Barack Obama, now a gray-haired elder statesman of the left, appeared at the Connecticut Forum in Hartford on Tuesday and engaged in a lengthy discussion with a sycophantic historian, Heather Cox Richardson. The welcoming environment apparently led the left’s revered hero to relax a bit too much, for he let the mask slip and demonstrated once again that what leftists want to do most is use the full force of the federal government to muzzle patriots, so that only the leftist perspective can be heard.
Obama knows his audience, and so he framed his latest call for authoritarianism in the context of a call to rein in the Emanuel Goldstein of the left, Donald Trump. “It doesn’t matter,” he intoned magisterially, “if a candidate running for office just is constantly, just hypothetically,” — ha ha! Yeah, right, Barack — “saying untrue things, or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost and that the system was rigged, but then when he wins, then it isn’t rigged because he won.” The assembled leftists laughed appreciatively at this. The great man was telling a joke, and even better, he was letting them in on it! Obama’s attempt at a sly dig at Trump was ham-handed, clumsy, obvious, and factually false, sure, but the crowd laughed anyway, because, hey, Orange Man Bad!
Buoyed by the adoring throng, Obama continued: “It doesn’t matter if everybody believes it, it just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.’ That’s what’s happened. That’s what’s happened in one of our major political parties, you have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true, but we will pretend like it is.” Yeah, gosh, it’s really bad when that happens, Mr. Ex-President, sir. Like, remember when one of our major political parties, along with 51 of our nation’s top “intelligence professionals,” was pushing the idea that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” even though they knew it wasn’t true?
“That is dangerous,” Obama said, but of course, Hunter’s laptop and other massive deceptions from his friends and colleagues were not what he had in mind. He went on to assert “we want diversity of opinion; we don’t want diversity of facts.” And in that, Obama actually came close to saying something that is actually true. He doesn’t really want diversity of opinion, as he made clear as he continued to speak, but it is an unfortunate reality today that leftists and patriots all too often have not only differing views on events, but vastly differing ideas of what actually happened. Leftists, for example, insist that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, while those who have looked into the question find no evidence for that claim. Yet if you dare to point this out in a crowd of leftists, you’ll be shouted down as a “genocide denier.”
And Obama wants to do more than just shout down the view of those whom he and his fellow leftists fear and hate. He called for active government censorship, saying:
How do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things, that I think is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment but that also says, “Look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices, or the most polarizing voices, or the most dangerous in the sense of inciting violence voices.” That I think is going to be a big challenge for all of us that we’re going to have to undertake.
So there’s the left’s new plan, which is, predictably, same as the old plan: brand its opponents “hateful” and “polarizing,” and silence them accordingly. The chief flagship organizations of the left’s defamation industry, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL, have been smearing patriots in this way for years. Obama wants to follow up these smears with a federal muzzle.
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He has, in fact, made this clear for years. Back in April 2022, Obama spoke at an event sponsored by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.” In the course of a long and rambling discussion with Jeffrey Goldberg of “The Atlantic,” who was as sycophantic as Heather Cox Richardson, Obama called for government control over the Internet in order to stem the “demand for crazy” that was spreading what he called “disinformation.” As leftists always do, Obama claimed that this “disinformation” was threatening “our democracy” — that is, the Left’s political and cultural hegemony.
Obama won’t get his way during this presidential administration, but he no doubt has high hopes for a chance to destroy the First Amendment after Jan. 20, 2029. It would be a relief if one of America’s major political parties would draw back from the brink of being on the verge of destroying the republic and imposing authoritarian rule, but the Democrats are too busy accusing Trump of doing exactly that to engage in any self-reflection. Nor is self-reflection particularly their thing, especially when they are in the middle of using their old tactic of accusing their enemies of what they themselves are guilty of doing.
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