by Stephen Soukup
Obama faced hardships no one else could possibly imagine, which is strange because he did, in fact, imagine them.
Yesterday in these pages, the inimitable Roger Kimball recounted the tall tale of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. As Kimball noted, Arday has been shown over the last few weeks to be more than just your average modern academic charlatan. With every passing day, it appears more and more that he’s a full-throated fabulist in the contemporary sense, which is to say that he made up almost everything about his life and public persona and plagiarized the rest. All his lies and deceptions were, however, uttered in the service of a larger purpose: to undermine the establishment and force its members to reckon with their hatreds and prejudices. Arday overcame more obstacles and barriers than the average man could ever even imagine, and therefore his struggle must be admired and applauded, while his “scholarship” is celebrated. Because of his bravery and courage, in the face of both fate and societal bigotry, he is owed a certain amount of deference and gratitude, irrespective of any perceived defects in the results of his professional endeavors. In short, he’s a better man than the rest of us, so we should, therefore, listen to him carefully and do as he says.
Now, my initial reaction upon reading about Arday’s remarkable achievements was to think of a few of our own American social and political pioneers, some who, like Arday, could manipulate time like plastic (to borrow Roger’s metaphor) and others whose life experiences closely mirrored more famous experiences of others. Hillary Clinton, for example, claimed that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first Western man to scale Mt. Everest. Mrs. Clinton, of course, was born in 1947, while Sir Edmund scaled the mountain in 1953. But then, what is a mere six years in the hands of one as profoundly gifted as the twice-failed presidential candidate? Likewise, Kamala Harris, also a failed presidential candidate, once told a story about how she, as a toddler, fell out of her stroller at a civil rights march and told her parents—and then the whole world—that all she wanted was “fweedom.” Interestingly, Martin Luther King Jr. had rather famously recounted a remarkably similar story about a young girl at a march in Birmingham, Alabama, who told the whole world that all she wanted was “feedom.” The difference a “w” can make, I guess.
Of all the American politicians whose extraordinary lives—and fabrications—parallel Jason Arday’s, however, none come close to the successful two-time presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Obama’s penchant for the dramatic is well known, as is his profoundly plastic memory. Like Arday, Obama faced hardships no one else could possibly imagine, which is strange because he did, in fact, imagine them. As I have noted before in these pages, David Maraniss’s 2012 biography of the 44th President of the United States—Barack Obama: The Story—is one of the greatest political biographies of this century, largely because it shows that its subject was a figment of his own imagination. Maraniss—the associate editor of The Washington Post, one of the nation’s most respected journalists, a renowned biographer, and an avowed fan of Obama’s—called Obama’s famous autobiography a work of “literature.” In reviewing Maraniss’s book, Conn Carroll, a senior editorial writer for the Washington Examiner, was a touch more candid: “President Obama was born in Hawaii and is an American citizen. That much is true. But…it appears that almost everything else in Obama’s supposed autobiography, Dreams from My Father, is complete fiction.”
Maraniss notes, for example, that Obama wrote about a friend named “Regina,” who, to him, represented the true African-American experience. Having been raised, in large part, by lily-white Kansas transplants to Hawaii, Obama didn’t have that experience and desperately wanted it. Regina was his ticket. Unfortunately, as Maraniss points out, she didn’t exist. She was “based” on a girl named Caroline Boss, whom Obama met when he was a student at Occidental College. Oh, and Caroline Boss was white. How she helped Obama get in touch with his inner-black self is anyone’s guess. Obama now claims Regina was a “composite” of three people, but given the role “she” supposedly played in his life, that’s hardly a minor technicality.
More consequentially—and laughably—Obama claimed that his Indonesian step-grandfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, died fighting Dutch colonizers and was a hero of the Indonesian independence movement. Maraniss, however, calls this “a concocted myth in almost all respects” and reports that Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumably suffering a heart attack.” Details, shmetails, I always say. Nevertheless, I concluded the following based on this reassessment of Obama’s “life story”:
Maraniss’s biography is not, as Ben Smith suggests, merely a “debunking” of the “core narrative” of Obama’s book. Rather, it is a debunking of the core narrative of Barack Obama, the man—as sold to the American public. The thoughtful, post-racial politician, shaped by the experiences of his exotic Indonesian youth and his Hawaiian adolescence; the inquisitive Ivy League intellectual, informed by the diverse experiences of his white mother, his white grandparents, his colonially oppressed grandfather, and his absentee yet misunderstood intellectual father; the brilliant, yet sensitive populist whose sense of self was forged through a black identity crisis and the realization of his responsibilities to those whose skin color he shares, despite his unique and inimitable background: none of these exist in any real sense of the word. All of them were fabricated. All were created completely out of whole cloth. None has any foundations in reality at all. Which is to say that the American electorate voted in 2008 for a candidate who was simply “made up.”
The similarities between Barack Obama and Jason Arday don’t end with their shared “creative” memories. Neither man crafted his public persona and captured the imagination of his contemporaries and the media in a vacuum. Both were part of the long, slow process of institutional ideological capture, driven largely by identitarian fervor, resulting in a system that both wanted and needed a mythological hero who had overcome all manner of hardships to emerge as its redeemer. Arday in academia and Obama in politics were exactly what the dysfunction in their respective systems inevitably demanded at the time of their appearance. Both delivered, and both caused otherwise normal and sensible people to lose any sense of proportion or reality as a result. Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of the faculty of education at Cambridge, embarrassingly called Arday “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do,” despite there being almost zero evidence of this. At the time, Arday had only a few publications to his name, and he apparently plagiarized at least some of them. As for Obama, the praise was similar, albeit even more embarrassingly over-the-top. Old political hands gushed at the crease in his pants or claimed that he sent a thrill up their legs. And of course, there was this:
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway….
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
Of course, the key difference between Arday and Obama is that when the former was caught mythologizing himself and plagiarizing from others, he was forced to resign. The latter, by contrast, dismissed charges of plagiarism as no big deal and has never been forced by anyone, anywhere to account for his biographical fabrications. Political commentator Ben Smith—also an Obama fan—blamed Obama’s opponents for enabling his self-mythologizing. “That the core narrative of Dreams could have survived this long into Obama’s public life is the product in part of an inadvertent conspiracy between the president and his enemies,” Smith wrote. “Obama’s young life was basically conventional, his personal struggles prosaic and later exaggerated….[R]ace, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood.” Nevertheless, Republicans took the bait and helped Obama turn the country into a racial powder keg.
I’m not sure that I agree with Smith’s assessment in its entirety, but between them, Obama and the political establishment that swallowed his bait broke American politics in a profound and thus far irreparable way.
I’d warn that Arday could have the same effect on academia, despite his resignation, but I doubt that very much, if for no other reason than academia was profoundly broken long before he appeared in the hallowed halls of Cambridge. Roger Kimball concluded his column yesterday, noting that “Cambridge has a lot more than Jason Arday to worry about.” He’s right. More to the point, as Kimball has shown with his own incredibly impressive body of work, dating back almost four decades, academia as a whole has a lot more than Jason Arday to worry about. Indeed, American politics was so readily breakable because of the influence of Western academia.
As hard as it may be to believe, the fraud and treachery in academia may be even greater than that in politics. Whether either can be saved from its myths and mythologizers remains to be seen.
Photo: Former US president Barack Obama speaks at the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois, on June 18, 2026. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP)
Stephen Soukup R. is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/iran-sets-conditions-strait-hormuz-reopening-calls-us-correct-its-behavior
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