Former U.S. President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama have teamed up with a lifelong Marxist propagandist to distribute a major new documentary for Netflix.
“American Factory” tells the story of a “worker revolt” against Chinese company Fuyao Glass America’s factory in the Dayton, Ohio, suburb of Moraine.
“The tale is rife with paradoxes: the communists are the capitalists; and the workers from the land of Reagan and Trump channel socialist solidarity as they move to form a union against the wishes of the folks from the People’s Republic.”The first film distributed by the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground Productions, “American Factory” has already won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Reichert, in particular, is a lifelong Marxist who, according to the “Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film,” “focuses on various social issues, like gender and working-class issues, from a socialist perspective.”
The film itself is pro-union and anti-free market. The protagonist is a Chinese billionaire who allegedly treated his American and imported Chinese employees like serfs. He is portrayed as an example of rapacious and heartless “capitalism,” rather than a representative of Chinese communism, which is much closer to the truth.
Reichert served on the DSA’s Feminist Commission in 1985. Before that, she was a leader of a DSA predecessor group the New American Movement (NAM), an explicitly Marxist group formed out of Students for a Democratic Society and some dissident members of the Communist Party USA. NAM was a Maoist-leaning organization, with a strong emphasis on changing culture through propaganda.
NAM also advocated for the ideas of late Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci—a believer in revolution through cultural change. According to Gramsci, the people would only be ready for socialism when their consciousness had been sufficiently changed through socialist infiltration of religion, media, and culture.
Reichert and her partner and NAM comrade Jim Klein produced several documentaries in the 1970s and ‘80s that would have made Mao and Gramsci proud.
Reichert received her first Academy Award nomination in 1978 with Klein and another NAM comrade Miles Mogulescu for “Union Maids,” a film about three far-left women union organizers in Chicago in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Obama Support
It’s no surprise that the Obamas would partner with a DSA comrade on such an obviously socialist propaganda project. Barack Obama, in particular, has worked closely with DSA-aligned socialists since his days at Occidental College in the late 1970s. In fact, it would be difficult to find a period in his adult life when he wasn’t tripping over DSA Marxists at every turn.The young Obama attended DSA’s annual Socialist Scholars Conference while attending Columbia University in New York.
In 1995, the Chicago DSA endorsed Obama in the Illinois state Senate primary. In January 1996, Obama addressed a DSA-organized forum at Chicago University alongside DSA members William Julius Wilson and Joseph Schwartz.
Most DSA members actively supported Obama in the November 2008 presidential election.
“DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda. ...
Obama went on to appoint one-time DSA comrade Ron Bloom as his “Car Czar.” Former congressman and DSAer David Bonior became a member of the Obama Economic Transition Team and was delegated by the president to negotiate the unification of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and Change to Win labor federations. Rosa Brooks, daughter of senior DSA comrade Barbara Ehrenreich, was appointed senior adviser to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy.
During his two terms of office, Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to at least three DSA comrades: Farmworkers Union leader Dolores Huerta, AFL-CIO boss John Sweeney, and feminist Gloria Steinem.
Given his clear affinity for the United States’ largest Marxist organization, it’s no surprise that Obama would now partner with another DSA comrade to churn out socialist propaganda for the apparently left-leaning Netflix.
As the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart used to say, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
No doubt “American Factory” will get lots of play and publicity between now and the 2020 election.