Michelle Obama is a stunning lady and a wonderful feminine role model for all women

 'Hope is all we have': Read Michelle Obama's full speech at Obama Center grand opening (transcript published by Channel 5 in Chicago)

Mrs. Michelle (Robinson) Obama

She ticked off highlights from her husband's eight years in office, including ordering the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, “standing up for marriage equality” and “listening to science.”

Mrs. Michelle Obama spoke directly to her husband when she stepped up to the podium at the Obama Center grand opening ceremony -- then proceeded to bring him and members of the audience to tears.

And she didn't stop there.💗😇

She ticked off highlights from her husband's eight years in office, including ordering the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, “standing up for marriage equality” and “listening to science.”

President Barack Obama appeared to wipe away a tear as she praised him.

Michelle Obama also referenced the current “anxious and divisive times” and warned against being cynical or complacent as “everything feels so upside down.” She pitched the center as “a respite from all that.”

Well. My goodness. I got my tissue in hand. I don't know about all of you.❓😙💟

Wow. Hello, everyone, and what a beautiful day, right❓🌞 

Nothing like a project by my husband to bring out the sun.

Let me start by thanking Addison for that magnificent introduction, and for exemplifying the heart, excellence and determination that has blossomed right here on the South Side for a very long time.

I also want to send some love to everyone who made this day a reality. The construction workers, landscapers, designers, the architects, artists, chefs, our staff, our board members, our donors. Barack and I simply cannot thank you enough for the care and brilliance you poured into every square inch of this campus. I also want to recognize all of the elected officials and distinguished leaders from around the city, the state, the country, and, yes, the world. Thank you for being here to celebrate with us,

Especially to all of my fellow formers. To Joe and Jill, George and Laura, Bill and Hillary.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your service to our country over so many years and for your constant friendship and support of our family. We love you guys. Truly.

Oh, to our daughters, Malia and Sasha, who will always be my babies. Even though we're no longer playing hide and seek on the South Lawn with Beau or hosting sleepovers in the solarium - I see a lot of sleepover girls here -you both have grown into such brilliant and beautiful young women making your way out there in the world.

Thank you for bringing so much joy and spirit and energy to a life you had no voice in choosing. And for making us proud every step of the way. Love you babe.

Oh, so please indulge me for a moment, because I'm gonna take a little time to do something that I know my husband will not do today. And that is to fully sing his praises.

Barack, you gotta look at me.

I love that.

You told me all those years ago that you couldn't promise me the world. But you could promise me an interesting life.And of course, you outdid yourself and managed to give me both.

I know it hasn't always been easy, but there hasn't been a single second through this experience that standing by your side hasn't left me in awe.

Eight years in The Crucible and not once did you melt from the heat. Not once did you let it harden you. Instead, you used it to reveal your truest essence - your stubborn optimism and unflinching courage, your dazzling brilliance and unpretentious decency, your ferocious work ethic and absolutely unshakable moral fiber.

And to do it all as a first and the higher standard that comes with all that.

The claims that a US senator and constitutional law expert wasn't qualified for the job, the lies about your birthright, your faith, your patriotism, the outrage when you stated the biological fact that if you'd had a son that he too would be Black.

Yet you were unflappable at every turn. Always focused, always calm, always looking at the long view to how absurd it is to even imagine that you might have buckled under the pressure, even once, lashed out in frustration, lost your temper. How absurd it is to imagine that you might have done anything but make our family and this entire country proud.

No, you were too busy.

I'm not done. Y'all. Not done. So much to say.

You were doing the people's work, rescuing our economy, expanding health care, ending a war, ordering the bin laden raid, saving an auto industry, winning a peace prize. For keeping us safe from Ebola, regulating the banks, standing up for marriage equality, listening to science and comforting an entire nation in the face of unspeakable tragedies. And you did it all with such grace and class and cool that you made the hardest job in the world look like a walk in this beautiful park.

Your mother, Toot, Gramps - you are a tribute to their love. They are up there grinning and hugging today because you never forgot who you are and where you came from.

Single mother working hard to get by and get an education and show her son the world. Grandparents who didn't have much but they had the perfect recipe to nurture your flame.

You never forgot the folks in the union halls and church basements here in Chicago, where you first put your ideals to the test. You never forgot all the voters you've registered, and students who taught and neighbors you organized. You never fell for the temptation of a quick fix or an easy payday.

You never changed from that idealistic summer associate who showed up on that rainy day when we first met without an umbrella.

You always gave us the very best within you, and in doing so, you reminded the rest of us that we could, too.

Barack, there are no words to express how proud I am of the way you showed up and continue to show up every single day. It has been an honor to be by your side.

You have made me a better person and have given us all an example that we should strive to emulate. And I hope you know, oh, there is truly no higher calling than that. All right.

To all of you joining us today, our invited guests and everyone listening and watching from afar.

The Obama Presidential Center was created as a beacon of hope, a monument to our unshakable values. The ones my husband has exemplified his entire life: equality, empathy, honesty, inclusion, fairness. Especially during these anxious and divisive times, it is so important that we remember that those values are not unique to my husband.

They are the same ones that your husbands and wives, your parents and children, your friends and neighbors exhibit and pass on every single day. Millions of people in this country wake up doing their very best to live decent and purposeful lives.

Yet we're all tested in one way or another, and there are plenty of times we all fall short.

But deep down in our hearts and souls, we all know right from wrong. We know selflessness from greed, righteousness from injustice. We understand that we all rise and fall together, that every last one of us is an invaluable contributor to the greatness of America. And I'm talking about the workers living paycheck to paycheck, hoping to give their kids a better future. The teachers using their own money to take their students on field trips. The business owners struggling to meet payroll but refusing to close their doors. All those folks sweating over stoves to provide meals for their communities. Folks shivering in the freezing cold to deliver our packages. Picking up trash to keep our parks clean. Volunteers dedicating their weekends to coaching T-ball or directing the church choir, or mentoring a child.

That's where the truth of this country lies. Not in grabbing as much as we can get for ourselves, or knocking folks down to prop ourselves up, but in the overwhelming goodness, the relentless striving, the quiet dignity that is inside all of us, our greatest hope is that this center can reflect back just a fraction of that light, that it can capture the beauty of who we all are, no matter what we look like or where we come from, or how much money we earn, or how we pray or vote or speak or love.

It's why during our administration, we threw open the White House doors to all sorts of folks who don't usually get to meet the President or First Lady.

The families pinch and pennies to send their first child to college. The teenagers, who know that a hot afternoon means the bullets start flying. The military spouses and children serving and sacrificing just like their loved ones in uniform. The native kid showing us that resilience and pride can never be stolen. The foragers and FFA members with calluses on their hands from feeding livestock. The immigrants proving what it truly means to be a dreamer.

These folks, these folks aren't Americans too. They are America. They are the beating heart of this country. They are us and we are them.

And to ignore the simple truth, to refuse to respect the contributions and experiences of people who aren't exactly like us, y'all puts us all at risk.

Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope. And once that slide starts, there's no telling where it stops. A dangerous precedent that flies in the very face of our faith. And of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us, all of us are created equal, that each of us is a child of God with inherent value.

And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgment of who's American enough.

And that's why, folks, we simply don't have the luxury or time to be cynical or complacent, to wring our hands in despair, to wait for someone else to fix the problem.

Y'all, hope is all we have.

Because hope is the essential spark that lights the fire of change. But hope is a choice. Whether or not we use our voices to speak up is a choice. Voting is a choice. Being a decent human being is a choice. Believing that we still hold the power to build a country that reflects us all is a choice.

The Obama Presidential Center is a living testament to the power of choice, y'all. The historic example that millions of you gave the world about what this imperfect democracy has strived for and achieved. And an urgent call to go out there and do it again.

So I hope that when you walk through this campus and bring your children here, you are reminded of the power of choice and the steady work of change. The arduous, unglamorous march march up that mountain one foot after another, day after day, generation after generation, but I also hope you fully absorb the elation of achieving something together.

You know that feeling when you clear the tree line and see a vista that takes your breath away? A feeling that can never be erased? And I know that can be hard to grasp right now when everything feels so upside down. When fact and fiction run together. When folks seek to stifle speech, limit access to education, devalue diversity, erase the inconvenient parts of our history. When our phones constantly buzz with the latest outrage.

So I hope that this place can offer a respite from all that, at least for a little while.

I hope it can reignite the optimism and empathy and ambition that has always powered this country's greatest change.

So we want you to come here and put away your phones and talk and laugh and cry, because you gonna cry and make new friends.

Get your hands dirty in my garden. Push your baby on a swing in the playground. Have a romantic picnic on the great lawn.

Because that's the work of democracy. To being neighborly, taking care of public spaces, having some fun, enjoying each other, shaking out of the isolation and division that have crept too deeply into our lives.

And to my fellow South Siders.

I want you all to make this campus a part of your lives, be inspired by the world class art, check out the books from our beautiful public library and bring them back on time, drop some beats in the recording studio, hit some corner threes at home court, hold birthday parties, jump start clothing drives, host citywide clean up dates. Here. Use this campus to show off this place we call home.

This joyful place where Marian and Fraser Robinson taught their two kids to dream big.

This hopeful place where an unknown guy with an unknown name took flight. This stubbornly optimistic place where family after family scrapes and claws and laughs and dances their way to a better tomorrow.

That's what this has always been about.

Barack and I have always said that this center is grounded in our stories, but it has never been about us. It's never been for us. And it's going to be here long after we're gone.

So what it becomes and how it's preserved, that work has to be done by all of us. Just like our democracy.

And thankfully, you have shown the world what we are capable of. You've proven that a lasting legacy isn't an award or a name on a building or number of zeros in a bank account, but the difference we make in one another's lives.

It's about seeing each other and showing up for each other and carrying each other. When we're weary or faltering or losing faith.

That's how you build something that endures. And that's what you all have done at every twist and turn of this extraordinary journey. You have protected and proclaimed the hope that beats within the heart of this campus. You've rekindled and renewed this untamable, unpredictable and unbreakable democracy.

And I know that you all are going to astonish us even more in the months and years ahead, because you all have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when we truly see each other, when we strive to bring out the best in ourselves and one another, oh, there is no limit to how high we can go.

Thank you all. I love you all. God bless you and God bless this country we love.

Donald Trump and evil maga Republicans openly using NAZI symbolism to promote fascism: The GOP is Nazism 2026

How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich❓

An echo essay published in The Atlantic by Tom Nichols.

Over the past few months, during his (evil) ICE agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol (aka evil 💢ICE❗) chief Greg Bovino wore an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. 

Printed in Nazi font

His coat looked like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

Bovino as an evil ICE Nazi re-enactor

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. 

A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. 

Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Then, J. D. Vance (aka former Marine corporal- the same rank, by the way, as Adolf Hitler in World War One) shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. 

More Nazi symbolism at the Labor Department where a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face was hung from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich

documents. December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X/ account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man❓” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978, book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told Politico. But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem❗

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush repudiated the former Klan leader David Duke, who was running as a Republican to be Louisiana’s governor. Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such fascist people❓

When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. 

In fact, a liberal Black Republican, Edward Brooke, had just finished two terms as our junior senator from Massachusetts; the liberal Republicans Lowell Weicker and John Chafee represented Connecticut and Rhode Island, respectively. In college, I worked in the Massachusetts state House for our hometown representative, a young and principled working-class Democrat (my GOP membership was not a disqualifier; imagine that). I got to know Republican legislators on Beacon Hill because they were close friends with my Democratic boss. Party affiliations were about political disagreements among Americans, not markers of antithetical worldviews.

I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants (something I objected to at the time).

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. 

In turn, Bush (wrongly❗) gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, (who later converted to Roman Catholicism.....believe it or not....) politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. 

As both men stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

Soon after McCain’s election loss to Obama, the Tea Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party❓ To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump.

So, I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But, they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. 

When I told Stevens how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. 🙄 “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance over the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. 

Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried
Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership.

For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.



Gingrich was eventually driven from the speakership; Buchanan left the Republican Party to run under the Reform Party, and then faded from public life. But an example had been set of welcoming extremism (extreme ideology, extreme tactics) for the sake of winning.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.Soon after McCain’s electio loss to Obama, the Tea

Party movement barreled into American politics. I was among those appalled by the Tea Partiers’ juvenile public behavior and anti-government nihilism; others believed they represented a new grassroots movement and the future of the party. In the end, their revolt against government bailouts soured into a giant yawp of anger at the first Black president. By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party? To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

Nixon and Reagan held racist views, as did many men of their generation. (Nixon was also an anti-Semite.) But they did not govern as racists, and they certainly weren’t Nazis; neither was Gingrich, Buchanan, or any national Republican over the past half century. But years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. Stevens, when he left the party, wrote a book with a bitter title: It Was All a Lie. When I told him how often people quote his title to argue that conservatism itself was a lie, he rolled his eyes. “We conservatives were right about everything,” Stevens told me. “Especially about the importance of character.”

I asked the writer Geoffrey Kabaservice, who has chronicled the decline of Republican moderates, whether the fall of the GOP was preordained, and why conservatism, once a moralizing movement, became so vulnerable to figures without moral character.

“I don’t happen to believe that conservatism is one of those doctrines that is flawed from the get-go,” Kabaservice told me, “and certainly not in the American context, in which conservatism is a variation on core liberal principles.” In that sense, he said, Reaganism, the strongest vehicle of 20th-century American conservatism, didn’t lead directly to Trumpism—not least because Trump’s vulgar populism is “a repudiation of conservatism.”

But, Reagan’s dominance of the party may have indirectly set the stage for Trump. Kabaservice brought up the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who created a balance-of-power system that worked only because it relied on Bismarck’s personal influence and political genius; it collapsed without him. Likewise, Kabaservice argued, Reagan enjoined his party to leave room in the tent for moderates and to avoid ideological litmus tests, but the GOP needed Reagan’s “personal magnetism” to keep his followers from spiraling into hyper-partisanship, or even political fratricide.

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. 

The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. 

And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods. Some of these trolls are merely pasting swastikas on their nihilism, but their ideological sincerity is irrelevant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his 1961 novel about a man posing as a Nazi: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”


Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But, their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. 

If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “That 1930s Feeling.” 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must put an end to illegal, cruel and evil raids on innocent immigrants

ICE violence is un-American and needs to stop | Opinion
Echo opinion letter published in the Houston Chronicle:

ICE is attacking our people:  Regarding “Houston mom in ICE custody despite family's plea for medical care,” (Sept. 26): I am getting a little tired of picking up my newspaper every day and reading about the thuggish way U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are acting.

They are supposed to be arresting criminals that are here illegally, but according to ABC News, since late May, individuals with criminal convictions make up only 30% of those arrested.

We have seen the misuse of power by this (evil❗👿ICE) agency, whose officers have thrown protesters and others to the ground and used gas, rubber bullets and flash bang devices. We have seen members of the press detained and intimidated with escalating force, as well as council members and even U.S. representatives arrested or forcibly removed.

One recent raid on an apartment complex in Chicago involved people in Black Hawk helicopters rappelling down on an apartment, separating mothers from children, dragging people onto the street.

We have seen roving bands of these agents stopping people on the streets without just cause, detaining people trying to abide by immigration law in court houses and chasing down agricultural workers in the field without any warrants. And the Supreme Court has permitted racial profiling as grounds for immigration stops. ICE agents are stopping people based solely on the color of their skin, the language they speak or their ethnic background.

We have witnessed the misuse of the National Guard as a military occupier in cities that Donald Trump doesn’t like.

It’s un-American, a disservice to our rule of law and the Constitution.
We are not OK. Donald Trump is behaving like a cruel tyrant.

WE the people need to speak out❗
From:  Robert L. Fischer, in Houston

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are enabling an illegal federal takeover calling for "war" on American citizens

Meanwhile, endless wars in Isreal, Gaza and Ukraine wage on when Donald Trump falsely claimed he could end them all "on day one".  So, here we are on September 8th, at day 231 into the Trump autoracy and our nation is at war with Donald Trump.  His public opinion polls are tanking but his cruelty continues.

Armed troops at the Washington Monument❓ This is not normal❗

Wake up America❗⏰Your front yard has been militarized. Yet residents and visitors there hardly pay the troops any mind.

Not what Washington is supposed to look like.

(Kent Nishimura / Getty Images)

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Jackie Calmes*

It’s the (not-normal) normalization of excessive federal force under Donald Trump, just seven months into his autocratic reign.

America’s Front Yard is what the National Park Service calls the National Mall, the grassy expanse that knits together the neighborhood that’s home to the U.S. Capitol and the iconic monuments to Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; veterans of World War II, Vietnam and Korea; and Martin Luther King Jr.

For decades I jogged here (one morning literally running into Jimmy Carter, long gone from the White House). I introduced friends and family to the Mall’s delights and the museums that open onto it. 

I attended festivals, concerts and Fourth of July fireworks displays. On a gorgeous, sunny Labor Day this year, I returned. And for the first time, I saw armed, camo-clad soldiers among the tourists.

As I left the World War II memorial, five soldiers emerged nearby, marching in single-line formation to join about two dozen more beside three vans under trees near the Reflecting Pool. At the pool’s opposite end, nearer the Lincoln Memorial, another dozen soldiers milled. Tourists mostly ignored the shows of force, except for the two park policemen on horseback along separate sides of the Reflecting Pool. Tourists wanted photos with them.

As I approached the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, five more soldiers circled a statue dedicated to women who served in Vietnam. The men studied the sculpted figures and read the inscriptions — just like tourists.

“They’re bored,” a park ranger told me. “They’d rather be home with their families.”

I and most Washingtonians (8 out of 10, according to a mid-August poll for the Washington Post) also would rather have them home with their families, wherever home is. Six states headed by Republican governors, ever-eager to please Trump, have sent hundreds of National Guard troops to supplement those from blue Washington, who, unlike in the states where governors hold sway, are under the president’s direct command.

Heading to a restroom on my way to the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial, I passed three hulking black SUVs. Despite their darkened windows, I could vaguely make out men inside. Only the vehicles’ license plates identified them: “DHS,” Department of Homeland Security, the tip of Trump’s antimigrant spear. Perhaps these secret agents were awaiting a dispatcher’s call to nab another Latino delivery driver or raid another restaurant’s kitchen to drive up the numbers for Trump’s immigration crackdown.

What you see out in the open — 2,200 uniformed soldiers and additional federal agents patrolling the nation’s capital — is bad enough. It’s what you don’t see, or can’t identify, that’s more disturbing in the land of the free. Like masked agents in unmarked cars stopping and searching residents without evident reason, as videos on social media regularly capture.

Either way, Trump’s takeover of the District of Columbia using National Guard troops and federal agents from the DHS, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and from the FBI and other agencies — together with his threats to Chicago, Baltimore and other cities — amount to “creating a national police force with the Trump as its chief,” as a federal judge proclaimed this week in ruling against troops acting as cops in Los Angeles.
“Why is the National Guard still around❓” an exasperated Senior District Judge Charles R. Breyer (brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer) demanded last month during a trial in the L.A. case. “What is the threat today? What was the threat yesterday or two weeks ago that allowed it? I’m trying to see whether there are any limits, any limits to the use of a federal force.”

Those were my questions in Washington as well, during my Labor Day stroll and a drive through downtown and various higher-crime neighborhoods.

That same day, Trump boasted on social media that, three weeks into his policing of the nation’s capital, Washington is “NOW A CRIME FREE ZONE.” Yet he’s vowed to keep boots on the ground beyond a legal 30-day limit next week, which would require Congress’ assent.

The fact is that Washington, like any city, still has crime, though the rate was at a 30-year low before Trump’s executive order Aug. 11 citing a nonexistent “crime emergency,” and it’s fallen more since then, as Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser has acknowledged. The issue isn’t whether there is crime that needs to be policed. It’s who does the policing. In America, that’s historically been the states and local jurisdictions — unless, as federal law requires, they prove incapable of doing so. Which they haven’t.

If more police is an answer to crime, as Bowser and most mayors of either party would agree, then Trump should quit cutting federal funding — Washington is short a full $1 billion in this fiscal year — and instead do what former President Clinton did amid high crime in the mid-1990s: increase money to states and cities to hire more local cops. That helped in Clinton’s time, if not so much as he liked to claim.

What’s worse is that Trump’s bid to take charge in U.S. cities extends mostly to states led by Democrats, despite high or higher crime in red state cities including Memphis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Jackson and Birmingham. Sending red-state troops to police unfamiliar blue cities can only exacerbate polarization. So does a president who spurs on those troops and agents by denigrating U.S. cities as “unsafe and dirty and disgusting” (Washington), “hell holes” (Chicago and Baltimore) and “terrible” (L.A.).

This is not normal, not in America’s front yard or anywhere else in this nation. Nor will it ultimately be accepted, as Trump takeovers spread and protests expand with them. I fear this is just what the Great Divider wants: an (evil💀👿)excuse to dispatch even more troops- just because he can.

*Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans creating chaos in American cities with wrongminded overreach use of National Guard

Trump’s Crackdown Will Make Crime Worse

Echo guest opinion published in The New York Times by Arne Duncan: Mr. Duncan founded Chicago CRED, a community-based anti-gun-violence organization. 

In just a few months, Donald Trump has reversed years of hard work underway in cities across America to bring down crime, restore trust in the police and expand proven approaches to public safety that can save lives and money. High on Trump’s list of target cities is my hometown, Chicago, which is currently on track for the lowest number of homicides in any year since 1965.

"we keep doing our innovative work of reducing gun violence by giving young people at risk a chance to heal from trauma, live safely,"

One factor contributing to the positive trends in Chicago is the growth of community violence intervention programs, or C.V.I. 

In fact, I help lead one of them.

Here’s how it works. With our research partners at Northwestern University, we identify the highest-risk individuals by looking at arrest data and their history of being victimized by gun violence. We also conduct a network analysis of their friends and associates for similar characteristics, and cross-check that with information gathered by our outreach workers on the ground.

Next we hire trusted and respected community members, many with criminal backgrounds, to recruit these individuals into our program. We offer participants stipends, a life coach, trauma treatment, education and job training. Their coaches and therapists teach them strategies to regulate their emotions and handle conflict without escalating. We help them live safely and make better choices. 

Since 2016, we have served over 2,000 people. Other C.V.I. organizations in Chicago have served thousands more.

To Trump, a 34x convicted felon who talks tough on crime even as he abuses his pardon power and oversees what seems to be the most corrupt administration in American history, our approach may sound simplistic or naïve. 

But a growing body of research — including data from Northwestern and the University of Chicago Crime Lab — supports addressing gun violence as largely a public health issue rather than strictly a matter of crime and punishment. In fact, the most promising trend in Chicago today is that both crimes and arrests are way down since the pandemic.

For participants, our organization’s work leads to a 73 percent drop in rearrests when compared with at-risk individuals who did not complete our program, according to a study by Northwestern researchers. That’s primarily because they stop carrying guns and start making safer, de-escalatory choices. It’s hard to demonstrate a direct cause for any given drop in shootings, but one study linked C.V.I. to 383 prevented shootings and 605 prevented arrests over five years.

Of course, a robust police presence is still a vital part of a comprehensive public safety strategy. In addition to arrest and incarceration, we need to provide at-risk people with offramps from the criminal justice system.

Today our organization gets referrals from the police, prosecutors, public defenders and judges. They all recognize that C.V.I. is proactive while traditional law enforcement is largely reactive. The former Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck said as much in distinguishing the role of the police from that of C.V.I. workers when he was acting police superintendent in Chicago: “My job is the last homicide. Your job is stopping the next homicide.”

C.V.I. workers in Chicago, including more than 1,000 who work in the state-funded Peacekeepers Program, can help to prevent thousands of shootings each year by mediating active disputes among street gang members and negotiating truces among factions. Because we have a strong professional understanding with the police force, it gives our outreach workers the leeway to intervene before shootings happen, saving both lives and money.

Thanks to an extraordinary partnership of philanthropy, business, government and local communities, Chicago has built one of the most extensive C.V.I. sectors in the country. We’re focusing on taking C.V.I. to scale in several of our most violent neighborhoods; our goal is to make it a permanent feature of our public safety strategy and put Chicago on par with the safest cities in America.

In 2022, we were thrilled to have the federal government as a partner in this work when Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Among other things, the law provided grants to scores of C.V.I. organizations around the country. My organization secured one of the grants and was planning to use the money to help smaller groups we work with build the capacity to serve more people. Unfortunately, the Trump administration canceled almost half of all C.V.I. grants in April, before we even saw a dime.

A month later Trump canceled more than 20 federally enforced consent decrees meant to curb police abuses and rebuild trust with communities. Now the president is needlessly deploying National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital — and he has threatened to expand the intervention to other cities. This deployment is a flagrant violation of well-established law and flies in the face of nationwide declines in gun violence. According to the Real Time Crime Index, murders across America are down almost 20 percent in 2025, following double-digit declines in the previous two years. Violent crime rates in Washington, D.C., were at a 30-year low before Mr. Trump was even sworn in.

Not surprisingly, the president wants to use the National Guard only in blue states, even though red states have higher murder rates. He knows Republican governors don’t want troops on their streets. In fact, they are sending their troops to Washington.

If Trump were serious about reducing crime, he would restore C.V.I. grants and maintain consent decrees driving needed police reforms. He would support common-sense gun safety laws that even gun owners support. Maybe he’d even try to address the economic inequality at the root of so much crime and disorder.

We’re not holding our breath. Instead, we keep doing our innovative work of reducing gun violence by giving young people at risk a chance to heal from trauma, live safely, work legally, support their families and share fully in the joys and blessings of life in America.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are hearing anger from voters who understand how much damage is happening to our nation

Opinion letter published in The Beverly Review news, in Chicago, Illinois: #WakeUpMAGAcult ❗

MAGA slowly starting to realize  the truth. #trump #politics # #memes #trumppolicies

 It’s amazing that some supporters of Donald Trump can go blissfully along and are happy with him without paying attention to what’s really happening—must be those blinding rose-colored glasses.

Some people believe that, if you’re a legal resident of the United States, you have nothing to worry about. Do they realize that Trump has removed legal status from millions of legal (not criminal) residents for no other reason than he doesn’t like them? Do some MAGA people realize that many of the immigrants being deported were working, paying taxes and paying into Social Security❓

Do the MAGA people realize how Trump has also threatened to deport people born in the U.S. because they have insulted his fragile ego❓


Do the cult MAGA people know that it’s only a misdemeanor for entering the U.S. illegally the first time? Do they feel it’s OK to send people to a labor camp in the swamps for a misdemeanor❓

I agree with the writer that said how the Nazis are looking up from hell with deep appreciation, but it’s appreciation for the lessons Trump and his toadies have learned from them. 

Maybe some of the cult MAGA people should sit down and read a little history of how Hitler took over Germany and conned the people, as Trump is doing, which led to millions of deaths.


We will never know the number of innocent people Trump is complicit in their deaths with his cuts to foreign aid, USAID’s numerous contracts, global health organizations and many others—not to mention all the thousands who will lose their Medicaid and health insurance.


As far as Trump and Musk pointing out (alternative) facts, I would question all their findings. They pointed out thousands of people over 130 years old on Social Security, one over 360 years old, receiving Social Security as well as fraud in other agencies. Yet there hasn’t been one arrest. Were these facts or fiction to con their supporters❓


Just like one of the writers said, I would love to see everyone get along. Nevertheless, it’s Trump who refused to even try and work with the Democrats. It’s Trump who has put his toadies in charge of the Justice Department, FBI, Homeland Security and others in order to go after everyone he disagrees with and wants revenge against. 

Moreover, it’s Trump who is using taxpayer money to fix up his $400 million airplane. It’s also Trump who is using taxpayer money to pay for a trip to Scotland to play golf and promote his new golf course.


It’s hard to get along with an administration that’s so cruel and is determined to enrich itself.


From Bill Scanlon

Pope Leo XIV is American by birth with a genealogy rich in diversity and migration

Is Pope Leo my cousin?

Excellent feature article published in the Boston Globe by Julian Sorapuru: A Globe reporter saw his last name on the gravestone of the new pope’s grandparents.

When reporter Julian Sorapuru saw his last name on the gravestone of Pope Leo XIV’s grandparents, he did some digging.Globe Staff/Jari Honora/Associated Press

Just hours after Pope Leo XIV (born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago) made history as the first head of the Catholic Church from the United States, my aunt sent a Facebook post to our family group chat. It claimed the pope — who, at that point, was only known to have European ancestry — had “Creole of color roots from New Orleans on his mother’s side.”

As a Black Creole from a New Orleans Catholic family, I was excited. But as a journalist, I was skeptical. 

In moments of high public interest, misinformation tends to spread. But then my hometown newspaper wrote about it. Next came The New York Times, which ran a photo of the gravestone of Leo‘s maternal grandparents in Illinois.

But they weren’t buried alone. Other members of their extended family were also interred there and memorialized on the gravestone. Any doubt I had about the veracity of the pope‘s Creole heritage evaporated when I read my last name at the bottom of that gravestone.

Growing up with a last name as unique as Sorapuru — or “Soraparu,” as it’s spelled on the gravestone — my family always told me that if someone else shared it, we’re probably related.

So I immediately thought: Is Pope Leo my cousin?

The answer, which I’ll get back to, involves a winding tale mixed up in the muddiness of race. But first, some context.

In modern popular culture, the word “Creole” has become shorthand to signify someone of mixed African and European heritage, usually with ancestral roots in Louisiana. 

But, the term did not originate as a racial designation, said Mary Gehman, an independent historian who has written for more than three decades about free people of color in Southern Louisiana. Instead, she said, “it just meant something that was cultivated and developed in Louisiana, when it was under the French and Spanish,” which could apply to people, animals, and plants alike.

To understand how “Creole” became synonymous with race, we have to examine Louisiana’s pre-American history as a French, and later a Spanish, Catholic colony.

Compared with English American colonies, there was “a toleration and a recognition that there is this mixing that’s happening,” said Kent W. Peacock, a history professor and director of the Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. There wasn’t “a full acceptance” of free mixed race people, he said, but they lived in a “space between the pure whites and enslaved Africans, and enslaved Indigenous folks.”

Many mixed-race people were designated free people of color and were permitted to seek things that were mostly denied to enslaved people like education, paid employment, property ownership — including that of other human beings — and legal protections.

The French and Spanish developed more laissez-faire attitudes toward racial mixing in comparison with the English for two reasons, Peacock said: The colony’s survival depended on it, and Catholic doctrine, which functioned both as religion and law, dictated that all people, regardless of race, had souls.

Although Louisiana functioned as a “tripartite” society, free mixed race people were still “a quandary,” said Wendy Gaudin, a professor at Xavier University of Louisiana, who specializes in Creole history. Despite speaking the same language, practicing similar customs, and often sharing ancestry, white Louisianans made it clear: “They’re not like us.”

After examining dozens of public records, mostly from the 19th century, I‘ve discovered my ancestry is filled with people who lived in this liminal space between fully realized humanity and complete dehumanization. But, that space slowly started to shrink after the Louisiana territory was sold to the United States in 1803. In the ensuing decades, as Americanization set in and the state transformed, so, too, did its racial ideas.

As the country grappled with the fallout of the Civil War, including the emancipation of enslaved people, “white people became very, very stringent about the question of race,” said Katy Morlas Shannon, a historian and author whose research focuses on the lives of enslaved people. 

White Louisianans, many of whom had family members of African descent, stopped describing themselves as Creole, because, they “became nervous that white Americans would think they were people of color,” she said.

Newly empowered to vote, Black people obtained unprecedented political power in Louisiana by way of public office during the 12-year Reconstruction period after the war. 

It was during this era, in 1875, that Joseph Paul Adolphe Sorapuru — my relative who is buried with the pope‘s maternal grandparents — was born in Louisiana.

Joseph, who went by Paul, is my first cousin four times removed. In other words, Paul‘s grandfather, Lorenzo Adolphe Sorapuru Sr., is my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

The earliest record I found of Paul — an 1880 census from St. John the Baptist Parish — marks his race, along with that of his grandfather, parents, and siblings, as “mulatto.” The term, which denotes a person of mixed African and European descent, is considered offensive by many today because “mulatto” derives from the Spanish word used to describe mules.

But, young Paul and his family would not be permitted to identify as such for much longer.

Shortly after Union troops ended their occupation of Louisiana, former Confederates and their children reclaimed political power in the state and “promptly decided that they would institute a binary racial system,” Morlas Shannon said.

So Creoles of color were left with a choice: attempt to disappear into whiteness and the privilege it grants, or fully embrace their Blackness and the marginalization that accompanies it.

Sometime between 1908, and 1917, Paul and Agnes moved north to Illinois. Records seem to suggest Agnes’s parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez, and her aunt and uncle, Joseph and Louise Martinez (the pope‘s maternal grandparents), also made the migration around this time. Leo‘s mother, Mildred, was born in Chicago in 1911. Agnes Sorapuru is listed as Mildred’s godmother on the younger cousin’s 1912 baptismal record. Mildred’s middle name was also Agnes.

By 1900, Paul and his family had moved 40 miles downriver to New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, the cradle of the city’s Black Creole population. However, by then, Paul, his mother, and his younger siblings were all listed as “white” on the census.

Eight years later, 32-year-old Paul married 22-year-old Agnes Martinez, also a Creole of color living in the Seventh Ward, in the Catholic church.

According to 1920, census documents, the Sorapuru and Martinez families — all marked as white — lived fairly close to each other in Chicago. It also appears Paul and Agnes lived with her parents, Gerard and Ernestine Martinez, on, of all places, Orleans Street.

Fair-skinned Black people leaving their hometown only to reemerge elsewhere living as a white person is known as passing, or “passé blanc” in Louisiana.

For many, it was an act of economic, social, and personal survival, Gaudin said, not an expression of anti-Blackness. They “made a decision that racism is harmful, it can harm me and it can harm my children,” said Gaudin, who wrote a book about her Creole ancestors’ migration to California. “Moving out of Louisiana gave people the opportunity, if they wanted it, to be more ambiguous, or to be able to slip and slide across racial lines a little easier.”

But that privilege came at a cost. Passing usually meant “breaking the ties of family,” Peacock said, because the discovery of African ancestry “could harm your opportunities.”

By passing, Paul and the Martinezes cemented their collective identity shift from Black Creoles living in Jim Crow New Orleans to a family of white Catholics in cosmopolitan Chicago. The latter narrative is the one Leo and his brothers seemingly grew up on.

John Prevost, the middle brother who is two years older than the pope, recently told the New York Times he and his siblings always identified as white and didn’t discuss their Creole roots.

“It was never an issue,” the Times quoted him saying.

The pope and his siblings never met Paul Sorapuru. He died in 1948, a few years before the oldest Prevost brother, Louis, was born. Agnes outlived her husband by 20 years. The couple, according to surviving records, never had children of their own.

Paul‘s marriage into the Martinez family connected the branches of Leo‘s family tree to my own. But the decision to move to Chicago and pass created a branching moment that separated us from them.

My direct ancestors who stayed in Louisiana were shaped by their Black Creole identity. Growing up, we called our godparents by Louisiana French titles: Parrain and Nana or Nanny, short for Nénènn. My First Communion photos are still on display in my childhood home nearly 20 years later. My paternal grandmother, both parents, and my older sister are all proud graduates of the only historically Black Catholic university in the country, Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.

Despite their racial change, one thing the pope‘s ancestors retained from New Orleans was their Catholic faith. It was one of the few cultural identity markers from their old lives that was safe for them to hold onto.

Our fascination with Leo‘s Creole heritage shows how important race remains to our perceptions of people in America. 

So far, he has not publicly acknowledged his African ancestry, but if he does, it would be more meaningful than a simple appeasing gesture.

“When people envision American Catholicism, they think of Boston, they think of New York,” said Jari C. Honora, the New Orleans genealogist who first publicly discovered the pope‘s Creole connections. “They don’t think of New Orleans as a very culturally and historically Catholic place, but it is, including the long history of Black Catholicism in the city.”

In Black communities, especially Catholic ones, from Chicago to Haiti many people are already treating the pope as one of our own. 

(Maine Writer note here:  The first settler who is credited with beginning the city of Chicago was a Haitian immigrant*.)

In fact, it is “an act of reclamation that comes from histories of oppression,” Gaudin said. The pope‘s ancestors’ passing was a form of “self-erasure,” she added, “so claiming them as Black is a kind of reversal of that erasure.”

Honora warned that racial identity is difficult to categorize. “People like to quantify race, and that is really impossible to do, even with the popular genetic tests,” he said. “Nobody can say, ‘You’re precisely 22 percent Black or white,’ because these things are social constructs.”

Mark Roudané relates to the pope‘s situation better than most.

In 2006, at 55 years old, Roudané was going through the belongings of his recently deceased father when he came across a binder. Inside were ancestral photos and documents that revealed Roudané, who was raised white, had a long lineage of Afro-Creole ancestry.

“My heritage reappeared from this historical fog,” said Roudané, who currently runs a website dedicated to the legacy of the first Black daily newspaper in the United States, founded by his great-great-grandfather, Louis Charles Roudanez. “There was this whirlwind of emotion that left me with this undefinable realization that I was no longer who I thought I was.”

For Leo, Roudané said, there is an opportunity to use his platform as a world leader to make a difference about how we understand racial identity.

“I think the best thing that could happen from all of this new stuff that has come to light with the pope‘s ancestry is that he, and we, begin to really take a much more sophisticated look at what it means to be a human being,” Roudané said, “what it means to be Black, what it means to be white, what it means to be mixed race.”

So is the pope my “cousin”? Technically, no. My family member, Paul, is related to Pope Leo XIV by marriage, not by blood.

But in Black communities across America, family is largely defined by bonds, not by blood alone. The ties between our two families may have been severed a century ago — by migration, by circumstance, by racism — but the revelation of the pope‘s hidden heritage offers us a path toward reconciliation.

Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.

*AI- overview:  The first known Haitian immigrant to settle what would become Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He is widely recognized as the first permanent non-Native settler and founder of Chicago. du Sable, born around 1750, established a trading post near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s. He was believed to be of Haitian descent, with a French father and an enslaved African mother.

Maine Writer Post Script:  Robert Francis Prevost is a beautiful example of the American melting pot, all in one family genealogy❗