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Doral, Florida —When Nazi bombs destroyed the House of Commons during the 1940 Blitz, Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged that it be rebuilt exactly as it had been. “We shape our buildings,” he observed, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The narrow, opposing benches of the old chamber, he argued, physically compelled face-to-face debate and preserved the combative spirit essential to representative government.
A similar truth emerges when one compares three buildings in Chicago:
1. The Obama Presidential Center, located in Jackson Park on the South Side lakefront, which opened in June 2026.
2. Trump Tower, completed in 2009 on the Chicago River just north of the Loop.
3. Project HOOD’s Learning Center (the Robert R. McCormick Leadership & Economic Opportunity Center), rising in the Woodlawn-Englewood neighborhood a couple of miles inland from the lakefront, scheduled to open this fall.
I. THE OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER
The Obama Center is a place of worship, with Barack Obama as its central object. He has become the Friar Johann Tetzel of American civilization—selling indulgences that absolve the nation’s supposed original sin of racism. Support his campaigns and vote for him, the implicit message runs, and you are personally redeemed.
If one wonders how the Democratic Party shifted from Bill Clinton’s center-left progressivism to its current dominance by figures such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, the answer begins with Obama’s elections. The same is true for the party’s transformation from the traditional home of most American Jews into a hotbed of antisemitism. The Obama Center is a tower of doom—its aesthetic ugliness reflecting a deeper spiritual one.
Land Acknowledgment
At the opening ceremony, Valerie Jarrett, long known as Obama’s senior advisor, delivered a “land acknowledgment” implying that Native American nations such as the Ojibwe and Potawatomi had rightfully owned the site and that American settlers had stolen it.
Two problems undermine this claim.
1. First, the indigenous peoples of the region had no land-title registries or rule of law to enforce ownership. Without clerks and judges, they lived near the state of nature—where life was, in Hobbes’s phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—and spent much of their energy warring with one another rather than formalizing titles.
2. Second, much of the Obama Center sits on landfill east of the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, created by American engineers around the time of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. This was new land made by the very settlers Jarrett implicitly condemns.
Given Jarrett’s background as a lawyer with real-estate experience, these incongruities are surprising. By contrast, Texas still maintains its historic General Land Office—established in 1836 after the Texas Revolution—to settle property titles under the rule of law.
Writing on the Walls
The building’s exterior features a passage from Obama’s 2007 Selma speech. Far more revealing would be some of his most memorable declarations: “We are days away from fundamentally transforming America… If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor… We are the ones we’ve been waiting for… I have a phone and a pen… You didn’t build that!”
Obama never produced significant scholarly writing as a law lecturer, nor did he practice law at a level that earned partnership in any firm. Substance, it appears, was never his strong suit.
II. TRUMP TOWER
Trump International Hotel and Tower is a place of commerce and enterprise. It houses condominium residences, a hotel, offices, retail stores, restaurants, and a parking garage. Sleek and soaring, its only exterior inscription is the name of the man who built it: “Trump.” He built that.
Designed by the renowned firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it ranks as Chicago’s second-tallest building. Both the Obama Center and Trump Tower cost roughly $800 million to construct. Yet Trump financed his project with private lenders and investors, while the Obama Center relied on public subsidies, wealthy donors, and—reports indicate—unpaid contractors.
III. PROJECT HOOD’S LEARNING CENTER
The Robert R. McCormick Leadership & Economic Opportunity Center is a place of Christian reform, renewal, and rebirth—a hall of light. Built by Pastor Corey Brooks and his New Beginnings Church across the street, it embodies Project HOOD (“Helping Others Obtain Destiny”)—destiny understood in accordance with the will
of our Creator.
Rising in the heart of the South Side, the center seeks to uplift and empower the local black community. Classrooms, meeting spaces, a theater, swimming pool, indoor basketball court, and neighborhood shops create a vibrant hub of opportunity, collaboration, and transformation.
Construction began in fall 2023 and is expected to finish this fall. Fully funded by philanthropic donations, community partners, and volunteers, the project carries no debt and has paid all contractors. Local contractors, tradesmen and laborers have been integral to the inclusive effort.
Though someone recently smashed a window with a rock, the work continues undeterred. As the Apostle Paul wrote: “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7).
CONCLUSION
As the American republic approaches its 250th anniversary, the nation stands at a crossroads. Will we reaffirm the Judeo-Christian principles, Protestant work ethic, and constitutional order that built our civilization? Or will we surrender to a new alliance of Communist and Jihadist ideologies promising free things in exchange for liberty?
These three buildings embody different paths. The Obama Center promotes a new dispensation of ethnic and gender grievance and group identity. Trump Tower celebrates the achievements of rugged individualism and free-market capitalism.
Project HOOD’s Learning Center offers a different vision for a community long tempted by the welfare state - - a return to church, family, courage, self-discipline, and the building of human capital in a free society.
