LifeShiteNews has fired its co-founder, John-Henry Westen. Steve Jalsevac engineered the coup d'etat. In a now-deleted post on X, Jalsevac gives some history.
JH certainly went off the deep end. As a Latin Mass promotor, cantor and choir director and head of an Una Voce chapter in Canada, I was happy to see his promotion of the Mass. What disturbed me about JH over the last couple of years was an almost obsessive dalliance with mystics and alleged prophets. He chased after them continuously, and for me, it was a major reason I stopped reading. That turned people off, Steve, not the Latin Mass.
What you, dear reader, don't know is that this writer was a source for many, many articles on LifeShiteNews. I did them many favours. My reward was when I called out Jalsevac for his grotesque anti-semitism and his ignoring of the events of October 7, 2023, he blocked me on the webpage, and mocked me, attacked me and made up lies, -- outright calumny in emails to a priest friend. When called out on it, he refused multiple times to apologize. He even wrote they they, LifeShitNews, were doing "God's work." Such hubris! Since when did fabrication and calumny become God's work? Blasphemous.
Jalsevac, like many other Catholics, have given the impression that the only way to be a good Catholic is to hate Jews. It seems deeply embedded in their psyche. It is grotesque.
Unlike Steve's view, I do see this as the end of LifeShiteNews. JH had a cult-following that will now close its wallets. In this day of splintered social media and Substack articles and as a blogger, I see the change in views and comments; there is too much information and not enough people prepared to fork over funds in a tough economy.
LifeShiteNews did good work for some time. Lately, it has reaped what it has sown, and the sacking of JH will only hasten its demise.
Steve Jalsevac
@jalsevacs
That is just what John-Henry may have wanted many to believe. It is completely false.
LifeSiteNews has been a close team of many talented persons who created what was an incredibly successful, international pro-life, pro-family news service. None of that could have happened without all those people and their valuable contributions to what, for the first 12 years, was a project of and within Canada’s national pro-life organization that dealt with many international developments related to the culture of death vs. the culture of life.
It was founded, funded, encouraged and guided by CLC and especially by its leader Jim Hughes who was the visionary who saw the great need for the pro-life movement to have its own international news service to counter the lies, manipulations and ignoring of many important developments within the international pro-life movement.
CLC gave us its large email list to begin the incredible growth of LifeSite. LifeSite would never have existed without CLC.
Jim Hughes assumed we would continue to grow and continue as the pro-life, pro-family news agency that it was founded to be and which CLC gave so much to from its own resources.
In recent years, John-Henry worked and insisted that we change the highly successful LifeSiteNews mission to become a dramatically different one of a traditional, Latin Mass Catholic evangelizing, religious organization to draw readers into the Catholic Church according to the teachings of the Council of Trent.
Founding board members Jim Hughes, myself and others strongly opposed this change which we believed would tremendously confuse our loyal readers and subscribers and most new people as to what LifeSiteNews really was because of the schizophrenic messaging that the new mission statement presented.
A large majority of subscribers and readers were not traditional Latin Mass Catholics or not Catholic at all, and the changed LifeSiteNews would appeal to a far narrower audience since the target audience that John-Henry insisted on preaching to were only a tiny fraction of Catholics and violated our founding purpose.
Sadly, John-Henry was able to arrange a board vote that outnumbered those who never thought they would have to vote on such a dramatic change, including other board memberss who were removed prior to the vote for poor behaviours because they were so intensely opposed to the change in what they had given so much of themselves to for a number of years.
One of those board members was wholly responsible for encouraging and paying for LifeSiteNews to incorporate in the United States and was a very generous donor and constantly active supporter in many other ways. The other removed board member was also a major donor and played a large role in our highly successful sustainers program
LifeSite will not die because it has always had a strong appeal to international pro-life Catholics/Christians amd others of goodwill and has never been dependent on any one person.
Our fears about the dangers of the dramatic mission change have proven to have been valid. Readership has plummeted, many have been dismayed by the change, LifeSite has been widely viewed as a sedavacatist website and donations have dramatically declined this past campaign.
Without major needed change LifeSiteNews cannot survive. With common sense return to the incredibly successful founding mission and a return to collaborative management, rather than top-down, one person control, it stands a very good chance of tremendous renewal for the good of all.
We will still always been based on traditional Catholic/Christian moral principles in all we do, as we always have been.
2:33 PM · Jul 9, 2025
Steve Jalsevac's letter to a priest committing calumny against this writer. We had not conversations where I influenced him. We were sympatico and as for the priest, nobody tells him what to think!
-------- Original Message --------
On 2024-11-22 11:33 p.m., Steve Jalsevac wrote:
Father,
Please don’t force us
to ban you from commenting. On many issues your comments have been good and
appreciated, although you do tend at times to be overly harsh and condemning
rather than providing thoughtful, helpful comments. However, on Israel you have
been irrational, making totally false accusations and revealing that you have a
poor knowledge about the history and actions of the Zionist state.
Several of our top journalists have been intensely researching and writing on
the issue. We have learned a great deal that we were previously not aware of
and have been humble enough to admit that in the face of irrefutable facts
discovered. We, like most Westerners, had a false, poorly informed
understanding about the history and actions of the Zionists who are NOT
authentic, believing Jews although there are a good number of authentic
religious Jews in Isreal who are being badly mistreated now over their
objections to being forced to be conscripted into the IDF and kill
Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians in violation of their religious beliefs.
We have reported and proven that there are at least a few million Jews who are
very critical and condemning of Israel and its antisemitic nature that is
harmful to all Jews in the world. Those are their words, not ours. Most of what
we have written has especially been based on the writings, comments, talks and
even first-hand communications with Christian leaders in the Middle East and an
even larger number of Jewish persons, including a substantial number of Jewish
rabbis.
LifeSite has
frequently quoted and shown many Jewish individuals, and quite a few Rabbis,
who expressed valid reasons for their grave concerns about the alleged state of
the Jews, Israel, which they consider to NOT authentically represent the Jews
of the world, and which was founded by atheistic, non-religious and even
Marxist Jews.
In their own writings, the Zionists reveal that they chose Palestine for their
new nation, not because it was the Holy Land, but because it was the most
marketable location for their non-religious project and racist-supremacist
ideology. Again, we learned that from orthodox religious rabbis and Middle East
Catholic and other Christian leaders. They have been telling us that and they
have greatly appreciated that the truth about the Zionists is finally getting
out to the world.
Your harsh, condemning comments in response to our article today by the
distinguished, faithful Catholic, Hugh Owen, whom you don’t seem to know
anything about, are disturbing to have come from someone who is supposed to be
a faithful Catholic priest and whom we thought was a dear friend.
I am suspecting that David Domet has been negatively influencing you since we
received similar hostile, off-the-wall comments from him today. David is known
for having a self-defeating quick temper and angry disposition although he does
have some valid reasons for demanding justice from the Church that seems to
have unjustly caused him harm. We have tried to be of help to him, but he has a
strange way of alienating true friends.
In his article today on LifeSite, Hugh Owen is NOT inciting “more hatred
against the Jewish People” with his article and your claim related to the
article that “it would be more than shameful if the biased, dangerous and
irresponsible reporting against the people of Israel resulted in more
bloodshed” only reveals your shocking mistrust, ignorance and unwillingness to
consider all that we have worked very hard to accurately report on the
Israel/Palestinian situation.
I could go on and on, but all of this has already been written and
explained in our many articles.
Don’t let David Domet
take you down to his frequently too bitter and emotional level. Please trust
that we really do know what we are doing. We understand that our reports can be
a shock to those who have never been exposed to this information before, as it
has also been to us, but PLEASE trust that we are indeed doing the will of God
on this. That is the only reason why we all work in this mission.
The reality is that when you condemn our reporting, you are in effect also
condemning all the Christian and Jewish leaders from whom we have learned the
information we have reported. That is condemning at least several million
people of good heart who love and serve God or who are otherwise good,
trustworthy and principled persons who have a true heart for the downtrodden
suffering injustice. We would not trust them if they were not those types of
persons.
Zionism is what we are writing about, not Jews and Judaism. They are not the
same. The conflict in Israel is NOT as we have been told again and again by
Jewish and Christian sources, a religious one of Muslims vs Jews. It is one
between Zionists vs Palestinians, Christians and others in the region whose
homes and lands of many generations have been stolen from them and forced to
live in what are essentially open-air prisons and subjected to constant
surveillance, frequent, unjust arrests, unjust killings, torture in prisons and
now starvation and no food, water, power or medical care. They are living under
horrific conditions.
If you open your mind and heart and read our many articles with a different,
prayerful disposition, I am sure you will develop a very different response to
these articles. No one in LifeSiteNews is antisemitic. We are faithful
Catholics, and we realize antisemitism is a sin, but valid criticisms of the
actions and ideology of the state of Isreal is NOT antisemitism. Israel itself
is antisemitic – as repeatedly explained to us by orthodox religious rabbis.
Wishing you all the best,
Steve Jalsevac
I expect LifeShitNews won't survive the year.
