Upon Barack Obama’s exit from the presidential office on Jan. 20, 2017, a conservative could not be faulted for thinking to himself that America had dodged a bullet. Obama seemed to have failed in his promise to fundamentally transform America. Other than Obamacare, then still vulnerable to repeal, he had overseen no transformative legislative changes and had left his party so weakened that a controversial outsider like Donald Trump could seize the reins of power.
Obama’s effect on the Democrats’ future certainly seemed deleterious. In January 2009, when Obama took office, the Democratic Party controlled both chambers of 27 state legislatures. Eight years later, Democrats controlled both chambers in only 13 states. More troubling for Democrats, on Obama’s watch, his party lost a net total of 13 governorships and 816 state legislative seats. (READ MORE: Obama the Puppet-Changer?)
However, as Scott McKay points out in his insightful new book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, Obama injected a toxic virus into America’s DNA that has continued to replicate itself ever since his departure from the White House. Obama, McKay writes boldly, “is an anti-American and a racist. His intention was never to heal us. It was to drive a wedge through our traditional heart and use the destruction to usher in an America unrecognizable 15 years later.” If that were truly his intention, his presidency was a roaring success.
Boldness is one of McKay’s strengths as an investigative journalist. For me, a litmus test of that virtue is whether the author acknowledges the collaboration between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama on Obama’s famed memoir, Dreams From My Father. McKay does. When I first unearthed this obvious connection in September 2008, even conservative publications ran from it. The fear of being called a racist intimidated the Right into silence. That silence on a range of issues cost the GOP the 2008 election, and the 2012 election as well.
McKay, whom I do not know, is a man after my own heart. He goes where others fear to tread — Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, even Donald Young — and if you don’t know who Davis and Young are, you need to read the book. Importantly, unlike some conservative writers, McKay does not let his imagination outrun his facts. When an author criticizes Obama, especially on the subject of race, he has to have his facts straighter than straight. Helpful for the reader too is that McKay writes clearly and succinctly.
ORDER Racism, Revenge and Ruin here today!
One subject McKay gives the attention it deserves is the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012. As McKay observes, the media violated every rule in the journalist handbook to condemn the transparently innocent Zimmerman and to inflame the passions of Black America. This was an election year, after all, and Florida was then a battleground state.
Obama waited until nearly four weeks after Martin’s death before weighing in. By then, anyone who was paying close attention knew the troubled teen had viciously and gratuitously blindsided a man nearly half a foot smaller. After yelling for help for nearly a minute, a desperate Zimmerman did the only thing he could do to save his life. He shot Martin. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 51: The Anti-American Legacy of Barack Obama)
This was the defining moment of Obama’s presidency. He had the opportunity to tell the truth about the incident and to ease Black America’s fears. What did he do? “Enter Obama,” writes McKay, “to pour kerosene on the fire.” Said Obama famously, throwing in his lot with the black underclass, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Never mind that the Hispanic Zimmerman was an Obama supporter and a civil rights activist. Obama had chosen sides. Even after Zimmerman was acquitted, he refused to abandon the lie, protesting, “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
The day after Zimmerman’s acquittal, with Obama fanning the flames, Black Lives Matter sprang to life. As McKay writes:
This is what comes from Obama’s racial pyromania — from Trayvon Martin, and Ferguson to, yes, George Floyd — all taken as confirmation of the lie, to which he wholeheartedly subscribes, that a black man can’t get a fair shake in America.
For those wanting to see how thoroughly that lie has subverted American justice, I cannot recommend strongly enough the new Alpha News documentary “The Fall of Minneapolis.” And for those wanting to know how that lie was planted and who has been its nurturer-in-chief for nearly 20 years, I cannot recommend strongly enough Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama.
“Obama and his allies have not merely birthed a militant anti-white racism,” concludes McKay. “[T]hey have lent mainstream respectability to its most strident backers in politics, media, and corporate America, weaponizing politics, economics and culture along the way.”
Now watching Obama’s allies in the pro-Hamas movement take to the streets, the saner of Obama’s supporters, especially the Jewish ones, have got to be asking themselves a question they should have asked 15 years ago: Just what hellish forces have we unleashed?
Jack Cashill is the author of Deconstructing Obama, Unmasking Obama, and, most recently, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities.
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