Barack Obama may be one of the most divisive presidents the U.S. has ever seen, presiding over an era that saw federal institutions weaponized, race relations crippled, and toxic identity politics become the dominant norm. Scott McKay (author of “The Revivalist Manifesto” and a contributing editor at The American Spectator) traces Obama’s political, personal, and ideological history, as well as the continuing sway he holds over the Democratic Party in particular, in his new book “Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama.”
Channeled through his usual witty and charming prose, McKay examines the 44th U.S. president’s childhood in Hawaii, his time as an urban Alinskyan community organizer, his meteoric rise to power in Chicago and federal politics, and his destructive presidency. Most conservatives recognize Obama as a staunch leftist, but McKay articulates the explicitly communist ideas that shaped Obama’s own worldview and unearths little-known or little-discussed historical facts that contextualize Obama’s radical ideology and “complete the puzzle” of his anti-American creed.
One of the book’s most startling revelations, according to McKay, is the high degree of influence card-carrying communist Frank Marshall Davis exercised over Obama’s ideological formation. “Racism, Revenge and Ruin” details how a young Barack Obama growing up in Hawaii was frequently taken to visit an elderly neighbor, the notorious Frank Marshall Davis.
As a young man, Davis had been active in Chicago and Atlanta, writing for and editing numerous left-wing newspapers and magazines, many of which espoused and promoted anti-white, anti-American ideas, casting the U.S. as an intrinsically racist colonial power. As a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), Davis operated pro-communist and even pro-Soviet newspapers and magazines after the end of World War II, earning him a spot on the FBI’s watchlists. In his autobiographical book “Livin’ the Blues,” Davis wrote, “I worked with all kinds of groups. I made no distinction between those labeled Communist, Socialist or merely liberal. My sole criterion was this: Are you with me in my determination to wipe out white supremacy?”
It was this radical ideology which a young Obama sat and soaked up on a weekly, almost a nightly basis in Honolulu, Hawaii. Speaking to The Washington Stand about his book, McKay said, “What’s clear is Frank Marshall Davis had a much larger role in Barack Obama’s development as a child in Hawaii than he lets on in ‘Dreams from My Father.’ But even within that, he’s allowing us to see that a good deal of his intellectual formation, philosophical underpinnings and so forth, doesn’t come from some Kenyan bureaucrat that he met one time.”
This resulted in a fundamentally communist basis for the 44th president’s worldview. McKay explained, “Barack Obama as president of the United States and as a post-presidential, amorphous leadership figure of some stripe that may or may not actually control the American government from his place in Kalorama is a product of the Communist Party U.S.A. of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.”
McKay also delves into Obama’s relationship with high-profile left-wing radicals. Bill Ayers is probably the best-known among these. As a founder of the far-left domestic terrorist organization The Weather Underground, Ayers dedicated his life and career to combatting what he saw as American imperialism, organizing the placing and detonating of bombs in public buildings throughout the 1960s and 70s. When running for president in 2008, Obama’s friendship with Ayers became a liability and he attempted to distance himself from the radical figure. Ayers contributed to the defense, claiming that he had never had a close friendship with Obama, the two merely moved in the same circles in Chicago. But McKay suggests that the two had a far closer relationship than either publicly admitted, even providing evidence to suggest that Ayers ghostwrote Obama’s autobiography “Dreams from My Father.”
Another radical influence on Obama was Saul Alinsky. Although Obama never met Alinsky, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago, Alinsky’s center of influence, implementing his radical principles and program. As McKay explains in his book, not many Americans were familiar with community organizing when Obama exploded on the national political scene — after all, the title is both innocuous and ambiguous. But community organizing as pioneered by Alinsky preaches and adheres to key tenets of division and conflict, effectively uniting minority groups with shared or common interests to wage war — whether political, social, cultural, or even physical — against a majority group labeled as oppressive, or even just in the way.
This destructive, divisive ideology became a hallmark of Obama’s presidency as he oversaw a rapid deterioration of race relations and an equally-rapid escalation of the prevalence of the LGBT agenda. According to McKay, the Obama administration tapped into fringe left-wing movements and “repurposed” issues like race and the LGBT agenda into what is today the sprawling woke movement.
“The genius of Obama — I guess the evil genius of Obama — was they were able to mobilize those resources … and put them into organizations that directly would affect that stuff which had never been done before,” McKay told TWS. “And certainly the Right wasn’t prepared for it. And it brought the … cultural battles to a scale that I think the country as a whole was not prepared for.”
“Racism, Revenge and Ruin” proves to be a crucial examination not only of what Obama did while in the White House, but of the anti-American ideologies that shaped him and how each can be found in his actions as president — and beyond. More than this, McKay’s book looks at the results of Obama’s presidency on the broader American culture and populace: the toxic partisanship and division, the rise of racial disharmony and subsequent nationwide race riots, the stranglehold that the LGBT lobby has taken on corporations and institutions, and the weaponization of government agencies and organizations — from local school boards all the way to the FBI.
Scott McKay’s “Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama” is available this week from Calamo Press.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
