Loudon goes global on Obama

What began as a few posts on his New Zeal blog exploring the political origins of Barack Obama has ended up with Christchurch blogger Trevor Loudon being invited to Washington to deliver his research in person.

Obama, whom Loudon describes as “Keith Locke with charisma,” grew up and has lived his life in what Max Friedman calls a “Marxist Rich Environment.”  So too have many other red nappy babies who have lived to tell a more rational tale, Lindsay Perigo amongst them, but Loudon says that Obama’s ties to the extreme left are not only historical, but are contemporary and ongoing.

Obama's teenage mentor was the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis. Loudon posted on this on his blog back in March 2007, and it was this discovery that first piqued his interest. He discovered that Obama’s career has been supported for many years by the Chicago branch of the US Communist Party (a CPUSA breakaway group), the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the Chicago branch of Democratic Socialists of America (which is, despite its name, a Marxist organization). Part of the information documenting Obama's ongoing interactions with the latter two groups, including his decision to launch his political campaign in 1995 at the home of two convicted terrorists, was published in a series of 20 articles on Loudon's blog.

These posts quickly garnered the attention of the US blogosphere, starting with the Democratic Socialists themselves, and spreading gradually to right-wing US blogs, gingerbread conservative outlets and, more recently, the conservative organisation 'Accuracy In Media' founded by Max Friedman (pictured right with Loudon and other AIM colleagues) which combined this with further juicy Communist Party associations (communist mentor unmasked!) and threw it out as an example of how the news media has a liberal bias for not reporting the story.

It was this 'Accuracy in Media' article that went viral, being republished on hundreds, if not thousands of US websites.  If this is to be believed, even the increasingly desperate Clintonistas are distributing it. 

AIM’s Cliff Kincaid has published several subsequent articles on the subject, all of which have been republished all over the US.  A small group formed, which included Cliff Kincaid, Loudon, and two of the US’s leading communist history researchers Max Friedman and Herb Romerstein (that's the whole team above), to undertake more extensive research into Obama’s background, culminating in a press conference in Washington DC last week which released two major dossiers:

• One on the communist culture which they say surrounded Obama and his family in Hawaii [pdf]; and
• another on Obama’s communist and socialist links in Chicago [pdf].

The journalists covering the conference included a Russian TV station, leading the group to joke that the Russians were there to see what “we had on their man.” The conference has been extensively covered favourably on hundreds of US websites including Renew America and WorldNetDaily -- and mockingly in a half-page story on page 3 of the Washington Post.  Loudon’s material has also been picked up by David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine and Discover the Network website. 

Loudon heads back to Christchurch this week, satisfied in the knowledge that Scott Dixon isn't the only Kiwi making waves in the States.