During the Soviet era, “samizdat” referred to the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. Since official news sources were little more than communist government propaganda, samizdat was often the only source of truthful reporting. In “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of Failed Presidency,” Jack Cashill tells the story of how an American samizdat of bloggers, online journals, and citizen journalists challenged the left – and, occasionally, the more “respectable” right – for control of the Obama narrative. In this excerpt Cashill tells the story of how the samizdat smoked out the origins of Black Lives Matter.
On the morning of March 23, 2012, Barack Obama said of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin four weeks earlier, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon – If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Four weeks after the shooting, Obama had no excuse for not knowing the facts of the case. This would prove to be the most destructive moment of his presidency.
On this same March day, the samizdat kicked into gear. Leading the way was a fellow who prefers to be known only as “Sundance.” Just a year earlier, he and a handful of like-minded citizens, most of them female, banded together to form a blogging collective called the “Conservative Treehouse.” Like most citizen journalists in the samizdat, Sundance and his fellow “Treepers.” worked without compensation…
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