Given America’s deplorable history of slavery and segregation, all Americans should be proud that their country had the courage to elect its first black president. With invaluable assistance from a cheerleading media, a young and charismatic Barack Obama was swept into the most powerful job in the world with the enthusiastic endorsement of a sizable majority of the American electorate. More than three years after leaving office, he remains one of the most influential political figures in America.

But is that plaudit warranted? These days, a look at his past suggests an exceptionally anti-American orientation, and as Obama's Democrats now swing even farther left, this history is worth a look.

Presenting himself in 2008 as a political moderate who fully embraced America’s two-party constitutional democracy and its free-market capitalist economy, Obama’s ideological beliefs were never closely examined by the mainstream media. But as his presidency unfolded, serious questions began to pile up about who he really was, specifically how closely he was aligned with the oppressive theories of Marx and Lenin. Obama denied being a Bolshevik, but many objective people doubted that assertion based on the long trail of troubling circumstantial evidence.

Following are parts of his past pointing to the suspicion that despite promising to be the most transparent president ever, he carefully concealed that core ideology.

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama described the only six months he would ever work for a profit-making company as “working for the enemy,” adding that he felt like “a spy behind enemy lines.” Obama also acknowledged in Dreams an affinity he had for Marxist professors, yet he has refused to release his transcripts of his years at Columbia, a university known as a hotbed of Marxist professors and student groups. Release of those records could provide important clues about his true ideological leanings.

In Dreams, Obama made numerous admiring references to Frank Marshall Davis, arguably his single most influential adolescent mentor. The subject of a 600-page FBI file, Davis was a pro-Soviet, card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. When Obama released a 2005 audio version of Dreams in anticipation of running for president, all references to Davis were quietly purged. In attempting to grind down the country he despised, Davis employed the class warfare tactics called for in The Communist Manifesto. Davis’s communist views would later be adopted by his most famous protégé, as evidenced by the class warfare strategy Obama used in his 2012 re-election campaign against Mitt Romney.

When Obama moved to Chicago two years after graduating from Harvard, he developed a close, 20-year association with Rev. Jeremiah “God d--n America” Wright. As pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church, Wright taught black liberation theology, a religious doctrine predicated on the perceived perpetual existence of an oppressor class (a predominately white society) vs. a victim class (people of color). Victim vs. oppressor ideology is classic Marxism. Obama had another important mentor from Chicago, Saul Alinsky. In his revolutionary book Rules for Radicals, the Marxist community organizer wrote, “The despair is there; it’s now up to us to rub raw the wounds of discontent and galvanize them for radical social change.” The radical change to which he referred is the transformation of America into a single-party socialist nation.

In 1995, Obama began his political career in the living room of Bill Ayers, a self-declared communist revolutionary who has worked his entire adult life toward the destruction of America’s capitalist system. To save his campaign, Obama dismissed Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood, not someone I regularly exchange ideas with.” But as reported by The Wall Street Journal, an investigation showed otherwise. In 2001, a defiant Bill Ayers demonstrated his disdain for America by consenting to be photographed trampling on the U.S. Flag. Seven years later, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama revealed his own low regard for the Flag by refusing to wear a lapel pin bearing its image, a position he later was forced to reverse out of political necessity.

In an unguarded moment while speaking with “Joe the Plumber” on the 2008 campaign trail, Obama was recorded saying that he intended to “spread the wealth around.” Seven years earlier, he lamented that the Supreme Court was not structured to bring about “major redistributive change.” Wealth redistribution is the foremost command of communism.

As president, Obama appointed an assortment of people with extreme-left views to key positions in his administration, including: former White House green jobs czar Van Jones, a self-avowed communist; FCC chief diversity officer Mark Lloyd, who expressed admiration for Venezuela’s communist strongman, Hugo Chavez; White House communications director Anita Dunn, who told a high school graduating class that Mao is one of her most admired philosophers; and, White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom, who said he agrees with Mao that “political power comes largely at the barrel of a gun.”

During his eight years in office, Obama routinely exhibited contempt for America and its capitalist system. In referring to his “You didn’t build that!” admonition directed at private sector job creators, The Wall Street Journal observed that “rarely do politicians so clearly reveal their core beliefs.” In September 2011, Obama showed his full-throated support of the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street protests by announcing, “We are on their side.” An influential group of hardened anti-capitalists known at the highest levels of the Democratic Party, OWS’s behind-the-scenes leaders have long sought the total destruction of America’s capitalist system. In a pre-rally pep talk to Occupy protestors in Chicago, OWS inspiration Bill Ayers — the same Bill Ayers in whose living room Obama launched his political career — said this: “I wake up every morning thinking that today will be the day I end capitalism.”

In March 2016, when he no longer faced re-election, and with communist officials of Castro’s murderous regime standing beside him, Obama defiantly posed in front of a six-story statue of one of communism’s most celebrated icons, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. To those who question Obama’s true ideological beliefs, posing in front of a six-story likeness of Guevara is no different than posing in front of a massive likeness of Stalin. Eight years earlier, a Cuban flag bearing an image of Guevara was removed from Obama’s Houston campaign office, but only after it was publicly revealed. The Guevara flag doesn’t mean that Obama approves of the mass-murdering communist revolutionary, but does suggest his Houston campaign office had reason to believe he did.

Finally, five days before he was first elected, Obama made a statement that attracted little attention at the time, vowing to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Caught up in the euphoria of Hope and Change, many who voted for him never thought to ask themselves, Transform it into what? A long trail of compelling evidence leads to the unavoidable conclusion that his strategy from the beginning has been to carefully conceal his true ideology, while quietly working to transform America into a communist society, a total betrayal of the oath he took to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, including the hammer and sickle. Without cover from the corrupt mainstream media, he would never have been elected.

Is Obama a traitor for the ages? You decide.

In September 2018, American Thinker ran an article about another prominent Democrat who also has worked to subvert his country: John Kerry: A Traitor for the Ages by Frank Hawkins. Now retired, Mr. Hawkins is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an Associated Press foreign correspondent.

Image credit: Maria Rantanen, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0