The Real Story of Chicago
It isn’t the Democratic National Convention. It’s the Chicago Activists Saving the City Democrats are Running Down.
For a hundred years, from the 1890s to the 1990s, Chicago, Illinois ran on industry, ethnic groups, sports, blue collar unions, and ward politics. For the last thirty, it’s run on white collar unions, media conglomerates, multinationals, universities, and nonprofits. It’s this new city that’s hosting the Democratic National Convention: taking over the Chicago Bulls’ United Center and showcasing the Democrats’ leading lights. These include Mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive supported by the Teachers Union; former President Barack Obama, a Hyde Park-minted academic; and Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose family’s politics and nonprofits set the terms of the city.
Another Chicago exists outside the convention center, the one these Democrats don’t live in but which their policies have created. It still looks like the old city: Irish pubs, church spires, Cubs and White Sox stadiums. But it’s become the site of public school indoctrinations, violent crime, and pop-up incursions of illegal immigrants. In this city, an older American tradition dating back to the Revolution is surfacing. Citizen-journalists and citizen activists are fighting for their neighborhoods and their city.
Terry Newsome is one of them. His arc from growing up in the old Chicago to rising with the new to fighting for the old shows how the city has fallen and how it might find its way back.
(Read more: EXCLUSIVE: He Infiltrated a Nonprofit Transporting Illegal Aliens from Texas to Chicago. This Is What He Saw.)
The Progress of a Citizen—and the Decline of his City
Terry Newsome’s life is a map of Chicago’s. An Italian American and former Democrat, he grew up when Chicago was a ward-and-ethnic redoubt under Mayor Richard J. Daley. In his twenties, he spent time on the wrong side of the tracks with the Mafia, like Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas. After stints in state and federal prison, he entered Chicago’s labor union scene, working as an electrician, a grip and a stuntman for films. Then he broke a completely new path: graduating from college at 37, entering business, and becoming a sales principal at a multinational technology consulting firm.
Newsome’s corporate arc matched Chicago’s under Richard J. Daley’s son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, who eroded his father’s world with downtown renovation and civil service growth. Daley’s Chicago boasted a majestic skyline and multinationals. It also seeded the careers of powerful Democrats: real estate operator, bureaucrat, and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett; Schools superintendent and Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Obama campaign consultant David Axelrod; and Obama-anointer Oprah Winfrey. But the price was steep. Old on-the-ground politickers and their wards became yuppie enclaves, and close-knit communities got pushed out by development. Pensioned administrators quietly gained power. Ethnic and identity fights moved from wards into schools, under the banner of Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Thanks to the Pritzkers’ influence on education, transgenderism infiltrated, too.
It was the impacts of these shifts that brought Terry Newsome, age sixty and in the middle of two bouts with prostate cancer, back from the corporate climb to refocus on his home city—and to use the skills he’d left behind.
The Activation of a Chicago Citizen
Newsome, like many activist-citizens reshaping our politics, came to his work via his children—a twin boy and girl attending public school in Downers Grove, a Chicago suburb. A few years ago, Newsome’s son surprised him when he reported that his eighth grade teacher had told the class there was no such thing as the “American dream.” After a message from Newsome, the school principal explained that the comment wasn’t part of “formal instruction.”
Newsome did not receive the reassurance he sought, and he started showing up at school board meetings with parents from the newly formed Moms for Liberty. Quickly, he realized just how far the city’s schools had “progressed” since his childhood. Powerful administrators and unionized teachers replaced neighborhoods and parents, shaping students’ worldviews in the name of idealism or expertise. Worse than anything were the easy-read graphic novels his new partners in protest told him were being offered in the school library. Under the heading of sexual education or emotional development, one included pictures and references to “vagina slime” and boy-on-boy fellatio.
Newsome went to friends high-up in Chicago’s private sector labor unions, weakened but still forces, and showed them slides of what public schools allowed their children and grandchildren to see. One of these union heads called Newsome the next day saying he hadn’t slept; even though his unions needed to work with the Democrats, he’d never vote for one again.
The Pushback
Newsome received constant pushback. The Downers Grove school board kicked out his Moms for Liberty allies for exceeding their three-minute speech allotment, a rule they hadn’t been made aware of. The Chicago Sun-Times, tied into the city’s power structures, ran a piece on the anti-pornography protests that focused on the presence of Proud Boys at the event. It didn’t mention that Antifa, as it did in cities like Miami, had targeted parent protestors opposed by the Teachers Unions, including Newsome, smearing them by association, and making threats against them.
Anti-fascist “researchers” took up this line. Well-known nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center tied into Washington via the new Democratic Party. SPLC labeled Newsome a racist. The Department of Justice, which SPLC briefs, placed him on a flight watch list.
Newsome didn’t slow down. He started a podcast, Behind Enemy Lines, reporting the newest outrages in Downers Grove schools, using information from his growing group of contacts and allies. He also joined the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans and Parents Involved in Education, and he won a race for committeeman for the 141st precinct of Illinois’ Republican Party, which alerted him to a new threat to the city.
Immigration Politics—and the Activation of a Citizen-Journalist
This threat came from illegal immigrants bused to Chicago from the border with the permission of Chicago’s governing class. They showed up in Downers Grove at the train station or the school parking lot or the gas station closest to Newsome’s house. There, a migrant would panhandle patrons while two or three others went through the distracted person’s car. Newsome visited a few nights to see for himself. He recognized the migrants’ tattoos as gang signs. Local officials put the number of migrants passing through DuPage County, the location of Downers Grove, at 3,000 in December 2023 alone. Downers Grove’s mayor estimated that 80 percent of those that passed through Downers Grove went on to the federal processing center in Chicago. Others were picked up by “personal vehicles.”
At Oakbrook Mall, the sheriff arrested 5 Venezuelan migrants for theft in February, on top of 6 in January and 2 in November. In Western Springs, 12 Venezuelans were arrested for stealing bikes, but there was no way to know if their names were real or not, or if they were minors or adults. So police “put the illegal aliens…on a Metra train heading east, towards Chicago.” Migrant children were being placed in public schools, but the teachers weren’t bilingual, so new teachers were reportedly being searched for, hurting taxpayers and helping the Teachers Unions.
The Church was in on the action, too: pressed by declining numbers in a city where downtown shopping destinations have displaced close-knit neighborhoods. One of Newsome’s Freedom of Information requests (FOIA) showed that Catholic Charities was instrumental in “facilitating” the housing of illegals in coordination with the city of Chicago. “They’re looking to put people in pews,” he realized. Rather than fighting the racket, they had joined it.
Newsome’s work on immigration put him in touch with unlikely allies: Black Americans who’d competed with Italians and Slavs for city favors through the ward systems years before and had also stayed loyal to Democrats. Now, in the face of a migrant surge that was driving crime and eroding opportunities for service work and labor, they were starting to break away. Newsome’s contact was Pastor David Lowery, and after him LaTasha Fields and Stephanie Trussle: respected community leaders putting their reputations behind a political shift. These leaders didn’t agree on everything even among themselves—their arguments over the usefulness of all black schools sounded like the arguments Poles and Italians had seventy years ago. But they agreed on enough.
Chicago’s Crisis—and How the Old City Resurfaces
Newsome’s activities got attention from conservatives. Ben Bergquam, who works with Steve Bannon’s War Room, teamed up with Newsome to broadcast the immigration problem—a natural alliance since Bannon, like Newsome, grew up ethnic Catholic Democrat. Equally eager, surprisingly, were some wealthy Chicago Republicans who actually wanted the city reformed by people on the ground.
The objections came from old-line Republicans—the “respectable” sort who accused him of offensiveness or vulgarity. But Newsome, who’d sweated his way to respectability after his prison stint, wasn’t fighting for a polite Chicago. He was fighting for the Chicago of his grandparents. They were Italian peasants who came over dirt-poor, lived with family, relied on the wards and unions, and gradually assimilated—a long time before bureaucracies, corporations, and nonprofits started importing and protecting illegal immigrants in exchange for low cost labor and eventually votes.
That older Chicago is the one Newsome is in touch with these days. He still uses his corporate skills arranging ice-breaker dinners for political allies at Gibson’s, or visiting wealthy supporters in Winnetka. But after the schmoozing comes the work, and not just podcasts and FOIA requests. He bluffs his way into Holiday Inns where the Pritzker Administration is stuffing illegal migrants and films them. He sports cut lips after scuffles in hotel parking lots head-butting Venezuelans with gang signs on their arms and pistols in their jackets who follow him when he leaves.
These scuffles aren’t much different for Newsome than times forty years ago in hotel rooms in Little Cuba with kilos of coke and money on the bed and dealers from the hood. But now he’s not a young tough chasing excitement; he’s defending his community, and bringing its values back. Before a recent impromptu filming, of illegal migrants trashing a gas station, he was driving with his son: a football player and wrestler who, like a lot of kids in the new Chicago, has been taught to avoid risks. He winked at him, told him they’d ease their way into the melee and muscle their way out, and pulled up to the gas station. Then the two generations of Chicagoans got out of the car to capture the footage.
(Read more: What “Human Rights” Hides in Lehigh)
