Meditations On The Notion That Obama “Never Had Any Scandals”

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Now that Trump is back in office I’m again seeing Democrats posting fondly about Barack Obama and how wonderful it was to have a president whose worst scandal was wearing a brown suit once. During the first Trump administration such sentiments were a great way to go viral on Liberal Twitter.

And the thing about this genre of tweet is that they’re kind of right — Obama didn’t have any “scandals” of the level we see from Trump. But the fact that the evil things Obama did weren’t considered scandalous says profoundly ugly things about the kind of society we are living in.

Obama committed all kinds of atrocities while president that would be considered scandalous if we lived in a world that is even remotely sane. Destroying Libya and leaving it a smoldering crater of humanitarian disaster. Tearing apart Syria with the dirty war that featured pouring weapons into the arms of al-Qaeda affiliates. Initiating the US-backed incineration of Yemen. Lighting the fuse for the ruination of Ukraine with the US-backed regime change op in 2014. His notorious drone program. The list goes on.

But none of that stuff registers for the average Democrat. They don’t care about it. They don’t think about it. It’s not even a blip on their screen. All they are interested in is the feelings Barack Obama made them feel inside about their favorite political faction. That’s all they’ve been trained to focus on.

The typical westerner inhabits a mental universe that is completely divorced from reality. Atrocities are only committed by foreign states that their government doesn’t like. Propaganda is something that only happens to people in other countries, or to people with different political ideologies. Scandals are whatever controversies the imperial media choose to focus on and inflame. The actual things that are happening in our world don’t register.

This happens because we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where public thought, speech, and behavior are aggressively manipulated by mass-scale psyops in the service of the powerful. The news is propaganda. The search algorithms are wildly slanted. The social media platforms herd us into isolated ideological echo chambers. Nobody who meaningfully challenges the information interests of the powerful is allowed to ascend to fame and influence. Hollywood is just a PR machine for the empire.

So most westerners are kept from forming an accurate picture of reality in their minds, which is what allows them to hold absurd beliefs like “Barack Obama never did anything bad.” They’re cut off from seeing all the immense suffering that’s inflicted upon the world by the empire they live under and the sociopaths who rule over it, and in its place a crude crayon drawing of a world which confirms their power-serving biases has been inserted into their minds.

They can’t see Libya. They can only see the feelings they felt while Obama was in office, and contrast them with the feelings they feel under Trump. This is the way they have been conditioned to relate to the world. Mass-scale psychological manipulation has turned them into drooling infants. And nobody benefits from this but the powerful.

We won’t be free until our minds are free. We can’t have a healthy world as long as we are thinking in the ways the powerful have trained us to think.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/whitehouse.gov (Public Domain).