“The Enemy Among Us” Commentary By Charles Krauthammer- Incorrect Attribution!
Summary of eRumor:
Charles Krauthammer has penned a column under the headline, “The Enemy Among Us,” about President Obama’s use of a group called Organizing for Action (OFA) to advance his political agenda after leaving the White House.
The Truth:
We couldn’t track down the author of the “The Enemy Among Us” commentary, but it was not written by conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer or published by the New York Post.
The column first surfaced in discussion forums and on social media in February 2017. At the time, it was attributed to the New York Post, but no author was listed. A quick read of those early versions reveals that the column wasn’t published in the New York Post — but it cited and was largely based on a commentary written by Post columnist Paul Sperry under the headline, “How Obama Is Scheming to Sabotage Trump’s Presidency.”
Sperry argues in the column that Organizing for Action (OFA), a 501c4 nonprofit group derived from Obama’s reelection campaign that works to organize and mobilize support for the former president’s agenda, has undermined President Trump by planning protests and coordinating opposition to Trump’s presidential agenda.
“The Enemy Among Us” has a similar premise, but it goes a step forward by arguing that Obama is using OFA to not only undermine Trump’s presidency — but to undermine America. Some version even reference a coming civil war:
I do not understand how living in a country with its democracy established over 200 years ago, and now, for the first time in history, suddenly we have one of our former presidents set up a group called “Organizing for Action” (OFA).
OFA is 30,000+ strong and working to disrupt everything that our current president’s administration is trying to do. This organization goes against our Democracy, and it is an operation that will destroy our way of governing. It goes against our Constitution, our laws, and the processes established over 200 years ago. If it is allowed to proceed then we will be living in chaos very much like third world countries are run. What good is it to have an established government if it is not going to be respected and allowed to follow our laws?
If you had an army some 30,000 strong and a court system stacked over the decades with judges who would allow you to break the laws, how much damage could you do to a country? We are about to find out in America!
“The Enemy Among Us” column was first attributed to Charles Krauthammer by Before Its News, a website that publishes user-generated (and conspiracy-minded) commentaries with no editing or fact-checking, on October 12, 2017. However, the commentary can’t be found at places where Krauthammer’s work regularly appears, including Fox News, the National Review and the Washington Post.
And we’ve seen columns inaccurately attributed to Charles Krauthammer before. Because he’s a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and a household name in conservative circles, Krauthammer’s name has been falsely used to help raise the visibility of essays and commentaries like this one in the past. The idea is that people give more weight to a column by Krauthammer, a well-known conservative thinker, than to a column by somebody they’ve never heard of. That appears to be the case here. Krauthammer didn’t write “The Enemy Among Us.”