Just this morning, we shared a new Rolling Stone profile of Gun Owners of America leader Larry Pratt, who despite his long record of anti-government extremism and association with any number of racist and anti-Semitic radicals continues to be an influential gun lobbyist who gets airtime from the mainstream media and attention from members of Congress.
As if to underscore the point, this weekend Pratt gave an interview to a pair of Patriot movement activists who recently launched a radio show after meeting at the Bundy ranch, where he shared the bizarre fringe birther theory that President Obama is secretly the son of labor activist Frank Marshall Davis, who groomed the president from birth to destroy America from within.
The Frank Marshall Davis birther theory was invented and popularized by right-wing filmmaker Joel Gilbert, who thinks that Obama got plastic surgery in an attempt to hide his resemblance to Davis and who also believes that the president wears a secret Muslim wedding ring and could have been behind the Aurora movie theater shooting .
The “evidence” for Gilbert’s claim — laid out in detail in his 2012 film “Dreams From My Real Father” — is a series of racy photos of a woman who bears a passing resemblance to Obama’s mother (but is not) and his totally scientific opinion that Obama looks more like Davis than like Barack Obama, Sr.
Gilbert’s theory has been panned by traditional birthers, because it undermines their claim that Obama isn’t a natural-born U.S. citizen, but has taken off among those who are seeking other ways to question the president’s origins. It was most notably endorsed by Bill Armistead, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, who said in 2012 that he had seen Gilbert’s movie and “verified that it is factual, all of it.”
In his interview with “The Liberty Brothers Radio Show,” Pratt presented the Frank Marshall Davis theory as a plausible explanation for why Obama “hates” America.
“His father was either a Kenyan socialist or the Communist Party member who lived across the street, Frank Marshall Davis, and there’s a lot more physical resemblance between the latter and Obama than Obama Sr. and Obama,” he said.
Bringing up the conspiracy theory that Obama enrolled in school as a foreign student, Pratt said that while he doesn’t think the president is foreign-born — “I really think that more likely was that the communist that lived across the street in Hawaii could have been the father” — he does think Obama lied about being a foreign student to get financial aid.
