As Obama’s endless time in office drags on, he seems increasingly candid about just how much he loathes any form of disagreement or opposition.
At a summit on poverty, the president is quoted as saying:
I think that the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant venue. They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re all like, “I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama Phone, or whatever.” And that becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical — who is raising a couple of kids and doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.
And so, if we’re going to change how Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like. And how budgets connect to that. And that’s a hard process because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news. [reported at breitbart.com, 5/12/15]
This isn’t about poverty. It’s about dissension.
Essentially, Obama is advocating propaganda. One definition of “propaganda” is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
Obama does not like dissension. He says he gets mad when a news station features or interviews people who don’t wish to work, and who even proudly live off the government and taxpayers.
Why does he get mad? Because that news station is showing things he would rather not see, and rather not know. Obama does not want to have to question his premise that his ideas and policies — policies of wealth redistribution — are inherently just. He doesn’t like questions.
I find this true of a lot of progressives. When I read progressive responses to non-progressive ideas (conservative, libertarian, Objectivist) on the Internet or elsewhere, I virtually never see the science of logic. I see name calling, intimidation, and sometimes hostility and hatred more intense than even the hatred of which they accuse their non-progressive adversaries.
Psychology, going back to the time of Freud, had a name for this phenomenon: Projection. Projection is when you claim to see in another the sordid and emotional motivation bubbling within your own consciousness.
Notice that Obama’s solution is neither to prove, nor even suggest, that these news stories he dislikes are false. Instead, he goes right to propaganda. “We’re going to have to change the way our body politic thinks.” How? Via persuasion, logic and facts? Or by some other means? He doesn’t say. But Obama is the executive head of the United States government, the most powerful government on earth, and in human history. When the head of such a government states, “We’re going to have to change,” it can logically only imply one thing — government force.
Fundamentally, dictatorship is based on philosophy. Specifically, it’s the philosophy that human beings have a right to initiate and impose force on other human beings in the name of some rationalization or another — religion, collective responsibility for one’s fellow man, the alleged public good, and so forth. We have heard them all, and Obama’s collectivism is nothing new.
The psychology of dictatorship flows from a hatred of dissension. I find this not just with Obama, but with nearly everyone (in or out of political office) trying to advance the progressive cause. Force appears to be their only (and most treasured) recourse. When you disagree with some aspect of their policies — taxes, socialized medicine, government regulation of the Internet, whatever it is — the response always boils down to accusations of “hate.” When in power, progressives appear to take glee in the fact of power for its own sake, that “I’m doing this because I can.”
Witness Obama’s blatant misuse of executive power by utilizing executive orders to suspend and reinstate the Obamacare law at will, to eradicate immigration laws, to regulate the Internet, to propose raising taxes without Congress, to propose changing gun laws without legislation, etc. Witness his bragging in a speech that he has a phone and a pen. He gets off on this power, and he does not care if it’s even Constitutional. That’s what progressivism is: power lust, power for its own sake. It’s as old as the Middle Ages, yet Obama has sold it as something cool, something enlightened, and something new to an increasingly uninformed and indifferent electorate.
The logic goes like this. “When you disagree with me, you are being hateful. Nobody but a hateful person could ever disagree with me on this topic. Hatred is morally wrong. If something is both morally wrong and hateful, it should be illegal.”
They might as well be saying: When you disagree with me, that makes you mean and hateful. I do not have to prove my point. I will do everything I can to try and make you feel ashamed of yourself. And if that doesn’t work — then we’ll call in the troops.
Granted, progressives — at least yet — do not always go so far as to claim everything they consider hateful should be illegal; they haven’t yet proposed wide scale censorship. But the psychological and ideological reasoning is already there. Progressives are poised for censorship, rationalized and repackaged — as always — as something “for your own good.” The only question is when and how they’ll propose it, and how people will respond to it.
Americans — including Republican leadership in Congress — have almost completely rolled over on every other issue. So in a way, can you blame Obama and other progressives for thinking the time may be right to force Fox News, or anyone else guilty of dissension, to “change” the way we think?
In this example, Obama is essentially saying not that Fox News is inaccurate, but that it’s hateful. He’s also claiming that Fox News is capable of “making” him angry. How? Isn’t anger caused by underlying ideas, thoughts, assumptions and premises? Some claim that emotions are entirely physiologically based. Regardless, Fox News can’t be causing anything. People’s emotions are caused by factors within a person, not by external agents.
Obama, like other progressives, is perfectly free to prove Fox News wrong. He’s perfectly free to say, “Here are the wrong facts,” or, “Here are the facts they leave out,” or, “Here’s their mistaken reasoning or premise, and here’s my correction of it.” Obama is free to do that, but that’s not enough for progressives like him. They do not have an answer, and it’s the dissension that “makes” Obama mad — not any actual or alleged falsification of objective truth.
So what next, Obama? What next, progressives, as you lick your chops for an even more aggressive leftist president such as Hillary Clinton, or maybe Elizabeth Warren? You’ve won most of the political battles you claimed you wanted to win. I see no equivalent of Ronald Reagan, much less a Thomas Jefferson, coming on the scene any time soon. You’ve got about as much government regulation and taxation of the private economy as we can get, short of becoming an outright Communist nation, complete with control-and-command economics and censorship, and perhaps concentration camps for dissenters. America is now a European-style welfare state. Our economy does not noticeably grow and our debt is horrendous, but the government “safety net” has extended to most of the population via Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, plus a host of other government programs. What else do you want, progressives?
Government control of the economy inevitably leads to censorship in the realm of ideas, absent a complete course reversal in both areas. Obama knows this. Where do the rest of us stand? Or do the rest of us even have a stand, at all? Has mediocre, government-sponsored public education so bred the independent thought out of us that we’ll willingly follow wherever our angry, resentful leaders take us? Do the personal mental chips on their shoulders require the rest of us to curb, or give up, our basic freedoms?
Censorship can happen here, because it can happen anywhere. It has been the norm of human history, with America a rare and brief exception. Individual rights are fragile and vulnerable — and Obama, along with other progressives, know this. It’s up to us to stop it.
