Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently, Barack Obama scoffed at the backlash to critical race theory. In his view, it is the backlash, not the theory, that is extreme. In the interview, Obama assumed the posture of the dispassionate moderate, carefully dissecting the irrationality of his opponents. He affected great perplexity at their resistance to a “changing America.”
“We have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” he said. Never mind that his whole political philosophy entails a rejection of America’s original principles. His clamoring for a fundamentally transformed America is nothing more than a project to replace the political order of the Founding Fathers with a new and dysfunctional one, based on liberal imperatives more akin to the French Revolution than the American Revolution.
Obama sees any resistance to liberal race policies as evidence of racism.
It is for this reason that Obama embraces the rank anti-Americanism of critical race theory. It is toxic propaganda designed to turn Americans against their own country and lay the groundwork for a new political system rooted in leftism. Obama can pontificate about assaults on democracy while celebrating a theory that portrays America’s democracy as a byproduct of racism. He can talk about Republicans as un-American even as he excuses athletes who boycott the flag.
Republicans, he intoned gravely in his interview with Cooper, have introduced “dark spirits” into our politics. This pretense of moderation is ludicrous given his long history of finding the company of anti-American extremists congenial. He sat in the church of Jeremiah Wright as he cursed America. At Harvard, Obama championed Derrick Bell, one of the progenitors of critical race theory. Obama launched his political career in the living room of Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist who tried to blow up the U.S. Capitol. Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer pushing the ugly agitprop of Saul Alinsky.
For Obama, the issue is never radicalism but resistance to radicalism. As a candidate for the presidency, he called such resistant Americans “bitter.” Now he calls them delusional, worked up over imaginary threats to their “way of life.” His cavalier laughter about critical race theory — “Who knew that was the threat to our republic?” — speaks volumes about his warped vision of that republic.
Americans can be excused for not joining him in his laughter after enduring months of rioting by Black Lives Matter and the indoctrination of their children in self-hatred. If Americans feel their way of life threatened, that’s because it is. They see Black Lives Matter flags flying atop American embassies. They see anti-white racism taught openly in schools. They see Joe Biden unveiling a blatant racial spoils system. They hear liberal intellectuals decrying the sight of flags and fantasizing about “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.”
The unstated premise of Obama’s musings on race is that those who bear no responsibility for slavery and segregation should nevertheless suffer penalties for them. The race-based social engineering he endorses involves endless violations of equality before law and freedom. Those who refuse to accept this arrangement are the problem, in his view. They can’t “reconcile” themselves to American history, as he puts it grandly. Through this distorted prism, Obama sees any resistance to liberal race policies as evidence of racism.
For all of his phony detachment, Obama remains as thin-skinned as ever about his own presidency. Even though Americans elected him twice, he still views them warily. It is impossible for him to conceive that their opposition to his polices was philosophical and not racist. Hence, he continues to whine about the America’s people displeasure with his handling of the Henry Louis Gates episode. A wounded Obama told Cooper that his poll numbers plummeted with white Americans after it. But what did he expect? He foolishly bashed the cop who arrested Gates (the cop was just following procedure) and injected race into a non-racial matter. Obama still sounds sore that he had to hold a “beer summit” between Gates and the cop at the White House in a frenzied attempt to stop his drop in the polls.
Obama insinuates that racism and a divisive “right-wing” media drove the controversy. That media, he says, thrives on the “fear and resentment of a white population.” He thus maligns the motives of his opponents and absolves himself of any responsibility for dividing people by race. The American people rightly resent this demagogic hectoring. It is a form of guilt-tripping political hypnosis that seeks to lull them into non-resistance at the very moment resistance is needed most. That resistance is not contrary to the health of American democracy, as Obama absurdly contends, but proof of it.
