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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
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INTRODUCTION
BY DINESH D’SOUZA
T his is a book unlike any other on Barack Obama. It is not the typical effusive book of apostolic praise, but neither is it a crude bashing of Obama. Rather, it is an effort to understand Obama, to discover what motivates him, and to formulate a theory that explains his actions in the White House. It offers a completely original theory for what drives Obama, and yet remarkably the theory is derived from Obama’s own autobiography and Obama’s own self-description. If you read this book, it will not only help you to understand Obama, it will also help you to predict what he is going to do next. I make three specific predictions in the last chapter, and in the twelve months following the book’s original hardcover publication, all three have already come to pass.
I wrote this book in two months in the summer of 2010. I have written ten books, and this is the first one that I have written in sixty days. But the central thesis came to me as a kind of epiphany, shortly after reading Obama’s Dreams from My Father and after discussing its ideas with my friend Bruce Schooley. I was struggling to reconcile Obama’s self-presentation as an African American with his father’s experience as an anti-colonialist from Kenya. How, I wondered, could the son’s experience and the father’s dream fit together? Then it hit me. The son’s account of his own experience was largely bogus. Obama never sat at a segregated lunch counter, and neither did any of his ancestors. He is not descended, as most African Americans are, from slaves. In fact, his accounts of prejudice in his autobiography are very slight and, it turns out, largely made up. In fact, the son’s formative experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya very closely track the anti-colonial journey of his father, and thus there is no conflict to be resolved. The son consciously chose to make himself in the image of his father, just as he tells us in his book.
So finally I had a theory to work with, and once I put on the anti-colonial spectacles, literally everything about Obama fell into place. Suddenly weird things that he was saying and doing started to make perfect sense. I saw that the broad sweep of Obama’s actions in the first two years of his presidency, from expanding the role of the government at home to shrinking the imprint of America’s role in the world, could now be fully explained. No, Obama wasn’t anti-American and he wasn’t a secret Muslim; within the framework of his ideology, he was doing things that he believed were good for America. But now I also could see why many people suspected him of being anti-American and a closet Muslim. From Obama’s ideological perspective, it was and is a good thing to shrink America’s global footprint, to cut America down to size, if you will. Obama views Muslims who are fighting against America in Iraq and Afghanistan as freedom-fighters, somewhat akin to Indians or Kenyans fighting to push out their British colonial occupier. So the beauty of my (or rather Obama’s) anti-colonial theory is that it makes sense of the facts in the world, facts that have eluded other comprehensive attempts to explain Obama.
When I finished the manuscript, I gave it to Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes , and asked him to read it and see what he thought. Right away he called me in to meet the senior editors, and together we agreed that I would write the cover story for the next issue. My article, “How He Thinks,” proved to be a sensation. The reason was that many business guys voted for Obama, hoping that he would govern like Bill Clinton. Now they were having buyer’s remorse. The prevailing idea was that Obama is clueless; Obama has never run a business and he doesn’t understand business. My argument was that Obama hates business. He is captive to an ideology that sees capitalism as a form of neocolonialism. Bringing down the rich and the big, bad corporations is the central
BY DINESH D’SOUZA
T his is a book unlike any other on Barack Obama. It is not the typical effusive book of apostolic praise, but neither is it a crude bashing of Obama. Rather, it is an effort to understand Obama, to discover what motivates him, and to formulate a theory that explains his actions in the White House. It offers a completely original theory for what drives Obama, and yet remarkably the theory is derived from Obama’s own autobiography and Obama’s own self-description. If you read this book, it will not only help you to understand Obama, it will also help you to predict what he is going to do next. I make three specific predictions in the last chapter, and in the twelve months following the book’s original hardcover publication, all three have already come to pass.
I wrote this book in two months in the summer of 2010. I have written ten books, and this is the first one that I have written in sixty days. But the central thesis came to me as a kind of epiphany, shortly after reading Obama’s Dreams from My Father and after discussing its ideas with my friend Bruce Schooley. I was struggling to reconcile Obama’s self-presentation as an African American with his father’s experience as an anti-colonialist from Kenya. How, I wondered, could the son’s experience and the father’s dream fit together? Then it hit me. The son’s account of his own experience was largely bogus. Obama never sat at a segregated lunch counter, and neither did any of his ancestors. He is not descended, as most African Americans are, from slaves. In fact, his accounts of prejudice in his autobiography are very slight and, it turns out, largely made up. In fact, the son’s formative experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya very closely track the anti-colonial journey of his father, and thus there is no conflict to be resolved. The son consciously chose to make himself in the image of his father, just as he tells us in his book.
So finally I had a theory to work with, and once I put on the anti-colonial spectacles, literally everything about Obama fell into place. Suddenly weird things that he was saying and doing started to make perfect sense. I saw that the broad sweep of Obama’s actions in the first two years of his presidency, from expanding the role of the government at home to shrinking the imprint of America’s role in the world, could now be fully explained. No, Obama wasn’t anti-American and he wasn’t a secret Muslim; within the framework of his ideology, he was doing things that he believed were good for America. But now I also could see why many people suspected him of being anti-American and a closet Muslim. From Obama’s ideological perspective, it was and is a good thing to shrink America’s global footprint, to cut America down to size, if you will. Obama views Muslims who are fighting against America in Iraq and Afghanistan as freedom-fighters, somewhat akin to Indians or Kenyans fighting to push out their British colonial occupier. So the beauty of my (or rather Obama’s) anti-colonial theory is that it makes sense of the facts in the world, facts that have eluded other comprehensive attempts to explain Obama.
When I finished the manuscript, I gave it to Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes , and asked him to read it and see what he thought. Right away he called me in to meet the senior editors, and together we agreed that I would write the cover story for the next issue. My article, “How He Thinks,” proved to be a sensation. The reason was that many business guys voted for Obama, hoping that he would govern like Bill Clinton. Now they were having buyer’s remorse. The prevailing idea was that Obama is clueless; Obama has never run a business and he doesn’t understand business. My argument was that Obama hates business. He is captive to an ideology that sees capitalism as a form of neocolonialism. Bringing down the rich and the big, bad corporations is the central
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