Obama's radicals

Editor's note: This is the fifth of a six-part series by the author of "The Audacity of Deceit." Read Part 1, "The Obama-Ayers incestuous money trail" Part 2, "Obama's sweetheart-deal home loan," Part 3, "The groups Obama kept off his résumé," and Part 4, "Obama's mentors."

Barack Obama would have Americans believe that every time he crossed paths with some of the nastiest, anti-American radicals in our nation, it was coincidence. The roll-call below of Obama supporters, campaigners, fundraisers and early mentors, however, paints a picture not of coincidence, but rather, of a web of radicals all dedicated to furthering the career of "The One" they believe can deliver their life-long dream of "social justice" through punitive taxation and massive wealth redistribution in America.

The radicals

Bill Ayers: Exactly when Obama met unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers may be open for discussion. At the very latest, however, Ayers met Obama after he was recommended to chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – a brainchild of Ayers and others. A more studied evaluation concludes that the two knew each other as early as the 1980s. Several news articles have pointed out that the two were at Columbia (Ayers was a few blocks away at the Bank Street School) back in the 1980s, and Obama's first job with the Developing Communities Project was to advocate a school-reform effort spear-headed at the time by Bill Ayers' father, Tom Ayers. Bill Ayers was a principal founder of the domestic terror organization the Weather Underground, which bombed the U.S. Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Times ran a story about Ayers, quoting him saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Bill Ayers was 56 years old at the time, and Obama was 40 years old.

In a 1995 interview, Ayers candidly described his philosophy:

I'm a radical, leftist, small "c" communist … [laughs]. Maybe I'm the last communist who is willing to admit it. We have always been small "c" communists in the sense that we were never in the [Communist] party and never Stalinists. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don't like Lenin as much as the early Marx.

As we saw in the previous installment of this series, the organizations on which Obama and communist Bill Ayers served and which Tom Ayers helped to fund are inextricably intertwined.

Bernardine Dohrn Ayers: The wife of Bill Ayers, Castro-trained Bernardine Dohrn is an associate professor of law at Northwestern University. Like her husband, she was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, and, like her husband, she spent much of the 1970s eluding the FBI, for Ayers and Dohrn were both on their "Ten Most Wanted List" for the string of bombings they committed in the U.S.

In 1980, she and her husband surrendered to authorities and all charges against them were dropped on the grounds that the fugitives were illegally surveilled. She later served seven months in prison for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury investigating the 1981 Brink's armored-car robbery in Rockland County, N.Y. The robbery left two police officers and a security guard dead. Weather Undergound members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert went to prison for their roles in that assault. The Ayerses went on to raise the son of Boudin and Gilbert, Chesa, who is now working with the Hugo Chavez revolution in Venezuela.

In the latter part of 1995, Dohrn and Ayers hosted a meet-and-greet for Obama in their home. According to the memoir of one attendee, Maria Warren, the meet-and-greet helped to launch Obama's political career.

Michael Klonsky: Until June 2008, Michael Klonsky had a blog that covered education politics and teaching for social justice on Obama's official presidential campaign website. After journalists and bloggers began to reveal Klonsky's past, the blog was airbrushed out of existence. Klonsky is a close friend of Bill Ayers and was active with Ayers in the Weather Underground precursor organization, Students for a Democratic Society. On May 12, 1969, Klonsky and four other SDSers were arrested at the organization's Chicago national headquarters for assaulting a police officer, interfering with a firefighter and inciting mob action. According Santa Clara Law professor Steve Diamond, "Klonsky was one of the most destructive hard-line Maoists in the [Students for a Democratic Society] in the late '60s who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky traveled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese Stalinist leadership who, in turn, "hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as 'reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,' effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official U.S. Maoist party."

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama funneled $175,000 to Klonsky through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to fund a radical training group called the Small Schools Workshop.

Susan Klonsky: Susan Klonsky is the wife of Mike Klonsky. She is a Chicago-based education writer who was national secretary of SDS in 1968. She is listed as a signatory on the Progressives for Obama website.

Fred Klonsky: Fred Klonsky is the brother of Mike Klonsky. The Klonsky brothers grew up in a socialist household as their father, Robert Klonsky, was a leading member of the Communist Party USA. Fred Klonsky was also active in Students for a Democratic Society.

Mark Rudd: Rudd is a signatory and endorser to Progressives for Obama. He was a member of SDS and a principal founder of the Weather Underground organization. As a member of SDS, he led the famed 1968 Columbia University strikes. Rudd worked closely with Bill Ayers and traveled to Cuba where he met with Castro regime. Rudd also wrote on his own website that he worked for the Weathermen as a radical alternative to the SDS and for white Americans to eject their "white skin privilege" and begin "armed struggle" against the U.S. government.

Carl Davidson: Carl Davidson is an American Marxist who serves as a national steering committee member of United for Peace and Justice, a field organizer for the Solidarity Economy Network, and co-chair of Chicagoans Against War & Injustice. A key organizer for Obama's 2002 anti-war demonstration hosted by Chicagoans Against War & Injustice, Davidson has known Obama since 1996, when the candidate came to him to discuss an endorsement.

Davidson was a major player in the Chicago branch of the New Party, a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials. In other words, Obama sought (and received) the endorsement of a Marxist political coalition for his state Senate race in 1996. As Davidson recalls:

I'm from Chicago, too, and [have] known Obama from the time he came to the New Party to get our endorsement for his first race ever. I've been in his home, and as an Illinois legislator, he's helped our community technology movement a number of times. He said all the right things to the ACORN and New Party folks, and we endorsed him, but I noticed, too, that he seemed to measure every answer to questions put to him several times before coming out with it.

He spoke at our first anti-war rally. He spent most of his speech detailing all the wars in history he supported, then finally made a distinction between just wars and "dumb" wars, and going into Iraq, which was still six months down the road then, was a "dumb war," and he flatly opposed it. Good, that put him on our side, and some of us organized a fundraiser for him for his Senate race.

FrontPage magazine's DiscoverTheNetworks, a website dedicated to profiling the political left, described Davidson. "As a college student in the 1960s, Davidson was a national secretary of Students of a Democratic Society and a national leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. … Davidson and Tom Hayden take credit for having launched in 1969 the 'Venceremos Brigades,' which covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to interact with Havana's communist revolutionary leadership. (The Brigades were organized by Fidel Castro's Cuban intelligence agency, which trained 'brigadistas' in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)"

Davidson is also a member of Progressives for Obama.

Marilyn Katz: Marilyn Katz is head of the public relations firm MK Communications and an "Obama bundler" who agreed to raise at least $50,000 each for the campaign. In fact, the blog site Rezko Watch states that she and her husband committed to raising $200,000 for Obama. Katz also helped organize, alongside her friend and fellow former SDS member Carl Davidson, the Oct. 2, 2002, anti-war protest sponsored by Chicagoans Against War and Injustice, where Obama spoke against the war in Iraq.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, "Katz met Ayers when he was 17 and they were members of Students for a Democratic Society, a peaceful group from which the Weather Underground splintered." Katz oversaw security for the SDS and was at the 1968 Chicago Convention and at the eye of the protests that took place that year.

Todd Gitlin: Gitlin was president of the SDS in 1963 and 1964 and was credited with organizing the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965. He is now a professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University. Gitlin is also a signatory to the Progressives for Obama effort.

Tom Hayden: Jane Fonda-ex and SDS founder Tom Hayden is one of the founders of Progressives for Obama. Hayden authored the SDS political manifesto, know as the Port Huron Statement, which the group's founding members adopted in 1962. This document condemned the American political system as the cause of international conflict and a variety of social ills – including racism, materialism, militarism and poverty.

Among the most visible and outspoken mouthpieces of the pro-communist camp during the Vietnam War era in the early 1970s, Hayden organized – along with his wife, Jane Fonda, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy – an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" (IPC) to cut off American aid to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. The IPC worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge (led by Pol Pot) emerged victorious.

On Jan. 28, 2008, he endorsed Obama for president. Hayden also gave $3,677 to a committee supporting Obama.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.: Fletcher is one of the principle founders of Progressives for Obama. He is a former Maoist and current leader of Democratic Socialists of America. Fletch was also a founder of the Black Radical Congress that has close ties to the Communist Party USA.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Along with Fletcher, Ehrenreich was a principle founder of Progressives for Obama. She is a member of the editorial board of the magazine The Nation. She is also an honorary chairman of Democratic Socialists of America, which was formerly active in anti-war movements in which some notorious radicals took part. Ehrenreich celebrated the re-release of the Communist Manifesto in 1998, claiming that as a commercial product, capitalists were – as Lenin had once predicted – providing the rope that eventually would hang them.

Cass Sunstein: Another Obama adviser, Sunstein is professor at the University of Chicago Law School. In 2004, Sunstein authored "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever," in which he argued that rights are discretionary grants from the government to the citizen.

Jodie Evans: Like Marilyn Katz, Evans is an Obama bundler who committed to raise $50,000 for the Obama campaign. She also founded Code Pink, a feminist anti-war group dedicated to protesting the war in Iraq. This highly visible outfit protested outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center with signs that read "Maimed for Lies" and "Enlist Here and Die for Haliburton." Code Pink lined up mock caskets outside the Army hospital. Evans is also a radical leftist who sits on the board of directors of the Rain Forest Action Network, a coalition of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate environmentalist groups.

Evans also sits on the advisory board of the International Occupation Watch center in Iraq, which Code Pink helped establish. Occupation Watch organizers Medea Benjamin and Leslie Cagan explicitly declared their purpose in setting up headquarters in Baghdad was to "thin U.S. forces by getting soldiers to declare themselves conscientious objectors."

Evans is also notorious for making ridiculous and insensitive remarks. For example, during a radio interview with Paul Ibbetson on his "Conscience of Kansas" radio show, Ibbetson tried to explain that the U.S. hadn't done anything to provoke the 9/11 attacks. Evans replied that we were in Saudi Arabia, which she claimed was reason enough for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans in terrorist attacks. While Evans said, "I don't think any terrorist attack is justified," she added that we should listen to bin Laden and change our policies because "Sometimes, it would be a good idea to listen to why someone is trying to blow you up."

In the last and final installment of the series, O'Leary will detail the enablers and friends of the Ayers family whom Obama met along the money trail.

Read Part 1, "The Obama-Ayers incestuous money trail."

Read Part 2, "Obama's sweetheart-deal home loan."

Read Part 3, "The groups Obama kept off his résumé."

Read Part 4, "Obama's mentors."

Order O'Leary's book exposing Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Deceit."

Brad O'Leary is the author of "The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama's War on American Values." To learn more, go to www.BarackObamaTest.com.