Unmasking Obama

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-64293-445-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-446-5

Unmasking Obama:

The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency

© 2020 by Jack Cashill

All Rights Reserved

Cover design by Joel Gilbert

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press, LLC

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Dedicated to my fellow Lilliputians

Table of Contents

Prologue: Michael Cohen Calling 

The Front Man 

Scandal Free 

The Home Front 

The Red Front 

The Black Front 

The Rainbow Front 

The Brown Front 

The Green Front 

The Pink Front 

The Crescent Front 

The Eastern Front 

Epilogue 

Acknowledgments 

Endnotes 

Prologue:

Michael Cohen Calling

In the spring of 2011, I received a call from a fellow named Michael Cohen. I did not recognize the name. Nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number. He explained that he was the attorney for Donald Trump—I did recognize that name—and he wanted to know what I knew about Barack O bama’s origins.

I would occasionally get calls like this from people of a higher pay grade than mine. Ever since I first started questioning the authorship of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, I had become something of a conduit between what I have come to think of as the conservative samizdat on the one hand and the responsible right on the other.

In Russian, samizdat means self-publishing. During the Soviet era, samizdat referred to the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. I use samizdat as shorthand for an alternative conservative media composed of what one Second Amendment blogger aptly called a coalition of willing Lilliputians.¹ In truth, those in the American samizdat run few risks beyond public shaming and perhaps job loss. For American citizen journalists on the right, the gulag is not an active worry, at least not for most of us—pace, Jerry Corsi—at least not yet.

During the Obama years, the conservative samizdat of blogs, public forums, news aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch challenged the left—and, occasionally, the responsible right—for control of the Obama narrative. The internet gave the samizdat unprecedented reportorial power, and social media, Facebook and Twitter most prominently, gave us an ability to distribute our message in ways Soviet dissidents could only imagine.

Every Lilliputian who dug up a useful fact and shared it on Facebook enlisted in the coalition of the willing. I got to know many such people. Aiding me in my Ayers-Obama research, for instance, were a half-dozen amateur sleuths from around the world, the two most helpful being the owner of a small Nebraska construction company and the caretaker of a Colorado ski resort. Volunteers did not need a law degree or a PhD. Heck, they didn’t need a GED. All they needed was common sense and a nose for the truth. In the only slightly repositioned words of Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, the struggle was our glasnost versus their glasnost.²

To keep damaging revelations out of the public square, a counterinsurgency emerged on the left parallel to the samizdat. These well-funded, internet-savvy shock troops had no larger goal than to suppress the information conservatives gathered or hoped to gather. This cohort included media watchdogs such as Media Matters for America, extremist monitors, most notably the Southern Poverty Law Center, various fact-checking operations, and a wide range of left-leaning online publications, some more reckless than others.

Watching these activists go about their business, I was reminded of a scene in Ray Bradbury’s 1951 dystopian sci-fi classic, Fahrenheit 451. In the way of background, 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns. In the novel, the state employs firemen to burn paper lest the few civilians who care about books avail themselves of information the state does not want them to have. Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them? a young woman asks her friend. The friend tells her she has been misinformed. Strange, she answers. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.³

Years ago, young journalists aspired to gather information and spread it. During the Obama era, however, the firemen on the left, like those in Bradbury’s novel, aspired to destroy inconvenient information before it could spread. At the risk of sounding sexist, I will use the term firemen both in homage to Bradbury and in recognition that men take to this dirty work with more relish than women. Every book burner I identify herein is male.

The firemen had numerous ways of protecting the Obama presidency: defaming opposition journalists, mocking their work, exposing their past sins, trivializing their information, and twisting their facts, among others. At the amateur level, firemen routinely subverted the Wikipedia pages of perceived opponents, wrote one-star book reviews of their work on Amazon, and trolled the comment sections of conservative journals. Former CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson saw the mission shift up close. After Watergate, she writes, few would have predicted today’s dynamic in which some journalists view their job not as questioning the powers that be, but undermining those who report on the powers that be.⁴

Many of the salaried firemen lived in the same world as their mainstream colleagues. They attended the same universities, hung out in the same bars, and occasionally slept in the same beds. More than a few would leave the firehouse for a desk in a major media newsroom. Among those who made this move was wunderkind Ezra Klein. As a twenty-two-year-old, Klein launched an online meeting space called JournoList in which bloggers on the counterinsurgent left like himself could communicate with major figures in the media.

In its first reporting on JournoList in March 2009, Politico described it as a site where left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics could compare notes and swap story ideas. Despite the many high-profile people who participated, Politico noted ingenuously, JList itself has received almost no attention from the media.⁵ This would change, but by that time, the twenty-five-year-old Klein was writing for the Washington Post.

The firemen took the samizdat more seriously than did many responsible conservative journalists. To the right’s tactical disadvantage, its better-connected writers and producers at the National Review, Washington Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and Fox News worked to keep their distance from their irregular allies. There was no JournoList on the right, nothing like it.

Editors at the flagship publication of the responsible right, the National Review, have ventured warily through the media minefield since the publication’s founding in 1955. This strategic caution became obvious in 1960 when NR condemned the less responsible John Birch Society. Rationalized an editor in an internal memo, We can’t afford to jeopardize the grudging status we’ve earned in the liberal community.⁶ Not to deny the dazzling National Review founder William Buckley his due, but Buckley established a modus operandi that has endured to this day throughout the responsible right.

During the Obama years, National Review editor Rich Lowry never stopped worrying about the status the liberal community begrudged his publication. As Lowry once noted, Mr. Buckley’s first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.⁷

In September 2008, when I stumbled onto the likelihood that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers was Obama’s muse, I almost wished I hadn’t. I knew what I was in for. I was about to become a kook, a racist kook at that. Allow me to cite my own case here as an example of the way the media forces aligned themselves during the Obama years.

Although not inclined to say so out loud, at least a few people on the responsible right trusted my judgment. From time to time, individuals would quietly call to confirm or deny a rumor about Obama. I suspect one of them referred me to Cohen. I told Cohen I followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance. I knew no more than anyone else. I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship issue. Although Obama claimed to have written his acclaimed memoir by himself, he definitely had help, much of it from Bill Ayers. This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.

Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Andersen’s sources in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and hopelessly blocked. At Michelle’s urging, Obama sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers. What attracted the Obamas were Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer as evident in his 1993 book, To Teach.⁸ Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.

My conversation with Cohen reaffirmed that Trump was the un-Obama, a creature of his own creation: crude, bombastic, and as subtle as a truck bomb. Unlike most on the right, Trump refused to be intimidated. He was eager and ready to vet the nation’s first unvetted president. On April 15, 2011, Sean Hannity of Fox News gave him the opportunity.

I heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard, said Trump in his inimitably artless style. He wrote a book that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person.

You suspect Bill Ayers? said Hannity.

I said, Bill Ayers wrote the book, Trump replied.

Trump had made the claim earlier in a public forum. He doubled down on Hannity’s show. For all the outrage about Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, the mainstream media (MSM) were noticeably silent about Trump’s much more tangible challenge to Obama’s literary skills. As was their wont, the firemen noticed and filed away Trump’s astounding racist projections for another day,⁹ but at the time, there was negligible pushback to Trump’s remarks about Dreams.

The mainstream media were equally silent about Andersen’s revelations. Indeed, at least fifty publications reviewed Andersen’s book, and not a one mentioned the six pages he spent on the book’s most newsworthy revelation. Relentless Obama defender Chris Matthews interviewed Andersen on MSNBC’s Hardball and did not address the authorship issue. Said Matthews at the end of the interview, You’re amazing, successful guy. You have a winning streak here.¹⁰ If Matthews did not read the book, which is likely, someone on his staff surely must have but chose not to notice the damning Ayers revelation. The MSM have been silent on this issue not because they think Trump was wrong, but because they think he might have been right. Contrary information frightens them.

The election was still in play that September. By late in that month, I had gathered enough evidence to make a strong public case for my thesis, but I needed a lot of words to make it and ideally some high-profile space to put those words. After much back and forth, Human Events passed on my research. True to form, the National Review editors did too, as did those at the American Spectator. The Fox News producers showed some interest, but the suits blanched.

The managing editor of the Weekly Standard, who had earlier published several of my articles, sent me to the magazine’s literary editor. His response nicely reflected the widespread fecklessness that allowed Obama to win the 2008 election: An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice. (Also, we had a long, rather critical, piece on Obama’s oeuvre not too long ago.) So permit me to decline with thanks for allowing me to take a look. The kind of editors who would use a word like oeuvre in the heat of an election proved themselves so responsibly disdainful of Donald Trump in 2016 that they oeuvred themselves out of business.

Through some combination of naiveté and courage, the genuinely responsible writer and attorney Andy McCarthy came to my defense in National Review Online. McCarthy called my analysis of Obama’s Dreams thorough, thoughtful and alarming—particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.¹¹

The liberal community quickly pounced on McCarthy and the National Review. In the Atlantic, then fireman and now mainstream darling Ta-Nehisi Coates took the first swipe at McCarthy. He extracted one of his quotes in my defense and introduced it with the barb, How desperate can it get? This desperate.¹² The Atlantic added another quick review that began thusly, At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill’s argument and proves himself to be an idiot.¹³

These exchanges took place a month before the 2008 election. New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick later observed about my theory and McCarthy’s endorsement, "if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, [it] could have been the end of [Obama’s] candidacy."¹⁴ Having acknowledged the samizdat as a force, Remnick attempted to negate its power through ridicule and outright contempt. Although he demeaned many of Obama’s critics, he reserved what neoconservative scholar Ron Radosh called his most extensive and nasty comments for me.¹⁵ In his Obama biography, The Bridge, Remnick introduces me as a little-known conservative writer, magazine editor, and former talk-radio-show host.¹⁶ The little known part speaks for itself. The talk-radio-show detail is code for not to be taken seriously. Radosh, whom I do not know at all, introduced me a shade more accurately: "Cashill has solid bona fide academic credentials. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University, and [is] author of a respected book on American intellectuals, Hoodwinked."

Remnick then reviews my theory that Ayers played a major role in the writing of Dreams from My Father by cherry-picking the least significant evidence and overlooking the most compelling. My theory, he insists, would have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit¹⁷ had not more influential conservative voices echoed it. True to form, Remnick makes no effort to find some hole in my argument. He simply attacks me personally and concludes, as Radosh noted, by playing the race card in an absurd way. Remnick would play that card until the spots wore off, explaining for the naive that mine was a racist insinuation, one with a particularly ugly pedigree.

There was a price to be paid for criticizing Obama. Everyone on the responsible right understood this. I am told McCarthy caught heat internally for jeopardizing National Review’s grudging status among liberals. What I know for sure is that the link from Coates’s article to McCarthy’s goes nowhere. I suspect McCarthy’s review was scrubbed almost immediately. I was unaware of it until I read Remnick’s attack on it two years later. In the final month of the campaign, no one on the responsible right would give me change for a dollar.

What made Trump’s entry into the public square so memorable in 2011 was that he showed no concern about his status with liberals or the responsible right, grudging or otherwise. He bulled right in. Race had little, if anything, to do with his appeal. Boldness had everything to do with it. Although Trump’s impact on the Obama presidency was minimal in 2011, he showed what a force he could be should he ever become president. To preserve their own version of events, as shall be seen, Obama and his allies would go to unprecedented lengths.

During the Obama years, an asymmetrical war was waged for control of that critical first draft of American history. There is no fair way to record that history without first acknowledging the war. The field of battle shaped up as follows: on the right, the samizdat and the responsible right, occasionally working together, often working at odds; on the left, the mainstream media, the social media giants, Hollywood, Broadway, the federal bureaucracies, the national security apparatus, and the ubiquitous firemen, amateur and professional. Rarely at odds, these forces routinely worked together to amplify what Obama adviser Ben Rhodes called the White House’s messaging campaign.

If push came to shove, the left had the most powerful ally of all in its corner, the U.S. government, particularly Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and a politicized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At least five of the truth tellers profiled herein were arrested for their efforts. Several more were harassed or threatened or subpoenaed by the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and unknown others. A few expressed reluctance in going on the record for fear of further retaliation.

Money, resources, and power overwhelmingly favored the left, but the right had the equalizer on its side—the facts. By book’s end, this dichotomy will not seem simplistic. From the moment of Obama’s emergence in 2004, journalists, mainstream and left, have relentlessly disgraced their profession and betrayed the American people. The histories they write will not be worth reading.

The Front Man

W e quickly settled on him, wrote John Kerry of Barack Obama. Kerry and his advisers had selected Obama to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was an easy decision—a clean slate, someone fresh who could articulate a new vision, someone who wa s unexpected. ¹

In reality, Obama’s slate was anything but clean in 2004. Knowing little about the man, Kerry and other Democrats preferred to imagine Obama as pure and noble, much as they imagined themselves. In the years ahead, court historians and Obama’s everyday enablers in the mainstream media refused to cloud the Democrats’ imagination. They deferred instead to team Obama and allowed his handlers to fashion an image of their man that best suited their purposes. Unfortunately for history’s sake, that image warred with reality, not only in regard to Obama’s objectives and accomplishments, but also in regard to his style and his very soul. In hindsight, it is remarkable how enthusiastically our nation’s elites—political, academic, tech, media—could conspire to twice elect a man president they understood so little.

They failed to understand the reality of the Obama presidency in part because of their failure to understand the political transformation that occurred during Obama’s tenure in the White House. Liberalism, as understood in the post-war era, died on Obama’s watch. Replacing it was progressivism. This was much more than a casual rebranding. If liberals could envision a harmonious future, benign and paternal, orderly and safe, progressives could not. Progressive, in fact, represents the rare bit of leftist nomenclature not cushioned by euphemism. At the risk of tautology, progressives progress. Like the sharks of our imagination, they move forward or they die. If liberals are to have any relevance, they follow, however uneasily, in the shark’s wake.

In its current permutation, American progressivism is fundamentally improvisational and anti-intellectual. American progressives owe less to cultural Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School, or even Karl Marx himself than they do to activists such as Alfred Kinsey, Gloria Steinem, and Jesse Jackson.

In the post-Soviet era, with no one hand guiding the international left, American progressives have moved forward on numerous fronts: black, brown, green, feminist, LGBT, Islamic, globalist, and socialist. Despite all the talk of external manipulation from the likes, say, of a George Soros, the evolution of these movements has been largely organic with the civil rights movement serving as paradigm. Almost always intentionally, these movements eroded the power of traditional institutions—church and family, local governments, and private businesses—and consolidated it in the federal government and judiciary.

Barack Obama led none of the left’s movements, but he enabled them all. He was supremely positioned to do so. Born to an African Marxist father with Muslim roots and a progressive American mother, Obama learned from leftist mentors throughout his life and sampled a wide range of socialist causes before finding himself, like a turtle on a fence post, keynoting the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Once on stage, Obama was able to turn the nation’s racial guilt against friend and foe alike, immunizing himself in the process against meaningful criticism.

Obama’s bourgeois lifestyle and cool demeanor made him all the more effective as a front man for a movement that had grown increasingly strident, even punitive. He was prepared to sell what he lacked the stomach to lead. For eight years, he would serve as the nation’s conscience-in-chief, assigning liberal doses of shame to those who defied America’s promised transformation, and encouragement to those who promoted it.

Given his origins and his education, there was no front in the progressive march through the institutions that Barack Obama could not credibly represent. His timing was excellent. Intersectionality was emerging on the left as more than just a buzzword. In theory, intersectionality meant that marginalized groups shared common oppressors and thus had common political interests. Schooled in street-level Critical Theory, activists from various fronts were forging alliances with those in other fronts who also saw themselves as oppressed. These activists, whether they knew it or not, would be expected to subordinate their own interests to the larger progressive cause—seizing and sustaining national power. Obama managed this entente well. Arguably his most useful contribution to the leftist cause was to shepherd the fractious coalition partners more or less along the same path.

The emotional force that held the movement together was a shared contempt for the enemy. Movement leaders showed less interest in celebrating the many colors of their multicultural rainbow than they did in punishing those who resisted the celebration. On Obama’s watch, and occasionally at his urging, progressives found common cause in imputing hatred to others—hatred of blacks, of gays, of transgenders, of immigrants, of Muslims, of women, of poor people, even, yes, of mother earth. If hate defined America’s deplorables, love and justice defined the good. A calculus this delusional would ultimately prove to be unsustainable, not to mention unmarketable.

The media helped pave the high road of good intentions. By the early 1960s, the mainstream media were prepared to accommodate leftward thrusts that did not put too much pressure on the Overton window—the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. By the end of that decade, in all but the largest cities, one newspaper stood unchallenged. There were but three major television news networks, all in New York and Washington, two news magazines of significance, and three newspapers with national clout. Newsrooms everywhere had begun to skew left, even their sports departments, but gently at first and not without internal opposition.

As leftists consolidated their power in universities, journalism schools included, newsrooms shifted leftwards with each new graduating class. For a variety of reasons too complex to explain in this space, the internet accelerated the shift. By 2008, conservatives had almost no voice in any newsroom of significance other than those of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Given license by the media, progressive activists felt comfortable in making claims that they knew would go unchallenged regarding all manner of presumed problems: global warming, wage gaps, hate crimes, sex crimes, AIDS, police brutality, gender differences, income distribution, homelessness, illegal immigration, and discrimination of all sorts. Narratives were constructed around strategic omissions and half-truths, and movements were built on narratives.

The victim in these narratives—most narratives had at least one—was inevitably some marginalized person or group; the culprit some privileged branch of corporate and/or conservative America. This strategy was more Sharptonian than Gramscian, more pop culture than Critical Theory. In Obama, this evolving Hydra-headed movement found the perfect front man to represent its many, often conflicting, interests. As a clean slate, at least from the media’s perspective, a multiracial, international charmer like Obama could be all things to all people.

Never has a president-elect entered the White House with higher expectations. Indeed, within weeks of his inauguration, Obama would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. None of his Democratic predecessors, not FDR, not even JFK, enjoyed a major media as agreeably one-sided as he did. Throughout Obama’s tenure, and with his support, leftist elites attempted to suppress criticism of the president, his policies, and progressive causes in general. As Angelo Codevilla has observed, these elites presided over nearly all federal, and state, government bureaucracies, over the media, the educational establishment, and major corporations.² They did not like, nor expect, to lose. Their control of the academies, the social media giants, and the major media outlets was very nearly monolithic.

Codevilla, perhaps the shrewdest observer of the contemporary left, contends that progressives today struggle not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real.³ For all of Obama’s control of the media during his tenure, the samizdat remained beyond his reach. Its irregular journalists routinely threatened to expose what Codevilla called "the gap between political correctness and reality." And working as many did on their own dime and on their own time, they had neither careers nor pensions to protect. There was power in that independence.

Scandal Free

I am proud of the fact that we will—knock on wood—leave this administration without significant scandal, said Barack Obama near the end of his second and last term in office. ¹ The use of the word significant scarcely dimmed the wattage of this boast. Obama quickly added, In terms of just abiding by the rules and norms and keeping trust with the American people, I will put this administration against any administration in history. Two years later, Obama felt free to repeat the claim, telling a tech audience, I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about. ²

Obama was not alone in thinking his administration was uniquely unblemished. Prominent media gatekeepers had been encouraging him to think along these lines for years. In 2011, Jonathan Alter headlined a Bloomberg story, The Obama Miracle, a White House Free of Scandal.³ In 2014, New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick thought it a huge achievement that there’s been no scandal, major scandal, in this administration, which is a rare thing in an administration.⁴ In 2016, New York Times columnist David Brooks insisted the Obama administration was not just scandal free, but remarkably scandal-free.⁵

A CNN discussion on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration showed how likely it was that fake news would soon become fake history. He is almost unimpeachable, said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. He has governed with such honesty and integrity, and he’s not only leaving with that 60 percent [approval rating] we keep talking, but a growing reputation. And the legacy of having eight scandal-free years is going to look larger and larger in history.⁶

The saying goes that a scandal is not a scandal until the New York Times calls it a scandal on the front page, and