Frankly Speaking…

In early 2008, after I had started looking into Obama’s background, I remember thinking, “Wow, as soon as the general public hears about this, it’s going to be curtains for this guy. There is no way! He’s unelectable!”

A case in point:  February of 2008,  Cliff Kincaid wrote a stunning piece for Accuracy in Media, Obama’s Communist Mentor.

Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had “some modest notoriety once,” was “a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago…” but was now “pushing eighty.” He writes about “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.

(For information on Obama’s Marxist activities at Occidental College, see this 6 part interview with former classmate [and former Marxist] Dr. John Drew, conducted on the B-Cast. Obama was already a committed Marxist by the time he started college, according to Drew.)

This “Frank” is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.”

That was the first time most of us in the conservative media had heard of him, although he had been on Trevor Loudon’s radar screen since March 2007, when he wrote   Obama’s Marxist Mentor. Some of us thought that it was a significant story that would have legs. Unfortunately many bloggers shied away from it because they didn’t want to be seen as “red-baiters”. The MSM had no interest in it, whatsoever. Including  Drudge:

Drudge Plays Role of Censor

While Obama’s far-left support seems to be worthy of news and comment, Matt Drudge of Drudge Report fame has just rejected two paid ads submitted by my group America’s Survival, Inc. about the influence that CPUSA member Davis exerted over a young Obama. The ads featured a photo of Davis and a communist hammer and sickle. They asked, “Who is this man?,” and urged viewers to click to “Meet the mysterious Red Mentor” so they could be directed to two reports on the subject. The ads were “too controversial,” Drudge’s representative told me.

A few lonely voices in the blogosphere pounded the story, though. I mentioned him here, included Davis in my Reds Who Support Obama post, and again Another Commie For Obamie.

At this point, some shill, who claimed to be Mark Davis,  the son of Frank Marshall Davis (on his OFA page), started commenting on my posts under the pseudonym, “Kaleokualoha”.

Kaleokualoha Says:

Every person of integrity will probably agree the slander and libel are wrong, especially when the target is a dead poet who cannot defend himself. Yet this is exactly what is happening. By defaming the character of my father, Frank Marshall Davis, and exaggerating his radical influence on Barack Obama in “Obama’s Communist Mentor” and other AIM reports, bloggers seek to portray Barack Obama as unworthy of becoming President of the United States. While there are legitimate concerns regarding every candidate, their disinformation regarding my father is especially heinous.

They vilify a dead poet who loved the United States, and who was more likely to teach random acts of kindness than disloyalty to young Barack Obama. They deliberately misrepresent the values Obama may have internalized through this relationship, in a transparent attempt to smear Obama’s character. Like weeds in a garden of truth, such disinformation must be removed at their roots. Unfortunately, their Internet brigade is very efficient at spreading this disinformation. Fortunately, their credibility can be destroyed in the eyes of people of integrity, through irrefutable proof of their deliberate misrepresentation.

Some of their most egregious misrepresentations are claims that Davis was a “lifelong member of the Communist Party USA,” and that he was a “Stalinist” because he “stayed with the Communist Party even after the Hitler-Stalin pact” of 1939, and that “his values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin.” These unprecedented claims were made AFTER the release of “Obama’s Communist Mentor,” suggesting they were either fabricated or discovered since February 2008. They should be challenged at their source: Cliff Kincaid (editor of Accuracy In Media in his “Media Excuse Obama’s False Advertising” column) and Bill Steigerwald, associate editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, in a 7 June 2008 interview (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/mostread/s_571431.html)

That’s only about half of one comment. He wrote several long-winded, obfuscating comments on different posts. Here’s part of another one from, AP Whitewashes the Frank Marshall Davis Story:

In June 2008, however, Kincaid starts the “Stalinist” falsehood (http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_571431.html). This is where Kincaid explains that he calls Davis a “Stalinist” because “he stayed with the CPUSA after the Hitler-Stalin pact” (1939). This contradicts Kincaid’s February 2008 column, which states Davis did not even JOIN the CPUSA until later. Obviously Davis could not have “stayed with” the CPUSA before he even joined the CPUSA. Obviously, Kincaid’s stated reason is invalid. Obviously, something else changed between February and June 2008, when Kincaid suddenly starts calling Davis a “Stalinist.” Davis suddenly became a “Stalinist” because Cliff Kincaid said so??

I doubt you will find any references to Davis being a “Stalinist” before Kincaid’s new label. Did the FBI or Congressional investigators consider him a “Stalinist”? I don’t think so!

The reason I bring this up is because I just finished reading yet another article in NRO, entitled, “Obama’s Communist Mentor by Paul Kenger, a researcher who, since the early 1990s, has “been absorbed with archives from the Soviet and Communist world — I’ve looked at every kind of declassified holding.”

In recent years, I’ve concentrated on an extraordinary cache of material from the Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA). This material is utterly damning to the American Left, especially in its vindication of the worst fears and warnings of anti-Communists. Not surprisingly, our illustrious “scholars” in the academy are studiously ignoring it.

Kenger has just written a 600 page book, called Dupes, which prominently features Frank Marshall Davis:

After an almost four-year-long sojourn in which I tried to ascertain whether Davis was a progressive duped by Communists, or, conversely, a Communist who duped progressives, I determined the latter. No doubt, this conclusion — which means the leader of the free world was strongly influenced by a Marxist — will bring the unholy wrath of liberals. Yet, they should brace themselves for another kind of anger. Once they read what Davis did and wrote, they might redirect their rage. In truth, Davis’s targets were mainly Democrats, and especially a Democratic icon, Harry Truman. What Davis said about Truman was unbelievably outrageous. Worse, he said it because it was the Moscow line.

***

With the help of two super-impressive researchers, including one living in Hawaii, I procured Davis’s weekly “Frank-ly Speaking” columns for the Record. These writings flawlessly parroted official Soviet propaganda and portrayed the likes of Harry Truman, George Marshall, and other courageous Democrats as colonialist-imperialist-fascist-racist monsters. Davis even denounced the Marshall Plan. As any student of this era knows, only the Soviet Union, via the public voices of Stalin and Molotov, took this absurd position.

In column after column, Davis claimed Truman craved not only a “third world war,” but to “rule Russia.” Davis said that Truman’s “fascism, American style” was motivated by an anti-Communism that was fueled by veiled racism. Davis repeatedly asserted that the Soviet Union not only desired peace — as Stalin seized Eastern Europe, while also killing tens of millions of his own people — but had abolished poverty, unemployment, and even racism.

Such examples from Davis are so voluminous that they constitute the longest chapter in my 600-plus-page book. Summarizing them here is impossible. But here are three telling examples.

The disgusting Stalinist propaganda Davis was spouting in these articles were written in 1950.

As someone who has long studied this period, I recognized Davis’s writing immediately as the crass propaganda pushed by Communists around the world at that time. Congress thought the same thing. Within only months of the appearance of these columns in the Honolulu Record, Davis’s name was appearing in investigations of the Communist movement. Eventually, in December 1956, he was called to testify before the U.S. Senate, where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment. In a Senate report in 1957 titled “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” Davis was plainly listed as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”

***

The real smoking gun, however, is Davis’s declassified 600-page FBI file, which was recently released through a freedom-of-information request by a fellow researcher. A cursory glance at these pages — which include accounts by informants and eyewitnesses — quickly reveals that Davis was a Communist. As evidence for readers, we have isolated and published about a dozen pages from the file in the appendix of my book, including one that lists Davis’s actual Communist-party number: 47544.

That number is consistent with those of the period. Consider the Communist-party numbers of some of the Hollywood Ten figures whom liberals laughably still defend as innocent lambs: John Howard Lawson (47275), Albert Maltz (47196), Alvah Bessie (46836).In sum, a mentor of the current president of the United States was a Communist — and not only a party member, but an actual propagandist for Stalin’s USSR, a man who unceasingly demonized Democratic presidents and their policies and cherished ideals. Even in World War II, Davis was on the wrong side: He was flatly pro-Soviet and anti-American.

You can read Kengor’s entire piece at NRO.

Okay, so it turns out, Kaleokualoha, that your dad was indeed, beyond a shadow of a doubt,  a card carrying, propagandizing Stalinist Commie.

The question is whether you are  a progressive duped by Communists, or, conversely, a Communist who duped progressives, (you sure as hell didn’t dupe me)

I’ve determined the latter.

Linked by Doug Ross, thanks