[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Twenty years ago, the Democrats held their national convention in Boston and their pick to deliver the keynote address was Illinois senator Barack Obama. On July 27, 2004, the 42-year-old stepped to the podium and said:  

On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

Many in the audience, and all across the land, had never heard a story quite like that. The source was the senator’s 1995 Dreams from My Father, billed as “a story of race and inheritance.” The cover bore the senator’s photo, between pictures of a black woman and child on the left and a white soldier and small girl on the right. In the early going, the author gave readers cause to wonder.

“We have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union – a black man and white woman, an African and an American, at face value,” the author explains. “As a result, people have a hard time taking me at face value.”  The author is normally addressed as Barry, and was in fact Barry Soetoro, stepson of Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry speaks of “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny,” but went ahead with the book project.

The Kenyan Barack Obama was born in 1934 and in 1954 married Kezia Aoko, who bore him two children. Barack and Kezia were still married when the Kenyan arrived at the University of Hawaii in 1959. According to Dreams from My Father, the university’s first African student, graduated at top of his class and organized the International Students Association, “of which he became the first president.” In a Russian language course, “he met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love. The girl’s parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married, and he bore then a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.”

The author’s white grandfather, known as “Gramps,” might say the Kenyan looks like Nat King Cole, but the book bears no photo of the African, so readers can’t compare. Beyond the cover, Dreams from My Father has no photos, no index, and no endnotes or footnotes. The Kenyan quickly becomes a nameless “Old Man,” and as the author explains, “my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop – an alien with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl – but a prop nonetheless.”

Getting more attention than the Kenyan prop is a black poet named “Frank,” one of several characters identified only by first name. Frank instructs Barry as he is about to head for Occidental College. By all indications, Barry never considered attending the University of Hawaii in the footsteps of the Kenyan who bequeathed the American his name.  The newly minted Barack Obama rides the narrative into Columbia, Harvard, and into politics. Later editions of Dreams include the 2004 keynote address, adding that the Kenyan grandfather was “a domestic servant to the British.” That same year, the former Barry Soetoro was elected to the U.S. Senate, a stepping stone to the presidency.

Former First Lady Hillary Clinton also sought that office and in 2008 her campaign circulated a rumor that the Illinois senator had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to run for president. Anyone critical of the Illinois Senator was then smeared as a “birther,” and of course any criticism of the candidate could only flow from racism.  On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president, promising to fundamentally transform the United States of America. That task would require a second term but by 2012 the identity of “Frank” had been revealed.

Grove City College professor Paul Kengor released The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. The African American Davis was a Communist Party member and ardent supporter of the Soviet Union’s all-white dictatorship, which earned Davis a spot on the FBI’s security index. As Kengor discovered, the political views of Davis, and Obama were quite similar. Documentarian Joel Gilbert took the resemblance to another level.

Dreams from My Real Father contended that Davis, a Hawaii resident since the late 1940s and an active pornographer, author of Sex Rebel: Black, was Obama’s actual father. The physical and speech similarities are truly remarkable, and in 2015 Gilbert asked Malik Obama, the Kenyan’s eldest son, if he saw any resemblance between the president and Frank Marshall Davis. “There’s a great resemblance,” said Malik, who was willing to take a DNA test. Malik also said he didn’t know what he would do if the president turned out to be “a fraud and a con.”

In 2012, Republican candidate Mitt Romney made no use of these strategic materials, ran a horrible campaign, and like John McCain in 2008 wound up a loser. One year later, news surfaced on the Kenyan foreign student who became a prop in someone else’s narrative.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York discovered a trove of materials from the Kenyan Barack Obama. As it turned out, in all his writing and documents from 1958 to 1964, the Kenyan mentions nothing about an American wife and son. The president declined to read the materials, and served out his second term with no challenge from the establishment media. His founding narrative would soon face another challenge from Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrowauthor of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. As Garrow explains:

Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself. (emphasis original)

Garrow missed the passages plagiarized from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann. On the other hand, Garrow was all over Frank Marshall Davis, whose “Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.”

Barry could have simply adopted an African name in the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)  or Hubert Gerold “Rap” Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), but he opted to claim he was the actual son of the Kenyan while paying tribute to Frank Marshall Davis, disguised in Dreams as kind of Grady Wilson character from “Sanford and Son.” The  composite character set up shop in Chicago, where Frank made his mark, and the Communist gave Barry instant street cred.

Garrow also discovered that Barry fantasized about making love to men, and that girlfriend Genevieve Cook called him a “pompous jive.” So no surprise that the composite character had strong disagreements with Garrow’s account.

“He wants people to believe his story, “For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” That was Garrow to David Samuels in “The Obama Factor” on Tablet last August. The two liberals also had problems with the composite character’s policies.

“I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud,” said Garrow. And as for Obama, “he’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.” A normal politician or human being might not put time back on the clock for Cuba’s Stalinist regime.

“I also found the Cuba thing deeply puzzling and offensive,” Garrow told Samuels. “It’s a fucking dictatorship that imprisons all sorts of truly progressive, creative people.” And the Pulitzer Prize winner wasn’t done. 

“I do find the Iran deal offensive and puzzling,” Garrow said. “I mean, it’s an explicitly anti-Semitic state.” For Samuels, the easy explanation was that “Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House.”

Samuels detected a section of Dreams from My Father lifted from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In the style of Communist hack jobs, the book betrays the hand of several writers but the principle author is likely “Obama’s narrator” David Axelrod. InBeliever: My Forty Years in Politics, published in 2015, Axelrod says, “I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories,” than running ads. Believer betrays the same elephantine, hagiographical style. Missing from the account is “Frank,” who vanished from the audio version of Dreams from My Father.  

Davis also fails to show up in The Audacity of Hope and everything else in the Obama brand, even the books attributed to Michelle Obama. The Stalinist Davis, who died in 1987, is also missing from Obama’s A Promised Land, released in November of 2020, with only a single mention of Dreams from My Father, the narrative based on the Kenyan “prop” who bequeathed his name to the American. The following year, the Kenyan’s wife joined the family plot. 

On April 13, 2021, Kezia Obama passed away in England at the age of 81. The establishment media had forgotten that in all his written materials from 1958 to 1965, Barack Obama had nothing to say about Ann Dunham or an American son born in Hawaii in 1961. According to coincidence theorists, that is all happenstance, and of no possible significance.

Dreams from My Father should have been quickly outed as a roman à clef, but was accepted as authentic autobiography. This is what happens when scholars and journalists abandon their critical faculties and act as cheerleaders for politicians, a dynamic Julian Benda described in La Trahison des Clercs. For David Samuels, the real problem is the author himself.

“There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president,” Samuels told Garrow, “that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” That disaster is the fictional character’s promised land, and things have come full circle. 

“We stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us,” the Illinois senator told the DNC in 2004. “Out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.”