 70 victims. “The real peak of this abuse was the 1950s to the 1960s and the '70s. And then it dropped sharply after the 1970s. And that's very consistent with what we've seen in other countries as well,” the report states.


	Pope Francis was quick to respond to the French study. "There is, unfortunately, a considerable number. I would like to express to the victims my sadness and pain for the trauma that they suffered,'' he said. "It is also my shame, our shame, my shame, for the incapacity of the church for too long to put them at the center of its concerns."


	The scandal has reawakened calls among progressive Catholics and others (secularists who think they know what is best for the Church) for a radical reconfiguration of Church practice and tradition. An article in The Guardian, for instance, calls for Pope Francis to summon a third Vatican Council and to consider ordaining married men to the priesthood. The ordination of married men to the priesthood was the standard practice in the early Church (it is currently maintained in Eastern Orthodoxy) but was altered by the Roman Church at the Second Lateran Council in 1139. The call for married priests by those wishing to reform the Church in the wake of the French scandal has less to do with tradition than as a “safeguard” to curtail or relieve the sexual pressures of celibacy. The thought is that if one is permitted to marry, they’ll be no temptation to fool around with children.


	“The problem is not with celibacy; the problem is with celibacy lived badly. To put it differently, allowing priests to marry would not prevent sexual transgressions,” wrote the Rev. Carter Griffin in Orange County Catholic. “Marriage is regrettably no stranger to scandal. Indeed, the notion that&nbsp;‘marrying off’&nbsp;priests will resolve the sex abuse crisis suggests a rather dim view of marriage as well as a certain naiveté&nbsp;about the rate of sexual abuse committed by individuals who are married.” Rev. Carter adds that too many people see celibates “as quivering bundles of sexual energy ready to explode at any moment.”


	Other progressive critics of the Church—or hack ‘physicians’ with a social agenda-- have taken to reinstating the call to ordain women to the priesthood, as if the sudden imposition of a matriarchy will take the battery acid out of the controlling clerical patriarchy that will somehow, over time, asexualize the bad priests or make them go away. The ‘bad priest problem,” as I see it, can in some ways be traced to the pressure Catholic schools once put on young boys in the eighth grade to enroll in high school seminaries before they had any experience with life or sexuality. A boy of 15 living the life of a pseudo seminarian cannot possibly develop normally but finds himself herded into a celibate life freeze where his sexual nature is ignored or suppressed until it comes roaring out at a later date, perhaps after ordination. By then he’s in a prison of sorts, at least as far as sexuality is concerned, and this can pave the way for covert, unseemly attachments. A good many of the priests responsible for the sex abuses in the 60s and 70s entered the seminary as immature teens.


	The social agenda physicians, in seeking to make the Church “listen up” or clean up its act (when really they would like nothing better than to see it destroyed), have even taken to challenging the Church’s ancient Seal of Confession which goes back to Christ’s command to his disciples to forgive sins in His name. The Seal of Confession was made famous in the 1953 Alfred Hitchcock move, “I Confess,” starring Montgomery Clift, about a priest under suspicion for murder who cannot clear his name without breaking the seal.


	In Australia, a law passed in 2020 requires priests in the state of Queensland to break the seal of confession to report child sex abuse to police or face three years in jail. The law was supported by both major parties there but was opposed by the Catholic Church. “The proposed legislation would make the priest at this vital point less a servant of God than an agent of the state,” Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane told the Queensland state government. “The mechanism within this legislation which deals with the confessional seal quite simply will not make a difference to the safety of our young people.”


	Under French law, anyone—a priest in the confessional or private citizen-- who is aware of a sex crime against a minor must report it to the authorities. &nbsp;Offenders risk heavy fines and imprisonment for failing to do so.


	“Nothing takes precedence over the laws of the republic in our country,” French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said this October. In July, a French bishop challenged the law with the backup of the Vatican, which issued the following statement: “Any political action or legislative initiative aimed at breaking the inviolability of the sacramental seal would constitute an unacceptable offense against the (freedom of the Church).


	“(The Church) does not receive its legitimacy from individual States, but from God; it (breaking the seal) would also constitute a violation of religious freedom, legally fundamental to all other freedoms, including the freedom of conscience of individual citizens, both penitents and confessors,” the Vatican statement concluded.


	In May 2019, the California Senate passed a bill to require that the seal of confession be broken if a priest learns of a penitent’s sex abuse in confession. Unlike the multiple slippery slopes and the dodging that Catholic bishops perform when it comes to issues like abortion (as well as giving Communion to so Catholic politicians who support abortion), on this issue there seems to be a solid front: The seal is forever sealed and it will stay shut.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

The Left's War on the Catholic Church's 'Seal of Confession'

The clergy sex abuse scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council of 1963 seem to be the fulfillment of the prophecies

The Brian Laundrie-Gabby Petito case, now front and center on the world stage, is a prime example of how police have come to be viewed and treated in the United States, especially since the George Floyd riots of 2020.


	By now, most people know the particulars of these two ill-fated lovers who embarked on a 4-month cross country road trip. Stories of their toxic relationship have been leaked to the press, as well as their encounter with police in Moab, Utah when tourists witnessed Laundrie slap and hit Petito. When police came on the scene to investigate, records show that they were exceedingly above board and polite, first getting Petito’s story, then switching to Laundrie to get his side of things. Police behavior in this case was textbook pure. "Pure" in the sense that their behavior went against the leftist stereotype stating that police are thugs and dangerous and therefore police departments everywhere should be defunded.


	Instead, records show two amazingly polite officers—they could have been well-mannered LDS missionaries with notepads—who broke another stereotype when they did not automatically assume that it’s the man who is always the abuser in male-female relationships. After quietly questioning both parties, the officers decided that Petito was the instigator and Laundrie the victim. As a result, Laundrie was put up in a hotel while Petito was told to spend the night in the van.


	John Walsh, former host of America’s Most Wanted, said after watching the police cam footage of the Moab incident, “This is classic domestic abuse. He terrorized her not to tell the cops. He was the aggressor and slapper and puncher.”


	Perhaps the officers misread the situation but there was no way they could have known that Laundrie was hiding a secret or that he had threatened Petito to lie to them to protect himself. Police officers are not psychic psychoanalysts. The officers’ reasonable, almost too-careful behavior in this case is clearly the result of the hatred and paranoia leveled against police departments everywhere as a result of the George Floyd riots.


	While I have never visited the Sarasota Police Department, several years ago I did visit North Port, Florida, the hometown of Christopher and Roberta Laundrie and their two children, Cassandra and Brian Laundrie. To get to North Port from Philadelphia I flew into Tampa then took a shuttle, a distance of about 84 miles. My driver was a talkative Florida native who delighted in telling tales about growing up in the area where the rite of passage for many boys was learning to wrestle alligators.


	North Port is a flat, nondescript place, a kind of moonscape Nowhereville where the palm trees, which normally enhance tropical environs, give the place an even more isolated feel. Incorporated in 1959, the city occupies 103 miles of southeast Sarasota County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. North Port is home to Ponce de Leon’s legendary Fountain of Youth, a health spa called Warm Mineral Springs which attracts mostly first-generation Ukrainians (about 10 percent of North Port’s population is Ukrainian). Spa patrons doggie paddle in a 2-million-year-old algae strewn pond, the site of an ancient sinkhole, while holding hands or rubbing their faces with algae. Users describe the healing waters there as being dense with a syrupy feel.


	Most people in North Port are native Floridians but there’s also a sizeable influx of New Yorkers and Long Islanders. The term "Cracker Joe" (a name that has nothing to do with race) is used by northern transplants to describe hard core natives, many of whom own a truck, wear baseball hats and hunt.


	Brian Laundrie’s family runs Juicer Services, Inc., an organic Mom and Pop health food enterprise that might be more fitting in a place like leftist Vermont, the blue state capitol of Birkenstock shoes. The family moved to North Port from Venice, Florida barely a year ago after Gabby Petito’s remains were found near Grand Teton National Park on September 19. Cassandra, 32, Brian Laundrie’s older sister, offered no predictions or insights regarding her brother’s disappearance after the death of Petito had been established. "I wish I could talk to him," she said. "I've cooperated every way that I can. I wish I had information or I would give more." Meanwhile, Brian Laundrie’s parents shut down all communication when they refused to say anything to the police or the media. The family did the bare minimum when they issued an generic statement in which they stated that the death of Petito was “heartbreaking.”


	The Laundries kept the police at bay in a way that suggests that they mistrusted and perhaps even hated them. Their actions sent out a clear-cut anti-police message.


	As DailyMail.com reported, “North Port Police spokesman Josh Taylor said the police were frustrated. Brian had driven the van back [from Wyoming] without Gabby, but neither he nor his parents were talking to police, even though Gabby had lived with them.”


	It was only when their son disappeared that the Laundrie family began to cooperate with the police investigation. Well, that’s self-interest for you. Involve one of our own, and we’re in (suggesting, of course, that Gabby was not one of their own.)


	Laundrie had been hiding out in his parents' North Port home until September 14, when he set off on a hike at the alligator infested Carlton Reserve. The family finally reported him missing three days later on September 17. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Laundrie’s parents have also done everything possible to avoid the media. When they are captured on film, as they were in one iconic photograph taken at their home, father Christopher glares emotionless at the camera, his hostile eyes as dense as marble implants, as mother Roberta is caught beating a quick retreat in her juicer jeans, a baseball cap over her oddly-arranged, bobbed hair. The photo is vaguely reminiscent of the work of Diane Arbus and could be labeled, The North Port Florida Creep Show.


	The Laundries' behavior suggests they are hiding something, as does the behavior of their run-and-hide son who has managed to elude search teams for weeks. Theories as to Brian Laundrie's whereabouts cover the waterfront although the most popular theory has Laundrie hiding in the wilderness. A former “co-worker” of Laundrie’s has even come forward and stated that Laundrie is capable of surviving for a long time in the wilderness, and that he once lived there for 6 weeks eating only crackers. Appetite control like this is more like willpower gone berserk (aka real psycho behavior) than an attempt to emulate 19th century American frontiersmen.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Living with Laundrie’s parents no doubt kept the lid on the couples’ toxic relationship. After they embarked on their planned 4-month road trip in July, nobody was keeping an eye on them. The idea of a road trip might have seemed the perfect solution to eliminating feelings of “suffocation” that often come with living with Mom and Dad. Ironically, Laundrie and Petito were laying the foundations for even greater feelings of suffocation: months on the road without even a pet dog to break up the monotony of just having each other’s company.


	The day Petito was reported missing, Brian Laundrie’s parents left their North Port home in their truck and camper. The date was September 11. Brian, who returned home alone from his odyssey with Petito, joined his parents for the new camping frolic. By this time, of course, he was already lawyered up. Who knows what tales the spoiled 23-year-old psychopath—his dark hair and thin build evocative of actor Tony Perkins in Hitchhock’s Psycho-- told Mom and Dad about his missing fiancé. Gabby ran off with another man to join a religious cult in Jackson Hole; Gabby said she was quitting the road trip and flying home later. On Sept. 17, Brian himself disappeared and the search has been on ever since.


	Now the whole world is talking. The Internet is filled with multiple reports about Laundrie sightings—on airlines, in cities like Toronto, in obscure deer park woodlands. The New York Post has taken to posting daily articles on any Laundrie lead that comes their way. Psychics and tarot card readers have been having a field day laying out cards and offering what they see happening: Laundrie is not in the wilderness, he is in a city holed up in a hotel room, and friends or family are helping him out. These powerful friends also want to him escape to Alaska or Australia and are in the process of arranging a small plane transport. Many speak of suicide attempts and some see him eventually doing that while others see him getting caught and then keeping mum throughout the trial, not talking to police and refusing to answer questions. Brian Laundrie and his parents have a lot in common: an attitude that broadcasts an almost maniacal distrust of police and an unwillingness to cooperate with them. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	The Laundrie-Petito news story even had some woke news commentators lambasting the coverage of Petito’s death as indicative of The Missing White Woman Syndrome and stating that the coverage would be much less had Petito been a person of color. We all saw this coming, of course, so stay tuned for the Oprah comment.


	In the end, the Laundrie-Petito story is not only about the tragic death of a young woman, it’s also about how the changes in society since the 2020 George Floyd riots have caused police departments in the United States to be viewed with suspicion and hatred. The bad press directed against police departments, as well as calls for their disbandment, is bound to have consequences. The Laundrie case is Exhibit A.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

Brian Laundrie &amp; Company: The North Port Florida Creep Show

The Brian Laundrie-Gabby Petito case, now front and center on the world stage, is a prime example of how police have come to be viewed and treated in the

When it became known that the new chief chaplain at Harvard University was an atheist, there was considerable international chatter. People wanted to know: Who is this atheist who has never seen the inside of a foxhole?


	Greg Epstein, 44, author of “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, a 2010 New York Times bestseller, has been the humanist chaplain at Harvard since 2005. Epstein, who describes himself as a humanist/atheist, was elected President of the University Chaplains’ Organization by more than 30 of his fellow chaplains. His election was met by cheers from woke religious communities, especially ‘reconfigured’ Protestant Christian denominations that are now a shadow of their former orthodox selves. The Harvard Catholic Chaplains released a statement emphasizing the “administrative nature of the presidency,” a coy way of suggesting that administrators have no ideological power or influence but are there merely to arrange meetings, smooth out possible irreconcilable differences between people, give introductions at lectures and carry big briefcases as they go from place to place. God may be dead but the intricate business of humanity is endless. &nbsp;


	The selection of Epstein as head university chaplain should come as no surprise. A Harvard Crimson survey&nbsp;of the class of 2019 found that more than 16 percent identify as atheists and more than 21 percent as agnostic, while some identify as “spiritual” (a vague term meaning anything from a belief in crystals to an intense love for humanity when high on cannabis). Students without a religious affiliation call themselves “nones,” meaning someone who puts their faith in human beings (politicians, world leaders) rather than a divine or supernatural being. Epstein’s election as chief chaplain is in keeping with this trend, especially given the leftward tilt of academia and the spread of woke ideology into the theological realm. &nbsp;


	The word chaplain is derived from the word chapel or a place of worship, and yet it’s a title that Epstein embraces, proof that wokeness has eclipsed standardized English usage. This queer development would have Harvard’s founders, all religious men, scratching their heads in feverish consternation.


	After Epstein’s election as president, The National Review observed that it isn’t so much that Epstein has rejected religion, “but rather chosen political leftism as his new faith — which just so happens to be the dominant creed of Harvard and of many elite institutions.” The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith offered his view that the Humanism of ‘Nones’ has taken off because of “the growing alliance between the Republican Party and the Christian right, a decline of trust in institutions, growing skepticism of religion in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a shift away from traditional family structures that centered on churchgoing.”


	Christian Smith’s comment is a mouthful in need of mouthwash because the “threat” of the Christian Right hardly registers in 2021 when practically the whole of Christianity harmonizes with the radical social agenda put forward by progressive Democrats. Furthermore, the September 11 attacks have everything to do with fallible “Man” (and his misuse of free will), and not God,


	The auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, Bishop Baron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic media, weighed in on Epstein’s election: “If a professed atheist counts as a chaplain — which is to say, a leader of religious services in a chapel — then ‘religion’ has quite obviously come to mean nothing at all.”


	Religion, of course, sinks into meaninglessness when it merges with secular culture so that the two become indistinguishable.


	This doesn’t mean, however, that Epstein is an angry, intolerant atheist in the tradition of the infamous Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919-1995). Critics admit to his being “extremely likeable.” His chaplaincy web page shows a wide range of Woke-related interests. Epstein loves “ethics in technology; meaning and purpose beyond religion; existentialism and humanism in literature and popular culture; developing healthy masculinity from a feminist perspective; secular humanistic Judaism; racial justice and healing; the philosophy and practice of interfaith work.”&nbsp;


	In many ways, Harvard’s new chief chaplain sounds like a zillion other educated, sophisticated left leaning academics. He’s the norm. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Epstein’s public charisma can be observed in various online videos that show him speaking before groups, like the Harvard Humanist Hub in Harvard Square. Epstein’s polished “evangelical” style has him sounding like the "Dr. Phil" of atheistic humanism. He talks with his hands (but not in an excessive way), makes appropriate eye contact with the audience, and goes out of his way not to offend “believers.” The humanist chaplain is also a bit of a ham, such as when he MC’d the Humanist Hub memorial service for Tom Ferrick in 2014


	Tom Ferrick is an important link when it comes to a fuller understanding of Greg Epstein.


	Ferrick, an ex-Roman Catholic priest-turned-humanist-atheist, founded the Harvard humanist chaplaincy in 1974. Epstein likes to refer to Ferrick as “the world’s first avowed atheist to become a university chaplain.” In an article about Ferrick in the Huffington Post, Epstein wrote more about his mentor:

<blockquote>
	
		In so many ways, Tom was ahead of his time. He bridged the chasm between religious and Humanist communities before most people even knew the latter existed. Now, a third of young Americans identify as nonreligious, and local communities for atheists are starting up like popcorn in the microwave, maybe even by the thousands, often calling themselves cheeky names like “Godless Congregations.&nbsp;&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Epstein took over Ferrick’s role in 2005 after the latter’s retirement. Epstein was assistant chaplain at the time and training for the rabbinate at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. Epstein, like his predecessor, believes that Humanism is the natural outgrowth of religion that has not lost sight of science.


	Tom Ferrick’s transformation from Jesuit priest-to-atheist began when he was the assistant Catholic chaplain at Dartmouth College and was questioned by the students he counseled there. Ferrick claims he had no answers to offer when the students asked him the big questions about life, death and suffering.


	Ferrick in many ways mirrored what was happening to some intellectually-inclined Catholic priests in the years following the Second Vatican Council: Rebel priests at that time became interested in social justice causes, non-violence and civil rights although some priests threw the baby out with the bathwater and became atheist or agnostic when they bought into the freedoms of the sexual revolution. In Ferrick’s case, once he came out as a gay man he ceased identifying as Christian or even a believer.


	Ferrick, according to Epstein, lived on $7,000 a year while maintaining a monastic lifestyle. When he went public with his intentions to leave the priesthood and the Church, Boston’s Cardinal Cushing called him in for an interview but failed to get him to change his mind. Ferrick stands in stark contrast to Daniel Berrigan, a priest of the same era who became an antiwar activist and a political radical but who stayed in the Church and alienated his leftist friends when he then went on to fight for pro life causes.


	Ferrick’s 2014 memorial service opens (predictably enough) with a singing/ guitar rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine, after which Epstein introduces friends of the deceased. The service ends with Epstein singing solo as the accompanying guitarist pretends not to notice the chaplain’s multiple missed notes.


	“We don’t look to a god for answers,” Mr. Epstein has been quoted as saying. “We are each other’s answers.” Of course, one could answer that with a brickbat from Issiah 2:22:&nbsp;“Stop trusting in mere humans, who have but a breath in their nostrils. Why hold them in esteem?”

Harvard University: God, Deader Than a Doornail  

When it became known that the new chief chaplain at Harvard University was an atheist, there was considerable international chatter. People wanted to know: Who

Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author, died in 2006 after she was indicted by a judge in her native Italy for violating the provisions of the Italian Penal Code for “vilifying” a religion admitted by the state. The religion in this case was Islam.


	Fallaci’s trilogy of writings critical of Islam, beginning with The Rage and The Pride, published one year after 9/11, set the tone for The Force of Reason (2006) and Oriana Fallaci Interviews Herself, caused many of her fans on the Left to distance themselves from her work. Fallaci, however, was a supernova journalist whose sole aim was to tell the truth. If reporting that truth caused her to become unpopular, she was ready to embrace that reality.


	The core message in Fallaci’s books had to do with the Muslim colonization of Europe through immigration and having large, multiple families. Fallaci was no armchair critic of Islam but had had direct experiences with Islam as a Middle Eastern war correspondent and when she interviewed the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During that interview Fallaci realized that political Islam had returned to the world stage in a big way. While making a point about women’s rights in Iran (and political Islam) to Khomeini, Fallaci, who was wearing a chador, ripped it off her head after Khomeini told her she didn’t have to wear it.&nbsp;


	“That’s very kind of you, Imam,” she said. “And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.”


	September 11, 2001 only reinforced her views on political Islam and led to the trilogy of books on the subject that she wrote towards the end of her life.


	Fallaci says that when she read the news of her indictment by the judge, she laughed.&nbsp; "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true."


	She never perceived her criticism of Islam as a betrayal of her lifelong anti-fascist views. She viewed her critique of Islam as a continuation of her fight against fascism, because to her political Islam was fascism.&nbsp; As she told Khomeini,

<blockquote>
	
		It seems to me that this is fanaticism, and of the most dangerous kind. I mean, fascist fanaticism. In fact, there are many who see a fascist threat in Iran today, and who even maintain that fascism is already being consolidated in Iran.
</blockquote>


	Her respect for the truth went beyond criticizing Islam. In 1973, she told Dick Cavett that Henry Kissinger had criticized her for quoting him out of context, a claim that she said was false.&nbsp; “That is not true,” she told the talk show host. “I tape recorded it. He knows that this is not true.” Lighting up a cigarette on- air (Fallaci smoked three packs a day) she told Cavett, “Politics and diplomacy are the sublimation of lying. Sometimes they do have to lie. I understand that. But as a journalist I have to write the truth. If I understand that he has to lie, he has to understand that I have to say the truth.”


	Still, one has to wonder what would have happened to the 5’1” 92 pound Fallaci had she lived to be tried by the Italian courts?


	Would she have gone to prison? If so, there surely would have been an outcry among intellectuals as there had been when Salman Rushdie was put under a fatwa for writing Satanic Verses. Perhaps Fallaci, who had a serious form of cancer when she was charged with pillorying Islam, might have died in prison. At best, she might have been released on ‘editorial parole’ with an EU fatwa over her head forbidding her from writing additional books critical of Islam. While we will never know how the court scenario might have played out, what is certain is that Fallaci would have ignored any order that had to do with what she could or could not write.


	Criticizing Islam has always been a classic tradition among the great minds of western civilization. The list of Islam-criticizers is legion. From John of Damascus, a Syrian monk in 600 AD to Voltaire (who wrote a satire on the life of Muhammad), to Alexis de Tocqueville ("I studied the Kuran a great deal ... I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammed.")&nbsp;&nbsp; 
	 
	Other writers like Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchhill, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Pipes, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and David Horowitz have leveled their own Islamist critiques and would no doubt have been found guilty by the same Italian courts had they fallen under its censoring hand. Fallaci died before the hateful Hate trial got underway, so she did not have to suffer the indignity of fools, but because of her stand on political Islam her legacy today is mixed. 
	 
	Today, critics either make excuses for her anti Islamist books—9/11 sent her into a sort of permanent mental breakdown, etc.—or they divide her career into two parts: the mostly anti-fascist leftwing part when her best work was produced, and then the downward spiral anti-Islamist part where the woman once famous for her celebrity interviews, her novel A Man and her book, Letter to a Child Unborn, went bonkers.&nbsp; &nbsp; 
	 
	Fallaci biographer Cristina De Stefano (Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend), admits that Fallaci’s last trilogy almost destroyed her career, but then she adds that Fallaci was not a political commentator—“she was a novelist, she was a writer. I think that, in talking about politics, she often asked the right questions, like: What is Europe’s position toward Islamic culture within its borders? Is Europe ready to stand up for its values?” 
	 
	Had Fallaci not died in 2006 but lived to the present day, there’s little doubt that her publishing options would be limited had she gone on wiring about Islam.&nbsp; In the United States, those options would certainly be close to nil sans publication in conservative publications like Frontpage, Gatestone Institute, Newsmax and The American Spectator.&nbsp; As for publishing books, what American publisher in 2021 would touch her stuff after her codification as an Islamophobe?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;


	The Rage and the Pride (2001), her inaugural book on the rise of political Islam, was published by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 
	 
	“Italians don’t produce babies anymore, the idiots,” Fallaci wrote in The Rage, “

<blockquote>
	
		For decades they have had and still have the lowest birth-rate in the West. Our foreign workers, instead, breed and multiply gloriously. At least of the Moslem women you see in our streets are pregnant or surrounded by streams of children. Yesterday, in Rome, three of them delivered in public.
</blockquote>


	Would Rizzoli, known for its exquisite coffee table and illustrated books on architecture, interior design, fashion, literature, photography and the fine arts&nbsp; have continued to publish Fallaci in 2021? Because the world is further down the rabbit hole of censorship than it was in 2006, a “yes’ answer to this question is doubtful. &nbsp; 
	 
	Also, were Fallaci alive today she may have found herself as another hapless Amazon author, where thousands of books about car maintenance to astro-physics to Aunt Bertha’s first Gothic romance novel are published with zero promotion or marketing and “rest” in online perpetuity like rows of endless tombstones in real time cemeteries. Yet even Amazon books are subject to unwanted surprises. Ever vigilant Amazon “editors” often force its authors to amend or cut offending passages from their books or risk ‘execution’ via the delete button. This is why it’s reasonable to suppose that Fallaci’s work would engage Amazon’s censors.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; 
	 
	Fallaci-- novelist, a writer of war dispatches, polemics and celebrity profiles-- began her social and celebrity reporting for Italian newspapers in Hollywood in the 1950s (where she acquired friends like Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery.)&nbsp; The New York Times equated her questions during interviews to “rectal probes.” Some critics insisted she was a poseur and a narcissist. 
	 
	Throughout her life, she often complained that she felt like Cassandra because people were not heeding her warnings. 
	 
	She was a wildly diverse writer. At times she could sound like a college co-ed freelancer for Cosmopolitan magazine, especially when she penned the following,

<blockquote>
	
		I have trouble writing when someone is hanging around. Men know how to isolate themselves to write because their wives don’t dare disturb them. But it’s different for women because men are always interrupting them, asking for a kiss or a cup of coffee.
</blockquote>


	In 1991 after discovering that she had a tumor in her breast, she said, “You goddamned bastard, don’t even think about coming back. Did you leave offspring inside of me? I’ll kill you! You won’t defeat me!” 
	 
	Fallaci returned to Italy when she knew that she was dying. From her sickbed she had a view of the famous Brunelleschi dome atop the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Foire while a CD played a melody of church bells. 
	 
	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia. His play (with Sabina Clarke), Rendezvous in Bangkok…Who Killed Thomas Merton will premier September 26 at Philadelphia’s Commodore John Barry Club at Philadelphia’s The Irish Center.

Remembering Oriana Fallaci - And How The Truth is Rarely Pleasant to Hear

Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author, died in 2006 after she was indicted by a judge in her native Italy for violating the provisions of the Italian

The year 2021 has seen a slew of articles in the leftist press condemning the perception that most of the violence against Asian people is committed by people of color. This message is still being hammered into readers’ heads with the thunderous intensity of Niagara Falls. A good number of these articles, while reluctantly conceding that people of color are statistically shown to be the main perpetuators of this kind of violence, go on to explain why this is the case.


	It all boils down to… white supremacy. 


	Yes, white supremacy has become the pop-up explanation for every ill in society, so much so that you can be sure that at this moment there’s a university scholar somewhere writing a thesis about how white supremacy is the root cause of black-on-black urban violence.


	While it is mostly radical leftist publications that are naming white supremacy as the root cause of anti-Asian violence, the mainstream news media has developed its own trope: remain silent when it comes to reporting the race of the perpetrator.&nbsp;


	The catalyst for these multiple (anti-Asian) news stories was Robert Aaron Long of Canton,&nbsp;Georgia, accused of murdering eight people, six of whom happened to be Asian American women who worked at various spas in the Atlanta metro area.&nbsp;Long, who has described himself as a sex addict, told police he began his killing spree to rid himself of sexual temptation, and that the killings had nothing to do with hating Asians.


	The fact that Long has not been charged with committing a hate crime is telling, suggesting that authorities believe that Long’s crime did in fact spring from the depths of psychosis, and not from an ideological hatred of Asians. In their view, the fact that Long’s victims were mostly Asian was incidental and accidental. As a self-realized sex addict, Long would naturally look to his former sexual haunts, spas and massage parlors, to perform his sick exorcism of the demons he says had been plaguing him. After all, the vast majority of spas and massage parlors in metropolitan areas tend to be Asian-run. Every city has its own Chinatown, and every Chinatown (as the stereotype goes) has its spa backrooms where special deals are made between client and masseuse. Long lacked the self-discipline to stop going to these places, so he took the crazy way out: he eliminated the source of his guilt.


	Leftwing media latched on to this story because it served woke journalism’s mission: to ramp up the "White Man as Supreme Asian Hater narrative," never mind that the Long case logs in as a super-rare anomaly. As anyone who has ever kept a keen eye on the dating habits of American men realizes, white men tend to marry Asian women, not push them down in subways or throw things at them in the street. If one were to officially charge white men with anything regarding Asian women---and this would only happen in an alternate feminist universe with Andrea Dworkin as the judge and jury---it would be for the “crime” of sexually objectifying and fetishizing them.


	Not long after the Atlanta area shooting, there were news reports of old Chinese men being attacked on New York streets, or old Korean women being beaten up on buses. These reports came with op-eds condemning anti-Asian violence, or reports on “Stop the Hate,” “Stop the Violence” demonstrations. As to “who” should stop the violence, well, that remained a mystery. Essentially, the message was as generic as a UN address, directed to all people because all people are potentially guilty of anti-Asian violence--- even your white Mennonite grandmother sitting on her porch in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. &nbsp;


	But this Orwellian science fiction doesn’t translate to reality at all.


	In many of the anti-Asian attacks stories the race of the perpetrator is not reported. With these reports there’s a sense that the reporter or editor in charge went to some length to avoid mentioning this fact, as if a description of the assailant was irrelevant because, you know, we are all potentially guilty of anti-Asian violence.


	In rare instances, a photo of the assailant is published, but only because the attack was caught on camera. These photos almost always reveal a person of color. This fact is neither a good nor a bad thing, it’s just the facts, or "reality" as it used to be called. But even these "photo ID" stories identifying the assailant have been called “insufficient and incendiary” when they come under scrutiny by the Left. Some critics also maintain that they are hurtful to the future of Black-Asian relations. The message here is that it’s better not to mention race because the local chapter of BLM might start burning things up again.


	NBC News’ headline, “Viral images show people of color as anti-Asian perpetuators. That misses the big picture,” suggests that the big picture has to do with white supremacy. At U.S. News, one headline did a triple woke somersault when it declared, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime Crosses Racial and Ethnic Lines.” Reading further into the piece, the reader discovers how little those lines are crossed when it was reported that of the 20 people arrested in New York City in 2020, only 2 of those 20 people were white, eleven were African American, six white Hispanic and one black Hispanic.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The Washington Examiner had a different slant when it reported that “Notable attacks have occurred in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle,” and then went on to state, “Often the victims are defenseless, the attacks unprovoked, and the culprits not white.”


	The normally staid Wall Street Journal made no bones about news media obfuscation when it comes to stories about anti-Asian violence:

<blockquote>
	
		Throughout 2020 there was a rise in violence against Asian-Americans, but the race of the perpetrators was typically mentioned only when they were white. Media and other elites obsessively push the narrative that the greatest threat in this country is coming from ‘white supremacists.
</blockquote>


	This gross oversimplification has dire consequences for the most vulnerable in our society—those living in the poorest neighborhoods—and for the nation as a whole.


	Meanwhile, Vox states that there’s no evidence that Black Americans are “predominantly responsible for the rise in attacks on Asian Americans or that they are particularly hostile to Asian Americans relative to the rest of the population.” Going one step further, Vox proclaims with dogmatic Howard Zinn-certainty (pound fist on table, look angry) that the “narrative of Black-Asian hostility is rooted in immigration and economic policies that have historically pitted these communities against one another.”


	But if there’s no evidence that black Americans are responsible for the rise in anti-Asian attacks, how then can there be a “record” (narrative) of “Black-Asian hostility?” Where does the myth come from? Harry Potter? E.B. White?


	According to Professor Jennifer Ho of the University of Colorado at Boulder, white supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the United States. Ho states that “Anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it... The dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians.” &nbsp;


	According to Ho, therefore, the white guy who wants to marry an Asian woman is guilty (by the very nature of his being white) of an attack by a black man on an Asian person 100 miles away because the black man has been fueled by the racism directed against him by all the white people he’s encountered since he was born.


	Would this kind of logic hold up in a court of law?&nbsp;


	When the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7790522/" target="_blank">American Journal of Criminal Justice</a> looked at hate crime statistics from 1992 to 2014, it found that compared to anti-Black and anti-Latino hate crimes, a higher proportion of perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes were people of color. US News also reported that, “While historically&nbsp;whites have been responsible for most hate crimes reported to the FBI, the arrest data from New York shines a light on a&nbsp;sensitive&nbsp;topic in the Asian American community&nbsp;—&nbsp;that attacks on Asians are often carried out by people of color."


	“Most&nbsp;police departments do&nbsp;not&nbsp;publish this kind of data," US News concluded.


	Of course, police departments would probably not publish that kind of data because the last thing any local police department needs is a charge of micro-aggression racism by BLM academics, aka the cheerleading squad of Defund the Police. 


	What was ridiculously chilling about almost every news report on anti-Asian crime is all the references to Donald Trump calling coronavirus the “China virus” or the “kung fu plague.”


	"When you have a former&nbsp;president&nbsp;who stoked the flames of&nbsp;white nationalism by using ethnic slurs to refer to the coronavirus, you're going to incite hate against a vulnerable minority, in this case, Chinese Americans, and by extension, Asian Americans," said one sociology professor at Columbia University. Well, what else would you expect from a university professor whose work environment is essentially a bubble where free thought is not allowed? Trump’s "China Virus" comments not only pointed to the suspicious origins of COVID but have proven more accurate over time, especially considering the recent GOP report pointing to the Wuhan lab as source of the pandemic.


	"The recent crime wave against Asians in America's big cities is not the fault of Donald&nbsp;Trump, MAGA&nbsp;activists, conservative talk radio, or&nbsp;white people," Asian-American columnist Michelle Malkin wrote. “It's the fault of the perpetrators and the perpetrators alone — most of whom happen to be thugs 'of color.'"&nbsp;


	The Washington Examiner said it best when it stated that an honest conversation about the prevalence of black crime and the existence of racism among nonwhite Americans is long overdue. “The goal is not to vilify an entire race for the crimes of individuals, nor is it to absolve individuals of other races who commit racist acts.”


	This means if we can never bring ourselves to face the unpleasant facts about the majority of these attacks, there will never be any kind of reconciliation. As for those who refuse to face those facts, perhaps the first step in a 12-step program might be to stop fixating on superficialities, namely the former president’s use of the term "China Virus.”


	The all-too-human truth is that you can call it the "China Virus" and still love your Asian neighbor.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia&nbsp; and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

Anti-Asian Violence: Myth and Reality

The year 2021 has seen a slew of articles in the leftist press condemning the perception that most of the violence against Asian people is committed by people

The radical handwriting was on the wall the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected to the papacy in 2013.&nbsp;


	At his first address to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square as Francis I, he had refused to wear the papal mozzetta. This seemingly insignificant break with tradition was the first red flag signaling that the new Bishop of Rome was a modernist. The second red flag occurred during Francis’ inaugural Mass. At that Mass, Francis’ vestments were noticeably plain. Not just plain, but ostentatiously plain. His white miter, decorated with a simple red cross, matched the miter he wore when officiating at puppet and Tango Masses in Argentina. Kneeling among Armenian rite bishops in their bejeweled tall miters during a prayer service before the crypt of St. Peter, Francis seemed to be making a show of his preference for “simplicity.”


	The new pope very quickly won the world’s admiration when it was reported that he paid his own hotel bill after the conclusion of the papal conclave. Non-Catholics who never noticed a pope before were now paying strict attention. Many saw Francis’ emphasis on simplicity as a saintly attribute, especially when he chose not to live in the papal palace but in the Vatican apartments. He was very quickly dubbed the “People’s Pope.”


	In 2014, the “People’s Pope” fired Colonel Daniel Rudolf Anrig, 42, head of the Swiss Guards, “for being overly strict and autocratic.” Reports stated how the pope ordered a Swiss Guard who had been standing outside his apartment all night to sit down. When the guard said it was against orders,&nbsp; Francis replied, “I give the orders around here!” and then promptly went out to get the guard a cup of coffee.


	Paying your own hotel bill and getting an overworked Swiss Guard a cup of coffee are ‘feel good’ stories that make up only a small part of this immensely complicated man.


	Ironically, over time Francis would prove to be as authoritarian as the head of the Swiss Guard whom he fired and replaced. That authoritarianism would manifest itself slowly at first, finally climaxing in his July 16, 2021 Motu Proprio restricting the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, the ancient liturgy of the Roman rite that was replaced by a more Protestant-friendly service in 1970 after the Second Vatican Council.


	It is not unheard of for a pope to get involved in political issues. Pope John Paul II’s alliance with Poland’s Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement, did much to end Communism there. Pope Benedict XVI was outspoken on the dangers of Islam and even had a private meeting with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, author of the bestseller, “The Rage and The Pride,” before her death in 2006. Francis got heavily political when he told reporters in 2015 that Donald Trump was "not Christian" because he had plans to build a wall along the border with Mexico to keep out illegal aliens. In response, Trump, according to Politico, “thundered back in a lengthy statement, declaring that, ‘For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.’” Trump also added that if the Vatican was ever attacked by the Islamic State, Francis would wish that he were president.


	When President Trump visited Francis in the Vatican the media was rife with interpretations of the pope’s movements during the meeting. Every gesture from the pope, from a simple head scratch to a momentary glance at the floor, was read as a sign of his disapproval of Trump. Suddenly every activist cub reporter had become a body language expert.


	Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, was at one time one of the progressive architects of the Second Vatican Council (where he appeared in photo ops wearing a necktie) but became conservative towards the end of his pontificate, issuing his famous Summorum Pontificum in July 2007 which brought new life to the Traditional Latin Mass by giving permission to Catholic priests to celebrate it without the permission of a bishop.


	The fever of reform generated by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s replaced the old Mass with guitar Masses, sappy sentimental hymns, altar girls in flip flops and Mrs. Broadbent from the church choir handing out the Eucharist instead of the priest. Catholic Church architecture also took a nose dive at this time, with high altars, statues and mosaics removed from churches and replaced by table altars (Julie Child’s table) and baptismal fonts that resembled Las Vegas hotel hot tubs. The new Mass, or the Novus Ordo, was specifically designed to make the Mass less mystical and more Protestant-friendly.&nbsp;


	Bergoglio, the Jesuit from Argentina, has always had a hatred of Tradition and the Traditional Latin Mass.


	When Benedict XVI issued his Summorum Pontifum facilitating the TLM, Bergoglio would allow it in one parish but the hour he chose when it could be celebrated was usually a time when people did not like going to Mass.&nbsp;Celebrants for the TLM were chosen by Bergoglio but these priests generally did not like the Old Mass at all. He also imposed many restrictions on the manner in which the Mass could be celebrated.&nbsp;The good Jesuit disobeyed the spirit, if not the letter, of Pope Benedict's Motu Propio. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Francis waited eight years before making a move against the TLM as head of the Catholic Church. During those years his focus was on navigating the sometimes slippery waters of Church teachings that are both liberal and conservative. Siding with the poor, illegal aliens, supporting economic equity and condemning capital punishment comes from the same Church that condemns abortion, birth control and sex outside of marriage.&nbsp; But Francis, the ever savvy Jesuit, had a knack for injecting a bit of ambiguity when he reflected on or talked about the Church’s most orthodox doctrines, causing many Catholics to ask, “What does Pope Francis really believe?”&nbsp;


	In the political realm, the pope’s leftist progressive beliefs were best exhibited during a speech before Congress in 2015. “In these times when social concerns are so important,” Francis said, “I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”


	The Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933 during the Great Depression, began with an emphasis on feeding the hungry and giving shelter to the homeless. Day (1897 – 1980) was a journalist and social activist who converted to Catholicism while keeping her anarchist beliefs. Today, the Catholic Worker movement has gone way beyond the vision of Day, who as a strict Catholic would not recognize the movement’s embrace of illicitly ordained women priests and the celebration of the Mass at movement houses by anyone called to do so.&nbsp;


	Before the 2020 election, Pope Francis did everything but give his apostolic blessing to the Biden campaign. Biden, who claims to be a devout Catholic and who is said to carry a rosary in his pocket, supports abortion on demand and has been criticized by many U.S. Catholic bishops for his views. In June 2021, The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to draft a statement on the meaning of communion, and whether President Biden and other politicians should be denied the rite based on their public stand on abortion.


	“We are not accustomed to a hearing from a pope, a month before Election Day, who&nbsp;<a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html" target="_blank">criticizes</a>&nbsp;“myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism,” and castigates those who, through their actions, cast immigrants as “less worthy, less important, less human.” The Washington Post reported in Oct 2020


	Pope Francis has charged headlong into a variety of issues, including migration, climate change and economic equality. His June 2015 environmental encyclical “Laudato Si’ ” called for a radical reduction in the use of fossil fuels. &nbsp;


	Francis’s first big liturgical scandal occurred in October 2019 during the so called Synod on the Amazon when statuettes of an idol representing the Mother Earth goddess, or Pachamama, were venerated in St. Peter’s Basilica.&nbsp; During the ceremonies there was a dancing procession of Pachamama where people prostrated themselves before the two wooden statues that represented naked and pregnant women and a statue of a male phallic figure reclining on his back. The event was meant to symbolize “the cry of the Amazonian land and native peoples.” When the figures were stored at the church at Traspontina, an Austrian Catholic activist, Alexander Tschugguel, took the idols and&nbsp; &nbsp;threw them into the Tiber.


	Francis later apologized for the incident.


	In 2017, a group of Catholic scholars and priests wrote an&nbsp;<a href="http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5983408-Open-Letter-to-the-Bishops-of-the-Catholic.html" target="_blank">open letter</a>&nbsp;to the College of Bishops accusing Pope Francis of heresy.


	Things were getting dicey but Francis continued to talk about the building of a “global human common good.” Francis was by now an irrepressible populist or, as one critic put it, “the globetrotting do-gooder CEO of Catholicism.” At a Mass in St. Peter’s Square in September 2019 celebrating World Day of Migrants and Refugees, he said, “Loving our neighbor as ourselves means being firmly committed to building a more just world, in which everyone has access to the goods of the earth, in which all can develop as individuals and as families, and in which fundamental rights and dignity are guaranteed to all.” &nbsp;In January 2021, Pope Francis' elaborated on his thoughts and called for open borders when he wrote that nations had an obligation "to welcome, promote, protect, and integrate those who come in search of better lives for themselves and their families."


	Ironically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has always defended the right of countries to limit immigrants. The Catechism, in fact, also states that migrants must respect the host country and assimilate.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	When Bergoglio was elected pope he predicted that his papacy would not be a long one but that prediction has obviously fizzled out. The longer Francis’ reign goes on, the more damage he seems to create. On July 16, 2021, he committed what many Catholic Traditionalists have called an act of violence against the Church when he restricted the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass.


	Under Francis’ new guidelines, a priest wanting to celebrate the ancient rite must first ask his bishop for permission, after which the bishop must seek permission from Rome. Since the beginning of his papacy Francis has appointed only progressive bishops and cardinals. This guarantees a difficult path when it comes to TLM permission slips.&nbsp;


	You Tube Catholic commentators like Taylor Marshall, Timothy Gordon, Michael Matt, Mother Meriam, Dr. Robert Moynihan and many others spent days&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; trying to make sense of the pope’s anti Latin Mass Motu Proprio.&nbsp; The blunt and at times nasty sounding document is a much harsher rekindling of what Bergoglio did to the Latin Mass communities in Buenos Aires. Jay Dyer, a Traditional Catholic who went over to the Orthodox Church (where Tradition is not subject to fashion) predicted that many Traditional Catholics would enter the Orthodox Church as a result of Francis’ invective.


	Francis’ act of activist violence against Traditional Catholics has had a ripple effect. As of this writing those reactions are still building and many observers see it as the pope’s last straw. Francis, they say, has met the ultime de la résistance, the Latin Mass communities throughout the world with their flourishing, full seminaries and convents and packed-to-the-gills parishes, a stark contrast to the empty pews in the modernist wing of the Pachamama church with its altar girls in flip flops and pony tails.


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Literary Philadelphia &nbsp;and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.

Globalist Pope Francis: Suppressing the Heritage of the Catholic Church

The radical handwriting was on the wall the moment Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected to the papacy in 2013.

Martin Scorses’s “The 50 Year Argument,” a 2014 documentary film on the history and influence of The New York Review of Books, opens, as one critic put it, “with a tender and hard-hitting monologue about the subjectivity of journalistic stories due to the impossibility of the human mind being able to objectively record and store memories from our lives.”


	Scorses’s film is far more exciting than the above sentence may indicate. It captures a time in New York when left wing radical chic was practically the whole of intellectual life. The so-called New York ‘right’ at the time (as represented by William F. Buckley’s Firing Line or Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine) was in a droll state of lack by comparison.


	Scorses’ film chronicles (and romanticizes) the founding of the magazine by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein in 1979 after a long New York City newspaper strike. Poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick added their support to the project and on February 1, 1963&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; the first issue of the NYRB appeared. Its sixty pages included articles by Gore Vidal, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, with each contributor agreeing to write for free (at least for the first issue) in order to help the publication go on to become one of the bedrocks of urban intellectual life.


	The NYRB stamp was soon everywhere. It even cast its intellectual canopy over the infamous 1971 debate between Norman Mailer and 4 feminist writers, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Village Voice dance critic and Lesbian Nation author, Jill Johnston. A documentary film of the debate, Town Bloody Hall, shows a young Susan Sontag during the audience Q and A (she was not yet famous enough to be on the panel), confronting Norman Mailer by suggesting that he not call women writers ‘lady writers.’ &nbsp;Her comment and tone is unbelievably polite (one can clearly see that she admires Mailer) but it was no match for Jill Johnston’s antics when Johnston, when it was her turn to speak, opted instead to make love with two of her girlfriends onstage while shouting triumphantly. “All women are lesbians!”


	The on-stage fully clothed orgy caused quite a commotion among the largely liberal left audience, with some showing expressions of disgust you’d expect to see among Pat Robertson 700 Club fans. Many feminists in 1971 thought of lesbians as being a threat to the mainstreaming of feminism. &nbsp;


	During a 1997 C-Span About Books interview, Silvers said that one of the reasons for finding NYRB was “to go behind the particular propaganda of the day….We feel that we have an extremely independent review.” Much of the early popularity of the magazine can be attributed to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War; this unpopularity certainly fueled the magazine forward long after the war protests had subsided. Silvers also told C-Span that the magazine didn’t have a particular political line and that it did not identify with any political party.


	Silvers’ observation was still mostly true in 1997. Susan Sontag, for instance, authored a defense of Salman Rushdie in NYRB’s April 1990 issue when Rushdie was put under a fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini for “insulting” Mohammed in his novel “Satanic Verses.” Sontag’s work on Rushdie’s defense, both as a writer for NYRB and as president of Pen at the time, was a remarkably brave thing to do, and yet it is highly unlikely that in 2021 any writer from NYRB would take a similar position when it comes to Islam. What is far more likely is that any novel perceived as insulting Mohammad would simply not be reviewed or discussed within its pages, or if discussed it would be from a detached analytical point of view in which the author’s premise was condemned or questioned. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Sontag also signed an Open Letter to Fidel Castro in NYRB pages in February 1989, urging the dictator to adopt Russia’s liberalizing free speech stance. “On January 1, 1989, you will have been in power for thirty years without having, so far, celebrated elections to determine if the Cuban people do wish you to continue as President of the Republic, President of the Council of Ministers, President of the Council of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces,” the letter stated. 
	 
	In 1982 after decades of supporting various Marxist causes, Sontag enraged the Left when she declared that communism was “fascism with a human face.”


	Robert Silvers died at age 87 in 2017. With his death, the Review’s streak of independent thinking, or what was left of it, disappeared altogether when Silvers’ replacement, Ian Buruma, published an essay by Canadian broadcaster, Jian Ghomeshi, accused (but freed by the courts) of sexually assaulting women. That essay, “<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/11/reflections-hashtag/">Reflections From a Hashtag</a>,” was a first-person account by Ghomeshi of being fired amid allegations of sexual misconduct and then acquitted of the charges by a Canadian court.


	Ghomeshi’s essay appeared during the height of the #METoo movement. Buruma, who assumed the editorship of the magazine with a promise to make it more “democratic,” was forced to resign as a result of the essay. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	“I made a themed issue about #MeToo perpetrators who were not convicted by the judiciary but by social media,” Buruma told The New York Times in 2018. “And now I am on the pillory myself.” Buruma explained that he expected that there would be strong reactions but that his hope “was that it would open up the discussion about what to do with people who have misbehaved, but have been acquitted by a court. Throughout the ordeal, The Times reported that he maintained his cool and called the attacks against him “ironic.”


	While many NYRB staffers called for Buruma’s resignation, many did not. One contributor noted that NYRB “had a history of publishing tough, controversial pieces that did not kowtow to public opinion,” and regretted that sticking to this ideal had cost Mr. Buruma his job. “Providing a platform for people in Ghomeshi’s position in no way exonerates them,” the staffer stated. “It’s important to hear what somebody has to say in the position of suddenly being exiled from social life, and sentenced to a nonexistence.” 
	 
	Some NYRB writers worried about coming to Buruma’s defense because in that toxic #MeToo climate any defense might be perceived as not caring about sexual assault, which in the mind of many leftists can be as serious as actually committing an assault. &nbsp;Even soft- left Atlantic Magazine jumped into the fray when it stated, “It is unusual for a well-regarded editor at a prestigious intellectual journal to lose a leadership position over just one article. What are the larger implications for American journalism?” 
	 
	The London Review of Books (LBR), founded in October 1979, once boasted that it championed independent thought although that reality came to an end with the election of Donald Trump.


	The Trump presidency quadrupled LBR’s and NYRB’s leftist identification so that one could not even read an article on an English poet or a Bulgarian scientist without seeing cryptic references to The Orange. The Trump obsession was unrelenting, as if every LBR/NYRB writer felt it was his/her obligation to state unflinchingly that he hated Trump more than the reader.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	The same might be said for NYRB. All during the presidential campaign, Trump references were as common as commas, even in articles about Monet, Van Gogh or obscure 19th century American poets. &nbsp;NYRB’s latest edition, for instance, contains an essay on “All-American Vigilantes,” an inventory of right wing vigilante groups going back to the Civil War up to and including “the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters.”


	“Right wing vigilantes have long been with us. Never did they loom larger than in the strife-torn United States of a hundred years ago.” Of course, the writer avoids any mention of Antifa and BLM and the weeks of burning and rioting those groups subjected American citizens to during the summer of 2020. The article ends in an ‘Iwo Jima’ explosion of Trump bashing: “The Klan’s members and sympathizers ranged from senators, governors, and Supreme Court justices to a youthful New York real estate developer named Fred Trump—who was arrested, wearing a hood, when a 1927 march of some one thousand Klansmen through Queens turned violent. Ninety-four years later, his son would launch the crowd of vigilantes who invaded the Capitol.” &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Many of LRB’s writers-- Susan Sontag, Julian Barnes, Penelope Fitzgerald,Terry Castle, Seymour Hersh, Christopher Hitchens and Bruce Chatwin—also wrote for NYRB. &nbsp;Published twice a month, LRB is known for its extraordinarily long essays. In 2014, The Guardian posed the question: “Is the LRB the best magazine in the world?” The magazine has spawned a LRB bookshop and a popular cake shop famous for its pistachio cakes. Mary Beard, the popular classical historian, is also a frequent contributor.


	Shortly after September 11, 2001, Beard wrote an essay “that America had it coming.” That essay did not seem to hurt Beard’s career as Sontag’s career, at least temporarily, was damaged by her New Yorker essay on 9/11 in which she stated that,

<blockquote>
	
		"If the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage [a morally neutral virtue]: Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Sept. 11's slaughter, they were not cowards."
</blockquote>


	Sontag received death threats for her words while Beard went on to become even more of a historian-celebrity. (Finding Beard’s 9/11 essay on 9/11 is a next to impossible task.)


	In 2018, The Guardian published, ‘The Cult of Mary Beard.’

<blockquote>
	
		&nbsp;One of her former students, Emily Kneebone, remembers supervisions – one-to-one or two-to-one teaching sessions – at Newnham, the women-only Cambridge college to which Beard has been attached for most of her adult life, first as a student, then as a don. She would teach from a chaise longue: “At first she’d be in a normal position, but as the hour progressed she would gradually slide further and further down so you could only see her feet.”
</blockquote>


	Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB from 1992 to 2021, is quick to point out that what Mary Beard really said in her 9/11 essay is, "'People will say America had it coming.” Regarding fallout regarding the piece, Wilmers added, "Well, everybody said we would have bombs put through our letterbox….. It just caught on and it obviously touched a nerve because there were people who presumably did think that." The Guardian, notes that on Wilmers’ mother’s side there was “a Stalinist agent responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky.”


	&nbsp;Ironically, Wilmers notes in The Guardian interview that she sees LRB&nbsp;as an antidote to the sameness of opinion in the rest of the media: "Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we're all horrified and collectively up in arms and there's normally more than one side to something.” Wilmers said this before the woke revolution imploded in the legacy left-leaning media, resulting in a situation where every publication winds up saying “the same thing over and over again.”&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Aside from the predictable political rhetoric, the biggest drawback in reading NYRB or LRB are the books that these publications choose to review or have their writers write essays about.


	Generally, the books chosen for review, sans biographies of great artists or writers (even here you’re likely to find a Trump reference), tend to have a similar bias. The classic definition of true literary and journalistic independence would suggest a diversity of books and ideas. After all, there’s no reason to suppose why a curious reader can’t jump from the latest biography of Gore Vidal to the latest book by Walter E. Williams, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Bruce Bawer, Jonah Goldberg or Andrew Klavan. Isn’t this the true definition of intellectual independence?


	But the narrow book terrain of these journals makes it impossible to get a sense of what’s really being published in the wider world. To discover this one must go to their nearest big bookstore and get the unadulterated truth by scanning the shelves. &nbsp;


	Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.&nbsp; He is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture and From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.&nbsp;

The Ideological Stink of Literary Journalism: The New York (and London) Review of Books

Martin Scorses’s “The 50 Year Argument,” a 2014 documentary film on the history and influence of The New York Review of Books, opens, as one critic put it, “

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