My latest in PJ Media:
As Tyler O’Neil noted here, The Atlantic on Thursday published an excerpt from Barack Obama’s latest autobiography, A Promised Land, and if you want to hear about how America was never great, you’ve come to the right place. “I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth,” Obama writes. What myth? The one about how America is marred by “systemic racism”? No, just the opposite: Obama wants us to drop our illusions and admit that “an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.”
It’s ironic that the nation’s first black president would be the one complaining about this alleged “racial caste system,” which, if it existed, would likely have prevented him from becoming president in the first place. Even if there were widespread, systemic racism in the United States, which is unlikely since it has been an offense that has been continually warned about and vigorously prosecuted since 1964, the last person who can claim to have been a victim of it is Barack Hussein Obama. It’s even more ironic that the same people who believe that his words about racism and capitalism are an accurate summation of what the United States is and has been also believe that President Trump is “racist” for not wanting to allow unrestrained, unrestricted mass migration into this sinkhole of racism and capitalist excess. If this country is so bad, Barack, why do so many people want to come live here?
In any case, as Rating America’s Presidents shows, if America does have anything like a racial caste system today, it’s largely due to the presidency of one Barack H. Obama. Throughout his tenure, Obama stoked racial tensions rather than calming them. When he took office, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.
Obama’s response to several widely publicized incidents also exacerbated racial tensions. On July 16, 2009, black intellectual Henry Louis Gates found himself locked out of his Massachusetts home and began trying to force his way in. An officer arrived to investigate a possible break-in; Gates began berating him and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Obama claimed that the police “acted stupidly” and noted the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately,” although there was no indication of racial bias in this case. He invited Gates and the police officer to the White House for a “beer summit,” which the media hailed as a manifestation of his determination to heal racial divisions, when in fact it was just the opposite: he was taking a case of misunderstanding and disorderly conduct and portraying it as a racial incident requiring presidential reconciliation.
There is much more. Read the rest here.