Photo from Barack Obama official Presidential Library at this link https://www.obamalibrary.gov/galleries/president-barack-obama#70
As we head into 2025, there is a whole new vibe in America and, arguably, the world. The election of Donald Trump, likely one of the greatest comeback stories of all time politically, portends a realignment of priorities, a reinstatement of our founding principles, and a reinforcement of our nation’s laws.
It is the hope that in 2025, America will find its centering point after the progressive policies of diversity, equity, and inclusion decimated commonsense, the nonsensical policies of green energy scams and COVID mandates hurt our economy, and the lawlessness of open borders, a weaponized Department of Justice and non-prosecution of crime in inner cities made a mockery of our Constitution and laws.
Numerous Democrats are now reassessing their party and what went wrong. Many are openly commenting about the far-Left takeover of the Democrat Party. Interestingly, they are assessing the damage only after they lost when the majority of Americans were telling them months ago that their views and policies were extreme, radical, untruthful, and much, much more.
At the center of all of the chaos lies Barack Obama.
It was his agenda, his plan, and his people that first pushed the radical DEI philosophy, disrupted the first term of Trump, lied in the 2020 campaign to elect Biden, and then, as many have been noticing, ran the Biden Presidency.
In my radio show this week, I review the top stories on the economy, politics, culture, and corruption. Of course, the Trump comeback election and decisive victory is the biggest story of 2024. Both Charles Lipson and Jim Iuorio remark in my interviews with them that Trump’s victory is not only important for what his policies mean going forward, but it is doubly important because America escaped electing Kamala Harris, who would have doubled down on Biden’s policies, making it harder for America to center itself in the future.
But after recognizing the Trump win as the top story, the next most important story is the takedown of Barack Obama.
David Samuels, writing in Tablet, wrote a lengthy, must-read article on precisely that topic. Titled Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment, Samuels dissects who Obama is and the machinations he used to rise to power until it all came unraveled by Trump, Musk, and, to a lesser extent, Netanyahu. He discusses the importance of social media, the censorship of stories, the collusion of government in the censorship, the fake experts created by the Obama machine to feed talking points to the media, and so much more.
Especially if you live in Illinois, you should grab a glass of wine and soak in every word. Here are a few excerpts to heighten your interest:
The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.
It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.
Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.
Samuels does all of America a great service by revealing with detail how America has been gaslit over the previous decade and who did it. Others have been making similar arguments about what we have just gone through in terms of thought experiments. But one reason Illinoisans should read Samuels’ piece is:
He also exposes the Chicago connection to Obama’s manipulation, done so with the help of David Axelrod, who until recently held a respected position at the University of Chicago as the Director for the Institute of Politics.
He also shows how Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate hinged on the Chicago Tribune forcing open the sealed divorce records of his opponent, Jack Ryan. In Illinois, dirty politics is the only kind of politics Illinois Democrats play, and this article is further evidence of such.
To be aware of the games politicians play is to be able to expose the game to others and counter the impact. More than anything, the Trump election and his upcoming administration hopefully mean Americans won’t be played for fools by elitists in government, academia, industry, and media. Game On.