The vision of Barack Obama
After nearly four years, we should know by now. But big media either don’t care to know, or don’t want us to know what they know. Good thing they’re no longer the gatekeepers for information access.
Dinesh D’Souza did a fair and decent job of presenting the man Barack Obama came to be and what formed him along his path to political participation in the film ‘2016’, still playing in a number of theaters. One of the sources in that film is a source of mine, Dr. Paul Kengor, who had just done an hour long interview on my show before I saw the film, though he never mentioned it. The interview was on his book The Communist, sub-titled Frank Marhsall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Kengor’s book is well-researched, meticulously documented, and fair. But it’s getting no attention in big media. None. Why is that? Why should we not be well informed about both presidential candidates, who influenced and informed them through life, and shaped their worldviews?
Seriously, why? It’s a fair and honest question. But the media have buried this information on Obama. Why?
It is scandalous that so little attention has been paid to Frank Marshall Davis and his influence on our president. The general public knows little to nothing about this man. Liberal journalists, historians, scholars, and pundits would never tolerate such self-imposed ignorance if facing a conservative president influenced by a figure this extreme to the right.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama’s left-leaning biographers have either willfully ignored Frank Marshall Davis or seriously downplayed his influence and communist leanings. Of everything written on Obama over the years, no book has focused specifically on Frank. And now, after considerable time researching and writing on the subject, I understand why: No president has been influenced by a figure as politically troubling as this one…
Frank Marshall Davis’s political antics were so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, which meant that he could be immediately detained or arrested in the event of a national emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and the USSR.
However…
Obama’s memoirs feature twenty-two direct references to “Frank” by name, and far more via pronouns and other forms of reference. Frank is a consistent theme throughout the book, appearing repeatedly and meaningfully in all three parts, which are titled “Origins,” “Chicago,” and “Kenya.” He is part of Obama’s life and mind, by Obama’s own extended recounting, from Hawaii–the site of visits and late evenings together–to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Africa, from adolescence to college to community organizing. Frank is always one of the few (and first) names mentioned by Obama in each mile marker upon his historic path from Hawaii to Washington.
So have you ever heard of him? Probably not. Why not? Americans traditionally want to know who and what informs our would-be leaders, especially American journalists. It’s a fair and reasonable question. Why didn’t media ask it? Or report on it once they learned, which surely some of them did?
Kengor did, and he gathered so much information, he analyzed the influence Obama’s mentor would continue to play over the recent DNC.
Frank Marshall Davis’s politics were so radical, and so pro-Soviet, that the Democrats who ran the Senate in 1956 summoned him to Washington to testify on his pro-Soviet activities. Even more remarkable, the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, meaning that if a war broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, Obama’s mentor could have been placed under immediate arrest.
I’ve noted this here before. I’ve also noted Davis’s unceasing class-based rhetoric and class warfare.
This is just one condensed article drawn out more at length in the book. But it’s very revealing.
After all those years trashing the Democratic Party, Davis, like many American communists, decided to join the Democrats. There were two primary factors that drove this decision: 1) American communists realized that they could never get elected to national office openly campaigning as communists, and 2) when Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party collapsed in 1948, the communists who had pervaded it had nowhere else to go. So, many American communists opted to hitch their wagon to a different star — namely, to the most viable left-leaning party in America: the Democratic Party. Sure, this would be a challenge when they encountered old anti-communist Democrats like John F. Kennedy, Pat McCarran, Thomas Dodd, and Scoop Jackson, but overall, in the long run, they would be patient, and they would seek alliances with Democrats much closer to their collectivist thinking.
Frank Marshall Davis was among these. This tactical move by Davis is evident in his declassified 600-page FBI file, and specifically an April 1950 report that states that “members of the subversive element in Honolulu were concentrating their efforts on infiltration of the Democratic Party through control of Precinct Clubs and organizations.” These communist subversives, said the report, were pushing “their candidates in these Precinct Club elections.”…
This began a long march to transform the Democratic Party from the party of Truman and JFK to the party of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. And in a quite fascinating twist of history, Frank Marshall Davis, as a “Democrat,” would go on to influence today’s Democratic Party standard-bearer: Barack Obama.
The consequences of that shift were seen in the DNC last week, which opened with an Orwellian narration of the government as the only thing we really belong to, and culminated in a platform fight over omitting a reference to God.
The two candidates for president have starkly different views of what should be the proper size and role of government, and religiously informed voices within it and in the public arena. This is the time to vet them.
