Barack Obama: Pied Piper of smiley-face fascism

By Jack Cashill

A sentence that begins, “People like Putin and Steve Bannon …,” tells the savvy observer that he is watching a demagogue in action, a demagogue of the worst sort – the smarmy, smiley-face, sanctimonious kind, the kind that children will follow.

The above sentence was one Barack Obama gem out of many in a talk at Stanford last April titled “Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy.”

In September of this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued the sequel to Obama’s talk with the shorthand title, Missouri v. Biden. Both should be required reading.

Rather than summarize these documents, allow me to focus on the one subject that both addressed, COVID-19. According to Obama, “People are dying because of misinformation.” He was righter than he knew.

As Obama sees things, this disinformation inevitably comes from the right. Using social media, the Putin-Bannon crowd “flood a country’s public square with enough raw sewage,” “spread enough dirt” and “plant enough conspiracy theories” to weaken democratic institutions.

Although Obama, of course, believes in free speech – he is very nearly an “absolutist” on the subject – he thinks that some “level of public oversight and regulation” is needed to clean up the sewage.

As Obama chose not to see, the sewage was flowing less from social media than from his allies in the major media. A survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup during the last six months of 2020 revealed just how polluted the minds of his followers had become.

In the survey, some 35,000 Americans were asked their assessment of COVID-19, a subject that had dominated the news cycle since March of 2020, if not earlier.

Depending on when they were surveyed, the respondents had no less than three months and as many as nine months to digest information about the disease.

The most revealing indicator came in response to the question: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” Unlike other questions, the answer to this one was reasonably well-established.

The Democrats that responded, however, had no idea what the answer was. Some 41% of them said 50% or above; another 28% said 20-50%.

The correct answer was 1-5%, an answer Republicans were nearly three times as likely to get right. In sum, 69% of Democrats were grossly misinformed about a subject of critical importance the news of which they digested on a daily basis.

Of note, while Obama was speaking theoretically about “disinformation” control, his proxy, President Joe Biden, was implementing it.

Thanks to the media induced hysteria about COVID-19, Biden had all the pretext he needed to offer the kind of public oversight that Obama could only dream about.

The 5th Circuit judges summed up Biden’s efforts. “On multiple occasions [White House] officials coerced the [social media] platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content.”

The judges added specifics: “Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests – they asked the platforms to remove posts ‘ASAP’ and accounts ‘immediately,’ and to ‘slow[] down’ or ‘demote’ content. In doing so, the officials were persistent and angry.”

Said the judges in summary, “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.”

Obama gave his Stanford talk while this coordinated censorship campaign was in full flower. He pretended not to notice. He had, after all, a problem to solve.

“So inside our personal information bubbles,” he said of his political enemies, “our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they’re reinforced.”

As the Gallup survey shows, however, it was his people who were living – and dying – inside the bubble. “And naturally,” said Obama, “we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions.” Yes, precisely. We call them “Karens,” Democrats almost to a person.

full story at https://www.wnd.com/2023/09/barack-obama-pied-piper-smiley-face-fascism/