The interview in Tablet Mag with David Garrow, a historian and biographer, about Obama’s personal life before his presidency and how these interactions in his youth shaped his worldview has made news with its juicy revelations about Obama’s allegedly acknowledging having repeated homoerotic fantasies to a girlfriend in a letter. Joel Pollak, a Breitbart News writer and editor at large, chides those who exclusively focus on that detail in the interview.
“People will be distracted by the homosexual fantasies. That doesn’t make Obama “gay” (though some will argue that he was the first gay president). The more important fact is the revelation of the lack of curiosity by journalists in finding the other facts, when it mattered” wrote Pollack on X (the new name for Twitter).
People will be distracted by the homosexual fantasies. That doesn’t make Obama “gay” (though some will argue that he was the first gay president). The more important fact is the revelation of the lack of curiosity by journalists in finding the other facts, when it mattered. (3/3)
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) August 4, 2023
The more important story, Pollack writes, is that “The [interview] article admits that Obama made up most of what he claimed about himself. It omits that Birtherism is one example: Obama himself likely spun the false narrative of his own foreign origins when it suited him, to build a literary profile…Importantly, the article confirms: 1. Obamacare is a “fraud.” 2. Obama’s presidency was a failure, especially on foreign policy. 3. Obama resented Israel deeply. 4. Obama is often a cold, empty person. 5. Obama represented a new elite cohort that punishes dissent ruthlessly.”
Importantly, the article confirms: 1. Obamacare is a “fraud.” 2. Obama’s presidency was a failure, especially on foreign policy. 3. Obama resented Israel deeply. 4. Obama is often a cold, empty person. 5. Obama represented a new elite cohort that punishes dissent ruthlessly (2/3)
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) August 4, 2023
Pollak pointed out an article he wrote back in 2012 that noted that “Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” The booklet, which was distributed to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.”
The piece included a photo of the image of Obama’s biography and its text mentioning those items. The note from the senior management of the news outlet that was attached to the article let the reader know that they regard this as “ evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.”
The Tablet Mag interview piece revealed that one of Barack Obama’s past girlfriends, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, had a different recollection about what caused their breakup than what Obama put down in his autobiography. The historian relayed that she recounted that “the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.”
It continued “[a]t the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans.”