“It’s a front-row seat to history, no matter where you are,” the Obamas promised everyone coming to the opening of their grim towering $850 million Obama Presidential Center. But much like Barack Obama’s famously cynical slogan, “we are the ones we have been waiting for”, some had actual front row seats to the Obama post-history while others were out back.
Most of the three thousand or so people who flocked to serve as human props for the official opening of the massively ugly addition to the Chicago skyline were forced to squat in camp chairs on the dying grass of what remained of a once beloved neighborhood park, burning in the hot sun, while their betters, politicians and celebrities, watched the spectacle up close.
Media reporting spent a good deal of time spotting celebrities in the VIP section. There was a sprightly Tom Hanks in sunglasses, there was Oprah, on her fortieth diet, and girlfriend Gayle King, and LA Mayor Karen Bass who had to return home after Los Angeles burned again which seems to happen every time she leaves town.
And then again there were the people who actually mattered, who had made Obama and the era of radicalism he brought into national politics, happen.
“Dig it!” the old woman in the third row of the Obama Presidential Center, had once gloated over the brutal murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
“Kill all the rich people,” the old man wearing the Communist ‘red star’ had defined his radical movement. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases.
“We want to find a way to turn toward each other again,” Barack Obama claimed, insisting that he stood for the traditional American values of “fairness and common sense and mutual respect.”
But what he actually stood for was sitting in the third row and wearing the Communist star. The media didn’t even believe that Obama’s mentor getting a front row seat to the opening of his presidential center while wearing the symbol of a movement responsible for the mass murder of millions mattered.
Bill Ayers was pretty clear about what Obama represented. “The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a black nationalist minister, none of that s___ worked,” Ayers told the one reporter who stopped him to chat.
It wasn’t the suckers in the camp chairs on the lawn still pining for the vanished Obama charm in between ‘No Kings’ rallies and New York Times op-eds and Wordle puzzles who had the ‘front row seat to history’ promised by the Obama Presidential Center, but Ayers, whose alum had served two terms in the White House and whose other alum was the LA mayor.
Ayers had bragged about sending members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. Former Rep. Karen Bass had gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. That Castroite connection had reportedly caused the Biden team to turn her down for the VP slot that eventually went to Kamala, but she still took over Los Angeles.
None of this is the story that was told by the Obamas, their political allies or the media. But that political narrative in which the Obamas represented the best of America, bringing us together before Trump tore us apart, is just more propaganda.
The Weathermen were a murderous Marxist terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the United States. After they realized that planting bombs wouldn’t work, they turned to politics.
And the radicals accomplished with politics what they never managed to do with explosives.
“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men,” Prairie Fire, a book co-authored by Ayers, Dohrn and other radicals declared. “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.”
Barack Obama may have seated his two terrorist mentors in the front rows, but he made no direct reference to them, except for having “found my community here, friendships that would last a lifetime.”
“Happy Birthday, Ho Chi Minh!!” Ayers had posted a month earlier. “Happy Birthday Cathy Boudin!! LIVE LIKE THEM! We love, love, love you!!!!”
Kathy Boudin had been a member of the Weathermen who, along with the May 19th Communist Organization, had distracted two police officers while her associates murdered them. No word on whether Boudin, now, like Ayers, an academic, was at the Obama Presidential Center opening, but like Ho Chi Minh, she was there in spirit.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
G-d bless and keep Daniel Greenfield. He looks at Babylon, as did his brave namesake, with clear eyes, and tells the nauseating truths.