Speaking to a Republican women’s group in Alabama yesterday, state GOP chairman Bill Armistead recommended to his audience a fringe birther movie that claims that President Obama’s real father is American labor activist Frank Marshall Davis, according Mobile Press-Register political editor George Talbot, who was reporting the event on Twitter:

The movie Armistead reportedly recommended, “Dreams From My Real Father,” represents a breakout fringe of the birther movement. The film, according to its director Joel Gilbert, “presents the case that Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA organizer and propagandist, was Obama’s real father, both biological and ideological, and indoctrinated Obama with a political foundation in Marxism and an anti-White world view.”

A trailer for the film cuts to various right-wing bogeymen including Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and ACORN in between misleadingly edited snippets of speeches by the president and Michelle Obama:

Gilbert’s film has divided the birther movement, since its assertion that Davis is Obama’s real father would seem to be incompatible with the theory that the president was born in Kenya. Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily, apparently untroubled by the contradiction, has embraced the film. Birther leader Orly Taitz, however, claims that by promoting the film, Corsi is “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

Thanks to an aggressive campaign by Gilbert, “Dreams From My Real Father” has had a remarkably wide reach. In September, the New York Post ran a full-page ad for the movie. Yesterday, World Net Daily reported that Gilbert has sent 1 million copies of the film to households in Ohio and plans to send 1 million more out in swing states. Gilbert and Corsi both fault the mainstream media for ignoring their film, which Gilbert claims they’re doing “because they support national health care.”

In a National Press Club appearance this summer, Gilbert expanded on his theory, claiming that Obama and strategist David Axelrod were both “red diaper babies,” born of communist parents to carry on the cause; that Obama is pursuing Davis’s “dreams of a forced imposition of a classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad”; and that Obama worked with ACORN to cause the subprime mortgage crisis as part of a plan to “use minorities and the poor to collapse capitalism.”

This is the first we’ve heard of a political leader embracing Gilbert’s conspiracy theory. Armistead is a former state senator who a became the Alabama GOP Chairman last year.

UPDATE: Talbot has posted some more of the context of Armistead’s remarks: