Former President Barack Obama appears to be enjoying his retirement. When he took office in 2008, he was worth a very nice $1.3 to $5 million, as the bean counters figured it. Most of that wealth came from royalties gleaned from his two books, which became best sellers after his rousing 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address and his election as president.
He has never created anything, never started a business, never had an original idea in his life. But today, Barack Obama is worth a cool $100 million smackers.
Is America a great country or what?
Obama has often been accused of being a "socialist." He wasn't. Obama was a crony capitalist who often gave lip service to the market economies of the West while advocating for top-down solutions to America's problems. The most prominent of those was, of course, Obamacare, which used private insurance companies to offer government-mandated coverages at set prices. Not socialism, not capitalism, instead, an unworkable, wasteful, massively expensive hybrid that the socialists want to turn into an entirely government operation. They will likely get their wish when Democrats retake the House, the Senate, and the presidency someday.
Obama rarely opens his mouth about politics, specifically Trump. He felt it necessary to directly address personal and racial rhetoric originating from Trump. Following highly controversial incidents on social media—including a widely condemned video shared from Trump's account—Obama directly criticized the behavior during an interview in February. He condemned the inflammatory online and television rhetoric as a "clown show" and characterized the behavior as "deeply troubling." He has also echoed other Democrats in saying that Trump, without naming him, is a "threat to democracy."
All in all, Obama has kept his mouth shut, especially when it comes to Democratic politics. He claims, “There are moments… where our core values are at stake. In those moments, I think it’s appropriate for me to say something.”
I believe any sane, rational person looking at the growing power of people like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or New York's 13th congressional district candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier might ask where Barack Obama is now that his party is being taken over by anti-capitalist, antisemitic, pro-Communist personalities who threaten a lot more than our "core values."
Ms. Avila Chevalier once retweeted: “I just cannot get over the fact that the universe has foisted upon us the perfect illustration of literally every failing of capitalism and people are still like we can’t be communists cuz there won’t be enough types of soup.”
CNN examined her now-deleted X account and reported it contained “repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin.” Another post encouraged workers to “seize the means of production.” Another advocated for labor’s control of wealth. She wrote: “You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.” She described Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” as an “essential must-read.”
Her posts went well beyond economics. In April 2020, she called President Biden, then a candidate, a “rapist.” After Vice President Harris urged migrants not to cross the southern border illegally, Ms. Avila Chevalier responded: “I have no nuance to add. F**k Kamala Harris.”
Ms. Avila Chevalier called for abolishing police and prisons, posted about wiping her hands on the American flag, and denounced interracial relationships by accusing Black and Arab men of “fetishizing ugly colonizer women,” one of several posts in which she attacked white women.
In 2025, Obama wrote on X, “After two years of unimaginable loss and suffering for Israeli families and the people of Gaza, we should all be encouraged and relieved that an end to the conflict is within sight; that those hostages still being held will be reunited with their families; and that vital aid can start reaching those inside Gaza whose lives have been shattered.”
His fellow Democrats, Mamdani, Avila Chevalier, and 7th congressional district candidate Claire Valdez, don't have quite the same view of Jews that Obama does.
Yet as Mr. Mamdani, DSA-backed candidates and others within the Democratic Party increasingly describe Israel as an apartheid state committing genocide, where is Mr. Obama?
How strong is this socialist, anti-Israel tide?
Governor Gavin Newsom strongly opposed a wealth tax in California on the state ballot in November, warning that it would drive high earners from California. Yet almost immediately after all Mamdani-endorsed candidates won their primaries, Newsom called for “an economic reset for America” and endorsed a nationwide billionaire tax.
A California state senator, Scott Wiener, a gay Jewish progressive Democrat running to succeed Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was loudly and profanely berated a week ago at a Trans Pride march for refusing to accuse Israel of genocide. Days later, he reversed himself and did just that.
In 2013, Mr. Obama said, “…nobody questions the efficacy of market economies in terms of producing wealth and innovation and keeping us competitive.” He's no dummy. He doesn't want to kill the goose that's laying all those golden eggs. He and less radical Democrats might want those eggs distributed differently, but they don't want to kill the goose that lays them.
Mamdani and his socialists want to kill the goose, the fatted calf, the milk cow, and any other producer of wealth in favor of radical redistribution schemes. Only Obama has the national standing in the Party to save Democrats from being remembered as the party that ended the American experiment.
Will he step forward and take a hand in the party's civil war? It would be good for the country if he did so. America needs two parties, and saving one of them from itself sounds like the perfect job for the Light Bringer.
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