For most of the last decade after the onset of Obamamania, I was gas-lighted by the man. Don’t get me wrong: I was always skeptical of the limits of soaring elocution and of the capacity of a pastor-in-chief to effect positive transformation in America. But following George W. Bush’s neocon adventure in Iraq—which continues to make all our lives worse—I was not entirely opposed to Obama’s rise.

Gradually, with the deadlock in Washington and the general mediocrity and legislative malaise of the Obama administration, I developed an apathy to him. I watched as he dug deeper into the moral trenches, grandiloquently casting everyone who disagreed with him as “on the wrong side of history.” I saw that he was highly left-brained, unimaginative and predictable. It became clear that he didn’t care what the average American thought about him, so long as the editors of The New Yorker or fellow Harvard Law alumni recognized his genius.

On matters of basic liberal policy, he was content with not getting his hands too dirty after the healthcare debacle, so long as historians recognized his unrealized potential. But it was only in the last year that I was jolted awake not just to Obama’s operational failings, but also to his ideological ones. Through his catatonic auto-responses to terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Orlando and Nice, he didn’t leave me any choice but to replace years of apathy with real suspicion. It was impossible not to notice that the script he followed after the attacks was always the same:

Express condolences and solidarity to the victims. Offer a comforting anecdote (e.g. “France is America’s oldest ally”). Express a resolve to take the battle against ISIS to another level, with more intelligence-sharing and airstrikes, while downplaying any link to Islamic terror. Expend great effort defending diversity and saying that if we turn on each other, the terrorists win.

This last step, in which Obama’s passions show most conspicuously, is where he overplays his hand. He insists, “We must keep doing what we’re doing or else the terrorists win” (translation: “Let’s uphold the cycle of Wahhabi–Zionist violence while inviting all peoples and ideologies to America”). But humans, though causelessly searching for new obstacles for themselves, need the veneer of progress and forward momentum. So telling Americans to simply carry on is a psychological dead-end. But that’s the least of Obama’s flaws, for his prescription for us to do nothing (as if more intelligence-sharing and airstrikes constitutes something) betrays his deeper motives at the core of his character.

Obama Debates An ROK Reader

At this point, if you, a perceptive Westerner, could debate Obama, you might tell him that America should stop trying to be all things to all people.

“A country that strictly controls its borders and alienates major populations will be full of hatred and will be a prime ISIS target,” Obama might retort.

“But what about Japan and Poland?” you ask.

“Those countries are on the wrong side of history!” Obama says.

“Why can’t we be more like them? We’ll stop meddling in the Middle East and we’ll have a stronger identity at home.”

“No way,” says Obama.

“Why?” you say.

“Because reasons™.”

“But I need something more from this country, Obama. I feel no civic engagement. I feel like our identity’s been hollowed out and outsourced. This place is one big strip mall. I can’t even talk to my neighbors because we have nothing in common and they hardly speak English. Something needs to change.”

“What you propose is nothing short of dismantling the American dream.”

“What is the American dream in 2016?” you ask.

“My dream.”

The Distillation Of Obama’s American Dream

In speech after speech, Obama spends the lion’s share of time exhorting the world not to discriminate between peoples and ideologies, insisting that violent extremists are unrepresentative of the mainstream—a mainstream that he and his fellow liberals get to define and massage the parameters of. This Soros-like conniption at a selective society is the germ of Obama’s political impulses. By comparison, he cares little about healthcare, poverty, job creation, inner-city violence, the environment, or Wall Street.

Obama’s American dream, it can hardly be debated, is a society of mixed-race knowledge workers who retweet John Oliver videos and spiral out in virtue-signalling and quota-filling as the national religion—all while partaking of the cult of economic growth and projecting American military power abroad to spread the seeds of globalism. Contra popular wisdom, Obama isn’t the martyr of a liberated, selfless, post-tribal world. Rather, he’s the step-child of a new globalist tribe of bankers, armchair moralists, and hordes of ressentiment whose mandate is to shred history and turn the debris into money.

Flanked by Merkel and Clinton, Barack Obama is the modern face of liberalism, wherein so long as he waves the rainbow flag and self-righteously balkanizes the West through worship of Otherness (“it’s who we are!”) and aggressive equality policing, he has impunity from bankers, media masters and the r-selected electorate to accomplish nothing. Only the age of Obama could afflict us with Justin Trudeau, an airheaded drama teacher who’d rather lead a gay-pride parade or deliver a historic apology than do anything else in the world.

The Rise Of Obama

Obama’s rise is often explained as an inevitability of history, an everyday miracle in America’s march towards fairness and openness to the world. And yet Obama is more of a unicorn than that, is more a one-off event whose mutations are being disseminated in the American (and global) genome. Despite insistences that Everyone Is The Same,™ Obama has little in common, culturally or intellectually, with many of his high-profile minority hires, such as Susan Rice, Jeh Johnson, Loretta Lynch and Katherine Archuleta. These are hardly state-of-the-art thinkers whose contributions would have been tragically denied us if not for Obama. (Witness former Attorney General Eric Holder, whose post-Administration job involves helping Airbnb craft a better “anti-discrimination policy.”)

Obama’s backstory is both completely different from those of his peers, and completely explanatory of his political mores. He was born to a Kenyan father who’d made the intergalactic leap from goat-herder brushing up against British colonial authorities to Harvard student. Obama Sr. must have been absurdly intelligent, which he combined with an unsurprising resentment towards colonialism: a heady combo that might explain his conversion to Islam and his abusive, alcoholic, pilfering behaviour.

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The man had at least five wives and had children with most of them, including with a Lithuanian Jew and various Kenyans, one of whom was pregnant with his child when he met Stanley Dunham, the white American woman he married, impregnated, and abandoned. Indeed, the most striking thread of Obama’s origins is his sprawling, globe-trotting, well-educated, and well-connected yet highly broken extended family, for Obama Sr. was not alone in trashing the traditional family unit: Stanley Dunham, ditched by Obama Sr., later married, bred with and divorced an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo, who also later married and bred with another woman.

Barack Obama, living fatherless with his mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, had no first-hand experience of the American nuclear family, and probably little concept of the American mainland. In Dreams from My Father, he recollects his first trips to Europe and Africa, giving two paragraphs to Europe and 140 pages to Africa. About Europe, he says:

By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine – stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I’d become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation – I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only a great emptiness there.

Contradicting the narrative in which Obama is post-racial, he rejected his 50% European ancestry in favor of the lineage of his father—a father who’d abandoned him to a white mother and grandparents. Under no illusion, however, that he was a full-blooded or cultural Kenyan, Obama settled on his identity as a black American global citizen who loved America insofar as it was a vehicle of racial and socioeconomic levelling. No wonder, then, that he took up Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and got to community organizing in Chicago.

How Did Obama Change The World?

The changes wrought during the presidency of this former community organizer, who no doubt had little prior managerial experience and will never develop a marginally functional relationship with Congress, are drastic and manifold. The full-scale colonization of Europe, previously a steady drip, is now a torrent under this Europhobe, who, despite allegedly clashing with Angela Merkel in the early days, now considers that continent-wrecker his “favorite ally.”

In America itself, Soros-funded Black Lives Matters protesters extort and disrupt taxpaying citizens while trumpeting violence against cops, at whose funerals Obama uses the eulogy to lecture the bereaved about white supremacy, leading to more blue deaths. (Never mind that in many Western cities, these bastions of white supremacy, a stroll downtown often reveals more bi-racial than mono-racial couples—an outcome that Obama surely rubs his hands over.)

What’s clear in 2016 is that we’re not living in the age of facts, but of hysterical and hollow prostrations to a secular god. The liberal media and aspirational middle class, in contrast to much of the electorate, remains in thrall to Obama’s moral imperialism, fawning over his words as the gospel of liberal egalitarianism, the dominant Western religion (and world religion, alongside Islam), whose main tenet might as well be, “If someone does a good deed and there’s no one there to see it, then it doesn’t exist,” or, more commonly, “If someone has the right elite-ordained opinion and there’s no one there to retweet it, then it doesn’t exist.”

In the thought dictatorship of the modern West, where the edgiest dissidents hide behind Twitter handles, Obama is free to issue transgender bathroom directives and Section 8 housing orders with no fucks given about the very certain fracturing of society or the metamorphosis of the Democratic Party from the workers’ party to the party of big business and vice versa—no fucks given as he watches this landfill-sized dumpster fire that used to be American cohesion burn, because it was the type of damage he wanted all along: making us out in his image as people vibrantly broken and in no position to judge him.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The results of the election in the United States will change the world. The neo-liberal empire will either further entrench itself under Hillary Clinton, perhaps leading closer to a one-world government, or it will halt its expansion under Trump and try to retreat back to some fragile and palsied form of its republican roots.

The results of the former scenario are easy to envision (because we’re living this reality now): unprecedented cultural strife, with America like a doctor strapping its nation-state patients (France, Germany, etc.) to the operating table and anesthetizing them in hopes that the seizures stop, that everyone just gets with the program of international culture and “The End of History.”

One patient, however, is too big and too cohesive to subdue—China—meaning the result of the Obama-Clinton-Soros doctrine, a generation or two down the line, could very well be a world split between a godless, consumeristic, terror-infested Gay-Muslim-Globalist federation (the West) and a powerful Chinese ethno-state (possibly allied with Russia and Iran). The result of a Trump presidency, on the other hand, might be a mere slowing and protracting of the latter dynamic, or it could be a splitting of the world into more spheres of influence—something Western power brokers absolutely do not want.

Learning From Obama

Whatever the outcome, men of influence would do well to recognize and internalize aspects of what made Obama so capable of universalizing his narrative: his statesmanlike eloquence, his seeming rationality, his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge, his camera-readiness. Influential dissidents like Roosh, Milo, Stefan Molyneux, and Mike Cernovich show some of these qualities as they go beyond simple statistics, essays and memes.

They know that in the cathedral of taboos and no-go thoughts that is the modern West, there’s an unmet black-market demand for people willing to tell the truth, a truth that is antithetical to Obama’s reason for getting up every morning. But whereas Obama, an offshore American, could fly in from Hawaii and ride the waves of decades of mass immigration, family disintegration, social programming and cat-lady liberationism to preach a feel-good (if naïve and insidious) narrative that even his opponents had to recognize and smile at, men willing to tell the truth in today’s world will be reviled and their livelihoods and safety will be threatened, no matter how well they present themselves. This is the conclusion of Obama’s age of hope: the age of heretics.

Read more: If Donald Trump Doesn’t Win, We’re Screwed