Glenn Beck is quite taken with Dinesh D'Souza. The Fox News host couldn't get enough praise in today for the conservative writer, who recently penned a controversial Forbes cover story that claims “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” And while several commentators have lambasted the article -- with Daniel Larison of The American Conservative calling it “the most ridiculous piece of Obama analysis yet written” -- Beck repeatedly applauded D'Souza during an hour-long interview on his syndicated radio show. Beck hailed D'Souza as “someone who really gets it” and who “has a better handle on [President Obama] than I think anybody else out there.”
Beck was so impressed with D'Souza's “handle” on Obama that he said he could now see that his statement that Obama is a “racist” was “almost infantile” “in its understanding of the president.” Beck stated:
BECK: I couldn't figure out what the president was doing and I missed the fact because I hadn't really looked into him. It becomes almost an illusion of racism -- and it's not racism. It's anti-colonialism. It is -- it's liberation theology, which is also in a way anti-colonialism. It's Marxism in its roots. And when you understand these things, all of a sudden everything makes sense. ... His grandfather and his father -- when you understand what they were doing, you all of a sudden can see Barack Obama and where he's going.
He would later add:
BECK: This doesn't have anything to do with race. And that's why I said my comment about a year and a half ago was infantile on its understanding of Obama, because that's your gut that says, 'Wait a minute, it's about race.' No, it's not. It's not about race; it is about colonialism, which is still the message of the left -- that America is stealing the resources of the rest of the world.
This is at least the second time Beck has “amended” his claim that Obama has “exposed himself as a guy” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” He had previously explained that he had “miscast” Obama's viewpoints as racism, not understanding that “really, what it is, is liberation theology.” As we noted at the time, believing in liberation theology may well be worse than hating white people -- according to Beck, liberation theology is “evil” and is part of a belief system that “can lead to genocide.”
The fact that Beck has now latched on to D'Souza's theory that Obama is an “anti-colonial” is hardly an improvement.
In his article, D'Souza casts anti-colonialists as people with a deep-seated hatred for the United States, and much of the Western world:
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.”
[...]
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
D'Souza uses that premise in purporting to explain Obama's “strange behavior” and why the “President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike”:
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
During the interview, Beck was so enamored with D'Souza's “theory,” he went ahead and called it "fact." He then recounted how he had gotten “a lot of heat” for espousing similar views in the past, saying: “You don't reject the name 'Barry' and go for 'Barack' as a way to embrace the culture that you're in. That's not embracing America.” D'Souza added:
D'SOUZA: Obama actually had his father's American name. The interesting thing isn't that Obama rejected his name and took his dad's name, he rejected his father's American name and took his father's African name. You can almost see a reverse transition: Obama's father went from African name, 'Barack,' to American name, 'Barry.'
Young Obama made the opposite journey. He went from American name, 'Barry,' to African name, 'Barack' -- and this is the trajectory of his life. He went to Europe, Obama did, and he said, 'I didn't like it over there.' He said it was beautiful, but it just wasn't mine. It wasn't me.
Now think about this: Obama has a white mom; he has an African dad. He's equally descendent from Africa and from Europe, but he rejects his European side and identifies with his dad. This is not my psychoanalysis; this is Obama.
Beck then asked D'Souza: “How do you possibly argue against this?” D'Souza replied: “Well, you can't.”
At the end of the interview, Beck plugged D'Souza's forthcoming book, The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery), saying that though he had yet to read it, “I know his theory and he is right.” He went on to say that the book is “about Obama's history that puts his present into perspective so you can understand what he's doing and why he's doing it.”
Here are other highlights from the interview:
Beck defends his comment that “You don't take the name Barack to identify with America”