'Radical-in-Chief' Details Obama's Socialist Convictions

'Radical-in-Chief' Details Obama's Socialist Convictions

Hannity and special guest Stanley Kurtz, author, "Radical-in-Chief"

Monday, October 18, 2010


This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," October 18, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: During his 2008 presidential campaign, many of President Obama's radical associations from his past were brought to light and forced Americans to question his real political aspirations.


Now almost two years after the election, a new book delves deeper into the president's ties to the likes of ACORN, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers and others. And detailed in the book are Obama's socialist convictions that he would like to keep secret.

Joining me now to explain is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, author of the brand new book "Radical-in-Chief, Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism," Stanley Kurtz is with us.

I've read your stuff often at National Review. Good to see you. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it.

STANLEY KURTZ, "RADICAL-IN-CHIEF" AUTHOR: Good to be here, Sean. Thanks for having me.

HANNITY: All right, hiding socialism. Now it is interesting because when conservatives such as myself and others pointed out that we felt Barack Obama had radical ties and socialist, radical views, we were laughed at, made fun of, people thought we were too harsh on the president. Now a full, you know, 60 percent of the American people view him as socialist. Were we right?

KURTZ: You were absolutely right, Sean. Frankly, I was nervous about the socialism charge myself. When I started researching Barack Obama's history after two years probing the archives, I realized that you and all the people who said he was socialist were absolutely right.

Really the book that I've written vindicates what you have been saying for the last three years.

HANNITY: You go a lot deeper than -- and I thought we went pretty deep into his background, I read "Dreams of My Father," "Audacity of Hope," and all these books. What did you find that stood out more than anything else that proved this point?

KURTZ: Well, Sean, the big picture first is that there is almost a kind of conveyor belt running from socialist activism to community organizing to electoral politics. Obama was riding that conveyor belt.

But the reason people don't understand that is that community organizers very intentionally keep their socialism secret. So what the book does is expose and explain the socialist background of community organizing and I used that to explain Barack Obama's entire political career.

I'll give you one important example. The beginning of the book lays out what happened to the series of socialist scholars conferences Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between about 1983 and 1985. Those conferences, Sean, connected Obama to groups, to strategies to mentors that have guided his entire political career.

For example, this conference titled community organizing is the key to moving America gradually toward socialism. Obama would first have heard about the groups ACORN and Project Vote, which of course, he spent his lifetime working with at these conferences and most amazing of all, these conferences touted a newly-formed alliance between Black Liberation Theology and socialism. So it was actually these socialists conferences that put Obama on the path that led him to Reverend Wright.

HANNITY: What's interesting as you say, all right, that's the key that led him to Reverend Wright, which Black Liberation Theology rooted in Marxism.

But you go into detail about the socialist scholar's conference and the Democratic Socialists of America for example and different activities that he attended during the years that we really have all question marks about his time in New York. So basically, you are saying this was him from the very beginning?

KURTZ: That's right, Sean. Those socialist conferences gave Obama a program for his whole career, but it didn't stop in his early adulthood, it went right on because, Sean, those conferences pointed Obama, for example, to a remarkable community organizer training institute in Chicago called the Midwest Academy.

Now the Midwest Academy was run by some of America's most prominent socialists, but these community organizers, very strongly believe you don't talk about your socialism out loud. You use it to strategize, but you don't actually tell the people you organize about your socialism.

These are the folks who trained Obama. They funded Obama and most important, Sean, they sponsored his political career. Why would they have done that if he didn't share their socialist views?

HANNITY: And then you go from, quote, "Frank" as he refers to in his book to Frank Marshal Davis, so you go to Bill Ayers, you go to Jeremiah Wright and you go to -- it is no surprise that he's governing in this fashion.

KURTZ: Right.

HANNITY: Is there any indication in your analysis, in your study, that he has any capacity to change or recognize that he's wrong? Because seems to be lashing out at his own bases we were discussing earlier.

He seems to think it is a communication problem as we saw in The New York Times this weekend. He seems to, as we were talking about with Karl Rove earlier in the program, to think that the American people just don't get it. And that they are not scientifically -- they are too afraid right now, they are not scientifically oriented in times of fear?

KURTZ: Well, I don't think he's going to change his views, Sean, maybe if the election is an overwhelming repudiation of him, he'll put himself in check very temporarily. But, you know, what he has been doing lately fits very closely to the some of the long term political strategies his socialist mentors had.

For example, Obama has been attacking the Chamber of Commerce, a real American institution. Now that might not seem to make sense. A lot of people say why the heck is he doing that? What's the political gain?

Obama's socialist mentors have a long term strategy for realigning the Democratic and Republican Parties along class lines. They thought if you attack business and drive it out of the Democratic Party, you simultaneously jumpstart a populous anti-business movement of the left. Bring that into the Democrats then the country is polarized on class lines and in the thought of Obama's mentors, the party of the have nots will slowly, but surely gravitate toward increasingly socialist ideas.

HANNITY: You have 48 million Americans now in need of government food stamps, one in seven Americans in poverty. It might be a greater danger I think than people think.

Stanley, good book. Good to see you. Thanks for being with us.

KURTZ: Thanks, Sean.

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