Obama’s Radical Influences: Davis, Ayers, Soros and Beyond
Cliff Kincaid on several “taboo” subjects that the media prefer to ignore. Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s mentor in Hawaii during his critical teen years, was a member of the Communist Party, as his FBI files revealed. William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist and a founder of The Weather Underground, was closely associated with Obama in Chicago. Transcript:
Transcript:
CLIFF KINCAID: All right. Well, thanks for holding on. I want to talk about some taboo subjects today. By way of introduction, I had a great experience at a 9/11 conference in New York City put on by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. I had the opportunity to meet some very courageous freedom fighters from Europe, including the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been physically attacked, his house was set on fire, he’s under constant threat of death, and has to travel with bodyguards wherever he goes. At this particular conference, we had bodyguards all over the auditorium, and I want to show you why. This is what got him into trouble: This is a drawing he did of the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog. This is what they’re trying to kill him over. It’s simply incredible when you see what some people are going through to tell the truth.
By the way, before I get into the subject of Frank Marshall Davis, this is the famous French magazine cover that’s now causing problems in France and around the world: That’s the Prophet Mohammed in a wheelchair. This is supposed to be “offensive to Islam.” This is what’s causing riots and demonstrations around the world, in addition to the so-called anti-Islam video [“Innocence of Muslims”] which the President has been complaining about; they’ve been trying to blame that video on what happened in Egypt and what happened in Libya, with the murder of the four Americans, including the ambassador. Now, it’s interesting: The President said the other day, on [the Late Show with David Letterman], that he was continuing to blame the video for the violence, when we now know—they finally admitted—that it was a terrorist operation in Libya, at least staged by al-Qaeda. The President referred to this video and said, “You know, there’s a shadowy character behind that video.” Well, let me tell you, we’ve been researching an equally shadowy character for over four years, by the name of Barack Obama. It’s an incredible story. You’d think, as serious as all these issues are that we’ve been talking about, that, four years later, as he’s running for a second term, we’d know something about him, we’d be able to document certain things about him, but it’s still a struggle. It’s still a struggle to get out information that we know is true, and to do some additional digging. I’m sorry to go back over time, but it’s important because of the basic necessity of the press to do what we’ve all come to call the “vetting” of these candidates.
Now, as equally as controversial as these Mohammed cartoons or drawings, are these things. The media will not tell you about these, but these, together, constitute the 600 pages of an FBI file on somebody named Frank Marshall Davis. We had gotten these documents, this file, over four years ago. Frank Marshall Davis was Barack Obama’s mentor—perhaps more than that—in Hawaii during his crucial growing-up years, right before he went off to college, for about seven years of his life. This file—we got this from the FBI—showed that this individual, Frank Marshall Davis, had been under FBI surveillance for nineteen years. He was a suspected Soviet agent. He was so important that the FBI said he could be detained in the event of a national emergency. He could be arrested in the event of a war with, say, the old Soviet Union. It also happens to be a fact that he was a sex pervert and a pornographer to boot—as if being a Communist wasn’t bad enough! Again, he helped raise Obama during his growing-up years in Hawaii, before Obama went off to college, first Occidental College in California, where, according to the book that his name is on—which Bill Ayers may have helped write, Dreams from My Father—he admits that when he went off to college he sought out the Marxist professors. In that book—and remember, his name is on the book, so he claims authorship of it, responsibility for it—Obama referred to Frank Marshall Davis, but only in an indirect, oblique way, as just, quote, “Frank.” There were 22 references by name to this “Frank,” who is described as a “poet,” a “writer,” somebody who gave Obama advice on college and growing up and how to conduct himself. Race relations was another thing that “Frank” talked to Obama about. Now, four years ago, early in 2008, we at Accuracy in Media exposed the fact that “Frank” was, indeed, Frank Marshall Davis. My column on this subject appeared around, I think, February or March of 2008. We had acted upon information about “Frank’s identity from Trevor Loudon, a blogger in New Zealand, who had reported this, and we had confirmed it with sources in Hawaii, that, indeed, “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis.
Now, needless to say, the fact that we have a President who, in effect, was raised by a Communist Party member is something that should have been addressed four years ago, and here we are, struggling—still!—to get this story out. But, looking on the bright side, perhaps the media will get around to addressing this in Obama’s second term, when they have more “flexibility” to deal with these kinds of things, when it won’t matter so much. But it’s been frustrating, and I want to acknowledge Agustín Blázquez in the audience here, and Jaums Sutton, who worked with my organization, America’s Survival, on a film about this whole thing. I don’t have the time to talk about it here, but it’s up on the Internet, a film about how we came to discover who “Frank” really was. It’s a film—I have some copies available here—called The Unvetted, which goes into the story of who Frank Marshall Davis was; how we discovered his identity; how the Obama Administration, or, then, the campaign, responded to these revelations.
Now, as I say, Obama’s relationship with Davis has never been investigated by the major media to this day, four years later. Suffice it to say that we have a President, we have somebody in the Oval Office, who could not pass a basic background check from the FBI, because the FBI, they’ve told me—former agents—that they look into things like character, associates, and loyalty, and they have, really, a test to examine whether somebody has the associates, has the loyalty, et cetera, that might disqualify them from a federal job. Now, the loophole in our system, as we’ve come to understand, is that there is no background check for candidates for federal office, including the Presidency of the United States. Now, over the last four years we’ve tried, through articles, columns, news briefings, films—all kinds of things—to get out the story about Frank Marshall Davis so that the media, we were hoping, would finally ask the President about these questions. At this point, right before the next Presidential election, most people still don’t even know who Frank Marshall Davis was. I speak to college audiences, and most students have never even heard of the name. I was on a radio talk show the other day, out of Peoria, Illinois, and the host, who’s a knowledgeable person, had never heard of the name Frank Marshall Davis.
This is the problem we’re facing with, again, a President in office who’s running for a second term. The Obama campaign, four years ago, when some of this came out through some of the books that have been published, by Jerry Corsi and David Freddoso, about Obama, responded that, well, yeah, “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, but “Frank” was just a civil rights activist. No mention of his Communist Party involvement. Recently, on MSNBC, Alex Wagner, one of the liberal hosts, talked about this issue just briefly, saying, “What’s the big deal over Obama’s relationship with Frank Marshall Davis?” who, she called, just a “labor activist.” Again, no mention—you can’t mention the Communist Party.
Now, one of the new developments this year has been the publication of [The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor] by Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College, who’s written numerous best-selling books about various Presidents, including one on Ronald Reagan called The Crusader. I strongly recommend this book to you if you haven’t gotten it, if you haven’t read it. This book was released on July 17th of this year. Through one of my organizations we hosted Paul Kengor for a speech at the National Press Club on July 19th. The only major media reporter who showed up was Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who then wrote a story making fun of us, saying, “Hope the Mitt Romney campaign has nothing to do with these cranks!” This tends to be how they approach the issue: They try to ridicule us. Milbank had come to a conference we put on on this subject four years ago and said we were holding a “UFO convention”—I mean, “These are kooks, these are conspiracy theorists.” You know, these are typical tactics. Just make fun, don’t don’t talk about the facts, just ridicule. Here’s what Paul Kengor told me, and I got this from him two days ago, about his book. Quote, “I haven’t received a single media inquiry from anyone in the mainstream media.” We’re talking about, again, this book on Frank Marshall Davis, called The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor—[Kengor] says not a single media inquiry from anyone in the mainstream media, despite the book making the Top Ten on The New York Times Bestseller List and hitting Number One in non-fiction on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Quote, “Not one reporter from the mainstream media has bothered to contact me. This is proof that I have my facts right.” He says, “When you’re wrong they attack you.” Of course, sometimes they attack you even when you have the facts right—as they’ve done with us—but, he says, “They’ll do anything to protect Barack Obama, the truth be damned.”
You know, four years ago, Obama ran for election saying he was the son of a Kenyan goat herder, the Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama, and he has also said, though more recently, that he was born to a single mom. So what is it? Which is it? What’s the truth? Well, perhaps it’s neither. I just want to end by talking about a rather controversial film—I have some copies of this available—Dreams from My Real Father, by Joel Gilbert, which makes the point that Frank Marshall Davis was not only the mentor, but the real father of Barack Obama. Now, you may raise your eyebrows at that, but take a look at the film. Decide for yourself. What’s interesting about the reaction to this particular film is that—and let me get these handouts here—[Gilbert] went to USA Today and The Washington Post to run ads for his film. They both turned him down. They wouldn’t run the ads for his film, Dreams from My Real Father, but both papers did publish this ad, from pornographer Larry Flynt, offering $1 million to dig up dirt on Mitt Romney. Now, Gilbert, Joel Gilbert, the producer and director of the film, was able to get his ad in the New York Post, but it’s a struggle, again, not only to get the media to cover this, but to even get them to accept your paid advertising! Now, on a positive note, Joel Gilbert was able to get paid advertising for his film up on the Drudge Report, and you might say, “Well, so what? That’s what should happen—they should accept the ads, certainly on a so-called conservative Internet site.” But let me tell you, four years ago, when we were trying to publicize these FBI files and the story of who “Frank” really was, I went to Matt Drudge and tried to pay him $5,000 for advertising to publicize my findings. This was in August, 2008, and they turned us down cold. Said the ads were “too controversial.”
So, ladies and gentlemen, I hate to say, as Frank Gaffney said earlier, after his somewhat negative speech, “Does anyone want to slit their wrists?” There’s no need to do that because we are making progress, but we’re not making progress fast enough. It’s really been a struggle. We have a more dishonest and corrupt media, at this point in history, than I’ve ever seen in my more than 30 years in Washington, D.C.
Thank you very much.
ARONOFF: A couple of questions here for Cliff? Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Yes. One question about your 30 years in the media: Four years ago, was the other side having seminars like this, attacking Bush, or eight years ago, when he was running for re-election? Or is this something that is just so topical, because we have so many facts on our side that we can’t get out? What brought the question up: When you talked about how they consider us a bunch of Yahoos, but do they do the same thing on their side, thinking that they can’t get their message out against us?
KINCAID: I don’t think they have the same kind of gripes that we have because they are dominating the media, even with the proliferation of alternative news and information outlets. Plus, they have their own conspiracies, if you will, one of them being the JournoList conspiracy, where, it was later discovered, by Breitbart and The Daily Caller, that liberals in the media were actually coordinating, planning together how to prepare their stories. So I think what they do is simply use Soros-funded groups like Media Matters, and people like Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who attack us in advance in order to alert the media that, “Hey, don’t take those people seriously. You don’t want to be associated with them, do you?” And it gets so dishonest, but these people are not embarrassed by anything, because they are so committed to the reelection of Barack Obama. It’s an extraordinary situation that I’ve never seen this intense. We’ve always known about liberal media bias, but not to this extent, where they go out of their way to attack anybody who brings forth the facts about their favorite candidate. Did that answer your question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Would you speak to George Soros in that regard?
KINCAID: Well, let me just mention, real quickly, Soros is somebody who’s behind Media Matters; he’s given them a million or so dollars. Let me also mention something—I was short on time but I had it in my remarks, I should mention it, too—there’s an extraordinary thing happening soon with a Soros connection. Robert Redford, the filmmaker, has finished a film called The Company You Keep, which is about the Weather Underground. Basically, from what we can tell, based on the trailer and other advance reports, this is a film that glorifies the Weather Underground terrorists—though not by name, they don’t mention Bill Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn, but you get the drift—who went underground as part of their bombing campaign, and later surfaced, depicting these people as just idealists who wanted to end the Vietnam War. Of course they were hardcore Communists who supported the enemy killing American soldiers. This Redford movie is significant. Redford is associated with the Sundance Institute, which has gotten a lot of money from George Soros. When we found out about this film, the original release date was going to be during the third week of November and we thought, Well, they’re trying to wait until after the election, because of the obvious political significance or connotations. Now we’ve found out that they’re actually going to release this film, probably, in the U.S. in mid-October. I don’t understand their rationale, but it may give us a chance to revisit the issue of some of Obama’s other associates, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Why is it that Obama seems to hang around with the people who belong in jail? You ever notice that? So we’re working working with Larry Grathwohl, who’s a former FBI informant in the Weather Underground, and Tina Trent, who’s done a lot of research on our Soros Files website, to get out the truth about the Weather Underground—their campaigns of murder; their bombing; their murder of a policeman in San Francisco, Brian V. McDonnell, in 1970, in particular; and we’re going to be putting the heat on Redford and his ilk about what they’re planning to do in terms of whitewashing this terrorist organization. There’s a Soros connection there, too, as there is a Soros connection to so many activities and organizations on the Left.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: He should [unintelligible] with The New York Times, Time, Newsweek. He’s got relationships—I mean personally, he’s got so many people working, he’s got hundreds of people working—
KINCAID: Well, and he also—his people got Glenn Beck fired from Fox News.
AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Bribery? Intimidation?
KINCAID: Go to sorosfiles.com and you can get more on that.
ARONOFF: Okay, thank you.
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