Vatican, Chicago-Style

What ever could it be that David Axelrod and Pope Leo have in common?

At the Vatican last week, one famous Chicagoan, Pope Leo XIV, received another famous Chicagoan, David Axelrod. You might say the private tete a tete on April 9 took place between two popes: the Pope of the Catholic Church and the political pope — Capo, certainly — of the Obama Democrats. More to the unpadded point, Axelrod is a scion of American Marxist networks, as is his own political masterwork, Barack Obama, who also has notable Chicago ties. These are just some of biographical details that should begin to bring the alarming “optics” of this papal audience into focus.

The meeting would be broken as news on X by Christopher Hale, identified in one account as a “substack journalist.” Looking over Hale’s profile as an “alum” of the Obama and Biden White Houses, a Biden delegate and a Democrat nominee for Congress in 2020, `Party foot-soldier’ is a more descriptive handle. Hale revealed nothing about the meeting itself except that it had taken place, framing his post much like a DNC read-out:

NEW: Pope XIV met with David Axelrod this morning.

Axelrod was chief strategist for President Obama in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaign.

As I reported last month, there are early talks between Vatican officials and President Obama’s circle about a meeting between the two men.

Donald Trump hasn't even spoken to the pope. Obama may meet him first.

Note the goofy “gotcha” at the end. Why would Donald Trump ever wish to speak with this pope, who has identified and intertwined his papacy with an open political assault on Trump’s presidency, starting with the immigration agenda voters resoundingly elected Trump to execute? Here, perhaps, another biographical detail will be helpful. As I argued in The Red Thread (2019), an investigation into the ideological drivers inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (“Russia, Russia”), Donald Trump is the most innately anti-communist president in US history. Could that be what accounts for Leo’s visceral opposition? We may not know what was discussed at the Leo-Axelrod meeting — or, also intriguing, how the two Chicagoans discussed it (“Who, Whom?” to invoke Lenin) — but I am hoping the stage, the players, the forces in play, become more vividly etched.

When I think of David Axelrod, I think of his star vehicle, Barack Obama, and the “post-partisan” candidacy Axelrod carved out of Obama’s fraud of a life story (also identity fraud) in order to deceive the American people into voting a Marxist faker into our highest office. How pathetic that even now perhaps only one aspect of Obama’s fakery has been what might be called mainstreamed: the fact that Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, which sold in the multi-millions, was “historical fiction” — the finding of a reliably progressive Obama biographer, David Garrow, in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017). Investigative journalist Jack Cashill, for one, discovered this as long ago in 2008 before Obama was elected president — back when it still mattered in a consequential way. Only in 2023 did Garrow reveal the punchline to The Tablet’s David Samuels, noted by author Lloyd Billingsley: “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him [Obama].” Had the political parties and MSM ever told the truth about Obama — they’d rather hold a Howitzer to their heads — Obama would probably have imploded.

I’ll bet David Axelrod just laughed. He’d had “the Establishment’s” OK to style Obama — a hyper-partisan disciple of a network of hardcore Chicago Marxists, socialists, revolutionists, alive and dead, from Weather Man Bill Ayers to Gramsci Marxist Saul Alinsky — as the “post-partisan” candidate of “hope and change.” The only thing that was real, of course, was “change.” Axelrod & Co. came into perfect alignment with that Establishment, which gave its best, its all, to shore up all of the flimsily constructed Big Lies about Obama to deceive the American people. And now, here was Axelrod, the chief strategist of this deception, playing elder statesmen as he sat across from the Pope. And vice versa.

Such ruthlessness goes to the ideological roots and influences, which I call red threads, of Axelrod and Obama both. These include their places in the Chicago “troika” alongside Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, discovered by historian Paul Kengor in the course of writing The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (2012). As Kengor explained, Obama, Axelrod and Jarrett were the political proteges of an older “troika” of Chicago Communists and radicals, which included Frank Marshall Davis (Obama), David Canter (Axelrod), and Robert Taylor/Vernon Jarrett (Valerie Jarrett). This was huge news, so, of course, it remained marooned, outside what Cashill calls “bubble media.”

There is much to say about this motley crew. One item about Stalinist CP-member and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis I’ve always found to be piquant is that he was on an FBI list for arrest in the event of war with the USSR. Communist Canter, whose daddy headed the Massachusetts Communist Party, is noted for his Translation World Publishers, which the House Un-American Activities Committee determined in 1962 to be "an outlet for the distribution of Soviet propaganda” and “subsidized by Soviet funds … to serve the propaganda interests of the U.S.S.R." Another detail I find irresistible is that in its investigations into Chicago 1968, the Committee found that David Canter “was in charge of organizing the printing of the special issue of The Ramparts newspaper” — not to bring David Horowitz into it. When in 1989 Herbert Romerstein and Stanislav Levchenko examined Soviet active measures against 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, they discovered that Domino Publications, the source of a 1963 booklet slandering Goldwater as a racist and leader of a planned “Bircher” putsch, had the very same address as Canter’s Translation World Publishers. David Axelrod’s association with the Canter family, which began in the 1970s, would help launch Axelrod into a “journalism” career.

As for Valerie Jarrett, here’s something: “Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.”

On some level (call it reality), it remains incredible that in 2008 the Obama team raced its little Manchurian troika all the way to the White House where they set out to “fundamentally transform this country.” Restoring what had been “tranformed” over the Obama years, crunch time in the century-Long March through America’s institutions, would be a centerpiece of the first Trump candidacy.

Such change — the grown-up word is subversion — is the forever-mission of operators all across the interlocking Left, from Communist red to Democrat (or Republican) pink, from liberation theologists to social justice warriors, from “intersectionality” (read: Marxist) academics to community organizers. What joins and also identifies them are the tactics they use, heavily influenced by Rules for Radicals (1971), Saul Alinsky’s “community organizing” guide to fomenting revolution.¹ If we look for Alinsky’s m.o. in one sentence, this may be it: “The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people in the community.” It is a rule Divider in Chief Obama learned well.

Is this too much “Chicago” context? Is this too much Alinsky context? I don’t think so. Not when prominent members of the “Catholic Left” in the Archdiocese of Chicago — clerics we find on the theological-ideological family tree overhanging Pope Leo — worked in concert with Alinsky in developing community organizing (read: revolution) as an “interfaith” or church activity.

We can date Alinsky’s expansion into “interfaith” “community organizing” to 1940 when, in Chicago, of course, Alinsky, Bishop James Bernard Shiel, and department store heir Marshall Field III² came together to found the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). This enterprise, retired military intelligence officer and expert Stephen C. Coughlin has noted, followed a 1930s Comintern order to Party faithful to create just such interfaith organizations. Field’s deep pockets gave revolutionist Alinsky the sheen of mercantile respectability; however, it was Sheil’s presence which lent Alinsky the weighty imprimatur of church tradition even as they pioneered “social justice” agitation together.

This was no passing fad, or loose engagement. IAF today is the largest “interfaith” organization in America. In their book No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom (2012), Phyllis Schlafly and George Neumayr bring a stunning clarity to what lay behind what may seem to be long-ago and amorphous machinations — nothing less than a war plan. They write: “The effort to subvert the Church in America goes back decades, is traceable to Saul Alinsky, and among its direct beneficiaries was Barack Obama when he was a community organizer in Chicago.” With this starkly in mind, think again about the meeting between Obama’s chief strategist and the Pope, and consider that both men successfully navigated the Alinskyite force field that has long shaped Chicago faith and politics to ascend to the world stage. We still don’t know what they said to each other, but there is now a swirl, if not a vortex, of inferences to ponder.

And not just inferences. Schlafly and Neumayr go on to quote Thomas Pauken’s 1995 book Thirty Years War (below), which I think makes it a simple matter to recast Alinsky’s “interfaith” “community-organizing” alongside and inside the Chicago Church as a communist-inspired assault on what was then a thoroughly anti-communist institution.

Turning their lens back to Barack Obama and the Catholic Church, Schlafly and Neumayr write:

In the 1980s, the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago contributed to the training of Obama in the very Alinskyite tradition that would culminate in such anti-religious measures as the HHS mandate.³ In fact, in the course of writing this book, we met a source who … supplied us with invoices, checks and letters that confirm the Church’s support for the man who would one day seek to destroy its religious freedom.

What an amazing story — again, silenced inside “bubble media.” These documents not only include receipts showing that the archdiocese of Chicago in 1986 paid for Obama to travel to an IAF training conference in Los Angeles, but also that Obama was the recipient that same year of a $33,000 grant for “socialist organizing,” as Schlafly and Neumayr write, from the Campaign for Human Development, which the authors identify as the Chicago archdiocese’s “Alinskyite `social justice’ office.”

The head man in Chicago archdiocese during this time of Obama’s extremely close association with it was none other than Cardinal Bernadin. I’m sure students of these matters will already be making the all-important connections between Obama and Bernardin, and Leo and Bernardin; however, I will provide some context from another source, John Zmirak’s The Politically Correct Guide to Catholicism (2016). As Zmirak explains, Cardinal Bernadin, who headed the Chicago archdiocese from 1982 until his death in 1996, was “the most influential Catholic prelate in America” — and very much politically speaking. It was Bernardin who was able to coalesce the American bishops around an overtly Left-wing political agenda, shocking at the time, including economics, welfare policy and defense matters (immigration was not on the table before Tump) which was a “virtual mirror of the Democratic Party platform.”

Zmirak elaborates on what, besides Barack Obama, is probably Bernadin’s most consequential legacy: his “seamless garment” philosophy, also known as “consistent ethic of life,” which — and this is the key — Pope Leo has wholeheartedly embraced.

Surely, we are looking back on one of the slickest bait-and-switches of all time. You go in pro-life, and you come out a social justice warrior. Is this not the “seamless” apogee of Barack Obama’s, and, I would add, Pope Leo’s Alinskyism? Little wonder Barack Obama has made it known how much he would like to meet with Pope Leo. If such a meeting takes place — and, in Chicago-ese, it’s a “can’t-loose-parlay” — we’re unlikely to discover what they say to each other. However, it will be easier to imagine the “Chicago style” in which they communicate. They have so much in common!

This is something Christopher Hale, our original Leo-Axelrod source, understands as clearly as anyone else. In fact, it turns out I really didn’t need to do so much research to think through the meaning of Axelrod, Obama, Leo and Chicago. I could have just skimmed the intro to Hale’s March 3 “Letters from Leo”:

Today’s subscriber-only essay tells the full story of Barack Obama’s Catholic formation — the bishops’ grants that funded his first job, the rectory where he kept his office, the priests who mentored him, and the cardinal whose “seamless garment” theology shaped how Obama sees the world to this day. It is a story that leads directly to the South Side of Chicago — the same South Side that formed the man who now sits on the Chair of Peter.

1. In his acknowledgements, Alinsky includes, no kidding, Lucifer: “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”

2. Field also funded PM magazine in Manhattan, where Myril Axelrod, David Axelrod’s mother, was a journalist. There were so many Communists and fellow-travelers on PM’s staff, it was sometimes referred to as the Uptown Daily Worker.

3. The authors refer to the Obama HHS mandate which ordered Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for health insurance plans providing contraceptive and abortion drugs .