By S.A. McCarthy

Mitt Romney was, without a doubt, one of the most milquetoast Republican presidential nominees in recent history. A former CEO of one of the Big Three management and consulting companies, a former GOP governor in a typically deep blue state, and a literal Mormon — all topped off with suits, ties, khakis, quarter-zip sweaters, and a haircut handpicked by statisticians, stylists, consultants, and focus groups — Romney had all the qualifications in 2012 to become entrenched as a member of the political establishment.

Yet as soon as he went up against then-incumbent President Barack Obama, Romney was accused of wanting to put black Americans “back in chains.” Although the comment was made by then-Vice President Joe Biden — who even 12 years ago had a serious case of foot-in-mouth syndrome that couldn’t yet be attributed to dementia — the Obama campaign immediately announced that “we have no problem with those comments in the full context of them.”

When 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Obama had an opportunity to unite the nation, to make his status as the first black president an instrument of healing and unity. Instead, the nation’s first black president said that Trayvon Martin “could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

Obama did not offer comfort and leadership, only racial division. Six months before Obama left the White House, a national survey found that 60% of Americans believed that race relations had deteriorated under Obama. In 2020, following the death of George Floyd, Obama did not condemn the weeks-long violence, rioting, arson, and looting that ensued, but rather called for the creation of a “new normal,” adding that “for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal'…”

In his pro-abortion zealotry, Obama issued a divisive mandate requiring employers to fund abortions and contraception for their employees. When a group of Catholic nuns sought an exemption from the mandate on religious grounds — both abortion and contraception are grave sins, according to Catholic moral teaching — Obama fought them, taking the nuns to court. For over five years of his presidency, Obama refused to relent, targeting the quiet, charitable religious order for daring to oppose his prescribed culture of death.

Notably, shortly before turning the White House over to then-President-Elect Donald Trump, Obama launched a program, in concert with his secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to smear Trump as a Russian agent and discredit Trump’s national security advisor, retired U.S. Army General Michael Flynn. The plot consisted of manufacturing enough “evidence,” including the infamously vulgar Steele Dossier, to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants in order to illegally spy on Trump’s transition team. The Obama-Clinton program resulted in riots upon Trump’s election, continued claims of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election, and eventually an unsuccessful impeachment effort against Trump.

These are but a few examples of the myriad ways that Obama — both during his tenure as president and following it — actively divided the country, debased public discourse and political rhetoric, and fractured the American people into warring, tribalistic sects pitted against one another. So it was something of an ironic cruelty when Obama asked, while campaigning this week for Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, how the American political landscape “got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter.” Isn’t it obvious? It was you.

Born to Divide

Although he sold himself in 2008 — and again in 2012 — as a great healer, a powerful force for unity and community, Obama was practically born to divide. Over the course of his life, he was mentored and influenced by some of the most volatile and polarizing figures he could have possibly encountered. First among them was Frank Marshall Davis, a prominent black journalist, poet, labor activist, and communist. In the first few chapters of Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Davis is mentioned several times as a friend of the young future president’s grandfather. As a child, Obama would often be dropped off at Davis’s house to sit at the grizzled old writer’s and activist’s feet and learn.

Davis became involved with the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s, frequently writing in the newspaper that he edited how much better America would be for black men if it were a communist, Soviet utopia. Such a purveyor of communist propaganda and so ingrained in communist and Soviet activism was he that, during the Cold War, the FBI actually kept Davis on a watchlist and had a standing order that, if war should break out with the Soviet Union, Davis was to be arrested immediately and detained for the duration of the conflict. In his book, “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor,” Dr. Paul Kengor unearthed an FBI memo noting that Davis became interested in communism in the 1930s, inspired by the Scottsboro Boys case and the case of Angelo Herndon.

In the Scottsboro case, a group of young black men were accused of raping two white teenage girls and were sentenced to death, the prescribed punishment for rape in Alabama since 1807, in what was described as a series of rushed trials. The CPUSA was instrumental in appealing the case. Angelo Herndon, on the other hand, was a labor organizer who was convicted of insurrection after leading a group of labor workers in a march on the Georgia state capital. Police reported that Herndon had been heavily influenced by communist literature. It was these cases that first brought Obama’s early mentor into the arms of the Communist Party USA. Davis described his life’s goal as eradicating “the disease of American racism” and “white supremacy,” and he believed that Soviet communism was the best and even only means of achieving this goal.

Davis wrote extensively during his time living in Atlanta before moving to Chicago following the end of World War II and founding his own newspaper, the Chicago Star, pejoratively nicknamed “the Red Star” due to its blatant Soviet propaganda. Davis hired the likes of KGB informant Johannes Steel, card-carrying CPUSA member and “Red Scare” critic Howard Fast, and Lee Pressman, a union lawyer who was alleged by Soviet spy Alger Hiss to have been a communist and a fellow Soviet spy. In his paper, Davis declared that Poland and other countries behind the Iron Curtain would be substantially improved by Soviet rule, compared the Allied powers in WWII to the Ku Klux Klan, and derided the “American way of life” as an analog to imperialism and systemic racism.

In the late 1940s, Davis moved to Hawaii, then only a territory of the U.S. He founded an explicitly communist alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and continued publishing Soviet screeds, this time in the Honolulu Record. He evaded arrest when half a dozen of his fellow Honolulu Record writers were convicted of crimes related to communist propagandizing.

As the U.S. engaged in conflicts and proxy wars against the Soviet Union, Davis railed against the “racist” ideology driving America to oppose communism. “A nation which has white supremacy as its internal policy would obviously support white supremacy internationally,” he wrote regarding the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as numerous other conflicts. Davis was also interested in photography, especially pornography, and the FBI reportedly had a 600-page file on the communist agitator by the end of the 1950s. A young Barack Obama spent many an afternoon in Hawaii learning whatever Davis would share with him and being shaped by the racially-obsessed communist agitator.

Another of the figures who influenced the 44th president of the United States was Derrick Bell, a Harvard professor who largely pioneered the doctrine commonly known today as critical race theory (CRT). Known as a legal scholar, Bell was one of the first black lawyers to work for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), specifically its civil rights division. In the 1950s, Bell published a treatise attempting to connect law-making and law enforcement in the U.S. to systemic racism and white supremacy. He was asked by the DOJ to resign his membership with the NAACP in order to mitigate potential claims of bias but chose instead to quit the DOJ.

Bell worked as an NAACP lawyer for years before moving into academia and eventually becoming Harvard’s first black law professor to receive tenure in 1971. Borrowing the terminology of the far-Left, communist-affiliated Frankfurt School, Bell began using the phrase “critical race theory” in his writing, beginning with the book “Race, Racism, and American Law” in 1970. Among other ideas, Bell promoted the theory that white people are inherently racist and, even when white people act in a non-racist way, it is always to serve the purposes of the white majority, never in an effort to actually benefit racial minorities. He also propounded that white people cannot experience racism and that the discrimination that racial minorities deal with must be “communicated to” white people by the racial minorities.

While CRT may have been a fledgling philosophy in 1970, it is now endemic, having infiltrated almost every level of public education in the U.S. and having become a staple in major institutions such as the military and the corporate world. Promotions are often awarded not to those who work the hardest and achieve the best results but to those who fit a racial or “gender” quota. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has been tainted with the ideology concocted by Bell over 50 years: President Biden promised to put a black woman on the court, and so he did, despite concerns raised over her record and credentials.

Obama was a student of Bell’s and, clearly, embraced the CRT ideology that he developed. Bell famously staged a protest in 1991 against Harvard’s hiring techniques. Perhaps forgetting that he himself had been a black, tenured professor for nearly 20 years, Bell refused to leave his office for a period of days in an effort to draw attention to the very few black professors granted tenure by Harvard. While president of the Harvard Law Review, a young Obama spoke publicly in support of Bell’s protest. “Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama said to his fellow students before handing the microphone over to the progenitor of critical race theory.

One of the better-known racially divisive influences on Obama, of course, was his pastor of roughly 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. In 2008, Wright made headlines when videos surfaced of his “preaching,” a vitriolic blend of racist invective and the worst of “social justice,” barely disguised as some angry kind of Christianity. “God bless America? No, God damn America,” Wright shouted in one of his most notorious rants. And who was sitting in the front row but Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Wright framed himself as a fire-and-brimstone preacher of what he called “the prophetic theology of the black church.” Despite its obvious Protestant roots, Wright’s “prophetic theology of the black church” was heavily influenced by the dissident blend of Roman Catholic social teaching and Marxist philosophy known as “liberation theology,” which was formally censored by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in the 1980s.

In his role as the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, Ratzinger explained that liberation theology is “damaging to the faith and to Christian living” due in no small part to its “insufficiently critical” use of “concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought.” Perversions of Christian theology centered around socio-political or socio-economic goals, such as liberation theology, attempt to create “a new interpretation of Christianity” in which “the Gospel is reduced to a purely earthly gospel,” Ratzinger explained, adding that Christian (and specifically Catholic) principles are incompatible with Marxism.

Theological flaws aside, Wright’s “preaching” was widely recognized as volatile and radical. He regularly compared Republicans to the Ku Klux Klan, called for reparations for slavery and segregation, and derided the U.S. as an inherently white supremacist and systemically racist nation. In an April 28, 2008 speech in Washington, D.C., Wright exposed the world to the “theology” that Obama had been absorbing for the past 20 years. Comparing white Americans to “slaveholders,” Wright declared that how “we are seeing God, our theology, is not the same. And what we both mean when we say, 'I am a Christian,’ is not the same thing.”

Still a young, slick, and ambitious political orator at the time, Obama deftly distanced himself from Wright’s inflammatory ideology — which he had willingly absorbed and listened to for decades — without risking distancing himself from the black voters he was counting on. In a speech later hailed as a political masterstroke, Obama compared Wright to his white grandmother, who he says had spoken negatively of homeless black people. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me,” Obama declared. The story passed from the news cycle, but the largely unexplored fact remains that for 20 years, Obama’s idea of God and of right and wrong was shaped by a racist agitator so divisive that even his most famous student had to disavow him in order to save face.

Obama also had to work quickly in 2008 to distance himself from known terrorist and left-wing activist Bill Ayers. In the early 1970s, Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground and, as such, was responsible for a string of bombings, including bombing the New York Police Department headquarters, the U.S. Capitol Building, and the Pentagon. In his memoir “Fugitive Days,” Ayers expressed no remorse for the acts of terrorism he committed.

The writing style of that memoir bears a striking resemblance to that of Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” so much so that journalist Scott McKay, in his book “Racism, Revenge, and Ruin: It’s All Obama,” concluded that Ayers may have actually ghostwritten the future president’s 1995 memoir. The same year that Obama’s foundational memoir was published, he launched his bid for Illinois state senate with a fundraiser in Ayers’s Chicago home.

Finally, one of the most divisive and destructive influences on Obama’s ideological makeup was a man he never met in the flesh: Saul Alinsky. The author of “Rules for Radicals,” a book of political ideology expressly dedicated to Satan, Alinsky developed “community organizing.” Before being elected to the Illinois state senate, Obama spent years as a community organizer in Chicago, practicing the diabolical ideology Alinsky devised.

One of the concepts Alinsky pioneered in community organizing is the necessity of conflict, often insisting that where there is no naturally-occurring conflict, conflict be engineered. The world, in his view, was to be divided into the categories of oppressed and oppressor, and community organizing was predicated on pitting the two factions against one another. When asked in an interview with conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. whether he would rather go to Heaven or Hell, if given the choice, Alinsky replied that he would rather go to Hell. He explained that Heaven is the home of the “haves” and Hell the home of the “have-nots,” among whom he was always more comfortable. In a moment of damnable hubris, Alinsky even claimed that he would “organize Hell” and take over Heaven.

While Obama has made subtle attempts to distance himself from the community organizing ideologue who dedicated his book to Satan, he has done nothing to distance himself from Alinsky’s principles. In fact, Obama has successfully elevated Alinsky’s practices from the community — the stockyards of Chicago, the farms and shipping lanes of the deep south, the factories of Detroit and New York — to the national scale. Obama once said that there are “limits of what can be achieved” applying Alinsky’s methods as he intended them to be applied. So Obama broadened his horizons.

The influence of Davis, Bell, Ayers, and Alinsky can clearly be seen in Obama’s political career. Since really coming to national prominence over 15 years ago, he has ushered in a new era of political diatribe, invective, and vitriol. In the early 2000s, the U.S. was a place of differences, where political rivals would argue about whose policies were better, whose judgement was better, whose qualifications for this office were better. Obama oversaw a nationwide deterioration into an Alinskyan power struggle fueled by the racist credos of the men who shaped him in his youth and early adulthood, pitting “oppressed” against “oppressor” and leaving behind a trail of struggle and conflict.

Under Obama, as evinced by his campaign rhetoric and his presidency, this “oppressed” versus “oppressor” dichotomy took on almost mythological proportions. Those who advocated this policy or that — respect for unborn life, for example — were no longer simply political rivals, but were now villains, domineering misogynists, and Bible-thumping fanatics bent on stamping out women’s “rights.” National headlines about police brutality or biased criminal prosecutions were no longer an opportunity for dialogue, healing, and reform, but a chance to pit black Americans against white Americans and subdue one or the other through a warped sense of either justice or guilt.

Obama’s Legacy of Division Lives On

And the devastating influence Obama has wielded has not dissipated; if anything, it has actually worsened. In 2016, Obama’s rival-turned-ally Clinton notoriously termed all those voting for Trump “deplorables,” the worst that society has to offer. This was not a matter of differentiating political rivals, of pointing out flaws with that rival’s platform or rationale, it was simply dehumanizing, dismissing the rival. And in a fractured world where the “oppressed” are the heroes and the “oppressors” are the villains, then why not treat the “oppressors” like villains?

This “toxic,” “divisive,” and dehumanizing mindset has resulted in a sharp polarization of the American public, including two assassination attempts against Trump. In a moment that would shock anyone unfamiliar with the damage by Obama, over a quarter of Democrats admitted in a survey that they think the U.S. would be better off if Trump were shot and killed.

Just one day after Obama asked how “we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter,” the woman he was campaigning for stood behind the vice presidential seal and compared her opponent to Adolf Hitler, after months of Democratic Party operatives and officials labeling Trump “Hitler” and “a threat to democracy” — even after two men took aim at Trump’s head, and with less than two weeks before the election. Thanks, Obama.

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.