Big Intel by J. Michael Waller

Author:J. Michael Waller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2024-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Barry to Barack

Davis prepared Obama well. In college, Obama embraced his African patrimony, stopped calling himself Barry, and went by his African given name, Barack, which had been the name of his father. He confirmed in a post-presidential memoir that at Occidental College he studied Marx and other Communist writers, including, he said, Herbert Marcuse. He downplayed it all, saying in A Promised Land that he read Marxist works as a way of picking up girls.9

In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote that his college circle of friends was “the more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.… At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Frantz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.”10 In other words, Obama spent his college not just reading about Marx but hanging out with Communist faculty and passing evenings with friends discussing and embracing the fundamental elements of critical race theory. It wasn’t about picking up girls. It defined his intellectual life, such that it was.

Frantz Fanon was an Afro-French radical from Martinique who based his anti-imperialist views on his childhood and experience in the Free French forces in the Caribbean and Algeria during World War II. He popularized the Soviet-backed Algerian fight against France and became a prominent Marxist and exponent of critical race theory.11 He was a strong philosophical influence on the domestic guerrilla warfare strategy of the 1960s Black Panthers under Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael.

In that sense Obama found Fanon as an intellectual extension of his father figure in Hawaii. Fanon and Davis both viewed their respective countries, and Western culture at large, as irredeemably racist. Davis, as young Obama’s “surrogate father,” equated imperialism not with history or ideology or economics but with white supremacy.12

By the end of college, Obama had steeped himself in Frankfurt School philosophy. Obama claimed that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was “my favorite philosopher.”13

Niebuhr was a fellow traveler of the relocated Frankfurt School in New York, but not a Communist. The Fellowship of Socialist Christians, which he helped found, claimed Christianity and capitalism were incompatible.

After college Obama dabbled in the financial industry, then ditched it to train as a community organizer. He moved to Chicago to seek his political fortune. He got engaged to Michelle Robinson, who worked as an aide to Valerie Bowman Jarrett, deputy chief of staff to the powerful Mayor Richard Daley. The Obamas and Jarrett would remain a close trio of friends.

Obama’s favorite philosopher enchanted another future American leader a few years younger. As president, Obama would choose that Niebuhr-infused individual to run the FBI.14

His name was James Comey.

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