Special to WorldTribune, June 12, 2022
Analysis by Joe Schaeffer, 247 Real News
Former two-term United States President Barack Obama was making the globalist rounds yet again, enjoying a swank trip to Denmark to take part in something called the “Copenhagen Democracy Summit.”
There’s only two things you need to know about Obama’s latest sojourn abroad. One, he was undoubtedly given the luxurious treatment to which he has become accustomed.
And two, he was bashing American citizens on foreign soil.
One would think that latter point would be quite noteworthy. A former president is not merely ripping political rivals overseas, a long-time famous no-no that has since been discarded in the Age of the Dragon, i.e. the rise of Donald Trump.
No, Obama has regular Americans in his gunsights. And he is blasting them to an admiring international audience.
From a transcript of his address posted June 10:
Now, while Ukraine properly commands our immediate attention, it’s also important to recognize that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s lawlessness is not happening in isolation. As I’m sure previous speakers have noted, on every continent, we are seeing democratic backsliding. On every continent, emboldened autocrats are ramping up oppression, they’re targeting minority groups, they’re often flouting international law.
Just as disturbing, within democracies, populist appeals grounded in fear and bigotry and resentment, have elevated leaders who, once they’re in office, have sought to systematically undermine democratic institutions and entrench themselves in power. In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Obama then proceeded to dish out a long-winded homage to the post-1945 “democratic” order full of lazy platitudes. Throughout, however, there loomed the ominous fact that, in what is a very deliberate tactic, he was donning “democracy” as a cloak, as something he defines and embodies:
I believe a genuine democracy must be rooted in the core principle that all persons, regardless of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical capacity, economic status — all persons have an inviolable dignity and worth, and that they are entitled to a say in how they are governed and deserve equal treatment in the eyes of the law. That to me is a core principle of democracy. (Applause.)
There was a time — and the reason that it’s important for us to say this is because there was a time, a long time — when countries could claim to be model democracies, despite the fact that they maintained effective caste systems, racial caste systems, religious caste systems, gender caste systems. They treated people differently, but they said, “Oh, we’re model democracies.”
No more. No democracy is perfect, and injustice is embedded in every society, we can acknowledge that, but any system of government that calls itself a democracy, while codifying injustice, violates the very essence of the word.
The above may sound rather benign in and of itself. But a discussion Obama holds with young “Obama Foundation leaders from all across Europe” at the conclusion of his speech reveals just how menacing things can be when one man, and the forces he represents, assumes the right to decide what is and is not proper democratic behavior:
OBAMA:
We talked about online organizing, but one of the things that I do think has changed, even since I was in office, was the amount of misinformation, the difficulty of sorting between what’s true and what’s false, what’s journalism and what’s fabrication….
In the United States, as I think many of you saw, COVID became somehow a political issue and getting vaccinated or wearing masks. A lot of that was driven just by misinformation that was out there, and that seems to be happening on more and more issues. I’m wondering how it’s affected you and whether you’ve seen some solutions to help young people distinguish between what’s true and false in making decisions about how to participate and what to support.
Foundation leader SELVIJE MUSTAFI:
[T]here are big concerns also in our movement about how false information and misinformation is spreading on the internet to influence decisions by some political actors or political sides. So using the social media, you can create, and you can expand different kinds of misinformation. And as you said, the challenge is that those kind of fake news and misinformation are making the people to have a different kind of opinion, which is not necessarily relevant or truthful…. There is a big base to spread fake news and to make [people] think like that, and not necessarily they can now differentiate what is opinion and what is fact.
OBAMA:
Excellent.
There you have it. Obama, the would-be champion of democracy, and his Obama Youth are openly stating that they have the right – even worse, the duty – to ensure that the citizens of the supposed Free World only hold thoughts deemed correct by him and the forces he represents.
A former president is denouncing wrongthink at a globalist conference sponsored by Facebook’s parent company Meta, Google and Microsoft.
Other sponsors include the fiercely pro-NATO, internationalist Atlantic Council, which helped orchestrate the first impeachment of President Trump, the George W. Bush Institute and the International Republican Institute.
The theme that holding a different political opinion than Barack Obama means one is an enemy of democracy has been a constant for the former Saul Alinsky disciple of late.
In April, Obama gave an address at Stanford University on “‘disinformation’ and challenges to democracy in the digital realm,” the pro-online free speech website Reclaim the Net reports. “The event was co-hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation,” the site states. It provided a transcript:
And that’s why I’m here today, on Stanford’s campus, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where so much of the digital revolution began, because I’m convinced that right now one of the biggest impediments to doing all of this, indeed, one of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening is the profound change that’s taking place in how we communicate and consume information….
People like Putin and Steve Bannon, for that matter, understand it’s not necessary for people to believe this information in order to weaken democratic institutions. You just have to flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage. You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe.
Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won. And as Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election, our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission, such a project.
His solution? Obama openly calls for the solidification of a censorious dominant information establishment:
That said, the First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter, any more than it applies to editorial decisions made by The New York Times or Fox News. Never has. Social media companies already make choices about what is or is not allowed on their platforms and how that content appears, both explicitly through content moderation, and implicitly through algorithms….
He’s really advocating for this…
[A]ny rules we come up with to govern the distribution of content on the Internet will involve value judgments. None of us are perfectly objective. What we consider unshakeable truth today may prove to be totally wrong tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t truer than others or that we can’t draw lines between opinions, facts, honest mistakes, intentional deceptions.
We make these distinctions all the time in our daily lives, at work, in school, at home, in sports, and we can do the same when it comes to Internet content, as long as we agree on a set of principles, some core values to guide the work. So, in the interest of full transparency, here’s what I think our guiding principles should be.
The way I’m going to evaluate any proposal touching on social media and the Internet is whether it strengthens or weakens the prospects for a healthy, inclusive democracy, whether it encourages robust debate and respect for our differences, whether it reinforces rule of law and self-governance, whether it helps us make collective decisions based on the best available information, and whether it recognizes the rights and freedoms and dignity of all our citizens.
And there we are, back at the wannabe despot draping himself in the fine garment of a “democracy” that he gets to define.
Barack Obama will “evaluate” what you can and cannot see on the Internet, and you will have no grounds to disagree, because he is all about “strengthening” democracy.
As he continued, Obama evinced the very strong belief that Americans are cattle that just need to be fed appropriately:
An interesting study came out recently, and this is just one study, so take it with a grain of salt. The researchers paid a large group of regular FOX News watchers to watch CNN for almost a month. And these were not swing voters, these were hard core, [Sean] Hannity, [Tucker] Carlson fans, right? They’re right there.
And what the researchers found was that, at the end of the month, people’s views on certain issues, like whether voting by mail should be allowed or whether electing Joe Biden would lead to more violence against police, on some of these issues, their views are changed by five, eight, ten points. These people didn’t suddenly turn into liberals. I am sure they still don’t like me. But at the margins, they had reshaped their perspectives in meaningful ways.
One month of the proper propaganda concentrated feed diet and… voila! A better, fitter democratic cow is the result.
This is what the ruling elite thinks of you. You can’t be trusted to think for yourself. You must be led by the nose to correct systems of thought.
The Great Destroyer of traditional American norms continues his work more than five years after leaving office.
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Obama abroad: Bashing Americans with focus on thoughtcrimes against ‘democracy’ added by Editor Three on
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