In the tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a vain emperor is swindled by two men who claim they can make him a special suit of garments invisible to the stupid or incompetent. When he later parades around naked in public, no one wants to state the obvious for fear of appearing the only “stupid” person who can’t see what the “competent” presumably do. That is, until a little child cries out, “But he doesn’t have anything on!”
Ex-NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s statement that Barack Obama was influenced by communists in his youth and doesn’t love his country isn’t nearly as fascinating as the reaction to it.
Usually when a person is labeled a “communist” or a “fascist,” it’s a pejorative applied to someone who, whether or not actually fitting the description, doesn’t apply the label to himself.
This wasn’t the case with Frank Marshall Davis.
The late journalist and activist was one of those rare things: An actual member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). We even know his party number: 47544. Even more striking, Davis joined the CPUSA in the early forties and was a member through the McCarthy era — when declaring oneself a communist could still mean personal destruction — and beyond. In other words, he was a true believer.
Davis was also an even rarer thing: a mentor of Barack Obama.
Neither of these statements are opinion, by the way, but fact.
Yet when Giuliani said, as the New York Post reported, “From the time he [Obama] was 9 years old, he was influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, who was a communist,” the paper and apparently all of the mainstream media called it a “claim.” What they’re not saying is that the claim was made by Obama himself.
Giuliani might have gotten one thing wrong: Some say Obama was likely 10 years old when introduced to the radical Davis. But that the introduction was made and a relationship resulted are not in dispute. As Professor Paul Kengor writes at American Spectator, “Frank Marshall Davis would eventually meet a young Barack Obama in 1970, introduced by Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, for the purpose of mentoring. The boy’s grandfather felt that the fatherless boy was in need of a black-male role model. For that, Dunham chose one of the most politically radical figures in all of Hawaii.” And this relationship was a deep one. Kengor continued:
An eyewitness, a woman named Dawna Weatherly-Williams, who knew Davis so well that she called him “Daddy,” was present the first time Obama and Davis met. She described the relationship as very influential, with Davis impacting Obama on “social justice,” on “life,” on “what’s important,” on no less than “how to use” his “heart” and “mind.”
So deep was Davis’s influence that Obama, in his huge bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father, would cite him repeatedly over thousands of words and in each and every section (all three parts) of his memoirs — though he referred to him only as “Frank.” “Frank” is mentioned 22 times by name, and far more times via pronouns and other forms of reference.
It’s not surprising that the fatherless 9- or 10-year-old Obama would attach himself to and be influenced by a male role model, especially one as passionate as Davis. And the communist’s lessons seem to have stuck. Obama also wrote in Dreams that while a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he chose his friends “carefully” and thus gravitated toward, among others, “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” (Emphasis added.)
Then we have the testimonial of Dr. John Drew — with whom I’ve talked on the phone and corresponded via e-mail — about the time he says he met Obama at Occidental in 1980. Drew, now managing director of Drew and Associates, a grant-writing consultancy firm, had just graduated from the college but met Obama through a mutual friend. Reporting on that meeting, Newsmax writes:
“He [Obama] was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, which anticipated that there would be a revolution of the working class, led by revolutionaries, who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute the wealth,” says Drew, who says he himself was then a Marxist.
… He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.”
Drew concluded that Obama thought of himself as “part of an intelligent, radical vanguard that was leading the way towards this revolution and towards this new society.”
“New society”? Does “fundamental change” sound synonymous — and familiar?
Then there’s Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church. A “spiritual advisor” whom Obama called an “old uncle,” Obama was married by, and had his daughters baptized by, Wright and sat in the preacher’s pews for 20 years. Yet this is the same man who spoke at an October 2009 conference of Monthly Review, which describes itself as “An Independent Socialist Magazine.” After impugning America in his speech, Wright lauded the periodical, saying, “We celebrate tonight six decades of [your] dedicated service.” Note that under Marxist doctrine, socialism is the revolutionary period that ushers in communism.
Much, much more can be said about Obama’s communist associations than an article can cover. The relevant point, however, is that the above is not opinion. It is not conjecture. It is fact.
But what of Giuliani’s assertion that Obama doesn’t love America? Is this fact? Well, it likely couldn’t be proven in a court of law, but we do have some pretty convincing clues. CPUSA members such as Obama mentor Davis “swore an oath to ‘ensure the triumph of Soviet power in the United States.’ They were dedicated to what CPUSA leader William Z. Foster had openly called ‘Soviet America,’” wrote Kengor. Michelle Obama once said that she’d never been “proud of America” as an adult and that the United States is “downright mean” and “getting worse all the time.” When Marxist Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega condemned our country in 2009 for alleged past sins, Obama’s only instinct was to defend himself and say, “I’m thankful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three years old.” And then there’s Obama’s “uncle” Wright again, who growled “God d*** America!” from the pulpit and mockingly called our nation the “US of KKK A!”
None of this is inexplicable to John Drew, by the way. As he told Newsmax, Obama’s view at Occidental was that “America was definitely the enemy … and whatever America was doing was definitely wrong and bad.”
And what of Obama’s prescription for America: “fundamental change”? “Fundamentals” are not window dressing — they are the “foundation or basis” of something. If you say your wife needs “fundamental change,” it means you don’t like her very much.
So “tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are”? Perhaps you can surround yourself with haters of America steeped in communism — the quintessential anti-American ideology— and not be a hater of America yourself. Maybe that emperor really is wearing invisible clothes.
This brings us to the upside-down-world media reaction to Giuliani, well epitomized by the Saturday New York Daily News cover title, “Shocking New Rudy Spin: Obama Grew Up a Communist.” Spin? Shocking is the media’s refusal to report facts.
But there are reasons for this media spin. First, the best way to keep truth suppressed is to brand those who express it “wacky,” “stupid,” or “incompetent.” Second, the mainstream media have invested so much of themselves in covering for Obama that publishing the truth now would be to further reveal themselves as incompetent — they’re in too deep.
Then there’s the philosophical dimension: Especially in a relativistic society such as ours — where Truth is considered illusion — there’s a great willingness to believe an oft-repeated big lie. There is a great tendency for Truth to be subordinated to acceptability. And then the labels “stupid” and “incompetent” aren’t earned by telling falsehoods but by violating fashions.
When the child blurts out the truth in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the ice is broken and everyone else chimes in. Unfortunately, though, while it’s one thing for reality to rise in fiction, it’s quite another for fiction to be exposed in reality.
