What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (6 page)

Thanks in large part to the influence of his parents and Davis, Obama admitted that as a student, he sought out Marxist professors. In April 1983, while a senior at Columbia University, Obama attended a “Socialist Scholars Conference” at Cooper Union, a confab touted as a tribute to Karl Marx. He was so taken by the socialist ideology that he attended the 1984 conference as well. According to Stanley Kurtz’s
Radical-in-Chief
, the archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) show Obama’s name on a conference registration list. Actually, it said Steven Quincy Urkel … but we knew who it really was. At the 1983 socialist hoedown, attendees included radical redistributionist and ACORN adviser Frances Fox Piven and community-organizing “theorist” Peter Dreier, who later served as an adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. As his radicalism fully flowered, Obama grew close to an even fuller array of influential kooks, including but not limited to his twenty-year-long association with the racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American radical Jeremiah Wright, in whose pews Obama sat silently for two decades, never uttering a peep of protest, and who claims American whites invented AIDS to kill blacks. Obama also had a fifteen-year-long friendship with William Ayers, the cofounder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorism group, which described itself as a communist revolutionary organization. (It was in Ayers’s living room that Obama launched his political career in 1995.) Obama struck up a shady business relationship with the criminal Tony Rezko and had possible ties to Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, the former Black Panther turned Muslim adviser to the Saudi royal family whom the late Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton claimed asked him to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law on Obama’s behalf—an allegation Obama denied. Obama also enjoys a continuing relationship with PLO sympathizer Rashid Khalidi. Obama was fed radical Marxist literature, anticolonial propaganda, and revolutionary poetry as they all sang Leninist show tunes.

None of these associations were coincidental, nor were they oneway. The older kooks steered their willing pupil toward ever-greater anti-American radicalism. Obama, through his actions and words, increasingly indicated his affinity for the ideas of wealth redistribution and class warfare and his problem with the exercise of U.S. power around the world. The kooks could not believe their good fortune in cultivating such a dreamy vessel for their ideas. They were in love with Obama, and he was in love with them. After all, the “dreams” to which he referred in the title of his book were his father’s dreams of radical redistributionist transformation.

Obama was clearly a young man on a quest to establish “social and economic justice” by leveraging the existing political tools and opportunities available to him. Community organizing, the hyper-localized method of mobilization to effect socialist change developed by Saul Alinsky, was his preferred route.

Published in 1971, Alinsky’s leftist revolutionary how-to,
Rules for Radicals
(which he dedicated to Lucifer), quickly became a kook bible. It is a comprehensive step-by-step manual for how the redistributionists could deconstruct America; first the existing order must be destroyed systematically, locally, block by block, then state by state, and ultimately nationally. The strategy was to work
within
the system until enough power had been accumulated to destroy it. It was what the leftists called “boring from within.” (In modern times, the term “boring from within” is reserved exclusively for Obama’s State of the Union addresses.) The former radical David Horowitz once described his old fellow kooks as “termites,” setting “about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they would cause it to collapse.” Once the existing capitalist order was taken down, full-on redistributionism could be maneuvered in its place.

Throughout the twentieth century, there had been various incarnations of the revolution. As Bill Ayers put it as his group bombed the Pentagon, “Kill all the rich people,” he ordered. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” Decades later, the old revolutionary was still at it, invoking themes of income inequality as he instructed the useful idiots of Occupy Wall Street on how best to overthrow American capitalism.

Alinsky, his contemporaries, and their radical successors knew that, given Americans’ fierce rejection of these fundamentally anti-American views and policies, it would help to have a crisis as a pretext. If a natural crisis did not exist, one could be created through the radical grass roots. This is one of the reasons why he founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940 “to train people to reorganize” and which he used to infiltrate traditional organizations such as churches. After Alinsky’s death in 1972, IAF morphed into successor groups, including ACORN, Citizen Action, National People’s Action, and the Gamaliel Foundation. The Gamaliel Foundation describes its vision as “shared abundance for all,” which is a polite way of characterizing wealth redistribution. In the summer of 1985, newly minted community organizer Barack Obama joined Gamaliel, where his work was paid for by the Woods Fund. Later, from 1993 to 2002, Obama would serve on the board of the Woods Fund with … guess who? … the terrorist and self-described “socialism advocate” Bill Ayers.

If the existing capitalist system were to be destroyed from within, those invested in the system could be expected to put up a fight to try to stop it. In order to marginalize them, Alinsky recommended neutralizing the opposition through humiliation, mockery, questioning of motives, smears, outright lies, and ultimately aggression if necessary: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Alinsky preached polarization, not negotiation. Alinskyite organizers are taught to be tough when confronting what they call “the enemy” but to paint every move not as ideological but pragmatic. Hence Obama’s constant refrain that he’s a neutral pragmatist, the “adult in the room,” just trying to get results. “Look Ma! No ideology!” The first rule of Alinsky’s “power tactics”? “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy
thinks
you have.” Demonize the opposition, remind them of the power you hold, and leverage it to stir chaos, divisions, and destruction, all while casting yourself as the reasonable broker.

Team Obama internalized these lessons well. After college, Obama moved to Chicago to be trained in community organizing by Gerald Kellman, an Alinsky protégé, who schooled Obama in the Alinskyite “power tactics,” including hiding their true goals by any means necessary. Obama himself went on to teach those Alinsky tactics at the University of Chicago. In 1990, he wrote an article called “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” which was published in that hot periodical
Illinois Issues
and as a chapter in
After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois
.

On page xix of
Rules for Radicals
, Alinsky writes, “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.”

In chapter 2 of
Rules for Radicals
, Alinsky emphasizes the objective: “The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the
Have-Nots against the Haves
, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive—but real—allies of the Haves.... The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.... The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived,
the world as it is
, not our wished-for fantasy of
the world as it should be
.” (Emphasis added.)

It must have been a mere coincidence that Michelle Obama quoted from this passage during her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Referring to a visit her husband had made to a Chicago neighborhood, she said, “Barack stood up that day and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the
world as it is
’ and ‘
the world as it should be
.’” She continued, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do—that we have an obligation to fight for
the world as it should be
.” If only America would follow Barack through the back of the magical Marxist wardrobe. She had used the radicals’ phrase “fighting for the world as it should be” before, so her invocation of Alinsky at the convention should not have come as a surprise to anybody paying attention. Most Americans heard that phrase—“fighting for the world as it should be”—as a siren call to idealism, a summons to a noble mission of improving the nation and world. But what the Obamas
meant
by “fighting for the world as it should be” and what most Americans understood that to mean were two very different things. Their “world as it should be” was one built on “social and economic justice” in which the have-nots would
seize
power, money, and resources from the haves. The “two Americas” would be jammed into one in which the playing field was forcibly leveled.

Although Obama was leading the kook parade, his chief political strategist, David Axelrod, had his own revolutionary street cred. Before he got to Obama, Axelrod was mentored by Chicago journalist and political activist Donald C. Rose, who was a member of the Communist Party front, the Alliance to End Repression. Axelrod met Rose while a student at the University of Chicago, and Rose took him under his wing. They worked together over the course of several years, with Rose and another communist-linked mentor, David Canter, showing Axelrod the ropes of community organizing and mobilization through the 1982 Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington and the 1992 U.S. Senate race of Carol Moseley Braun. The group with whom they worked also helped to elect Obama to Braun’s Senate seat and ultimately to the presidency.

Obama took the Alinsky techniques national beginning in 2004, playing the role of the “reasonable” liberal intellectual, even as he planned the ultimate redistributionist takeover. Alinsky’s dream—of destroying the existing capitalist system and replacing it with a redistributionist one—was about to be realized, beyond ol’ Saul’s wildest dreams. In fact, on August 31, 2008, the
Boston Globe
published a letter to the editor from Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky. He cheered Obama for having mobilized the masses at the Democratic National Convention “Saul Alinsky style.” “Obama learned his lesson well,” he wrote. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully.”

On Super Tuesday 2008, Obama proclaimed that the radicals’ dream was within reach: “This is it! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for! We are the change we seek!” Precisely. And ever since that day, Obama has carried around a makeup compact, and during quiet moments alone he pulls it out, peers down into its tiny mirror, and whispers, “We love you.”

Obama never made a deep secret of his beliefs or intentions. He wrote extensively about his mission to bring “social and economic justice” to America in both of his books and spoke often about his redistributive beliefs. He voted that way too. He was so into redistribution that he even had a “tramp stamp” of Mao Zedong tattooed onto the small of his back. Oh wait: that was former White House communications director Anita Dunn. In 1995, the same year he published
Dreams from My Father
, Obama said this: “… working on issues of crime and education and employment and seeing that in some ways certain portions of the African American community are doing as bad if not worse, and recognizing that my fate remains tied up with their fates, that my individual salvation is not going to come about without a
collective salvation for the country
. Unfortunately, I think that recognition
requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to bring about a new day and a new age
.” (Emphasis added.)

Two points are evident here: (a) Obama believes that the “collective” is superior to the “individual” and that “collective salvation” must take precedence over individual action or freedom; and (b) it’s our fault that the country hasn’t reached that vaunted “collective salvation” yet because we’ve been selfish, capitalist pigs, but he was going to move our consciousness to a higher, less greedy plane.

In 2001, as an Illinois state senator, he gave an interview to WBEZ radio and advocated wealth redistribution as reparations for slavery and other injustices toward “previously dispossessed peoples.” He said, “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of
redistribution of wealth
and sort of more basic issues of
political and economic justice
in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”

And then Obama made one of the most revealing statements of his political life: “[The Warren court]
didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution
, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.”

Consider his explosive words: “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.” This is a revolutionary sentiment. Obama is calling for
actively
charging against what the Founders intended and enshrined in the Constitution. His comments go further than simple leftist arguments about the “living Constitution” in which the document conceptually passively evolves. He is calling for a
concerted and deliberate
effort to shatter the very constraints the Founders put in place—to prevent abuses of the kind he’s advocating! This is the very essence of Obama’s redistributive radicalism: it’s all about “breaking free” from the Founders’ constraints to build a wholly different kind of America. His entire kook philosophy is summed up in that one sentence.