“My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya,” Illinois State Senator Barack Obama said in his July 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. “He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.”

As Michael Corleone would say, it was the kind of story people might like. Its sole source was the speaker’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father, published in 1995 and 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.

“We have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union—a black man and white woman, and African and an American, at face value,” Obama explained. “As a result, people have a hard time taking me at face value.”

Obama normally goes by Barry and was in fact Barry Soetoro, stepson of the Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, whom his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry speaks of “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny.” Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from writing a widely publicized book about his life.

Obama’s supposed Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr., was born in 1934 and arrived at the University of Hawaii in 1959. According to Dreams, Obama’s father was the university’s first African student, “studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration and graduated in three years at the top of his class.” He also

helped organize 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 she bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.

Beyond the cover, Dreams From My Father has no photos, no index, and no endnotes or footnotes. The Kenyan father quickly becomes a nameless “Old Man.” 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 father is the happy-drunk poet “Frank,” one of several characters identified only by first name. Frank instructs Barry as he heads for Occidental College. By all indications, Barry never considered attending the University of Hawaii in the footsteps of the brilliant Kenyan who bequeathed the American his name. That would have been quite a story for local media, but it was not to be.  

Barry, newly dubbed Barack Obama, rode his biographical narrative into Columbia, Harvard, and into politics. Later editions of Dreams include his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote, adding that the Kenyan grandfather was “a domestic servant to the British.” That year, the former Barry Soetoro was elected to the U.S. Senate with his eye on the Big Prize: the presidency.

In 2008, the Hillary Clinton campaign circulated a rumor that Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to run for president. In response, anyone critical of the Illinois senator’s background was smeared as a “birther” and also accused of racism. The birther charge also served as a diversion from the real issue: the identity of Obama’s real father. These issues failed to get the attention they deserved, and on Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president, promising a fundamental transformation of the United States of America.

But, by 2012, Grove City College professor Paul Kengor had identified the mysterious “Frank” and profiled him at great length. The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor revealed the African American Davis as a Communist Party member and ardent supporter of the Soviet Union. That earned Davis a spot on the FBI’s security index. As Kengor discovered, the political views of Davis and Obama were quite similar.

Documentary filmmaker Joel Gilbert unearthed another level of Obama’s connection with Davis. His film Dreams From My Real Father contended that Davis, a pornographer and Hawaii resident since the late 1940s, was Obama’s actual father. The timeline of their lives supports this conclusion and Obama and Davis share similar physical and speech patterns. In 2015, Gilbert asked Malik Obama, Barack Obama, Sr.’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.

In 2012, Republican candidate Mitt Romney made no use of these strategic materials, ran a horrible campaign, and, like John McCain, wound up a loser. One year later, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York discovered a trove of materials on Barack Obama, Sr., who had become a prop in the presidential narrative. In all his writing and documents from 1958 to 1964, Barack Obama, Sr. mentions nothing about an American wife and son.

The New York Times report on the Schomberg finding showed photos of Barack Obama, Sr., who did not share a resemblance with his alleged son. The president, with that stubborn desire to protect himself from scrutiny, declined to read the materials and served out his second term with no challenge from the establishment media. In 2017, his founding narrative would face another challenge from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Garrow. On page 538 of his massive 2017 biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Garrow writes:

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 in the original]

Garrow missed the passages plagiarized from I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann. In African Nights, Gallmann and company “camped in the area of Narok, one of the main centers of the proud Maasai tribe.” In Dreams From My Father, the American travels to Narok, “a small trading town where we stopped for gas and lunch.”

In African Nights and I Dreamed of Africa, the reader finds “the ink-black of Arap Langat” and “the ink-black darkness” where fish are approaching. Under a slate sky lies the “ink-black turmoil of the ocean.” Dreams of My Father speaks of “ink-black stairwells” and “tall ink-black Luos and short brown Kikuyus.” In Kenya, men “dive into inky-black waters.” And so on, with other passages that are too similar to be accidental.

On the other hand, Garrow was all over Frank Marshall Davis, whose “Communist background plus his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive.” A president whose father was a Stalinist pornographer and Soviet agent is not going to play well, even with Democrats. If one doubts those charges, check out Davis’s memoir Sex Rebel: Black, written under the pseudonym Bob Greene.

Obama could have simply changed his name in the style of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) or Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (Hubert Gerold Brown), but he opted to claim he was the actual son of Barack Obama, Sr., while paying tribute in his autobiography to his real father, Frank, disguised as a kind of Grady Wilson character from Sanford and Son.

Garrow also discovered that Barry fantasized about making love to men and that his girlfriend Genevieve Cook called him a “pompous jive.” It’s no wonder the composite identity he created had strong disagreements with Garrow’s account.

“He wants people to believe his story,” Garrow told David Samuels in an interview at Tablet last year. “For me to conclude that Dreams From My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.”

Garrow and Samuels, both 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,” Garrow said. And as for Obama, “he’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

They also disagreed with Obama’s attempt to normalize trade relations with Cuba’s Stalinist regime. “I also found the Cuba thing deeply puzzling and offensive,” Garrow told Samuels. “It’s a f—–g dictatorship that imprisons all sorts of truly progressive, creative people.”

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 for Obama’s Iran policy is 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 principal author is likely “Obama’s narrator,” David Axelrod. In Believer: My Forty Years in Politics, published in 2015, Axelrod explains, “I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories.” Alexrod’s Believer betrays the same elephantine, hagiographical style found in Dreams From My Father. Missing from Alexrod’s account is “Frank,” who also disappeared from the audio version of Dreams. 

Davis also fails to show up in Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and everything else in the Obama brand, even the books attributed to Michelle Obama, whose college thesis, according to Christopher Hitchens, “wasn’t written in any known language.” The Stalinist Davis, who died on July 26, 1987, is also missing from Obama’s 2020 memoir A Promised Land, with only a single mention of Dreams From My Father.

On April 13, 2021, Kezia Obama passed away at the age of 81. She married Barack Obama, Sr., in 1956 and was still married to him when the Kenyan attended the University of Hawaii. Newsweek reported that Obama Sr. later married the American Ann Dunham, but in all his documents from 1958 to 1965, Barack Obama had not a word to say about Ann Dunham or an American son born in Hawaii in 1961. According to coincidence theorists, this is nothing but pure happenstance and of no possible significance.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, the same year Dreams From My Father hit the shelves. The book should have been quickly outed as fiction, but it was accepted as an authentic autobiography. This is what happens when journalists and scholars abandon their critical faculties and act as cheerleaders for politicians, a dynamic Julien Benda described in La Trahison des Clercs.

For David Samuels, the real problem is the former president himself. “There was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now,” Samuels said.

If the fictional character “Barack Obama” wanted to come clean, he would show up at this year’s Democratic National Convention, 20 years after his gala debut, and say something like this:

My real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the United States Communist Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, whose all-white dictatorship he served faithfully for most of his life. I loved Frank dearly, but he was politically radioactive, so I stole the identity of a dead Kenyan named Obama, who became a key prop in my fictional life story. I served two terms and named Hillary Clinton as my successor. When she failed, I helped to deploy the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department against Donald Trump.

We tapped my faithful vice president, Joe Biden, to run against him, and with mail-in ballots plus time-tested voter fraud tactics, we were able to push him over the line. Joe has always been a dim bulb, so I continued to run the country from behind the scenes. The disaster you see now is the fundamentally transformed America I promised, and that will continue under the candidate we pick to run in November.

If we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that this country will realize the dream of my real father. Thank you, and God bless you.