Rush, Andrew, Donald, and the Republican Reconquista
“Most of my friends were graduating that year,” writes Barack Obama in Dreams from My Father. “Hasan off to work with his family in London, Regina on her way to Andalusia to study Spanish Gypsies.”
Ah yes, “Andalusia!” That, of course, is left-speak for “Spain.” For anti-colonialists like Obama, Andalusia is more than an historical place. It is a metaphor for a progressive golden age, one in which wisdom ruled and peace reigned. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,” affirmed Obama at Cairo in 2009. “We see it in the history of Andalusia.”
True, after the invading Moors brutally ripped the Iberian Peninsula from its indigenous Latinos, peace of a sort did reign. It came at a price, specifically the jizya, a tax non-Muslims had to pay to secure their dhimmi status, the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow.
The Moors arrived in the year 711. The Christians started reconquering their homeland in 721. It would take them seven centuries to finish the job. In all of Obama’s musings about Andalusia, he has spared scarcely a word for the “Reconquista,” a Republican variation of which has hatched on his watch.
A few days ago, casually searching YouTube, I came across a short video I had not seen in five years called “The Media Reaction to Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.” In seven compact minutes producer Chris Kusnell sheds some unexpected light on the Republican Reconquista in embryo.
What makes the video particularly relevant is that it features on-screen appearances by some of the leading figures in this movement -- Rush Limbaugh, the late Andrew Breitbart, and, most intriguingly, Donald Trump.
Kusnell’s piece begins with a video of candidate Barack Obama boasting to a crowd of Virginia schoolteachers in July 2008, "I've written two books. I actually wrote them myself."
Obama was comfortable making this claim for one reason: the left dominates America’s culture as thoroughly as the Andalusian Muslims did the culture of Iberia. From experience, Obama knew that the nation’s cultural imams were willing to enable his fraud if it advanced a cause close to their hearts.
And a fraud it most certainly was. By September 2008, I was 100 percent certain Obama did not write Dreams from My Father or Audacity of Hope by himself, and I was 90 percent certain that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers co-authored Dreams.
Knowing Obama’s media allies would have zero interest in my evidence, I tried to find an influential forum on the right. Yet when I knocked on insider doors to advance my thesis, they remained firmly shut. Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did too. The FOX producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not.
The managing editor of the Weekly Standard referred me to the magazine’s literary editor, whose response was myopic to a fault: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice.”
A Weekly Standard cover that read “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father?” might have changed the outcome of the election, but the editor, alas, was “oversubscribed.” Like the other high profile dhimmis, he had made his “peace” with the progressive establishment. Whether Obama won or lost, he still had his job and the grudging tolerance of his overlords. He was not about to risk either to advance an idea someone might call “racist.”
On October 9, 2008, the American Thinker gave me the space I needed to make my case. Rush Limbaugh amplified the American Thinker piece that same day. As the Kusnell video shows, he gave it a good airing.
To keep Limbaugh’s influence in check, the cultural imams fought back with the most potent weapon in their arsenal -- shame. “This may not have been Limbaugh’s most racist insinuation of the campaign,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick, citing others he liked less. He concluded, though, that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir -- the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship -- had a particularly ugly pedigree.”
During the next four weeks, despite Limbaugh’s overture and my best efforts, not a single “respectable” conservative, either in the media or in the McCain campaign, dared explore this issue. On the up side, no one called our respectable friends “racist.” On the down side, Obama was elected president.
When McCain lost, the dhimmis blamed “Internet zanies” like me for his defeat. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto singled me out by name as among those who “engaged in irresponsible rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing.” The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg sniffed, “I think trying to claim some sort of literary conspiracy is a bridge too far.”
In the fall of 2009, without ever talking to me, bestselling celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed my thesis in his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Although the apolitical Andersen spent six pages on Ayers’s involvement with Dreams, the mainstream media simply pretended he didn’t. And once again, the conservative media enabled the pretense.
In 2011, Simon & Schuster published my book, Deconstructing Obama. In it, I make a case for Ayers’s role as Obama’s muse so compelling that only a liberal or a dhimmi would deny it. As the Kusnell video shows, Andrew Breitbart was neither.
“Let’s get on to the racism of today,” Bill Maher asked Breitbart on his HBO show. “You do not believe Obama wrote his own book?” Breitbart was not surprised by this line of attack. Martin Bashir had already tried to shame him for defending me on his MSNBC show.
Breitbart, however, did not offer the expected apologies. A true culture warrior, he was taking conservatism one step beyond Limbaugh, out of the Dhimmi ghetto and right into the pinkest of parlors, fully impervious to their ritual defamation. His unexpected death in March 2012 stalled the Reconquista and his left his heirs fighting over his legacy.
The Kusnell video held one more surprise for me. In 2011, as the video shows, the only other major figure to support my thesis publicly was Donald Trump. Said Trump about Obama to a gathered crowd, "His whole aura was caused by the genius of the first book which was written by Bill Ayers."
At the time, the media, Democrat and dhimmi, gleefully took Trump to task for questioning Obama’s birth certificate, but they dared not question him on the authorship issue. By 2011, even if the major media refused to admit it, most of them sensed Obama was a fraud. True to form, our dhimmi friends refused to raise the authorship issue in 2012 and once again helped elect Obama president.
What Limbaugh, Breitbart and Trump have in common is less a shared belief system than a refusal to accept their dhimmi status. They want to take the culture back. If Trump has attacked the dhimmi establishment from outside, Ted Cruz has attacked it from within. Calling the Senate majority leader a liar on the Senate floor is a sure way to get its attention.
Ordinary Americans are “mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years -- havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it,” writes David Gelertner in the Weekly Standard, a dhimmi publication hostile to Cruz and apoplectic about Trump. Yet Gelernter nails the issue.
In a June 10, 2015, column, I wrote, “The Republican nominee for president will be that candidate who best learns that there is no future in apologizing.” This was a week before Trump declared. I did not even know he was running.
Nine months later, Republican voters have rejected all the apologizers, all the collaborators, all the dhimmi candidates. Ready or not, they will be asked to join the first full scale battle in the Republican Reconquista behind either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and the dhimmis are atwitter.
Shame has not stopped either candidate. Violence won’t work either. The one force that will stop the Reconquista is division. There was much of that in Christian Iberia, so much of it, in fact, that it took seven centuries for the Christians to win their country back. Here is hoping the Republicans can do a little better.