Obama was the turning point
I've long felt that, as the title of this post says, Obama was the turning point - not to some hoped-for racial reconciliation, but to a divisive leftist dominance in US politics. Here’s an article from yesterday that illustrates his malign influence [emphasis mine]:
At their Substack “Truth Over News,” independent journalists Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke report on the newly obtained transcript of a Jan. 17, 2017 meeting between then outgoing President Barack Obama and 17 unnamed “progressive” journalists, in which they discussed Trump’s upcoming term and allegations that Trump had colluded with Russia. As Carlson and Mahncke note, Obama knew the Russia allegations were false; his CIA director, John Brennan, had briefed him in late July on a “proposal from one of [Hillary Clinton’s] foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference from Russian security services.”…
It would be an understatement to say that the press fell for the scam; this entirely fake story became the dominant political narrative of the first two years of Trump’s presidency...
... it points to the origin point for the derangement of American politics over the past eight years: the Obama faction’s weaponization of the security state and the press to deny the American people a legitimate opportunity to reject their agenda at the ballot box... Indeed, both in and out of government, the party-state machine constructed by Obama did its best to create, in lieu of a governing program that could appeal to the majority of Americans, a vast public-private apparatus of censorship and thought control targeting dissident speech as “misinformation” - a project that was thwarted only by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022...
After the election of Obama, who was the first truly leftist president and the first Alinskyite president, the MSM became totally taken over by propaganda rather than partially, and the president became deceptive about his goals and methods. The Democratic Party began to veer more strongly and openly to the left as the Overton window moved.
Obama didn’t try to shape his policy to the needs and desires of the American people, but rather to do what he could to further a global rather than a US agenda, and if the people didn’t like it they were just going to have to accept it...