At a recent talk at the book store Politics & Prose, leftist Mother Jones journalist David Corn made the claim that conservatives have embraced radicalism in a way that liberals have not. “There’s no example that you can give me,” Corn announced, “of a high-ranking Democrat — a president, presidential candidate, a national Democratic leader — who embraces something like the Tea Party: a conspiratorial, paranoid, racist-driven force. It just doesn’t exist.”
Corn’s analysis is a perfect example of the way liberalism whitewashes its own past and its present connections with socialism and communism. After all, one of the most racist, conspiratorial, paranoid, and violent movements over the last century has been communism, and some of the foremost supporters of that movement have been American liberals, including high-ranking Democrats.
Before getting to liberalism’s communist ties, it’s worth noting that Corn played a key role in disseminating the debunked Steele dossier, a central part of the Russiagate hoax. Corn was the first reporter to write about the dossier, reporting on its contents without even the slightest hint of speculation, of course.
He has since been taken to the woodshed for this by the Washington Post. The Post’s Erik Wemple noted that Corn was selective about what he published concerning the dossier, running with unproven stories and then playing down the fact that the dossier all turned out to be garbage. Wemple wrote: “When the dossier’s allegations were fresh and sexy and unvetted, in other words, they were suitable for inclusion in Mother Jones. Once they were vetted and found wanting, however, they lost their appeal.”
Wemple asked Corn whether Corn could point “to a story where he laid out [Inspector General Michael] Horowitz’s damning conclusions about the dossier.” Corn gave a slippery answer, and Wemple blasted him: “Very articulate, very specious — and 100% hogwash. Why not make a ‘priority’ of telling readers that the dossier at the heart of that long-ago pre-election story lies in tatters within an FBI spreadsheet?”
The answer is simple: because the Left censors anything that might hurt its cause. This is why it yells and screams about conservatism’s supposedly incipient fascism — or, as President Joe Biden put it, “semi-fascism” — while ignoring the fact that former President Barack Obama was once tight with radical and violent extremists.
In 1995, for example, then-community activist Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Twenty-five years prior, Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted; Ayers was not.
Ayers, a leader of the violent group the Weather Underground, is not sorry, telling the New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Then there’s Frank Marshall Davis. Davis was a mentor to a young and fatherless Barack Obama. Davis was also a hardcore member of the communist party. As Paul Kengor writes in his fascinating book The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, Obama was a young man in Hawaii during the 1970s when he “repeatedly sought the counsel of a Hawaiian man named Frank Marshall Davis, whom he first met in 1970 through his maternal grandfather.” Obama’s grandfather “had sought out Davis as a mentor for his grandson, a black-male role model/father figure that the young Obama was lacking.”
“I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama in Dreams From My Father, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.” Davis offered Obama advice on race, college, women, and, as Kengor notes, “on the very notion of what Davis himself called ‘fundamental change.’” In his memoirs, Obama features 22 direct references to “Frank” by name. Kengor explains: “When Obama arrived in Chicago” to pursue a career in politics, “just as Frank Marshall Davis himself had once done in the 1930s,” Obama “literally visualized Davis, pictured him.”
Davis joined Communist Party USA in Chicago during World War II and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Communist Party paper there, the Chicago Star. Davis left Chicago in 1948 for Hawaii, where he would write for the party newspaper there as well, the Honolulu Record. According to Kengor, “those writings reveal a man fully loyal to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party line, and often bare an uncanny resemblance to Obama’s own rhetoric, whether Davis was bashing Wall Street, big oil, big banks, corporate executives and their ‘excess profits’ and ‘greed’ and their ‘fat contracts,’ the wealthy and ‘millionaires,’ GOP tax cuts that ‘spare the rich,’ and on and on.”
In the 2005 audiobook version of Obama’s Dreams From My Father, all references to Frank Marshall Davis have been scrubbed.
The Communist also reveals the 2022 Left’s love of communism, from Nancy Pelosi’s adoration of International Longshore and Warehouse Union chief Harry Bridges (and a member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA) and the ties of Obama and now Biden-insiders Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod to many of the same American communists who were allies and collaborators of Frank Marshall Davis. And I haven’t even mentioned the open socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), whom the Democratic Socialists of America call “DSA’s foremost socialist superstar.”
“History compels us towards reckonings,” David Corn announced at his talk.
To see just what kind of reckoning he and the rest of the amnesiac Left has in store for us, read Darkness at Noon, The Gulag Archipelago, Witness by Whittaker Chambers — or my forthcoming book, The Devil’s Triangle.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
