This is the most popular editorial at Investors Business Daily right now. It goes over what we know about Barack Obama influences and background.

Excerpt:

Obama’s father was so anti-West that British intelligence warned the U.S. not to grant him and a group of Kenyan students visas to study in the U.S. They were flagged in a 1959 diplomatic cable as radicals with an “anti-American and anti-white” political agenda.

When Obama Sr. returned to Kenya with a Harvard economics degree, he joined the newly independent Kenyan government as a Marxian economist. AP never mentions the July 1965 policy paper he wrote advising Nairobi to wring all vestiges of Western “neocolonialism” out of the Kenyan economy and replace them with Soviet-style communism, including industrial nationalization.

In the eight-page tract, he proposed economic tonics strikingly similar to ones now being pushed by his son, including: taxing the “rich” to “redistribute economic gains” and “economic power,” funding public works projects and other government “investments,” and forcing “people to do things they would not do otherwise,” such as joining government-run cooperatives to discourage “individual” choices not in the “public interest.” He railed against “free enterprise,” arguing it creates wealth “disparities” and benefits “only a few individuals.”

And more:

It’s plain from Obama’s memoir that he worshipped his father. Obama devotes more than 130 pages, or roughly a third, of “Dreams” to covering his father’s life and his colonized ancestry in Kenya. This is purposeful. Obama sympathizes with the idea that “neocolonial wealth,” held even by Asian business owners in Nairobi, should be “redistributed to the people.” (Neocolonialism is the alleged economic exploitation that remains even after political independence.)

Obama says he realized who he is and what he really cares about when he visited his father’s grave. He describes breaking down and weeping, whereupon he reflects: “The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”

D’Souza says Obama sought out paternal surrogates who shared his father’s anti-colonial, anti-capitalist beliefs, including:

Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member investigated by the FBI for un-American activities. As a teenager, Obama sat at Davis’ knee in his Waikiki bungalow, where he was brainwashed into hating America while romanticizing Soviet Russia. Interestingly, Davis put Churchill at the center of Anglo-American “imperialism.”

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, moreover, baptized Obama into “liberation theology,” which emerged from the communist movement in Central America. Wright’s church “stood in solidarity” with the Sandinista dictators of Nicaragua while Obama attended there.

Not surprisingly, Obama protested U.S. support for the Contra rebels. Wright also lionized Hamas and called for divestment in Israel, which he accused of having “illegally occupied Palestinian territories” for decades.

Derrick Bell, the late Harvard law professor, taught Obama “critical race theory” and “postcolonial theory,” which argues that Western imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Obama remained close to Bell until his death last year.

All three of these surrogate fathers of Obama, along with Obama Sr. himself, were heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon, a Marxist revolutionary who didn’t look or sound like one. Rarely seen without a suit and tie, the handsome and cerebral Fanon nonetheless described capitalists as “wretched” and the United States as “a monster.”

He called for “a planned economy, for outlawing profiteers,” and for wringing neocolonialism and capitalism out of every institution of society. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” the late Fanon wrote, “What matters today is the need for a redistribution of wealth,” adding “humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

If you’ve never heard about any of the facts from Obama’s background, then I really recommend you go and check out “2016: Obama’s America” in theaters now.