"Late in the afternoon of 1983, Barack Obama made his way into the historic Great Hall of Manhattan's Cooper Union to attend a 'Socialist Scholars Conference.' Within twenty-four hours, his life had transformed. There at that conference Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his adult life."
So begins Stanley Kurtz's new monumental work, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.
The book is an in-depth reference work that documents the voluminous archival material on Obama's background, which Kurtz thoroughly examines in order to establish its authenticity and to separate fact from fiction. Scholarly in its approach, the Kurtz book does not lend itself to 5-second sound bites or to blazing headlines in the 'drive-by media.'
As a scholar and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Kurtz's motive was not to make headlines or to provide red meat to the conservative media but to undertake a thorough investigation into the charges that Obama's past is rife with dubious and dangerous associations on the Leftwing fringe of American politics, and to trace how such associations have molded and shaped his career, political ideology, and policy initiatives.
In a book review published by Asia Times, the writer relates a first-hand experience with the 'Socialist Scholars Conference' that Obama attended as a college senior:
As it happens, I was a senior at Columbia a decade earlier, and attended a couple of the annual Socialist Scholars' Conferences; in 1988, long after I had repudiated my youthful radicalism, I was in a PhD program at City University of New York, and ran into some of the conference organizers - as it happens, the same gang who ran the 1983 conference that Obama attended. At the time, they were making violent threats against art historians for the crime of wanting to teach classical Western art.
As a matter of personal experience, I can report that the Socialist Scholars Conference was not an academic exercise for the intellectually curious, but a Walpurgisnacht for hard-core activists. No-one came who was not prepared to kiss the goat's hindquarters.
Kurtz recognizes that Obama was a Socialist Radical long before he attended the conference. But the event in 1983 was a watershed moment--a turning point that solidified in Obama's thinking what he wanted to do with his life and how he would go about it. Community organizers are not kind-hearted do-gooders but are part and parcel of a Marxist venture that believes in linking Socialist-Communist principles and practices to the American culture.
Their tactic? Bring down American society and its Capitalistic assumptions from within, at the very bottom, starting with the underprivileged that could easily be led into class warfare, demanding costly entitlement programs from 'the rich.'
The ultimate goal of the organizers of the socialist conference sounds eerily reminiscent to that of Cloward-Piven, the two Leftwing professors in the late 60s who proposed initiating the collapse of American society by overloading it with entitlement programs it cannot afford. The book review describes what Obama heard at the 1983 conference:
Peddling socialism - a dirty word in mainstream American parlance - required some repackaging, and that is what the 1983 conference proposed. Peter Dreier, one of the speakers Obama heard, proposed to bring down American capitalism from below, by swamping governments with entitlement programs. Dreier envisioned "a revolution of rising entitlements" that "cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class". In the short run, Dreier claimed, "the process leads to expansion of state activity and budgets, and … to fiscal crisis in the public sector. In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for expansion or at least visibility."
Kurtz then carefully traces Obama's career beginning with his 'community organizing' in Chicago, his association with the 'Midwest Academy' which was part of Students for a Democratic Society, and his intermingling with ACORN, the Woods Foundation, and the Annenberg Challenge. It was with the latter group that Obama worked with confirmed Leftwing domestic terrorist William 'Bill' Ayers.
As Kurtz delved into these dubious Chicago Marxist connections he discovered a most interesting fact concerning Obama's pastor for 30 years--the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Ayers and Obama jointly funneled money from the Annenberg Foundation into the coffers of 'education programs' that mirrored Wright's anti-American, pro-Liberation Theology cabal.
The book further establishes a direct link between Obama and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other radical Muslims engaged in the struggle for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.
Thus, the reviewer of the book concludes,
These highlights barely suggest the flavor of Kurtz' account, which provides detailed organizational charts, histories, and smoking-gun documentation about the world of left-wing organizations in which Obama circulated through the formative stages of his career.
The documentation is exhaustive, and the source attribution impeccable.
Perhaps Patriots should place Kurtz's book on their 'must-read' list.
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