A Promised Land:
Obama, from Illinois to Abbottabad

3,518 words

Barack Obama
A Promised Land
New York: Random House, 2020

There were stacks and stacks of Barack Obama’s new memoir at the brick-and-mortar bookstore I went to on Black Friday, 2020. I hadn’t been to a brick-and-mortar store for some time. If possible, I go to the library.

The bookstore had Christopher Caldwell’s excellent Age of Entitlement as well as other titles one could call “Right-wing,” but there were more Leftist books around. Row upon row of books screamed about the “threat” of President Trump. What I found quite remarkable was the number of titles that declared “white Christianity” was a corruption, somehow, of true religion.

When I returned home, I started to dig into A Promised Land. It’s pretty wordy. There are many flowery comments about his family, walking through the garden at the White House, etc. There was so much padding that the book was hard to get through.

After reading it, though, I’ve come to believe that Obama was considerably hostile to and alienated from America’s whites. His second term put forces into play that have led to a low-level civil war with no end in sight. In fact, this civil war could get really ugly.

During the last civil war, foreign powers kept as far away as possible. In the ongoing low-level one, globalists and lobbyists of “allies” are doing everything they can to keep the immigration (conquest) door open while insisting American troops deploy so they can satisfy their greed by using Americans to dispossess their neighbors.

The Scramble for America is ongoing, and Obama aided it.

Obama in Illinois

Obama’s rise to the presidency was enabled by several really fortunate breaks in Illinois politics as well as his own considerable personal charm, discipline, and unique background.

Illinois has a unique local political scene. It is a mostly white state with a northern part that is an extension of New England. Outside of Chicago, that area is dotted with villages centered upon a white church with a Congregationalist-style steeple. There is a large central zone, which is a Rust Belt extension of Pennsylvania. The southern part of the state is the northern extension of Kentucky. These three regions get along pretty well. John A. Logan, a southern Illinois war hero, is honored with a massive statue in Chicago. Chicago is not so different from the rest of the state, no matter how much anyone from the city or downstate protests. It’s not New York City vs. Upstate New York.

Then Illinois has its ghettos. The Sub-Saharans in the state are concentrated in small areas like Chicago’s South Side and East Saint Louis. Concentration is a key concept here. The Sub-Saharan populations are large and organized. There are Hispanics in the Chicago area, but they mostly act, talk, and look like whites that are “ethnic.”

Illinois is also corrupt, though these unspoken rules are easy to understand if one is an Illinois white. It’s mostly related to the push and pull of the goods and bad of alcohol and the goods and bad of temperance. Otherwise, savvy Illinois politicians can get by with corruption that is so complex that the public can’t understand it. The Illinois public always understands bribes and sex, though.

Illinois has been the cradle for a mix of law-and-order Democrats like Mayor Richard J. Daily, idealists like William Jennings Bryan and Mother Ann Bickerdyke, and white advocates like Matt Hale and Congressman Albert Johnson. George Lincoln Rockwell’s greatest success was in Chicago. There are also plenty of Sub-Sharan nationalists that are able to get tied into American politics through Illinois’s political machine.

Obama’s parents were train wrecks. His father was a philandering Kenyan that was sponsored to come to America through some Cold War policy to woo Third World people to the American side. Those policies turned out to be naïve; the newly independent African states all ended up failing, so Americans could have imposed travel bans in 1960 and saved everyone a great deal of trouble. The so-called leaders of these lands didn’t become the next George Washington. They were lucky if they got in the bread lines of the Western countries. Obama’s father died drunk in a car wreck.

Obama’s mother was a white liberal from the Anglo-Nordic American majority — mostly Scots-Irish. She married an Indonesian after her first husband left her. She died of cancer fairly young. Despite her unusual marriage partners and lifestyle, she was really a goody-two-shoes product of the 1950s and 1960s, when race-mixing was pushed by the political elite and expected to solve problems. For more information, I suggest reading Steve Sailer’s book about Obama.

Obama was working as a “community organizer” — i.e., as a well-spoken African that corralled Sub-Saharans together to get benefits from whites through the political process. Eventually, the Sub-Saharan Congressman in Obama’s district was destroyed by a financial scandal. His state Senator decided to run for the open Congressional seat and Obama tried for her vacant state Senate seat. Obama won after he had to beat off an election fraud attempt from a challenger in his own party.

He served as a state Senator for several terms, learning the ins and outs of legislative activity. He ran against a former Black Panther named Bobby Rush for Congress but lost. He then ran for the US Senate seat for Illinois after Carol Mosley Braun destroyed her political career with some financial issues and then strangely decided to run for President.

Obama was initially faced by a serious Republican challenger named Jack Ryan. Ryan had been married to the actress who played Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager. They had a nasty divorce and the resulting sex scandal destroyed Ryan’s chances. The Republican Party then got Alan Keys to run. Keys was a combination of Puritanical Catholicism, “based black” tokenism, and carpetbagging. Keys only gained support from some members of Illinois’s Religious Right. On the other hand, Obama was a blank screen upon which whites and blacks could project their own contradictory fantasies. Obama was also able to draw incredibly talented help to himself. Good people walked up to him and volunteered. Obama’s support didn’t just come from Chicago’s black neighborhoods, but from rich white suburbs and the rural parts of the state.

Then came Iraq. While the Bush administration, the neoconservatives, and the mainstream media stampeded America into war, Senator Obama gave a short speech suggesting conflict might be ill-advised. The speech made him look like a genius as the situation in Iraq spun out of control.

The Iraq War

The damage of the Iraq War to America is greater than the Vietnam War. Regarding the latter conflict, one can argue that it was a noble but failed campaign in a larger Cold War that was otherwise wisely waged and successfully won. With Iraq, all one got was bloodshed, expense, and the appearance of a radical Islam that brought back slavery and created horror films where real people were actually chopped, burned, and blasted. It was also waged on behalf of Israel and planned by Jews that didn’t care for America other than to use it for their own ends.

Meanwhile, the conservative movement was led to destruction by the waters of Babylon by a pied piper: President George W. Bush. For his first term and a year into his second, Bush did a passably good job. That changed when Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast and Bush’s faulty character and iffy philosophical presuppositions were exposed. Bush was a colorblind conservative. He didn’t recognize how helpless Louisiana’s Sub-Saharan population would be, nor did he realize how poorly governed southern Louisiana was. As Louisiana flooded and fell to disorder, Iraq became a place of sectarian violence. The conservatives and the Religious Right were caught up in Bush’s mistakes, and an entire generation of Americans moved away from old-time conservatism.

The 2008 Election

The economy started to collapse in the spring of 2008, and Obama was getting first-rate economic information regarding that from “walk-on” volunteers seeking to help him. Meanwhile, he was knee-deep in the Democratic Party’s primary. His main rival was Hillary Clinton. Hillary was a terrible candidate and her staff was plagued with infighting and recriminations. When she won in New Hampshire, there was a flicker of concern in Obama’s campaign, but it faded as more good people showed up to volunteer.

Obama did make one terrible mistake. At a fundraiser, he said of people in the Rust Belt: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” He’d go on to lose the Pennsylvania primary and his remarks would haunt him for the rest of his presidency.

Despite the above setback, Obama kept inching towards victory in the Democratic primary. Then the economy went into an uncontrollable nose dive due to the mortgage crisis. Banks had been pressured to lend to iffy borrowers, such as Sub-Saharans and illegal immigrants. When those debtors started to default, the housing bubble popped and banks started to fail. President Bush then held a conference with candidates Obama and McCain as well as notables in both parties to push for what would become the TARP Act.

The idea behind the TARP Act was to use US government funds to save the top Wall Street banks in an effort to shore up the rest of the collapsing economy. According to Obama, he had several suggestions in line with what the outgoing Bush administration wished to do, but John McCain had no ideas. I believe this is true.

Obama’s 2008 presidential rival, John McCain, was a man that I personally cannot understand. He had no principles that I can discern. He’d say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite. He concerned himself with keeping bad policies alive and never seemed to learn from ongoing disasters.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama did some America First-style Trumpism. He said he’d reach out to various dictators and enemies of America like Fidel Castro if it was in America’s best interest. McCain went ballistic with moral piety and virtue-signaling over the comment, but Obama was clearly the wiser man. McCain also hinted that he’d respect Pakistani sovereignty even if they were hiding Osama bin Laden.

A John McCain Aside

McCain made a bold gamble in picking a potentially solid Vice Presidential candidate in Sarah Palin. There was a temporary upswing in support as Palin represented Middle America so well, but her family was a drama-show of poor choices, and Palin was ignorant of world affairs. All the walk-on volunteers for Obama did opposition research and carried out actions to make Palin look like a fool.

One of John McCain’s last acts was pure spite. He voted against ending Obamacare. McCain had campaigned against it, but made no plan for a better replacement. Again, I cannot understand why someone in such a visible job would be so obviously petty in their final days.

Obama’s Presidency, 2009-2011

Obama began his presidency with the 2008 global financial crisis to deal with. His inauguration was also threatened by Somali terrorists that had infiltrated the United States from Canada. Fortunately, the threatened terrorist attack failed to materialize.

The TARP Act of 2008, launched by the Bush administration and carried out by Obama, saved the big banks. The United States Treasury even got the money back with interest shortly thereafter. However, job losses continued for months afterward while the public’s anger built.

This anger crystalized on CNBC when Rick Santelli, a financial analyst, passionately argued against the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan which was launched by Obama in 2009. Santelli was responding to the many complex questions raised by the financial collapse. Those that had most directly caused the problem — the biggest banks on Wall Street — were bailed out. Those who’d gotten a mortgage and couldn’t or wouldn’t pay were given a lifeline. Those in the middle suffered. For the next two years, the economy limped along while public discontentment grew.

Obama found himself helpless to stop greedy Wall Street corporations from paying bonuses to the very bankers that had caused the wreck. It made him look weak to his progressive Leftist base. The main problem was that the law was designed for managing prosperity, so things like contracted bonuses had to be paid. He also had to explain to a group of frustrated Wall Street executives that he wasn’t the one trying to “get” them, he was the only one protecting them from the pitchforks. In the end, Old Testament-style justice couldn’t be applied to a disaster like the 2008 economic meltdown.

It was at this time that Obama recognized the scale of polarization in the United States. Between 1930 and 1964, it was easier for a President to get a coalition to pass a bill in response to a crisis. It was usually a matter of explaining the facts of the situation and then Congress would start to work the phones and make deals.

According to Obama, the polarization problem boiled down to three things:

1. Congressional districts are so gerrymandered in favor of one party or another that no Congressman is really required to seek accommodation with anyone from a different party.
2. The media environment has become so fragmented and partisan that large swathes of the population feel they are well-informed, but have a set of facts totally at odds with another part of the population. The media is also routinely dishonest.
3. “Civil rights.” I’ll quote Obama here: “With America’s global economic dominance unchallenged, its foreign policy defined by the unifying threat of communism, and its social policy marked by a bipartisan confidence that women and people of color knew their place, both Democrats and Republicans felt free to cross party lines when required to get a bill passed. They observed customary courtesies when it came to offer amendments or bring nominations to a vote and kept partisan attacks and hardball tactics within tolerable bounds” (pages 241 and 242).

Obama discusses the “Beer Summit,” where his commentary regarding the arrest of his friend “Skip” Gates by a white, working-class Cambridge, Massachusetts cop kicked off a firestorm of anger. Obama gives his view of the matter, including the view of oppression and humiliation the colored folk feel whenever whites lock their car doors the instant they walk by, or when a cop comes calling after they do something suspicious like break into a house, like what Gates was doing. (It was Gates’s house. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. Gates could have cleared up the mess with a kind word, but he went full chimpout. That was the problem.)

Obama also gives his take on what he thinks the white view of the matter was, but I feel he misses the mark. He pushes the idea that whites engage in “legally sanctioned violence” against blacks and browns. (398) Presumably, they do this for no reason at all. I’ll argue frankly here that whites must use the police against blacks and browns because, as a group, they are dangerous.

Obama discusses his Tea Party opposition and saw the movement as racially motivated. I agree with him, it was racially motivated. It was certainly “implicitly white.”  Whether or not it was effective is uncertain. It probably did help white advocacy in the long run.

Obama discusses his efforts at healthcare reform. Personally, I’ve never been angry about Obamacare. Obama’s account of the efforts to create the program is worth the read if one enjoys the ins-and-outs of logrolling and politicking to get major reform passed. Throughout this process, Obama had a very difficult time with the press getting his message out. The press often insisted that the “backroom deals” were some sort of evil when they were really a normal part of the legislative process.

Obama & the Limitations of the Military Mind

In 2009, military men in the Pentagon, led by Secretary of Defense Gates and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, were pushing for a major counterinsurgency campaign to win the war in Afghanistan. This was despite the fact that the Taliban then and now hasn’t attacked America and Osama bin Laden was still at large.

The military men leaked their ideas to the press and went on a media blitz, so well-orchestrated war lovers like Senator John McCain starting making all sorts of statements that backed Obama in a corner. Obama eventually had to have a serious talk with Secretary of Defense Gates and several other general officers regarding their push for more aggressive action without considering the wider political implications.

The counterinsurgency campaign was a failure. Eventually, American platoon leaders would lead men in single file lines across the dry plains, hills, and valleys of Afghanistan, each man stepping into the footprints of the trooper in front of him. The locals made every location a minefield. Soldiers that went outside the wire prepositioned tourniquets on their limbs since it was so likely they’d be hit.

Nothing was accomplished. The Afghanis remained as savage as always. Simply put, the Afghanis are a people beyond hope of salvation. Eventually, General Stan McChrystal, the commander on the scene, submitted his letter of resignation after making unguarded remarks to a reporter that were critical of various elected officials.

This is where an America First ideology can be helpful. Obama was being painted into a corner due to his appearance of inaction. By saying “America First,” a president is taking action. He automatically makes a show of bravery against powerful interest groups that wish for Americans to stay engaged in conflicts abroad and tells “allies” who wish to use American force for their own ends that they are on their own. America First can leave the damned to their own hell and let Americans move on with a clear conscience.

I’d like to mention that military men are smart, but they are not geniuses. Furthermore, if one is in command of any sort of military operation, beware of being intimidated by the Airborne Ranger types like McChrystal. Their testosterone and past accomplishments often outshine their judgment.

Obama ends the book at a high point: the slaying of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This violation of Pakistani sovereignty to kill a wicked man was a great move and it has freed up other Presidents from sending men to march around the minefields of Afghanistan.

Obama: Architect of Civil War II?

A Promised Land is only part one of Obama’s memoirs. It is so flowery and wordy that I don’t know if I will read and review part two. What are the few lessons from A Promised Land?

Obama was aware, perhaps more aware than he lets on, of pro-white thought. He very much implies that he understood white frustration with lending programs to non-whites who failed to pay anything back.

Don’t lend to bad debtors. The Greek debt crisis was a headache for Obama too. Its causes had some parallels to the causes of the 2008 Great Recession in America. France and Germany had to bail out Greece to save their own banks and industries since they’d lent so much to Greece.

Obama helped legitimize the revival of the America First ideology. He has much hostility for foreign powers that “oppress gays” in some way. Waging a war with dubious benefits to America doesn’t go well if advancing sodomy is the central moral cause.

There isn’t much introspection in this book. There is no sense of how Obama thought the Libyan intervention really worked out. Obama has no thoughts on white concerns about Sub-Saharan crime. Throughout the book, there are also many anti-white resentments and asides. Pate Philip, the President of the Illinois State Senate, is declared by Obama to be “notorious for insulting women and people of color.” This remark has too much of National Public Radio’s fearful commentary to be totally true. Obama has no insights about how men like Pate Philip kept things running in Illinois. I felt that was a big missed opportunity and would have liked to know more about the man and his relationship with Obama.

The United States is headed for a second civil war. In fact, America is already in a low-intensity civil war right now. Obama’s insistence that all “blacks and browns” were oppressed systematically while disparaging whites from his positions as President and President Emeritus has become a moral call for a Sub-Saharan insurgency. The traps his supporters in the federal bureaucracy laid for President Trump were not a peaceful transfer of power — they were a dangerous precedent.

An empowered African population and radicalized white Leftists are now wreaking havoc. Obama is partially responsible for this. The future is grim.

If you want to support Counter-Currents, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend on DLive.

Don’t forget to sign up for the twice-monthly email Counter-Currents Newsletter for exclusive content, offers, and news.