Joel Gilbert - Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power

Advance Praise for Michelle Obama 2024

Joel Gilbert has done a lot of research. Keep a very close eye on Michelle Obama for 2024. Shes plausible, popular and immune to criticism.

Monica Crowley, CPAC 2022

Meticulous research is Joel Gilberts forte. In Michelle Obama 2024 he tells us exactly who Michelle Obama is and exactly what she is up to.

Roger Stone

Joel Gilbert is a fantastic film maker and journalist. After you watch the film, you will realize that very little of what Michelle Obama has represented about her life story is actually true. Like me, you are going to learn a lot.

Malik Obama, brother of Barack Obama

A clever, persuasive, amazingly-sourced and brilliantly presented masterpiece of research and revelation.

Frank Hawkins, Associated Press

Published by Bombardier Books

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-572-6

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-573-3

Michelle Obama 2024:

Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power

2022 by Joel Gilbert

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Joel Gilbert

Interior Design by Yoni Limor

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A s 2018 rolled into 2019, and 2019 into 2020, I became increasingly aware that Michelle Obama was, well, everywhere. I thought there was a chance that she would step out of the public eye after the release of her autobiography, Becoming , in November 2018but she didnt.

With just a little research, I learned that Michelle (Miche to her family) and Barack began cashing in on their arduous years of public service within weeks of leaving the White House. In February 2017, they inked a joint deal with Penguin Random House worth a cool $65 million to write their respective books. The advance, said Publishers Weekly, is, if not the largest on record for two stand-alone works, certainly the largest in recent memory. A year after the book deal, Barack and Michelle signed a multiyear, multimillion dollar production deal with Netflix, which included a movie version of Becoming .

Of course, the book reviews were pure gush and the autobiography performed well right out of the gate. Reportedly, the book sold more than ten million copies and proved that Michelle was even more a pop culture icon than her husband. The promotion was as unprecedented as the advance. Never shy about aggrandizing herself, Michelle scheduled a U.S. tour, and then a world tour to promote the book. She sold out twenty-thousand-seat arenas and sat with celebrity pals for interviews about her storied life. Helping boost sales was ready acceptance by ideologically sympathetic celebrity friends. In her first stage appearance, Oprah interviewed her. Later, Stephen Colbert interviewed her on stage in London. There was scarcely a talk show or podcast that she passed up. It was all Michelle all the time.

Curious, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a hard copy of Becoming at my local Barnes & Noble. The bookstore had what seemed like a thousand copies readily available. Sitting next to stacks of Becoming on the shelf, along with a few standard biographies of her life, was a display of books written about Michelle for children. These had hero-worshipping titles: I Look Up to Michelle Obama ; Be Bold Baby: Michelle Obama ; Michelle Obama: First Lady and Superhero ; The Story of Michelle Obama; Michelle Obama: a Biography Book for New Readers ; and Courage is Contagious .

The book that stood out the most was an odd, smallish volume disturbingly reminiscent of Chairman Maos collection of sayings known as The Little Red Book . This one was pink and titled Pocket Michelle Obama Wisdom: Wise and Inspirational Words from Michelle Obama . I opened it and read a few of Michelles seemingly benign pearls: Be the best you can be and Know your community. Know your politics. (As Chairman Mao reminds us, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.)

This orchestrated effort to create a cult of personality for Michelle Obama reminded me not only of Chairman Mao, but also of personality cults I had seen in my student travels in the Communist world. Closer to home, these books about Michelle recalled the Barack Obama displays I had seen in bookstores in 2008: coffee table books, kiddie books, coloring books, you name it. In fact, Michelle likely pulled the title of her memoir from a cultish film about her husband titled Becoming Barack .

What I witnessed at the Barnes & Noble only confirmed my long-held suspicions about Michelle: her husband and his allies were preparing her to run for president in 2024. And, the formula she was following exactly mirrored Baracks path to the White House. Like Barack who had based much of his campaign on his personal story as depicted in his memoir Dreams from My Father , Michelle had positioned herself with her own autobiography, Becoming . Then, just as Barack had been John Kerrys keynote speaker (whose role is to introduce the candidate) in 2004, Michelle appeared at the virtual Democratic National Convention in 2020 as Joe Bidens keynote speaker. The Democrats often give the keynote spot to the likely next presidential candidate, and the same now appeared to be well in the works for Michelle. Then too, Michelle became the leader of a voter registration organization called When We All Vote, paralleling Baracks leadership of Project Vote, a voter registration organization in Chicago in 1992. Michelle was clearly headed for her own political career, following the same path as Barack. I realized then that if I didnt slice and dice the background of a metaphorical cow as sacred as Michelle, no one would.

As a documentary film maker, I have produced a wide range of films, including musical histories of Bob Dylan, comedies about Paul McCartney and Elvis Presley, and serious political documentaries on Middle East history, Islamism, the Iranian nuclear program, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and progressivism in America. Serious research, I have learned, takes at a minimum two elements: time and space. With a subject whose life is as seemingly well-documented as Michelle Robinson Obamas, the more I had of both the better. I say seemingly for a reason. Although more has been written and said about Michelle Robinson Obama than any woman on the planet not named Hillary, almost all the reporting has been soft and superficial, even reverential. The result is a public history of Michelle Obama as far removed from reality as that of her husband, Barack (the subject of my 2012 documentary, Dreams from My Real Father ).

With ample help from a variety of sources, including his mother and grandparents, Barack had created what the CIA calls a legenda sophisticated cover that amounts to an entire artificial life history (often with supporting documents) to fool even determined counterintelligence professionals. Barack and friends had provided this cover in his bestselling 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

As I proved beyond any doubt, and as even mainstream journalists have come to see, the personal story Barack told in his breakthrough 2004 Democratic Convention speech was as fictional as his memoir. You dont have to take my word for itPulitzer Prize-winning Obama biographer David Garrow writes that Dreams was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction .