THERE'S NEVER BEEN A GREATER DANGER TO AMERICA THAN JOE BIDEN AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY!
A Modest Proposal to Defeat the Political Class
It’s time for a do-over.
Like you, I am tired of unkept promises and rampant special interests. Faith in government has never been lower. Patriotism is in short supply. I hear a countdown clock ticking off the remaining days of our grand experiment before it becomes ancient history.
Our political process has had the pungent stench of partisanship and self-dealing for too long. From the Chicago political machine to the White House Plumbers, from election shenanigans to measures undertaken in the name of a Covid-19 “emergency,” most Americans realize our political processes have been corrupted. Marxist policies and progressivism are layered over our old politics, further suppressing two of the most important identities Americans, regardless of political beliefs, have historically had in common—a strong sense of national unity, and a belief in the sacredness of the election process. (The death of free and fair elections comes with endless long voting).
Can’t we all agree that it is in our national interest to count the vote on election day? Who could be against that? (Massive voting by mail could be tied to the undoing of our country.) If they have nothing to hide, then why not fix this unnecessary and divisive fear for millions of us for the sake of national unity? This is the nexus for many conservatives who rightfully don’t trust Democrat marionettes, because we know there’s a puppet master behind the curtain.
But what are we going to do about our conclusions? Nothing? So where’s the deterrence for the next time, by another enemy? Mass murderers and those that deliberately weaken our country must face the consequences. Bidenomics is a sham; who is going to call him out on it? The MSM?
As previously discussed, the government no longer exists to serve we, the people, but rather itself. Unfortunately, the fox runs the hen house in D.C. So, as an American Thinker, I present to you a modest proposal: Let’s dump the Deep State. Let’s gut it and save our Republic. Such dramatic action would signal to all Americans that we have an irreconcilable crisis requiring drastic measures to fix. But how?
First, a couple of quick facts should remind us that America isn’t quite so familiar anymore, and there are American subversives afoot:
About seven million people have died globally from Covid-19, with almost 700 million more sickened. Given the broad debate on the origins of Covid, it grows increasingly clearer that the Wuhan Lab, and the Chinese military with support from our own country, are complicit.
The American middle class shrank due to government policies following the takeover of the economy during the pandemic era. This is entirely different than the issue of the disease itself and flies in the face of Biden’s claim that Bidenomics triumph—nearly half of Americans would have trouble coming up with $500 for an emergency.
On an average day, about 140 people die in the U.S. from fentanyl, more than from any other drug in history. Not limited to viral agents, China is also a culprit behind our fentanyl crisis. Precursor chemicals are made in China and sent to Mexican labs to be manufactured into fentanyl. The penalty for manufacturing and distributing most illicit drugs in China is death, while here, you get a clean needle or a shot of Narcan. China exports this killer to America to disrupt and distract our country. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, engaging in meaningless negotiations with China and somehow expecting our enemy to change its ways, is another symptom of our weakness. How many ministerial-level Chinese have ventured here, compared to the wave of high-level officials we have dispatched, hats in hand? Isn’t it obvious our strategy is wrong?
The Civil War saw “only” 500,000 dead. But, because it was a virus this time, we seem to treat this differently. Covid-19 was likely weaponized. Whether through accident or intent, it was an attack on our country. Try to prove me wrong. You can’t. Why? The Chinese won’t cooperate. In a civil trial, you only have to prove that the preponderance of evidence would make a reasonable person believe the assertion was true. I think we have exceeded that bar in the Covid-19 contention. China is responsible, just as President Trump stated.
Our government’s now almost complete control of our economy has led to the introduction of initiatives impossible without the extraordinary power it granted itself during the still ongoing pandemic emergency that unofficially continues. Unprecedented concepts such as the Green New Deal encompass everything from energy, population control, transfers of wealth, universal government, and even more Wokeness (if you can believe it). Through the coercion of financial institutions, major corporations, and local governments, and the initiation of a selected winners-and-losers economy have reordered our country without anyone voting to do so. We’ve seemingly been overthrown in a bloodless revolution. How many truly understand this? Worse, how many care enough to take ownership over the state of the nation?
Perhaps the most significant limitation any free country has is the ability to efficiently and reliably share an understanding of what’s true and what’s not. Our country is confused on a fundamental level as this or that authoritative-sounding person or group uses highly scripted and tested language to influence you to adopt their position. Freedom of speech is under attack in a manner and means few can fully comprehend. We must understand who is behind that speech, particularly when the government is said to be the assailant.
The answer is decentralization.
Why not move large parts of the government out of Washington, D.C.? We should demand from our federal legislators that entire departments be disbanded, such as the Department of Education, which interferes with how states decide to educate your children. We outgrew Washington, D.C., years ago—250 years of the Potomac two-step has mainly delivered a better-paid political class that considers itself superior to the rest of us. Mockingjay anyone?
Technology has eliminated the need for centralized government. Although many nominally work in D.C., many are still at home. That is all the proof you need. Time to spread around some of the largesse of working for the U.S. Career Civil Service, where the average employee makes $117,228 a year! That’s more money than the average entrepreneur earns who takes on risk and invests hard work, all without guarantees. Yet, many (not all) federal workers take their jobs as a right.
The numbers are overwhelming: 364,000 federal employees “work” in the District of Columbia. Hundreds of thousands more lawyers, lobbyists, contractors, and others there aim to figure out how to game the system in a client’s favor; frequently successfully!
Countless minds have attempted to figure out how to undo this abomination, and yet, here we are. But, things can be done to limit federal influence, and that starts with decentralization, just as the Founders envisioned. Restricting the revolving door arrangement between government and the bureaucratic political employment that fosters out-of-control spending and minimizes the value we receive for our money, must happen.
There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. What’s your favorite way to save the Republic?
God Bless America!
Allan J. Feifer—Patriot, Author, Businessman, and Thinker. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.
Federal Data Shows 2 Million+ Foreign Grads in U.S. White-Collar Jobs
President Joe Biden’s deputies are hiding a huge and growing population of at least 2 million foreign white-collar contract workers in the U.S. jobs needed by U.S. graduates and their families.
“Americans should be outraged that the federal government is not disclosing the number of long-term, so-called ‘temporary’ workers who are here,” Jessica Vaughn, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. She continued:
It almost seems as if the government’s actually trying to hide it from the public because these statistics are reported in such an opaque way and some of these numbers are never reported. You have to resort to detective work to figure out how many foreign workers are actually here.
The laws, regulations, and loopholes effectively allow U.S. companies to import are many foreign white-collar workers as they want, for as long as they want. This reality means that CEOs can easily import more foreign workers to prevent any rise in U.S. salaries.
For example, the U.S. economy is shedding white-collar jobs, but lobbyists and journalists are pushing “labor shortage” claims for new jobs in government-funded chip factories in the Midwest. So far, Republican senators have blocked industry efforts to expand the flow of foreign workers into those factories.
The State Department’s incomplete data reviewed by Breitbart News shows a population of at least 1.5 million foreign workers in U.S. white-collar jobs. That huge population is the output from almost two years of American business, healthcare, and STEM graduates, and it allows major U.S. investors to hold down salaries and minimize the ability of U.S. graduates to enforce professional standards for quality and security.
“We have seen how it dilutes the clout of American workers because employers will either replace Americans who are doing certain kinds of work… and they can threaten to do so,” Vaughan said, adding:
It puts them in a weaker position with respect to their employment because they become afraid to complain because they don’t want to be replaced, right? They just shut up and keep their nose down.
The huge inflow also skews the geography of wealth, she said. The foreign workers “are not evenly scattered across the economy,” Vaughan said. “They’re concentrated in certain sectors that have figured out how to manipulate the visa system — technology, physical therapy, accounting … [and] university science,” she said.
The inflow has also helped suppress the salaries of U.S. college graduates since the 1970s. For example, the inflation-adjusted hourly salary earned by U.S. graduates of four-year colleges has inched up from $32.21 in 1990 to $41.60 in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That’s an annual growth of just 0.9 percent, even as the cost of housing, education, and healthcare have climbed far faster.
Bloomberg.com reported in January:
In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.
Starting salaries for U.S. computer experts are also falling, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported in February: “The average starting salary for bachelor’s degree graduates studying computer science is expected to fall by 4.0% compared to a year ago.”
Most visa workers will work for lower salaries than American graduates. That is rational because any job in the United States is often better than a decent job in their home country. Moreover, CEOs know they can dangle the government subsidy of green cards and citizenship — easily worth $1 million — to extract the long hours of labor that they cannot extract from American graduates.
The hidden army of foreign white-collar workers mostly threatens new American graduates. The Wall Street Journal reported in March:
Jim Fish, chief executive of Waste Management Inc., described the situation this way: “We can’t hire a truck driver to drive a trash truck for $90,000 in Houston, Texas, but I can hire an M.B.A. from a small school for $60,000, and I can get them all day long.”
National Center for Education Statistics
The salaries lost by U.S. graduates have been mostly diverted to profits and stock values. For example, a group of economists estimated in 2021 that President Donald Trump’s short-lived 2020 curbs on corporate use of additional H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.”
Roughly 30 million Americans hold jobs in the healthcare, computer, engineering, science, or financial sectors. Many of these American professionals are swing voters, yet few politicians talk about the visa worker programs that take their wealth, careers, and jobs. Presidnet Joe Biden’s “approval among college grads slipped to 48%-42% in July from 52%-40% in June and 55%-37% in May,” Investors.com reported in July.
Numbers
The scale of the white-collar workforce inflow in 2022 is revealed by a State Department document. The document shows the number of 2022 work visas awarded to many categories of foreign graduates.
Breitbart News added the annual inflow of uncapped E-2, H-1B, H4, J-1, L-1, O-1, and TN visas, to show roughly 543,000 arrivals in 2022.
Most white-collar arrivals are allowed to stay and work for several years. For example, H-1B graduates can stay for three years, so the total number of working H-1Bs in the United States should be about 550.000. The E-2 managers can stay for five years, so the 2022 inflow of 50,000 arrivals suggests a resident population of 225,000. The L-1 visas can stay up to years, prompting a 2021 population of an estimated of almost 340,000 workers.
Overall, the 543,000 arrivals in 2022 suggest a resident population of 1.5 million white-collar workers, not counting the workers’ spouses and children, and not counting the many workers who have converted their temporary visas into green cards.
But many temporary workers can stay forever once their employers file a request for a green card. This wait-and-work population of visa workers has reached 700,000, according to a 2022 report by the pro-migration Cato Institute.
The State Department, however, does not manage the Optional Practical Training or the Curricular Practical Training work programs. In 2022, those two programs provided work permits to an additional workforce of roughly 350,000 foreign graduates, including many working in Fortune 500 jobs. Many additional students take jobs within universities, such as in university laboratories.
The data also excludes the inflow of TN workers from Canada. This loophole allows Canadians — including recent immigrants — to get approval at the U.S. border to take a wide variety of jobs via a little-recognized section of the NAFTA treaty.
The department’s data also excludes the number of migrants who take white-collar jobs after overstaying their visas. Those numbers are difficult to track because the federal data does not hide white-collar overstays from blue-collar overstays. But the 2022 overstay report shows that officials allowed 50,000 foreign graduates and short-term workers in 2022 — such as H-1Bs workers — to overstay their visas.
The State Department also does not track the number of people who take white-collar jobs after arriving with B-1/B-2 visitor visas.
However, Breitbart News has learned from U.S. professionals and from Indian visa workers that many Indian graduates enter as tourists to get jobs in the layers of subcontractors working for Fortune 500 companies. Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security largely ignore this large population of white-collar illegals, even when their employers are exposed.
City Journal reported in May 2023:
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers authorize most foreign tourists who arrive with B1/B2 visas for a six-month stay, and some can legally extend their stays for up to 18 months. They can’t work legally, but many work anyway …
It’s also legal for foreign “tourists” to come here and interview for jobs. If they find one, their employer can file an adjustment-of-visa-status request for them. The bottom line is that the U.S. is likely the only Western country where one can arrive as a tourist and never go home—all legally.
Many companies, particularly those that can’t capture as many H-1B visas as they want, send employees here with B1/B2 visas, claiming that they’re here for training when in fact they work here. The government doesn’t have the manpower to investigate what foreign employees on B1/B2 visas actually do when they set foot in offices.
President Joe Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has tried to grow the population of foreign white-collar contract workers. For example, he expanded the J-1 program to let companies — not just universities — employ J-1 visa workers.
He has also twice expanded the OPT program to let companies hire foreign child psychologists, landscapers, accountants, and many other categories of white-collar workers.
He accelerated the award of work permits to the spouses of L-1 white-collar workers and E-2 managers. Many of the beneficiaries then take white-collar jobs alongside their spouses but are not included in the state department’s account.
Mayorkas also discarded the 2020 reforms of the H-1B program that would have opened up more starter jobs to American graduates.
The vast majority of the imported white-collar visa workers are lower-skilled migrants who are slotted into the career-starter jobs needed by young U.S. graduates. In many cases, foreign workers use the Internet to hire very cheap home-country experts who can do their daily workload in the United States — even when they are working with private data.
Without starter jobs, many American graduates are sidelined into lower-pay, low-promotion jobs while foreign workers are promoted via kickbacks and ethnic hiring networks. For example, a 2021 study by the Census Bureau reported:
The vast majority (62%) of college-educated workers who majored in a STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] field were employed in non-STEM fields such as non-STEM management, law, education, social work, accounting or counseling. In addition, 10% of STEM college graduates worked in STEM-related occupations such as health care.
The path to STEM jobs for non-STEM majors was narrow. Only a few STEM-related majors (7%) and non-STEM majors (6%) ultimately ended up in STEM occupations.
Some of the OPT and J-1 white-collar workers do not take jobs, or get sidetracked into menial jobs, such as in a dog-food factory.
The total inflow of blue-collar visa workers is also huge — and even more difficult to track.
They arrive via the H-2B seasonal program for about 120,000 workers, the uncapped H-2A program for agriculture workers, and the J-1 program for seasonal workers.
Many white-collar E-2 foreign managers also import blue-collar workers via various illegal routes. These home-country illegal workers allow the E-2 managers to profitably operate their franchise hotels, 7-Eleven stores, and other retail outlets — while also paying high franchise fees to the investor-owned companies that own the brand names.
Worse, the State Department data shows about 1.2 million active “border crossing cards.” They allow people who live in Mexico to work in U.S. jobs within 75 miles of the border. In 2020 Reuters reported:
While such B1/B2 “border crossing cards” are officially recreational, Reuters spoke to nearly two dozen residents of Tijuana, Nogales and Ciudad Juarez who use their cards to reach jobs or to care for relatives on the U.S. side of the frontier.
All said they could no longer make the crossing, dealing another blow to businesses already suffering from shutdowns on the U.S. side of the border, including vital industries like agriculture.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without money. I’m just waiting for a miracle,” said 28-year-old Rosario Cruz, a mother of two young children who works for a cleaning company that subcontracts with major retailers in California.
“We have no idea how those cards are being used because [the government] doesn’t track them,” said Vaughan.
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries, reduces beneficial trade, and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
Analysis conducted last year reveal that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania
By failures of border security, a lack of the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States and huge numbers of visas for high tech workers, the lives and livelihoods of Americans and their children, are being stolen by America’s corrupt political elite who are doing the bidding of those who provide them with huge “Campaign Contributions” (Orwellian euphemism for bribes) pursue legislation that is diametrically opposed to the best interests of America and Americans.
MICHAEL CUTLER
NLRB Complaint: Google and Accenture Violated Labor Laws by Laying Off Contractors Who Voted to Unionize
Google parent company Alphabet and Accenture are facing allegations of violating labor laws, after about 80 Google Help subcontractors who recently voted to unionize were laid off. The workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that claims the layoffs were in retaliation for the union vote.
Engadget reports that around 80 Google Help subcontractors who recently voted to unionize were fired, prompting accusations that Alphabet and Accenture violated labor laws. The Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA) has filed a complaint with the NLRB, claiming the layoffs are retaliatory and in violation of labor laws.
Google walkout protest (Bryan R. Smith/Getty)
“When my coworkers and I announced our union with overwhelming support, Google and Accenture management refused to acknowledge us,” said general writer at Accenture and Google, Anjail Muhammad. “A few short weeks later they announced their response — that they would be laying off dozens of employees. These jobs aren’t going away though, we’re just being asked to train our replacements abroad.”
The team, primarily involved in content creation, will be reduced from 130 people to around 40. They were reportedly instructed to train replacements working from India and the Philippines.
Alphabet’s response to the situation has been to distance itself from the issue, stating that “Google does not control [the contractor’s] employment terms or working conditions” and that the situation was “a matter between them and their employer, Accenture.” The company further added that the layoffs were for savings and efficiency and no other reason, and that it “chooses its partners and staffing agencies carefully and reviews their compliance with its Supplier Code of Conduct.”
The situation has raised significant questions about the rights and protections of contract workers, especially in the tech industry, where the majority of Google’s employees have been contractors since 2018.
“We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections,” said senior writer and union member Julia Nagatsu Granstrom.
“If it’s Accenture and Google’s goal to demoralize us, they have failed,” said Casey Padron, a general writer on the team scheduled to lose her job in August. “We are more united than ever and will continue to fight for this job that so many of us love and rely on.”
Read more at Engadget here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
What Biographer Garrow Missed in His Obama Takedown
On August 2, two days before Barack Obama’s reported sixty-second birthday, the Jewish journal Tablet published an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian David Garrow.
Asking the questions and providing extensive commentary of his own was the well-traveled journalist David Samuels. Although Garrow is a progressive and Samuels something of a centrist, their evaluation of Obama’s tenure in the White House borders on cruel.
The exchange between the two deserves to be read in full. Rather than summarize that exchange, I will focus on a few key truths, both those they nailed and those that squirmed away. Most intriguing in the latter category are the questions about Obama’s literary talents and about his birth. Garrow’s opinion matters. His 2017 bio, Rising Star. The Making of Barack Obama, is easily the boldest and most accurate of the Obama biographies.
One thing Garrow and Samuels get right is their take on Obama as president. Says Garrow, “I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency.” On the subject of race relations, Garrow does not equivocate: “There’s no question in anybody’s mind, that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure.”
If anything, Samuels was harsher. Once a “fan” of Obama, Samuels slams his legacy: “America’s emerging oligarchy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate.” Says Samuels, “It all happened with Obama in the White House,” a man he derisively labels, “the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex.”
Both Samuels and Garrow lament as well the demise of American journalism. Writes Samuels in his introduction, “Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.”
At the same time the media were turning a blind eye to Obama, says Samuels, they spent years “broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin.” One symptom of this fantasy was the ready acceptance of the Steele dossier, packaged and sold on Obama’s watch. “From the get-go,” says Garrow, “I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap.”
Obsessed with Trump and still smitten by Obama, the Washington press corps failed, says Samuels, “to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.” He believes that Obama is still the man in charge. He points out that Obama’s continued residence in D.C. is an historical first for an ex-president. Then too, “large parts of White House policymaking” belong to Obama in that they’re “staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him.”
More than once, Samuels looks to Garrow for affirmation on this point, but Garrow resists. He knows Obama too well. “The number one thing about Barack this past five years is how completely he’s vanished,” says Garrow. He describes Obama as “lazy” and adds, “He has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution… And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant.”
Here, I tend to agree with Garrow. Obama is not a serious man, never was, more the Hirohito of the imperial left than a Tojo. Garrow calls Obama “hollow.” He paraphrases an intermediary who claimed “Barack once said to him that the only two things he wanted were a valet and an airplane.” Even Samuels cannot dismiss the possibility that Obama might very well be little more than a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire.”
To the surprise of many readers, the two reporters ventured into several journalistic no-go zones, one of which being Obama’s sexual orientation. Garrow speaks candidly about a letter in which the young Obama “repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.”
As Garrow reports in the paperback version of Rising Star, Obama wrote to girlfriend Alex McNear that he viewed gay sex as “an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life.” Obama continued, “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination. My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so.”
In researching my 2020 book, Unmasking Obama, I reached out to Garrow for an explanation as to why this passage appeared in the paperback but not in the original. As Garrow told me and as he relates in the interview, he was able to access the original only after McNear sold her letters to Emory University.
Obama’s flirtation with homosexuality, perhaps ongoing, should have been big news when Garrow revealed these letters five years ago. Like so many details of Obama’s life, however, the media have obliged Obama by suppressing an inconvenient story line.
When alleged former lover and drug buddy, Larry Sinclair, planned a press conference in 2008, some leftist bloggers launched a petition drive to deny Sinclair a stage at the National Press Club. Others succeeded in getting Sinclair arrested by reporting him to authorities for an outstanding warrant. The mainstream media ignored the story altogether.
In their conversation, Samuels and Garrow dance around another touchy subject, the unreality of Obama’s literary genius. Samuels, for instance, describes Obama’s letters to Alex McNear as “poorly written.” He says of Dreams, however, “The whole book’s really good.”
Arguably, the letters are the best part of Obama’s clunky pre-Dreams oeuvre, such as it was. His one great solo effort, an 1800-word piece on nuclear disarmament as a senior at Columbia, rivals Michelle’s misbegotten Princeton thesis for sheer awfulness.
No paper trail traces Obama’s rise from sophomoric student writer to literary star. In their conversation, neither Samuels nor Garrow addresses its absence. As a way of self-protection, Obama guards his journals as zealously as he has his LSAT scores. “He doesn’t want the writerliness challenged,” Garrows tells Samuels. “It’s my story and I’m sticking to it. The book is so fictionalized. It’s so inaccurate.”
On the right, this comes as old news. In an October 2008 American Thinker article, “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father,” I made the same point -- Dreams was in no small part fabricated. In this same American Thinker article, I introduced another likelihood, namely that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers played a major role in the crafting of Dreams.
Ayers was a fabricator as well. He called his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, a “memory book,” one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama learned from his mentor.
In writing my own recently published memoir, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I felt no need to invent incidents, create composite characters, or shift timelines to make my point. That’s not postmodernism. That’s fraud. So is plagiarism. In his chapter on Kenya, Obama freely pilfered words, phrases, and even events from Kuki Gallman’s 1994 memoir, African Nights. Garrow does not get into this, either in the conversation with Samuels or in his book.
By October 2008, the textual evidence for Ayers’s involvement in Dreams was strong. By the time of my 2011 book, Deconstructing Obama, it was overwhelming. In the interim, the apolitical mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s role 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, with book deadline looming, found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” he “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with family and friends, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”
In Rising Star, Garrow put a lie to Obama’s famous 2008 campaign canard that Ayers was just another guy in the neighborhood. According to Garrow, Barack and Michelle attended “almost nightly dinners” with Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, along with PLO supporter Rashidi Khalidi and his wife Mona. These dinners continued up until the time Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Garrow, however, has blinded himself to Ayers’s role in the composition of Dreams. Ayers is a skilled writer and editor. In his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi gave credit where due. "First, chronologically and in other ways comes Bill Ayers,” he wrote in the acknowledgements section. As a radical with tenure, Khalidi could afford to give Ayers the public strokes an aspiring politician could not.
For all his virtues Garrow shares a flaw common to nearly all mainstream journalists, namely the failure to take seriously information generated by the conservative media. In Rising Star, Garrow fails to cite my Ayers-Obama thesis, even to discredit it. Christopher Andersen gets no mention in the text at all. He and I are relegated to the footnotes. Mine involves a poem that Obama wrote in college called “Pop.” Garrow writes, “Most commentators presumed that Obama had written about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis.”
Among the friendly commentators was New Yorker editor David Remnick. In his 2010 Obama biography, The Bridge, Remnick claims the poem “clearly reflects Obama’s relationship with his grandfather Stanley Dunham.” No, the poem is not about “Gramps.” It clearly reflects the young Obama’s inappropriate relationship with “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, a pornographer, and a man Obama and his pals called “Pop.”
Garrow implies the poem is about Davis, but he attributes that interpretation to unnamed “hostile critics.” In the footnotes, he identifies those critics as Paul Kengor, a Davis biographer and now the editor of the American Spectator, and yours truly, adding parenthetically, “someone who is cited with the greatest reluctance.” Ouch!
Remnick was meaner still. In The Bridge, he dismisses my theory about Ayers as “a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit,” calling it a “racist insinuation,” one with a “particularly ugly pedigree.” The Obama fanboys never weary of attributing racism to his critics. It remains the best way to silence high profile conservatives with careers to protect.
Remnick, I should add, made a complete botch of Obama’s first few years. In a book self-published before the 2008 election, conservative journalist Michael Patrick Leahy successfully deconstructed the sham romance that propped up, in Remnick’s words, Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.”
These details were manufactured by Obama and his family and spread mindlessly by the likes of Remnick. Not until Garrow confirmed baby Obama’s fatherless first year in Seattle did anyone in the mainstream media get the story straight.
Not surprisingly, the touchiest of all subjects with Obama was the Kenyan Barack Obama. The attorney assigned to help protect Obama’s literary legacy, Bob Bauer, told Garrow before the first of his three off-the-record interviews with the president, “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.”
Bauer, a top gun from the Democrats’ go-to law firm, Perkins Coie, led the legal fight during the 2008 campaign against Democrat attorney Philip Berg. Berg had petitioned to see Obama’s birth certificate. With that suit successfully quashed, Bauer was appointed White House counsel.
“I never paid much attention to birtherism for a large chunk of time, but I know I thought that they were making a mistake by not putting the actual birth certificate out there,” says Garrow unprompted. “And I think, in retrospect, there’s no question that it was horrific political malpractice not to put the birth certificate out there ASAP.”
“Why didn’t they?” Samuels asks. Responds Garrow unconvincingly, “Because Barack was so deeply contemptuous.” Samuels offers an even less convincing explanation as to why Obama might have invested so much time and resources in so gratuitous an act of resistance. If Garrow asked Bauer for clarity, his answer does not appear in this admittedly edited interview. Bauer was in a position to know.
“Finally I decided I’d had enough,” Obama writes of Donald Trump’s challenge in his 2020 memoir, A Promised Land. “I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office.” Bauer dispatched Obama’s personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, to secure two copies of the long form birth certificate.
Obama went live on national TV in late April 2011 to address the birth certificate issue. The timing was strategic. Planning was well underway for the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Less than a week after the announcement, Osama bin Laden was killed, and the “birther” controversy was deep-sixed along with him.
It should be noted that the same law firm that retrieved the birth certificate commissioned the “crap” Steele dossier. For the record, Trump never said Obama was born in Kenya. He merely said Obama was hiding something. I believe he was, not the state of his birth, but the date of his birth, and that’s a story for another day.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.
