Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s retirement marks the end of a stunning career, complete with a million photo ops that show her in 4-inch stilettos while on official government business.
To wit, the time she held the House floor for 8 hours-in heels-while advocating for Dreamers; the press at that time remarked, “What man could ever hope to match such an athletic fete!” (In today’s Democrat Party, there could be quite a few.)
Search the Web for shots of Pelosi in heels and you’ll find many dedicated to the topic: Pelosi playing darts in heels; Pelosi showing up for work, in heels; Pelosi returning to Congress in 2025 after hip surgery without her trademark 4-inch stilettos.
In 2018, The Washington Post featured a story about Pelosi with the headline: “What is it about women and power and shoes?”
Then there’s the lipstick. There are articles devoted to her fashion and lipstick.
In a New York Times interview with Pelosi right after Harris’ loss to Trump, there are numerous bracketed references [Pelosi bangs on the table] indicating her emotional response to certain questions.
During that interview, Pelosi said,
“When the candidate for president [Trump] is saying that these people coming in [illegally] are murderers, rapists, thieves and all the rest of that. He made that a cultural issue….He said they were criminals. And they weren’t. They weren’t. I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump.”
This is nothing but lipstick on a lie.
Politico, summing up Pelosi’s political style as a “realpolitk approach,” went into detail about why she “stands alone” and why “Mike Johnson will never have that level of [4-inch heel] name recognition.”
In an October 2025, Harvard Institute of Politics interview, Pelosi answered questions about her career and the future of the Democrat Party. After stating that her main concerns had always been working families, social justice and reproductive freedom, she was asked if the Democrats had drifted too far to the Left.
Her answer was that the Democrat Party was a reflection of the country (never mind the nation’s sweeping rejection of Democrat values in the 2024 election). Then she U-turned and said, “Most elected official govern from the center,” while calling herself a leftwing liberal.
She didn’t stop there.
She accelerated gears and slipped into a stream of consciousness rant, going from one topic to another, rambling at times while waving her hands and then extending her arms in great sweeping motions as if conducting an orchestra. She slurred some words while mispronouncing others. Her face seemed to move in a big choreographed spasm.
The journalist, afraid to interrupt, let her proceed. At one point Pelosi even stood up and walked out near the audience, waving to people she recognized.
She praised Ronald Reagan. “What a great communicator,” she said, commenting on the last speech he gave before switching to Republicans who criticize her views.
“Oh you’re too walk!” they say. She blinked harshly and corrected herself. “I mean woke!”
She talked about social policies that have come to be associated with Democrats like “affordability,” and paired this with a phrase that took me by surprise: “When Christ came down from Heaven He enabled us to partake in His divinity.” Suddenly she was Bishop Fulton F. Sheen.
Do leftwing liberals really talk like this? The juxtaposition of a 2nd grade catechism lesson with Democrat policies advocating abortion, transgender and gender insanity left me spellbound.
A friend told me to watch Pelosi’s interviews for facial movements and mannerisms reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe. I did that and concurred this was sometimes the case. Pelosi’s look of wide-eyed astonishment accelerates when she talks politics; her tongue rolls around inside her mouth and then seems to push out her upper lip, while her lipstick adds a surrealist touch.
Recorded before Mamdani’s victory in New York City, the Harvard interview gave her the opportunity to comment on whether the communist represented the future of the Democrat Party.
“It’s up to the people of New York,” she said, “but Republicans will tattoo Mamdani on every Democrat running for office.”
Obviously, she doesn’t have a good feeling about Mamdani because she refused to comment further. One wonders what her thoughts will be when New York City is no longer the nation’s chief financial hub because of a Mamdani-driven mass exodus to Texas.
Pelosi prefers political brawling on lighter issues, especially when it comes to the art of winning elections. This became obvious when she flipped the interviewer’s question to say how Republicans have demonized her, leading to how, “Somebody came in my house and hurt my husband with a hammer.”
Yet not a single word about how Democrats and their ilk have demonized Donald Trump.
She’s been called the ‘Queen of Stock Trading’ and an alcoholic, though there are claims that she doesn’t drink at all while other claims and posts on X “document” how at 84 years of age she’ll have 7 alcoholic drinks on a 4 hour airline flight. The truth is hard to discern.
In March 2018, she appeared on Ru Paul’s ‘Drag Race’ where she posed with Paul in a power-to-the people salute. The photo of the two of them together has become a Democrat “icon” representing all the ways in which “Christ’s coming down from Heaven enables us to partake in His [woke] divinity.”
In 2020, CNN reported how she felt “liberated” when she ripped up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address on camera. Her face wasn’t moving or shaking then, and her lipstick wasn’t all that bright red, but the action constituted a sort of soft insurrection that should have had severe consequences.
She should have been censured, but wasn’t.
Republicans denounced her actions and introduced a resolution calling the speaker’s conduct at the State of the Union “a breach of decorum” that “degraded the proceedings of the joint session,” but it fell on deaf ears.
She did it, she said, because she felt Trump was “shredding the truth” and so she would shred his speech. She claimed the move was largely unplanned; it was spontaneous, like the movement of the muscles on her face. Susan Page, the author of a new book, “Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power,” explained that Pelosi tore the speech up because she couldn’t find a pen.
“So she made a tiny tear in the margin of the paper so that she could find this untruth. Then she found another thing she thought was untrue, and another, and another. She said by the time he was through speaking, the whole speech had little tears along the margins of things he had said that she said she thought were false. That’s when she decided, ‘I might as well tear this up.”
All in all, the process was a little bit like applying make-up, Pelosi-style.
Put it on and take it off and gloss over the truth until its time to walk off-stage in your 4-inch heels.
