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Barack Obama and the "Bitter Clingers"
When I look around at the crumbling empire I helped build, I wonder how it all went so wrong. How did so many people lose their minds, the legacy media lose its objectivity, and so many so-called “educated” people lose their grip on reality?
What is Trump Derangement Syndrome anyway?
I think, as someone who lived it and has been online for the last 30 years, that the people with all of the power could not let go of that power, just like the South during the last Civil War.
The South had built for itself a utopian version of America, one not rooted in reality, but one they deeply believed in. The same is true for the Left today. I know, I helped build it. I believed in it too and thought it would last forever.
Trump’s win in 2016 was a sign that half of the country was not happy with how things were going and wanted change, just as much of America understood that a country that proclaimed all men are created equal could not keep slaves.
And just as the freeing of the slaves sent the South into mass psychosis that would lead to Jim Crow laws and the oppression of Black Americans, after eight years of deeply rooted propaganda that said Trump was a racist and for him to win would be an existential threat to our way of life, one our country could not survive, sent those of us inside utopia cascading into madness.
And so we began fighting a Civil War. Not at Gettysburg or Shiloh, but on Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, and TikTok. But only one side is cutting off friends and family. Only one side has no plan for the rest of America on the outside. Only one side seems prepared to become violent to preserve their utopia.
I thought November of 2024 was like the burning of Atlanta. Not quite the end of the war, but almost. Now, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the fracturing of the Right, I’m not so sure.
What I do know is that so much of what defines our Civil War, so much of what explains the Left’s mass psychosis, took root in 2008.
What is an American?
2008 was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning, according to Neil Howe, who co-wrote the book with William H. Strauss. It wasn’t just the election of the first Black president, or the launch of the iPhone, the rise of social media, or the $800 billion bailout of Wall Street that birthed two populist movements on the Left with Occupy and on the Right with the Tea Party. It was also the year an idea contagion began to spread.
In April of 2008, Obama was recorded writing off half the country as people who were “bitter” and clinging to “guns and religion.”
“Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton activated her entire campaign apparatus to portray Mr. Obama’s remarks as reflective of an elitist view of faith and community. His comments, she said, were “not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”
Those comments were not seen as racist, yet months later, in October, when Sarah Palin said more or less the same thing, she was called an “Islamaphobe.” Seven years after 9/11, that is what the Left was worried about, not “Radical Islamic terrorism.”
From the Washington Post, “Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?”
Race and racism became the dividing line after that. By 2010, the idea that the Tea Party was racist became a big story. ABC News still had some objectivity and attempted to tell both sides.
Reason’s Michael Moynihan made a video montage showing how widely accepted it was to call the Tea Party racist.
Two years later, in 2012, amid Obama’s re-election, Mitt Romney and the Republicans had no idea what they were up against.
I was among those fighting Obama’s media wars on Twitter, havi
Published on 8 hours ago