The Real Story of Chicago

It’s not 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, labor unions, and neighborhood politics. For the last three decades, it has run on white-collar unions, media conglomerates, multinational corporations, universities, and nonprofits. It is this new city that is hosting the Democratic National Convention, taking over the Chicago Bulls’ United Center and showcasing the Democrats’ leading lights. They include Mayor Brandon Johnson, a progressive backed by the Teachers Union; former President Barack Obama, a Hyde Park-born academic; and Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose family politics and nonprofits define the city’s terms.

Another Chicago exists outside the convention center, where these Democrats don’t live but that their policies have created. It still looks like the old city: Irish pubs, church steeples, Cubs and White Sox stadiums. But it has become the site of public school indoctrination, violent crime, and sudden incursions of illegal immigrants. In this city, an older American tradition that goes back to the Revolutionary War is emerging. Citizen journalists and activists are fighting for their neighborhoods and their city.

Terry Newsome is one of them. His storyline of growing up in the old Chicago to rising up 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 That Transported Illegal Aliens From Texas to Chicago. Here’s What He Saw.)

The progress of a citizen – and the decline of his city

Terry Newsome’s life is a map of Chicago. An Italian-American and former Democrat, he grew up when Chicago was a neighborhood and ethnic stronghold under Mayor Richard J. Daley. In his 20s, he spent time on the wrong side of the tracks with the mob, like Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas. After stints in state and federal prison, he entered Chicago’s union scene, working as an electrician, a grip, and a stuntman for films. Then he embarked on a completely new path: He graduated from college at 37, went into business, and became a sales principal for a multinational technology consulting firm.

Newsome’s business arc paralleled that of Chicago under Richard J. Daley’s son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, who eroded his father’s world with downtown renovation and bureaucratic growth. Daley’s Chicago had a majestic skyline and multinational corporations. It also built the careers of powerful Democrats: real estate manager, civil servant, and Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett; school superintendent and Obama Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod; and Obama’s counterpart Oprah Winfrey. But the price was high. Old-school politicians and their neighborhoods became yuppie enclaves, and tight-knit communities were displaced by development. Retired administrators quietly rose to power. Race and identity battles moved from neighborhoods to schools, under the banner of social-emotional learning (SEL). Thanks to the Pritzkers’ influence on education, transgenderism also infiltrated the system.

It was the fallout from these changes that led Terry Newsome, 60 years old and in the midst of two bouts of prostate cancer, to return from his career to his hometown. He wanted to refocus on his hometown and use the skills he had left behind.

The activation of a citizen of Chicago

Newsome, like many activist citizens who are reshaping our politics, came to his work through his children: twin boys and girls who attended 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 that there was no such thing as the “American dream.” After Newsome reported, the principal explained that the comment was not part of “formal education.”

Unable to get the reassurance he sought, Newsome began showing up at school board meetings with parents from the newly formed Moms for Liberty. He soon realized how far the city’s schools had “evolved” since his childhood. Powerful administrators and union members replaced neighborhoods and parents, shaping students’ worldviews in the name of idealism or expertise. Worse than anything were the easy-to-read graphic novels his new protest partners told him were offered in the school library. Labeled sex education or emotional development, one contained pictures and references to “vaginal mucus” and fellatio between boys.

Newsome went to friends high up in Chicago’s private-sector unions, weakened but still powerful, and showed them slides of what the public schools were showing their children and grandchildren. One of these union leaders called Newsome the next day and said he hadn’t slept; even though his unions had to work with the Democrats, he would never vote for one of them again.

The counterattack

Newsome faced continued opposition. The Downers Grove school board kicked out his Moms for Liberty allies for exceeding their three-minute speaking time, a rule they were unaware of. The Chicago Sun-Times, which has ties to the city’s power structures, ran an article about the anti-pornography protests that focused on the presence of Proud Boys at the event. It failed to mention that Antifa, as in cities like Miami, had attacked protesting parents opposed by teachers’ unions, including Newsome, vilifying them by association and threatening them.

Antifascist “researchers” picked up on this line. Well-known nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center had ties to Washington through the new Democratic Party. SPLC called Newsome a racist. The Justice Department, informed by SPLC, put him on a fugitive list.

Newsome didn’t slow down. He started a podcast, Behind enemy lineswho reported on the latest scandals in Downers Grove schools, drawing on 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 won a race for committeeman for the 141^st Illinois Republican Party district, warning him of a new threat to the city.

Immigration policy – ​​and the activation of a citizen journalist

The threat came from illegal immigrants who were bused into Chicago with the permission of Chicago’s government class. They would show up in Downers Grove at the train station, the school parking lot, or the gas station nearest Newsome’s house. There, one immigrant would beg for customers while two or three others went through the distracted person’s car. Newsome came by a few nights to see for himself. He recognized the immigrants’ tattoos as gang insignia. Local officials estimate the number of migrants passing through DuPage County, the location of Downers Grove, at 3,000 in December 2023 alone. The mayor of Downers Grove estimated that 80 percent of those passing through Downers Grove were headed to the federal processing center in Chicago. Others were picked up by “personal vehicles.”

At Oakbrook Mall, the sheriff arrested five Venezuelan immigrants for theft in February, along with six in January and two in November. In Western Springs, 12 Venezuelans were arrested for stealing bicycles, but there was no way to know if their names were real or not, or if they were minors or adults. So the police “put the illegal aliens… on a Metra train headed east toward Chicago.” Migrant children were placed in public schools, but the teachers were not bilingual, so a search was reportedly underway for new teachers, hurting taxpayers and helping teachers unions.

The church was also involved, pressured by declining numbers in a city where downtown shopping destinations have crowded out tight-knit neighborhoods. One of Newsome’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests revealed that Catholic Charities was instrumental in “facilitating” the housing of illegal immigrants in partnership with the city of Chicago. “They want to put people in pews,” he realized. Instead of fighting the gang, they had joined it.

Newsome’s work on immigration brought him into contact with unlikely allies: African Americans who had competed with Italians and Slavs for city favors through the borough systems for years before, and who had also remained loyal to the Democrats. Now, in the face of a wave of immigrants that fueled crime and eroded service and labor opportunities, they began to secede. Newsome’s point man was the Reverend David Lowery, and after him LaTasha Fields and Stephanie Trussle, respected community leaders who staked their reputations behind a political shift. These leaders didn’t agree on everything, even among themselves. Their arguments about the value of all black schools sounded like the arguments Poles and Italians had made seventy years earlier. But they agreed on plenty.

The Chicago Crisis – and How the Old City Is Rising Again

Newsome’s activities attracted attention from conservatives. Ben Bergquam, who works with Steve Bannon’s War Room, joined Newsome to highlight the immigration issue — a natural alliance since Bannon, like Newsome, grew up as an ethnic Catholic Democrat. Also enthusiastic, surprisingly, were some wealthy Chicago Republicans who genuinely wanted to see the city reformed by people on the ground.

The objections came from the old Republicans, the “respectable” kind who accused him of being offensive or vulgar. But Newsome, who had struggled to become respectable after his prison sentence, wasn’t fighting for a polite Chicago. He was fighting for the Chicago of his grandparents. They were Italian farmers who came across as dirt poor, living with relatives, relying on neighborhoods and unions, and gradually assimilating, long before bureaucracies, corporations and nonprofits began importing and protecting illegal immigrants in exchange for cheap labor and, ultimately, votes.

That older Chicagoan is the one Newsome is in touch with these days. He still uses his business skills to arrange icebreaker dinners for political allies at Gibson’s, or to visit 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 stashing and filming illegal immigrants. He’s cut his lips after skirmishes in hotel parking lots, and headbutted Venezuelans with gang scars on their arms and guns in their jackets who follow him when he leaves.

These skirmishes are not much different for Newsome than they were 40 years ago in Little Cuba hotel rooms with pounds of coke and cash on the bed and neighborhood dealers. But now he’s not a young tough guy looking for excitement; he’s defending his community and restoring its values. For a recent candid shot of illegal immigrants trashing a gas station, he drove with his son, a football player and wrestler who, like many kids in the new Chicago, has been trained to avoid risk. He winked at him, told him they were going to slowly ease into the melee and fight their way out, and drove to the gas station. Then the two generations of Chicagoans got out of the car to capture the footage.

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