During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama pledged to end the type of politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism,” and to help Americans “rediscover our bonds to each other and to get out of this constant petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics.” He then proceeded to become the most divisive president in American history. Not only has he emphasized the need to enact his agendas swiftly and with a great sense of urgency, but he has depicted his political opponents as essentially obstructionists whose ideological absolutism is at odds with the common good. During his second inaugural address on January 21, 2013, for instance, the newly re-elected Obama said: “For now, decisions are upon us and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.”
This section documents how Obama has based both his activist and political careers on fomenting group-based resentments designed to energize his political base. “Hope and Change” has become, in practice, “Divide and Conquer.” Obama’s propensity to pit populations and “interests” against each other is an outgrowth of the socialist worldview that sees all human interactions in terms of “class struggles.” The divisions that Obama seeks to promote, as the following material shows, are not only those of class, but also of race, ethnicity, and gender.
1) DIVIDING AMERICANS BY CLASS
Obama the Chicago Community Organizer
Obama’s Ties to Saul Alinsky’s Tactics for Fomenting Class Resentments
Obama’s Introduction to ACORN and Project Vote, Groups That Pit the Poor and Nonwhite Minorities Against the Rest of Society
Obama Calls for Massive Government Spending Hikes on Education, and the Enactment of “Living Wage” Laws
Obama Emphasizes Inter-Group Conflict
Obama Scapegoats the “Top 5 Percent”
Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Obama’s Entry into Politics
“I Actually Believe in Redistribution”: Obama Views the Poor As a Potential Voting Bloc
At an October 19, 1998 conference at Loyola University, Obama said: “There has been a systematic … propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. And I think some of it has been deserved…. The trick is, how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.” At other points during his address, Obama stated that the “working poor” on welfare constituted a political voting bloc that could be harnessed to the advantage of Democrats. Specifically, he said that:
“Rich People Are All for Nonviolence…. They Want to Make Sure Folks Don’t Take Their Stuff”
Obama Equates Conservatism with Greed, and Free Markets with “Social Darwinism”
“Tax Breaks to Paris Hilton Instead of Providing Child Care and Education”
The “Rich” Should Pay More Taxes
Calling for a Capital Gains Tax Hike
Higher Taxes for the Wealthy
Telling “Joe the Plumber” about “Spreading the Wealth Around”
“Fat-Cat Bankers”
“At Some Point, You’ve Made Enough Money”
Obama Opposes Tax Cuts for Top Earners
The “Rich” Should Pay More Taxes
Despite His Rhetoric against “Greed,” Obama Rewards Big Donors with Jobs, Stimulus Money, and Government Contracts
On June 15, 2011, the Center for Public Integrity reported:
Obama Says the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement Reflects Americans’ Frustrations
Obama Calls for Tax Hikes on “Millionaires,” “Billionaires,” and “Corporate Jet Owners”
On June 29, 2011, President Obama called on Republicans to drop their opposition to tax increases for those earning $250,000 or more, saying that because “everybody else” was sacrificing their “sacred cows” for deficit reduction, GOP lawmakers should be willing to follow suit. He made six mentions of eliminating a tax loophole for corporate jets, suggesting that insufficient taxes on such jets had the effect of depriving student-loan funds or food-safety funds of their needed revenues. For example:
Obama Again Calls for Tax Hikes on High Earners
Obama Denounces the Wealthy, the “Greed” of Bankers, “Inequality,” and Free Markets
On December 6, 2011, President Obama delivered a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he said:
Obama Again Denounces Inequality, the Wealthy, and Tax Breaks
In an April 3, 2012 speech at an Associated Press luncheon, President Obama said:
“You Didn’t Build That”: Obama Disparages Entrepreneurs and Praises Government
Obama Calls for “An America in Which Prosperity Is Shared”
“Everybody’s Getting a Fair Share”
Obama Gives an Indication That Taxes Will Ultimately Be Raised on most Americans, Not Just the Wealthy (though the latter will be targeted first)
“A Shrinking Few Do Very Well and a Growing Many Barely Make It”
Obama Says Republicans Only Care About Cutting Taxes for the Rich
Obama’s Weekly Address Emphasizes Class Warfare
During his weekly address to the American people on February 23, 2013, Obama addressed the looming “sequestration” budget cuts that were scheduled to take effect in a few days:
Obama Say “The Wealthiest and Most Powerful” Are Not Paying Enough in Taxes
Obama Seeks to Cap Americans’ Tax-Sheltered Retirement Savings
Obama Tells College Grads that the Traditional U.S. Economic System Is Rigged Against Them
“Winner-Take-All Economy” and “Growing Inequality”
On July 24, 2013, President Obama made the following remarks on the economy at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois:
Obama Speaks about America’s Economic Injustice
On August 28, 2013—the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—Obama spoke about America’s economic inequity and the role that government could play in curbing it via wealth redistribution:
“We can continue down our current path in which the gears of this great democracy grind to a halt and our children accept a life of lower expectations, where politics is a zero-sum game, where a few do very well while struggling families of every race fight over a shrinking economic pie….
“And with that courage, we can stand together for good jobs and just wages. With that courage, we can stand together for the right to health care in the richest nation on earth for every person. With that courage, we can stand together for the right of every child, from the corners of Anacostia to the hills of Appalachia, to get an education that stirs the mind and captures the spirit and prepares them for the world that awaits them. With that courage, we can feed the hungry and house the homeless and transform bleak wastelands of poverty into fields of commerce and promise.”
Obama Calls for More Economic Equality and More Government Control of the Economy
In a December 4, 2013 speech on the U.S. economy, President Obama made the following remarks to his Center for American Progress audience:
Obama Derides “Tax Loopholes for the Very Very Fortunate”
During a White House speech on June 9, 2014, President Obama criticized congressional Republicans for refusing to close tax loopholes for high earners as a way to pay for his initiative to limit student-loan interest payments to 10% of a person’s annual income. Said Obama:
“It would be scandalous if we allowed those kinds of tax loopholes for the very, very fortunate to survive while students are having trouble just getting started in their lives. If you’re a big oil company they’ll go to bat for you. If you’re a student, good luck. Some of these Republicans in Congress seem to believe that just because some of the young people behind me [i.e., college students in attendance] need some help, that they’re not trying hard enough.”
Further, Obama blasted lawmakers who “pay lip service to the next generation and then abandon them when it counts.” He also urged voters to be aware of “who it is that’s fighting for you and your kids and who it is that’s not.”
Radio broadcaster Mark Levin pointed out Obama’s hypocrisy by noting that America’s national debt had already grown by approximately $7 trillion under Obama’s watch — a fact that would impose a massive financial burden on “the next generation” for many decades to come.
Obama Says Republicans Favor “Billionaires” over the “Middle Class”
In early October 2014, the Obama Administration disseminated a fundraising email wherein the president said: “If the Republicans win [the midterm elections], we know who they’ll be fighting for. Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”
Obama Calls for Government to Enforce Wealth Redistribution and “Inclusive Capitalism”
In a January 23, 2015 interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, President Obama said that traditional market forces that historically redistributed income were failing, and that the time for government to take on that role had thus arrived. At one point in the interview, Klein asked: “To focus a bit on that long-term question, does that put us in a place where redistribution becomes, in a sense, a positive good in and of itself? Do we need the government playing the role not of powering the growth engine — which is a lot of what had to be done after the financial crisis — but of making sure that while that growth engine is running, it is ensuring that enough of the gains and prosperity is shared so that the political support for that fundamental economic model remains strong?
Obama replied:
“That’s always been the case. I don’t think that’s entirely new. The fact of the matter is that relative to our post-war history, taxes now are not particularly high or particularly progressive compared to what they were, say, in the late ’50s or the ’60s. 5 And there’s always been this notion that for a country to thrive there are some things, as Lincoln says, that we can do better together than we can do for ourselves. And whether that’s building roads, or setting up effective power grids, or making sure that we’ve got high-quality public education — that teachers are paid enough — the market will not cover those things. And we’ve got to do them together. Basic research falls in that category. So that’s always been true.
“I think that part of what’s changed is that a lot of that burden for making sure that the pie was broadly shared took place before government even got involved. 6 If you had stronger unions, you had higher wages. If you had a corporate culture that felt a sense of place and commitment so that the CEO was in Pittsburgh or was in Detroit and felt obliged, partly because of social pressure but partly because they felt a real affinity toward the community, to re-invest in that community and to be seen as a good corporate citizen. Today what you have is quarterly earning reports, compensation levels for CEOs that are tied directly to those quarterly earnings. You’ve got international capital that is demanding maximizing short-term profits. And so what happens is that a lot of the distributional questions that used to be handled in the marketplace through decent wages or health care or defined benefit pension plans — those things all are eliminated. And the average employee, the average worker, doesn’t feel any benefit.
“So part of our job is, what can government do directly through tax policy? What we’ve proposed, for example, in terms of capital gains — that would make a big difference in our capacity to give a tax break to a working mom for child care. And that’s smart policy, and there’s no evidence that would hurt the incentives of folks at Google or Microsoft or Uber not to invent what they invent or not to provide services they provide. It just means that instead of $20 billion, maybe they’ve got 18, right? But it does mean that Mom can go to work without worrying that her kid’s not in a safe place.
“We also still have to focus on the front end. Which is even before taxes are paid, are there ways that we can increase the bargaining power: making sure that an employee has some measurable increases in their incomes and their wealth and their security as a consequence of an economy that’s improving. And that’s where issues like labor laws make a difference. That’s where say in shareholder meetings and trying to change the culture in terms of compensation at the corporate level could make a difference. And there’s been some interesting conversations globally around issues like inclusive capitalism and how we can make it work for everybody.”
Obama also said that policymakers must “make sure” that “folks at the very top are doing enough of their fair share,” and he disparaged the “winner-take-all aspect of this modern economy” and the need to be “investing enough in the common good.”
2) DIVIDING AMERICANS BY RACE & ETHNICITY
Obama Characterizes America As “Mean-Spirited,” Where Race is Concerned
Obama Supports Professor Derrick Bell, Godfather of “Critical Race Theory”
What Derrick Bell Said About Race
Professor Obama Teaches about America’s “Institutional Racism”
Obama’s Relationship with Jeremiah Wright, Who Views America As a Racist Country
What Obama’s Longtime Mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Has Said
Obama Tries to Keep Jeremiah Wright Quiet until after Election Day 2008
Obama Depicts Opponents of Affirmative Action As Racists
Obama Implies that Suburban Whites Are Racist
Obama’s Remarks About Race at a 1995 Book Reading
In a September 1995 book reading at the Cambridge, Massachusetts Public Library, Obama promoted his then-newly released memoir, Dreams from My Father. A professionally shot video of that presentation suddenly appeared on YouTube in April 2015. In an article published by the American Thinker, author Jack Cashill made the following observations about the video:
* “Despite his concession that white Americans were ‘basically decent,’ Obama did not think they were ‘making a serious effort’ to compensate for the ‘brutal experience’ of black history. That ‘was going to cost some money,’ and, according to Obama, ‘Americans don’t like to sacrifice.’”
* “Obama made the supersized claim that ‘American culture at this point, what is truly American, is black culture to a large degree.’ As evidence, he cited Pulp Fiction, a pop-art gangster movie with a surfer music sound track and an Italian-American director.”
* “Obama’s ‘angry black man’ is largely fictional. The one and only passage that Obama read [at the 1995 book reading] details how he came to grips with the reality of being a black man in America. Much of it is fabricated, especially the part about his brooding black friend ‘Ray.’ Obama-friendly biographer David Maraniss tracked the real ‘Ray’ down. His name is ‘Keith Kakaguwa.’ Two years ahead of Obama at Punahou, Kakaguwa is only about one fourth black. Maraniss describes Ray as the ‘first of several distorted or composite characters’ in Dreams. According to Kakaguwa, he and Obama lived close to a carefree Hawaiian existence, not at all the tortured, race-scarred one Obama imagined.”
* “In [a] cited passage, Obama tells the story of how a ‘very aggressive’ panhandler harassed ‘Toot,’ his diminutive white grandmother. ‘Gramps’ then tells Obama that Toot felt threatened because the aggressor was black. ‘The words were like a fist in my stomach,’ wrote Obama. In 2008, he would compare Toot’s alleged racism to Jeremiah Wright’s to save his candidacy.”
* “After this incident, Obama visited ‘Frank’ [his Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis] to get the lowdown on white people. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared,’ Davis tells Obama. ‘She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is.’ With these words of wisdom ringing in his ears, Obama heads into the night ‘utterly alone.’”
Also at his 1995 presentation in Cambridge, Obama read a passage that discussed how he had once invited some white friends to a black party, where they attempted for awhile to mask their palpable discomfort by “trying to tap their foot to the beat and being extraordinarily friendly,” before telling Obama that they wanted to leave. Obama concluded: “What I have had to put up with every day of my life is something that they find so objectionable that they can’t even put up with a day.” This demonstration of what he perceived as white racism, said Obama, “trigger[ed]” something in his mind that suddenly enabled him to comprehend a “new map of the world.”
Obama Says Racism Infests Corporate America, the Criminal-Justice System, & Education
Obama Poses for Photo with Farrakhan; the Photo Then Remains Hidden from the Public for 13 Years
At a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) meeting in 2005, a broadly smiling Obama posed for a photograph with the Jew-hating black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. Also posing with Farrakhan and Obama were Mustapha Farrakhan (Minister Farrakhan’s security chief and son), Joshua Farrakhan (his other son), and Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad (his chief of staff and son-in-law). In addition, the photo included a Farrakhan ally named Willie F. Wilson, who had once led a protest against an Asian business by a mob shouting, “F___ the Chinks”. (“We forgave Mr. Chan,” Wilson told reporters after that incident. “If we didn’t forgive him, we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street.”)
The photographer, Nation Of Islam employee Askia Muhammad, subsequently hid the photo for the next 13 years, in order to protect Obama politically. As Muhammad explained in January 2018, he had “basically swor[n] secrecy” and handed over the picture to Farrakhan’s chief of staff and son-in-law, Leonard Farrakhan, who had kept the photo hidden for 13 years. Though he handed over the file to Farrakhan’s team, Muhammad quietly kept a digital copy for himself. “Realizing that I had given it up, I mean, it was sort of like a promise to keep the photograph secret,” Muhammad said, adding that he was “really afraid of them” if he were to ever leak the photo. He insisted that a photo like this leaking to the press would have “absolutely… made a difference” in Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House. As Jim Geraghty of National Review noted in January 2018: “Put another way, Obama met with Farrakhan at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in 2005, and not a single person in attendance leaked that information until now.”
Obama Advocates Welfare State; Says Much Success Is Due to “Blind Luck”
Obama Accuses the Bush Administration of “Passive Indifference” in Responding to Hurricane Katrina’s Effects on Mostly-Black New Orleans
Obama Accuses the Bush Administration of Racial Insensitivity Regarding Hurricane Katrina
Emphasis on Judges’ “Hearts” and Their Inclination to Help “the Weak,” Rather Than on Abiding by the Law
Obama Endorses Dorothy Tillman, Proponent of Reparations and Admirer of Louis Farrakhan
Obama’s Charges Government with Racism in Response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina
2007 Speech to the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”)
In July 2007, presidential candidate Obama was a featured speaker at the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza, which lobbies for racial preferences, mass immigration, and a path to legalization for illegal aliens. Among his remarks were the following:
2008 Speech to the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”)
In July 2008, candidate Obama again spoke to the National Council of La Raza. Among his remarks were the following:
Obama Administration’s Massive Support for the National Council of La Raza
Obama Appoints La Raza’s Cecilia Munoz to Administrative Posts
Obama Urges Hispanic Voters to “Punish” Their “Enemies”
Obama Says the Criminal-Justice System Is Racially Inequitable
What Obama Misrepresented:
The Truth about the Criminal-Justice System
Obama’s assertions about the criminal-justice system are utterly untrue. They are designed not to instruct, but rather to divide Americans along racial lines. Consider the following:
Obama Says Crack Cocaine Laws Are Racially Discriminatory
What Obama Misrepresented:
The Truth about the Crack-vs.-Powder Sentencing Disparities
Obama Says Drug-Dealing Results from Economic Deprivation
Obama’s African American Religious Leadership Committee
Another Racialist Minister with Ties to Obama: James Meeks
Accusing Republicans of Racism
Obama’s Alliance with Al Sharpton
Who Is Al Sharpton, Friend of Obama?
Reference to American Bigotry and Intolerance:
During an April 2008 campaign stop in San Francisco, Obama said: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then 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.”
Minority Education Expenditures:
In the 2008 campaign, Obama said: “Latinos have such a high dropout rate. What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters.”
Obama’s Black Advisory Council (Cornel West)
Who Is Cornel West, the “Genius” and “Oracle”?
“They Cling to Guns or Religion”: Obama Refers to American Bigotry and Intolerance
Obama Says Inadequate Funding for Education Causes High Minority-Dropout Rates
Obama Favors Racial Preferences
Obama Laments America’s Mistreatment of Native Americans
Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court
The Henry Louis Gates Affair and America’s “Long History” of Racial Injustice
Obama Calls for Support from “African Americans, Latinos, and Women”
“You’re Going to Be Harassed”: Obama Criticizes Arizona’s New Immigration Law
Obama Criticizes Arizona Immigration Law in Meeting with Mexican President
Obama Supports The DREAM Act: In November 2010, President Obama spoke out in favor of the DREAM Act, a proposed law that would provide a path to citizenship for illegal-alien high-school graduates in the U.S.
Obama Reacts to Supreme Court Ruling on the Arizona Immigration Law
Obama Urges Hispanic Voters to “Punish” Their “Enemies”:
In a radio interview conducted a few days before the November 2010 midterm elections, President Obama urged Hispanic listeners to flock to the polls: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.” Obama said that Republicans who supported Arizona’s immigration law “aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”
Obama Administration’s Massive Support for the National Council of La Raza:
A Judicial Watch investigation revealed that federal funding for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and its affiliates had skyrocketed since President Obama had appointed NCLR’s senior vice president, Cecilia Muñoz, to be his director of intergovernmental affairs in 2009. The year Muñoz joined the White House, government funds earmarked for La Raza increased from $4.1 million to $11 million. Fully 60 percent of that money came from the Department of Labor, headed by Hilda Solis, who has close ties to the La Raza movement. Also in 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave NCLR $2.5 million for housing counseling, the Department of Education contributed almost $800,000, and the Centers for Disease Control gave approximately $250,000.
The DREAM Act by Executive Order: Obama Announces Plan to Stop Deporting Illegal Immigrants Who Came to U.S. As Children
Obama Makes It Virtually Impossible to Deport Anyone Living in the U.S. Illegally Unless They Have also Committed an Additional Crime
Obama Expands DREAM Act Protections to Illegal Immigrant Relatives of “DREAMers”
“Maybe They’ll Need a Moat” with “Alligators”: Obama Mocks Republican Position on Illegal Immigration
Obama Justice Department Ignores Civil Rights Cases with White Victims
More Allegations that the Obama Justice Department Ignores Civil Rights Cases Involving White Victims
Obama Justice Department Sues Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Obama Signs Bill Paying $1.15 Billion in Discrimination Compensation to Black Farmers
Obama USDA Awards $760 Million to Native American Farmers As Compensation for “Discrimination”
Obama USDA Offers Female and Hispanic farmers over $1.3 billion in “Discrimination” Payouts
The Fraudulence of the Black, Native American, Hispanic, and Female Farmer “Discrimination Payouts Is Confirmed
On April 25, 2013, The New York Times reported the following:
In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.
In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.
Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.
But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost. They were wrong.
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.
The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud….
The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.
From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.
Yet those concerns were played down as the compensation effort grew. Though the government has started requiring more evidence to support some claims, even now people who say they were unfairly denied loans can collect up to $50,000 with little documentation.
As a senator, Barack Obama supported expanding compensation for black farmers, and then as president he pressed for $1.15 billion to pay those new claims. Other groups quickly escalated their demands for similar treatment. In a letter to the White House in September 2009, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a leading Hispanic Democrat, threatened to mount a campaign “outside the Beltway” if Hispanic farmers were not compensated.
The groups found a champion in the new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. New settlements would provide “a way to neutralize the argument that the government favors black farmers over Hispanic, Native American or women farmers,” an internal department memorandum stated in March 2010.
The payouts pitted Mr. Vilsack and other political appointees against career lawyers and agency officials, who argued that the legal risks did not justify the costs.
Beyond that, they said it was legally questionable to sidestep Congress and compensate the Hispanic and female farmers out of a special Treasury Department account, known as the Judgment Fund. The fund is restricted to payments of court-approved judgments and settlements, as well as to out-of-court settlements in cases where the government faces imminent litigation that it could lose. Some officials argued that tapping the fund for the farmers set a bad precedent, since most had arguably never contemplated suing and might not have won if they had….
A 2010 settlement with Native Americans was contentious for its own reasons. Justice Department lawyers argued that the $760 million agreement far outstripped the potential cost of a defeat in court. Agriculture officials said not that many farmers would file claims.
That prediction proved prophetic. Only $300 million in claims were filed, leaving nearly $400 million in the control of plaintiffs’ lawyers to be distributed among a handful of nonprofit organizations serving Native American farmers. Two and a half years later, the groups have yet to be chosen. It is unclear how many even exist….
[Senior Justice Department officials] said the attorney general had broad discretion to settle litigation. “It was a priority for the administration to resolve the long-standing discrimination cases,” a senior official said, and give “farmers who believed they had been discriminated against a chance to seek redress.” …
Farmers routinely borrow money to carry themselves from high-cost planting season to harvest time; lack of credit can lead to barren fields. The original lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, filed in federal court in Washington in August 1997, argued that the Agriculture Department’s credit bureau, now called the Farm Service Agency, routinely denied or limited loans to black farmers while freely distributing them to whites.
Two government reports that year found no evidence of ongoing, systemic discrimination. The Government Accountability Office reported that 16 percent of minority farmers were denied loans, compared with 10 percent of white farmers, but traced the difference to objective factors like bad credit. An Agriculture Department study also found “no consistent picture of disparity” over the previous two years.
But the study concluded that decades of discrimination before then had cost African-American farmers significant amounts of land and income. Black farmers gave heart-rending accounts of loan officers who withheld promised money while crops withered, who repossessed their land and sold it to white cronies, who advised them to milk cows for white farmers rather than sow their own crops.
Written discrimination complaints had fallen on deaf ears at the Agriculture Department, where the civil rights office had been disbanded during the Reagan administration.
John W. Boyd Jr., a Virginia farmer who leads the National Black Farmers Association, was among those who pressed President Bill Clinton to settle the case….
Just five months after the lawsuit was filed, and without the investigative step of discovery, the Justice Department opened settlement negotiations….
“[I]t was more a political decision than a litigation decision,” said one lawyer familiar with the administration’s stance. “The administration was genuinely sympathetic to the plight of these farmers.” …
[Presiding Federal Judge Paul L. Friedman] initially limited the class of potential claimants to African-Americans who had farmed between 1981 and 1996 and had previously filed written discrimination complaints. But his final order significantly expanded the class, admitting those who had only “attempted to farm.” And it threw out the requirement for a written bias complaint, stating that an oral complaint was sufficient if someone other than a family member attested to it in an affidavit.
The Agriculture Department was partly to blame for the lack of records. It routinely discarded failed loan applications after three years, and it had badly mismanaged written discrimination complaints. Ninety percent of the farmers had no records either, plaintiffs’ lawyers said.
The billion-dollar settlement, the judge’s opinion said, was designed to provide “those class members with little or no documentary evidence with a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000.” Those with documentary proof could seek higher awards, a tack ultimately chosen by fewer than 1 percent of applicants.
Justice Department lawyers worried about false claims. But the lawyer familiar with the Clinton administration’s stance said they had decided that “it was better to err on the side of giving money to people who might not qualify if they went through litigation than to deny money to people who actually deserve it.” …
Accusations of unfair treatment could be checked against department files if claimants had previously received loans. But four-fifths of successful claimants had never done so. For them, “there was no way to refute what they said,” said Sandy Grammer, a former program analyst from Indiana who reviewed claims for three years. “Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers.”
The true dimensions of the problem are impossible to gauge. The Agriculture Department insists that the names and addresses of claimants are protected under privacy provisions. But department data released in response to a Freedom of Information request by The Times are telling. The data cover 15,601 African-Americans who filed successful claims and were paid before 2009.
In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.
In Maple Hill, a struggling town in southeastern North Carolina, the number of people paid was nearly four times the total number of farms. More than one in nine African-American adults there received checks. In Little Rock, Ark., a confidential list of payments shows, 10 members of one extended family collected a total of $500,000, and dozens of other successful claimants shared addresses, phone numbers or close family connections.
Thirty percent of all payments, totaling $290 million, went to predominantly urban counties — a phenomenon that supporters of the settlement say reflects black farmers’ migration during the 15 years covered by the lawsuit. Only 11 percent, or $107 million, went to what the Agriculture Department classifies as “completely rural” counties….
The claim period ended in late 1999, although the adjudication process dragged on for a dozen years. But the gusher of claims had only begun.
“Once those checks started hitting the mailboxes, people couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Wright, the Pine Bluff justice of the peace. “Then it dawned on them. ‘If Joe Blow got a check, I can get one.’” …
Some 66,000 claims poured in after the 1999 deadline. Noting that the government had given “extensive” notice, Judge Friedman ruled the door closed to late filers. “That is simply how class actions work,” he wrote.
But it was not how politics worked. The next nine years brought a concerted effort to allow the late filers to seek awards. Career Agriculture Department officials warned that they might be even more problematic than initial claimants: in one ZIP code in Columbus, Ohio, nearly everyone in two adjoining apartment buildings had filed, according to the former high-ranking agency official.
President George W. Bush was unreceptive to farmers’ repeated protests. But Congress was not: legislators from both parties, including Mr. Obama as a senator in 2007, sponsored bills to grant the late filers relief.
Mr. Boyd said Mr. Obama’s support led him to throw the backing of his 109,000-member black farmers’ association behind the Obama presidential primary campaign. Hilary Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.’s chief lobbyist, said Mr. Obama’s stance helped establish him as a defender of the concerns of rural African-American communities.
Public criticism came primarily from conservative news outlets like Breitbart.com and from Congressional conservatives like Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who described the program as rife with fraud. Few Republicans or Democrats supported him. Asked why, Mr. King said, “Never underestimate the fear of being called a racist.”
Congress finally inserted a provision in the 2008 farm bill allowing late filers to bring new lawsuits, with their claims to be decided by the same standard of evidence as before. The bill also declared a sense of Congress that minority farmers’ bias claims and lawsuits should be quickly and justly resolved.
Congress overrode a veto by Mr. Bush, who objected to other provisions in the bill. But as Mr. Bush left Washington, Congress had appropriated only $100 million for compensation, hardly enough to pay for processing claims.
Within months of taking office, President Obama promised to seek an additional $1.15 billion. In November 2010, Congress approved the funds. To protect against fraud, legislators ordered the Government Accountability Office and the Agriculture Department’s inspector general to audit the payment process.
But simultaneously, the Agriculture Department abandoned the costly and burdensome review process it had applied to earlier claims. As a result, according to internal government memos, the percentage of successful claims is expected to exceed that in the original 1999 settlement. More than 40,000 claims have been filed and are under review.
In November, the G.A.O. concluded that antifraud provisions provided “reasonable assurance” of weeding out false claims, saying more than 3,100 suspicious applications had been identified. But as before, it noted, late filers need not document claims, leaving adjudicators to rely on assertions that they have “no way of independently verifying.” …
The Bush Justice Department had rebuffed all efforts to settle the parallel discrimination suits brought by Native American, Hispanic and female farmers. But now, the Obama administration’s efforts to compensate African-American farmers intensified pressure from members of Congress and lobbyists to settle those cases as well.
Within the administration, Secretary Vilsack, a former Iowa governor who had briefly run for president, found an ally in Mr. West, who had been named an assistant attorney general after serving as a major Obama fund-raiser….
The Native-American case was clearly problematic for the government. The federal judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, had already certified the plaintiffs as a class, although only to seek changes in government practices and policies. He postponed a decision on whether they could seek monetary damages as a class.
But Justice Department litigators were far from unarmed. If they lost on damages, case law suggested that the decision might be reversed. Depositions had revealed many of the individual farmers’ complaints to be shaky. And federal judges had already scornfully rejected the methodology of the plaintiffs’ expert, a former Agriculture Department official named Patrick O’Brien, in the women’s case.
Mr. O’Brien contended that white farmers were two to three times as likely as Native Americans to receive federal farm loans in the 1980s and 1990s than were other farmers. But the government’s expert, Gordon C. Rausser, a professor of economics and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, had produced a 340-page report stating that Mr. O’Brien’s conclusions were based “in a counter-factual world” and that Native Americans had generally fared as well as white male farmers.
Professor Rausser was astounded when, with both sides gearing up for trial in late 2009, the government began settlement negotiations. “If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed,” he said.
“It was just a joke,” he added. “I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native-Americans.”
Agriculture officials predicted that only 5,300 Native Americans were likely to file claims. The plaintiffs’ lawyers, whose fees were to be based on a percentage of the settlement, estimated up to 19,000 claims.
Only 4,400 people filed claims, with 3,600 winning compensation at a cost of roughly $300 million. That left $460 million unspent — of which roughly $400 million under the terms of the settlement must be given to nonprofit groups that aid Native American farmers….
The remaining $60.8 million will go to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, led by the Washington firm Cohen, Milstein, Sellers & Toll….
On Feb. 19, 2010, Alan Wiseman, a lawyer for the Hispanic farmers, strode into Federal District Court in Washington unusually upbeat. “Sometimes,” he told Judge James Robertson, “it takes divine intervention” to move the government.
Over the past decade, his case had not gone well. Nor had the parallel lawsuit brought by female farmers.
Judge Robertson had refused to certify either group as a class. The United States Court of Appeals had upheld him, stating in 2006 that the Hispanic plaintiffs had been denied loans “for a variety of reasons, including inadequate farm plans and lack of funds.” Nor had female farmers proved a pattern of bias, the court found.
The Justice Department’s lawyers had definitively ruled out any group-style settlement. “Some of these folks have never made a loan payment in their entire history with U.S.D.A.,” Lisa A. Olson, the lead government litigator against the 81 Hispanic plaintiffs, told Judge Robertson in August 2009. “There may even be folks who are under criminal investigation.”
Michael Sitcov, assistant director of the Justice Department’s federal program branch, told the judge that senior department officials agreed with career litigators that the cases should be fought one by one.
But members of the Congressional Hispanic caucus and a group of eight Democratic senators, led by Mr. [Bob] Menendez, were lobbying the White House to move in the opposite direction. They grew increasingly agitated as the plaintiffs’ cases appeared to falter.
In a letter to Mr. Obama in June 2009, the senators noted that black farmers stood to receive $2.25 billion in compensation, but that Hispanic farmers, who alleged the same kind of discrimination, had gotten nothing. Should that continue, Mr. Menendez wrote that September, “Hispanic farmers and ranchers, and their supporters, will be reaching out to community and industry leaders outside of the Beltway in order to bring wider attention to this problem.”
The issue came to a head after the Supreme Court refused to reopen the issue of class certification. The next month, on Feb. 11, 2010, Daniel J. Meltzer, principal deputy White House counsel, held the first of three meetings at which resolution of the case was discussed, records and interviews show. Among the attendees were senior Justice and Agriculture Department officials, including Mr. West, Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, and Krysta Harden, then the assistant agriculture secretary for Congressional relations. Settlement negotiations began the next week…. Attorneys for the 81 Hispanic farmers also raised the vague specter of tens of thousands of plaintiffs….
In agreeing to the payout, the government did, for the first time, impose a greater evidentiary burden. While one major category of claimants — those who said their loan applications had been unfairly denied — remained eligible for payments of up to $50,000 without any documentation, others were required to produce written evidence that they had complained of bias at the time. The Hispanic plaintiffs were indignant.
Adam P. Feinberg, who represents some of them, said: “Once the government puts a program in place for one racial group, even if it decides it is too generous, it cannot adopt a different set of restrictions for another racial group. It’s outrageous.”
The claims process opened in late September, six weeks before the election. In the weeks before the March 25 deadline, facing far fewer claimants than expected, the Agriculture Department instructed processors to call about 16,000 people to remind them that time was running out, despite internal disquiet that the government was almost recruiting claims against itself. The deadline was then extended to May 1.
So far, about 1,900 Hispanics and 24,000 women have sought compensation, many in states where middlemen have built a cottage industry, promising to help win payouts for a fee.
Obama Justice Department Alleges Racism in Police Departments
Claiming That Voter ID Laws Are Racist and Discriminatory
Obama Lauds the Race-Baiting Civil-Rights Activist Al Sharpton:
On April 6, 2011, President Obama traveled to New York’s Sheraton Hotel & Towers to attend a 20th anniversary celebration of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. When addressing the crowd, Obama, who had heartily embraced Sharpton and complimented him for “his style.” Obama also praised “the National Action Network’s commitment to fight injustice and inequality here in New York City and across America. That’s not only a testament to Reverend Sharpton. It’s a testament to all of you who are here tonight. I want to commend you for the work that you’ve done over the last two decades.”
Opposition to Purging Voter Rolls of Ineligible Names
Obama Mocks Anti-Illegal-Immigration Activists:
In May 2011, President Obama went to El Paso, Texas to give what was billed as an important speech on immigration. He mocked opponents of illegal immigration by saying, “Maybe they’ll need a moat [i.e., in addition to a wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States]. Maybe they’ll need alligators in the moat.”
Obama DOJ Investigates Police Departments for Civil-Rights Abuses:
On May 31, 2011, Salon.com reported that “President Obama’s Justice Department is aggressively investigating several big urban police departments for systematic civil rights abuses such as harassment of racial minorities, false arrests, and excessive use of force….”
Working to Bring Back the Subprime Mortgage-Lending Practices That Caused the Housing Market to Collapse in 2008:
In July 2011, it was reported that the Obama DOJ, in a manner reminiscent of the lending practices that helped cause the housing crisis of 2008, was once again strong-arming banks to make risky loans to minority applicants – threatening to charge banks with discrimination if they failed to comply.
Claims of Discrimination Against Black Schoolchildren:
In a February 25, 2012 speech to the organization 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Attorney General Eric Holder lamented the findings of a 2011 study of discipline patterns in Texas schools. Holder said the study showed that “83 percent of African American male students and 74 percent of Hispanic male students ended up in trouble and suspended for some period of time” — as compared to 59% of white male students. “We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled,” Holder stated. “This is, quite simply, unacceptable.… These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed.” After citing the Texas study, Holder added that “tellingly, 97 percent of all suspensions were discretionary and reflected the administrator’s discipline philosophy as much as the student’s behavior.” In his speech, Holder ignored data indicating that the different discipline rates were consistent with differences in actual schoolyard behavior.
Holder revisited this theme in January 2014, when he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first-ever national guidelines for discipline in public schools. These guidelines demanded that schools adhere, as an Associated Press (AP) report put it, “to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don’t.” “[I]n our investigations,” saidthe administration, “we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students. In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.” Holder, for his part, declared: “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct.”
In particular, the Obama administration was troubled by the fact that:
“Too often, said Holder, “so-called zero-tolerance policies [which mandate uniform and swift punishment for such offenses as truancy, smoking, or carrying a weapon], however well intentioned they might be, make students feel unwelcome in their own schools; they disrupt the learning process. And they can have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”
To address this matter, the Obama administration encouraged schools to:
As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams observed, under the Obama policy:
“The nation’s educators can avoid sanctions by adopting a racial quota system for student discipline. So as Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, predicts, ‘school officials will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be, or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.’ I can imagine school administrators reasoning this way: ‘Blacks are 20 percent of our student body, and 20 percent of suspensions this year have been of black students. In order to discipline another black student while maintaining our suspension quota, we will have to suspend some white students, whether they’re guilty or not.’”
The Trayvon Martin Case
“And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
“The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case….
“We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.
“And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.
“I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.
“So — so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different….
“Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department — governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.
“You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing….
“Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations….
“We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?…
“And then finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching…. [A]t least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.
On August 7, 2013, Obama appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, who asked him to comment on the Trayvon Martin case. The President replied:
“Well, I think all of us were troubled by what happened. And any of us who were parents can imagine the heartache that those parents went through. It doesn’t mean that Trayvon was a perfect kid — none of us were. We were talking offstage — when you’re a teenager, especially a teenage boy, you’re going to mess up, and you won’t always have the best judgment. But what I think all of us agree to is, is that we should have a criminal justice system that’s fair, that’s just. And what I wanted to try to explain was why this was a particularly sensitive topic for African American families, because a lot of people who have sons know the experience they had of being followed or being viewed suspiciously.
“We all know that young African American men disproportionately have involvement in criminal activities and violence — for a lot of reasons, a lot of it having to do with poverty, a lot of it having to do with disruptions in their neighborhoods and their communities, and failing schools and all those things. And that’s no excuse, but what we also believe in is, is that people — everybody — should be treated fairly and the system should work for everyone.”
Obama’s Commitment to Racial Preferences
Claims of Discrimination Against Black Schoolchildren
In a February 25, 2012 speech to the organization 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Attorney General Eric Holder lamented the findings of a 2011 study of discipline patterns in Texas schools. Holder said the study showed that “83 percent of African American male students and 74 percent of Hispanic male students ended up in trouble and suspended for some period of time” — as compared to 59% of white male students. “We’ve often seen that students of color, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and students with special needs are disproportionately likely to be suspended or expelled,” Holder stated. “This is, quite simply, unacceptable.… These unnecessary and destructive policies must be changed.” After citing the Texas study, Holder added that “tellingly, 97 percent of all suspensions were discretionary and reflected the administrator’s discipline philosophy as much as the student’s behavior.” In his speech, Holder ignored data indicating that the different discipline rates were consistent with differences in actual schoolyard behavior.
Holder revisited this theme in January 2014, when he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first-ever national guidelines for discipline in public schools. These guidelines demanded that schools adhere, as an Associated Press (AP) report put it, “to the principle of fairness and equity in student discipline or face strong action if they don’t.” “[I]n our investigations,” said the administration, “we have found cases where African-American students were disciplined more harshly and more frequently because of their race than similarly situated white students. In short, racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.” Holder, for his part, declared: “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct.”
In particular, the Obama administration was troubled by the fact that:
“Too often, said Holder, “so-called zero-tolerance policies [which mandate uniform and swift punishment for such offenses as truancy, smoking, or carrying a weapon], however well intentioned they might be, make students feel unwelcome in their own schools; they disrupt the learning process. And they can have significant and lasting negative effects on the long-term well-being of our young people, increasing their likelihood of future contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”
To address this matter, the Obama administration encouraged schools to:
As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams observed:
“The nation’s educators can avoid sanctions by adopting a racial quota system for student discipline. So as Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, predicts, ‘school officials will either start disciplining students who shouldn’t be, or, more likely, will not discipline some students who ought to be.’ I can imagine school administrators reasoning this way: ‘Blacks are 20 percent of our student body, and 20 percent of suspensions this year have been of black students. In order to discipline another black student while maintaining our suspension quota, we will have to suspend some white students, whether they’re guilty or not.’”
In November 2014, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell reported: “Under an implicit threat of losing their federal subsidies, the Minneapolis Public Schools have agreed to reduce the disparity in punishment of black students by 25 percent by the end of this school year, and then by 50 percent, 75 percent and finally 100 percent in each of the following years. In other words, there are now racial quota limits for punishment in the Minneapolis schools.”
Obama Says Illegal Immigrants Should Not Be “Expelled from Our Country”
Obama Says That People From Mexico “Did Not Cross the Border, The Border Crossed Them”
Americans’ View of Race Relations Has Deteriorated Greatly During Obama Administration: In June 2013, a poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal reported that 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks had a favorable opinion of race relations in the U.S. At the beginning of Obama’s first term (4 and 1/2 years earlier, the corresponding figures were 79 percent and 63 percent.
Obama Speaks about America’s Racial Injustice, Past and Present
In an August 23, 2013 speech at Binghamton University, Obama said:
Obama Marks the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech by Emphasizing America’s Racial Inequity
On August 28, 2013, Obama said:
Obama Laments America’s Historical and Continuing Racial Injustice:
In a December 4, 2013 speech on the U.S. economy, President Obama said: “[I]t’s true that the painful legacy of discrimination means that African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of opportunity — higher unemployment, higher poverty rates…. So we’re going to need strong application of anti-discrimination laws. We’re going to need immigration reform that grows the economy and takes people out of the shadows. We’re going to need targeted initiatives to close those gaps.”
Obama Commutes the Sentences of Eight Crack-Cocaine Offenders Convicted under “Unfair System”
Federal Hate-Crime Charge Against White Perpetrator of the “Knockout Game”
Obama Says Racism Causes Some Voters to Dislike Him
In the January 27, 2014 issue of the New Yorker magazine, President Obama said: “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president.” “Now, the flip side of it,” added Obama, “is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.”
Obama Lauds Al Sharpton and Warns That Voting Rights for Blacks Are in Peril
On April 11, 2014, President Obama spoke at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York and said to Sharpton: “Of course, one thing that has not changed is your commitment to problems of civil rights for everybody and opportunity for all people.”
Focusing also on the issue of Republican proposals to tighten ID requirements for voting in political elections, Obama claimed that such measures would unfairly make it more difficult for millions of Americans to cast their ballots. Said Obama, to thunderous applause: “America did not stand up and did not march and did not sacrifice to gain the right to vote for themselves and others only to see it denied to their kids and their grandchildren. The stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today.”
Obama Denounces the Death Penalty and Laments the “Significant Problems” Associated with the Execution of a Particular, Remorseless Black Murderer
On April 20, 2014, a 38-year-old, black Oklahoma man named Clayton Lockett was executed by lethal injection because he had raped and murdered a 19-year-old girl named Stephanie Neiman fifteen years earlier. The injection procedure was botched, however, and it took a full 43 minutes after the drug was administered before Lockett died. A TulsaWorld.com report provided background on the crime that had led to this execution:
Stephanie Neiman … was dropping off a friend at a Perry [Oklahoma] residence on June 3, 1999, the same evening Clayton Lockett and two accomplices decided to pull a home invasion robbery there. Neiman fought Lockett when he tried to take the keys to her truck.
The men beat her and used duct tape to bind her hands and cover her mouth. Even after being kidnapped and driven to a dusty country road, Neiman didn’t back down when Lockett asked if she planned to contact police.
The men had also beaten and kidnapped Neiman’s friend along with Bobby Bornt, who lived in the residence, and Bornt’s 9-month-old baby….
Neiman was forced to watch as Lockett’s accomplice, Shawn Mathis, spent 20 minutes digging a shallow grave in a ditch beside the road. Her friends saw Neiman standing in the ditch and heard a single shot.
Lockett returned to the truck because the gun had jammed. He later said he could hear Neiman pleading, “Oh God, please, please” as he fixed the shotgun. The men could be heard “laughing about how tough Stephanie was” before Lockett shot Neiman a second time.
He ordered Mathis to bury her, despite the fact that Mathis informed him Stephanie was still alive.
A few days after Lockett’s execution, a foreign reporter raised the issue with Obama and compared America’s use of the death penalty to that of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China. After conceding that the death penalty might be appropriate in a very “terrible” crime such as “mass killing” or “the killings of children,” Obama went on to denounce the capital punishment generally:
“The application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems — racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, you know, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence. And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied. And this situation in Oklahoma I think just highlights some of the significant problems there.
“So I’ll be discussing with Eric Holder and others, you know — you know, to get me an analysis of what steps have been taken, not just in this particular instance, but more broadly in this area. I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions around these issues.”
Obama and a White Police Officer’s Killing of Black Teenager Michael Brown
On August 14, 2014, Obama addressed the riots that had been raging in recent days in response to the August 9 kiling — by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri — of an unarmed 18-year-old black male named Michael Brown in circumstances that were not yet clear. While he called for “unity” and calm, the president also issued a sternly worded reprimand to the police:
“This morning, I received a thorough update on the situation from Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been following and been in communication with his team. I’ve already tasked the Department of Justice and the FBI to independently investigate the death of Michael Brown, along with local officials on the ground. The Department of Justice is also consulting with local authorities about ways that they can maintain public safety without restricting the right of peaceful protest and while avoiding unnecessary escalation. I made clear to the attorney general that we should do what is necessary to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done….
“Of course, it’s important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old, and his family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities. There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”
On August 18, Obama said: “In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and left as objects to fear. Part of the ongoing challenge of perfecting our union has involved dealing with communities that feel left behind.” And in light of the fact that some police in Ferguson were employing tanks and riot gear in order to deal with the looters, Obama stated: “There is no excuse for excessive force by police…. I think it’s probably useful for us to review how the funding has gone, how local law enforcement has used grant dollars, to make sure that what they’re purchasing [such as military equipment] is stuff that they actually need. There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement, and we don’t want those lines blurred.”
At the annual Congressional Black Caucus Awards Dinner in Washington, DC on September 28, 2014, President Obama said his administration was working to close “the justice gap” between whites and nonwhites. A key consideration, he explained, was not merely “how justice is applied, but also how it is perceived, how it is experienced.” Citing the shooting of Michael Brown as well as other incidents, Obama lamented that “too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.” The racial disparities in everything from traffic stops to criminal sentences, said the president, feeds the widespread belief that “the criminal justice system doesn’t treat people of all races equally.” “That has a corrosive effect,” he added, “not just on the black community. It has a corrosive effect on America.”
On November 5, 2014 — the day after Democrats had lost the U.S. Senate in the midterm elections — Obama met at the White House with protest leaders from Ferguson and urged them to “stay on course” with their activism. Among those with whom he met was Al Sharpton.
On the night of November 24, 2014 — less than an hour after a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who had shot and killed Michael Brown — Obama delivered a televised address to the nation. Among his remarks were assertions that because “we are a nation built on the rule of law,… we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make”; that “anyone who protests this decision [should] do so peacefully”; that “our police officers put their lives on the line for us every single day”; and that “we have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades.” But the bulk of his address contained references to the ongoing inequities allegedly plaguing American society and its criminal-justice system, and the rage spawned by those inequities. For example:
* “There are Americans who agree with [the grand jury decision], and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction.”
* “I also appeal to the law enforcement officials in Ferguson and the region to show care and restraint in managing peaceful protests that may occur…. As they do their jobs in the coming days, they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence. Distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how communities and law enforcement interact.”
* “[W]e need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country…. I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement. That means working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody.”
* “[W]e know that there are communities who’ve been able to deal with this in an effective way, but also who are interested in working with this administration and local and state officials to start tackling much-needed criminal justice reform. So, those should be the lessons that we draw from these tragic events. We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson. This is an issue for America.”
* “[T]here are still problems, and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion. I don’t think that’s the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials. But these are real issues. And we have to lift them up and not deny them or try to tamp them down. What we need to do is understand them and figure out how do we make more progress.”
* “[T]hose who are only interested in focusing on the violence and just want the problem to go away need to recognize that we do have work to do here and we shouldn’t try to paper it over. Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America isn’t everything that it could be. And I am confident that if we focus our attention on the problem and we look at what has happened in communities around the country effectively, then we can make progress not just in Ferguson but in a lot of other cities and communities around the country.”
The following day — November 25, 2014 — Obama spoke at Copernicus Community Center in Chicago and again addressed the riots and protests that were taking place not only in Ferguson but throughout the country. Stating that violence was both counterproductive and wrong, he also said that “the frustrations that we have seen are not just about a particular incident” but “have deep roots in many communities of color, who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly”; that “that’s an impression that folks have and it’s not just made up” but is “rooted in reality”; that it was vital “to have real conversations about how do we change the situation so that there’s more trust between law enforcement and some of these communities”; that “I have instructed attorney general Eric Holder not just to investigate what happened in Ferguson, but [to] also identify specific steps we can take together to set up a series of regional meetings focused on building trust in our communities”; that changes were necessary to ensure “that law enforcement is fair and is being applied equally to every person in this country”; and that “if we train police properly, that … improves policing and makes people feel that the system is fair.”
In a primetime address that same day in Chicago, Obama expressed his support for the Ferguson protesters by declaring: “So my message to those people who are constructively moving forward, trying to mobilize, organize and … I want those folks to know their president is going to work with them.”
In March 2015, the Justice Department released an 87-page report stating conclusively that — based on physical, forensic, and eyewitness testimony — the shooting of Michael Brown was justifiable. This was accompanied by a report accusing the Ferguson Police Department of discriminating consistently and egregiously against African Americans. In reponse to that second report, Obama said that while racism may be “no longer endemic,” as it had been a half-century earlier, the DOJ report showed that the “nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.” Moreover, after noting that just as “you can’t generalize about police officers who do an extraordinarily tough job [and] overwhelmingly they do it professionally,” “you can’t generalize about protesters who it turns out had some very legitimate grievances.” Added Obama: “The Justice Department report showed that African Americans were being stopped disproportionately, mainly so the city could raise money even though these were unjust. What was happening in Ferguson was you had city government telling the Police Department … ‘Stop more people. We need to raise more money.’ Folks would get stopped. They’d get tickets. Then, they’d have to wait in line to pay it, take a day off work. Folks would lose their jobs. In some cases, they were thrown in jail because they didn’t have enough money for the fines. And then they’d get fined for that. So there was a whole structure there, according to the Justice Department report, that indicated both racism and just a disregard for what law enforcement’s supposed to do.”
John R. Lott — president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and a former chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission — explained that the DOJ report that smeared the Ferguson Police Department was a deeply flawed piece of propaganda. Wrote Lott:
The Justice report doesn’t prove disparate treatment, let alone discrimination. In fact, it looks more like something ginned up to distract from the embarrassing fact that Justice (in another report released the same day) wound up fully validating the findings of the Ferguson grand jury.
Racism is serious, and those engaging in it should be shamed — but we should have real evidence before accusing others of it. And every one of the Justice report’s main claims of evidence of discrimination falls short. Starting with the primary numerical claim. The report notes on Page 4: “Ferguson’s law-enforcement practices overwhelmingly impact African-Americans…. Data collected by the Ferguson Police Department from 2012 to 2014 shows that African-Americans account for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations, and 93 percent of arrests made by FPD officers, despite comprising only 67 percent of Ferguson’s population.”
Those statistics don’t prove racism, because blacks don’t commit traffic offenses at the same rate as other population groups.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2011 Police-Public Contact Survey indicates that, nationwide, blacks were 31 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over for a traffic stop. Ferguson is a black-majority town. If its blacks were pulled over at the same rate as blacks nationally, they’d account for 87.5 percent of traffic stops. In other words, the numbers actually suggest that Ferguson police may be slightly less likely to pull over black drivers than are their national counterparts. They certainly don’t show that Ferguson is a hotbed of racism.
Critics may assert that that “31 percent more likely” figure simply shows that racism is endemic to police forces nationwide.
Hmm: The survey also reveals that men are 42 percent more likely than women to be pulled over for traffic stops. Should we conclude that police are biased against men, or that men drive more recklessly?
In fact, blacks die in car accidents at a rate about twice their share of car owners. A 2006 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study found that black drivers who were killed in accidents have the highest rate of past convictions for speeding and for other moving violations. This suggests that there are a lot of unsafe black drivers, not racism.
The Justice report on Ferguson continues, “African-Americans are at least 50 percent more likely to have their cases lead to an arrest warrant, and accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued by the Ferguson Municipal Court in 2013.”
Again, this pretends that a mere difference is evidence of discrimination. But the report’s statistic doesn’t even look at whether people pay their fine or appear in court — something that makes a big difference in whether to issue a warrant. Could it be that blacks are more likely to face particularly serious charges? Since Justice has gone through the case files, it could easily have answered the questions. Perhaps it didn’t like the answers. (Unfortunately, no national data are available for comparison.)
Another major complaint in the Justice report: “Most strikingly, the court issues municipal arrest warrants not on the basis of public-safety needs, but rather as a routine response to missed court appearances and required fine payments.” If you think that this is unique to Ferguson, try not paying your next speeding ticket.
As for the anecdotal evidence Justice offers to bring home this complaint, well, here’s an anecdote from Washington, DC — a town with a black mayor and black-majority city council. Megan Johnson, a black DC woman, recently failed to pay 10 parking tickets within the allotted 30 days. The city doubled her fines from $500 to $1,000, then booted, towed and sold her car — and charged her $700 for towing and impounding it. DC sold the car at auction for $500 and won’t even credit that amount to what she owes. It’s now attaching her tax refunds. Justice’s Ferguson anecdotes no more prove racism than Megan Johnson’s experience proves the DC government is racist.
Finally, for “direct evidence of racial bias,” the report describes seven emails from Ferguson police officers from 2008 to 2011 that Justice describes as offensive to blacks, women, Muslims, President Obama and his wife, and possibly people of mixed race.
But this begs some big questions: Did only one or two of the 53 officers send the emails? Did the objectionable emails end in 2011 because those officers no longer worked for the department or were told to stop?
The Justice Department’s report reads as a prosecutor’s brief, not an unbiased attempt to get at the truth, with evidence carefully selected and portrayed in the strongest possible light. Differences don’t necessarily imply racism, but the Obama Justice Department doesn’t seem to care.
Details of How Obama and the DOJ Report Smeared the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department As Racist
On March 4, 2015, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released an 87-page report stating conclusively that based on the physical and eyewitness evidence, Officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (in August 2014) was justified; that Wilson’s version of events was consistent with the physical and eyewitness evidence; and that just prior to the shooting, Brown in fact had assaulted Wilson, tried to steal his gun, and charged at him in an effort to harm or kill him. Notwithstanding these facts, President Obama, in the days that followed, announced that the Ferguson Police Department was awash in racism and discrimination against African Americans. Said Obama at a town hall-style meeting in South Carolina: “What we saw was that the Ferguson Police Department in conjunction with the municipality saw traffic stops, arrests, tickets as a revenue generator, as opposed to serving the community, and that it systematically was biased against African Americas in that city who were stopped, harassed, mistreated, abused, called names, fined.”
“[T]he Department of Justice’s Ferguson … report’s narrative was woefully familiar,” said Obama. “It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement.”He stated that unless the city of Ferguson agreed to “enter into some sort of agreement with the Justice Department to fix what is clearly a broken and racially biased system,” the Justice Department would use its “capacity to sue the city for violations of the rights of the people of Ferguson.”
The evidence included a number of emails that Justice Department investigators cited as examples of “racial bias among police and court staff in Ferguson” — emails including jokes about President Obama, Michelle Obama, African Americans, and Muslims. The DOJ report listed 7 of these emails:
The DOJ said that these and other emails showed “racial or ethnic bias, as well as other forms of bias.”
The DOJ report further stated that though blacks made up 67% of residents in Ferguson, from 2011 to 2013 they accounted for 85% of vehicle stops, 90% of citations, and 93% of arrests. These statistics were cited as examples of systemic police racism.
Moreover, the report cited anecdotal evidence consisting of testimony by black residents who told investigators stories of being harassed by police for no apparent reason.
Obama Meets with Sharpton Regarding Police Department Reform
On December 1, 2014, President Obama met with Al Sharpton at the White House to discuss matters related to the Michael Brown shooting and police-department reform. News reports indicated that Obama would demand $263 million from Congress to put 50,000 body-worn cameras in U.S. police departments and train local officers in the proper use pf surplus military equipment. Brown’s parents had pushed for the use of cameras as one way to reduce distrust between police and nonwhites. In August, the administration had said that it agreed with the idea in principle, writing: “We support the use of cameras and video technology by law enforcement officers, and the Department of Justice continues to research best practices for implementation.”
Al Sharpton Has Become Obama’s Chief Advisor on Racial Issues
In August 2014, Politico.com published a feature story titled, “How Al Sharpton Became Obama’s Go-To Man on Race.” The piece stated that “Sharpton not only visits the White House frequently, he often texts or emails with senior Obama officials such as [Valerie] Jarrett and Attorney General Eric Holder.” It quoted Jesse Jackson saying, “I’ve known Al since he was 12 years old, and he’s arrived at the level he always wanted to arrive at, which is gratifying. He’s the man who’s the liaison to the White House, he’s the one who’s talking to the Justice Department.” Sharpton himself, meanwhile, offered his own assessment of how he had bonded with Obama: “The relationship evolved over time…. The key for him was seeing that I wasn’t insincere, that I actually believed in the stuff I was talking about.”
In a subsequent New York Times piece, Obama was quoted as having said of Sharpton: “You can do business with that guy.”
From January 2009 through December 2014, Sharpton visited the Obama White House on 72 separate occasions, including 5 one-on-one meetings with the president and 20 meetings with staff members or senior advisers. Most of the other visits occurred when Sharpton attended group or public events.
Obama Sees Racism As the Cause of Opposition to Immigration Reform
In an August 2014 interview with The Economist, President Obama derided “the dysfunction of a Republican Party that knows we need immigration reform, knows that it would actually be good for its long-term prospects, but is captive to the nativist elements in its party.”
Obama Says Racism in America Is “Deeply Rooted”
In a December 2014 interview with Black Entertainment Television, President Obama said that racism “is something that is deeply rooted in our society, it’s deeply rooted in our history.” He added: “When you’re dealing with something as deeply rooted as racism or bias, you’ve got to have vigilance but you have to recognize that it’s going to take some time, and you just have to be steady so you don’t give up when we don’t get all the way there. This isn’t going to be solved overnight.”
Obama Cites the Continuing “Legacy of Slavery”
In an October 2014 New Yorker article, President Obama was quoted saying that the biggest issues concerning race are “rooted in economics and the legacy of slavery,” which have created “vastly different opportunities for African-Americans and whites.” He added: “I understand, certainly sitting in this office, that probably the single most important thing I could do for poor black kids is to make sure that they’re getting a good K-through-12 education. And, if they’re coming out of high school well prepared, then they’ll be able to compete for university slots and jobs. And that has more to do with budgets and early-childhood education and stuff that needs to be legislated.”
Obama Discusses Society’s Continuing Racism
In A December 2014 interview with People magazine, Obama said: “The small irritations or indignities that we experience are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced. It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala [an alleged incident that Mrs. Obama had just recounted to the interviewer]. It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.”
Obama also told People: “There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.”
The President also said that he and Mrs. Obama had often encouraged their daughters to reflect on racial stereotypes, particularly “how they think they should have to act as African-American girls.” “Around the dinner table,” he added, “we’re pointing out to them that too often in our society black boys are still perceived as more dangerous, and it will be part of their generation’s task to try to eradicate those stereotypes.”
Obama Says America Has a Long History of Mistreating Blacks, and That White Police Fear Black People
In December 2014, President Obama said: “This country is at its best when everybody is being treated fairly. We have a history and a legacy of people not being treated fairly in all kinds of walks of life. It is particularly important for people to feel like they’re being treated fairly by law enforcement and police, because the consequences when they’re not treated fairly can be deadly. And, you know, I’ve said it before, the vast majority of law enforcement officers are doing a really tough job, and most of them are doing it well and are trying to do the right thing. But a combination of bad training, in some cases, a combination in some cases of departments that really are not trying to root out biases, or tolerate sloppy police work. A combination, in some cases of folks just not knowing any better, and in a lot of cases, subconscious fear of folks who look different, all of this contributes to a national problem that’s going to require a national solution.”
Obama’s Speech on the 50th Anniversary of the Selma Civil-Rights March
On March 7, 2015 in Selma, Alabama, President Obama took part in a ceremony commemorating the famous civil-rights march that had taken place there 50 years earlier. Below are some noteworthy excerpts from the speech he delivered to those in attendance. His comments placed a heavy emphasis on America’s historical, and continuing, transgressions and injustices:
* “They marched [in Selma in 1965] as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, and countless daily indignities – but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before.”
* In what might have been a retort to critics who had long referred to Obama as a Communist/Marxist, and to other critics (like Rudolph Giuliani) who had expressed doubt about his patriotism and love of country, the president said: “As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, half-breeds, outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse – everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism was challenged.”
* “It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what’s right and shake up the status quo.”
* “Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for African-Americans, but for every American. Women marched through those doors. Latinos marched through those doors. Asian-Americans, gay Americans, and Americans with disabilities came through those doors. Their endeavors gave the entire South the chance to rise again, not by reasserting the past, but by transcending the past.”
* “[A] more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the ‘race card’ for their own purposes…. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character – requires admitting as much.”
* “With such effort, we can make sure our criminal justice system serves all and not just some. Together, we can raise the level of mutual trust that policing is built on – the idea that police officers are members of the communities they risk their lives to protect, and citizens in Ferguson and New York and Cleveland just want the same thing young people here marched for – the protection of the law. Together, we can address unfair sentencing, and overcrowded prisons, and the stunted circumstances that rob too many boys of the chance to become men, and rob the nation of too many men who could be good dads, and workers, and neighbors.”
“[W]e can protect the foundation stone of our democracy for which so many marched across this bridge – and that is the right to vote. Right now, in 2015, fifty years after Selma, there are laws [Voter ID laws] across this country designed to make it harder for people to vote. As we speak, more of such laws are being proposed. Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood and sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, stands weakened, its future subject to partisan rancor.”
* In a reference to the millions of illegal immigrants who had crossed the Mexico-U.S. Border – and to whom Obama had recently granted executive amnesty from deportation – the president made reference to “the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because they want their kids to know a better life..”
* He made reference to “the slaves who built the White House,” “Japanese-Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied,” and “the gay Americans whose blood ran on the streets of San Francisco and New York.”
Obama Advocates Mandatory Voting, Because It Would Be Politically “Transformative”
During a March 18, 2015 speech in Cleveland, Obama said: “In Australia, and some other countries, there’s mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody voted [in America]. That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country, because the people who tend not to vote are young; they’re lower income; they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups; and they’re often the folks who are — they’re scratching and climbing to get into the middle class. And they’re working hard, and there’s a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls. We should want to get them into the polls. So that may end up being a better strategy in the short term.”
Defense Department Says the Bible, the Constitution and the Declaration Of Independence All Perpetuate Racism and Sexism
In April 2015, the Daily Caller reported that according to a Defense Department-approved “sexism course” prepared by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), – an entity whose mission is to provide a “world-class human relations education” – the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence are all “historical influences that allow sexism to continue.” For example, the course teaches that:
* the Bible contains “quotes” that certain readers can interpret as sexist;
* the Declaration of Independence refers only to the rights of “all men” — not “men and women”;
* the Constitution’s reference to “We the people” only included white men, not women or black slaves;
* institutional discrimination is today widespread throughout all aspects of American society, including employment, education, housing, and the military;
* “individuals who have been segregated to inferior schools cannot find employment in businesses that hire according to specified credentials that inferior schools do not offer”;
* academic tests “may have inherent cultural bias”;
* textbooks promote discrimination because they “provide little or no information on minority groups, especially minority histories and the contributions that minorities have made to American culture”; and
* individuals can discriminate in both active and inactive ways, including: (a) “refusing to acknowledge one’s own privilege,” and (b) wrongly “considering prejudices and discrimination to be a thing of a past.”
Obama Uses the Baltimore Riots As an Opportunity to Call for More Federal Welfare Spending and to Condemn the Criminal-Justice System
In April 2015, as the city of Baltimore was being overrun by black riots in response to the death of a black suspect while he was in police custody, President Obama issued a brief and obligatory denunciation of the violence and then proceeded to devote the vast majority of his attention to the need for: (a) more federal spending on programs for poor minorities, and (b) reforms to a racially discriminatory criminal-justice system. Said Obama:
“We can’t just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. This is not new. It’s been going on for decades.
“And without making any excuses for criminal activities that take place in these communities, what we also know is that if you have impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty; they’ve got parents — often because of substance-abuse problems or incarceration or lack of education themselves — can’t do right by their kids; if it’s more likely that those kids end up in jail or dead, than they go to college. In communities where there are no fathers who can provide guidance to young men; communities where there’s no investment, and manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks — in those environments, if we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem. And we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.
“If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do — the rest of us — to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs. That’s hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force. And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that.
“Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform and around job training, and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses in.
“But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant — and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence…. I think we all understand that the politics of that are tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them just as a law and order issue, as opposed to a broader social issue.”
Obama Says Police Misconduct Is a Crisis with a Long History
Also in April 2015, while Baltimore was being overrun by black riots in response to the death of a black suspect while he was in police custody, President Obama said: “Since Ferguson, and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals — primarily African American, often poor — in ways that have raised troubling questions. And it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks. And so I think it’s pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations but, more importantly, moms and dads across the country, might start saying this is a crisis. What I’d say is this has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new…”
Obama Discusses Society’s, and the Criminal-Justice System’s, Discrimination Against Nonwhites
In a May 4, 2015 address at Lehman College in New York, President Obama said the following:
“You all know the numbers. By almost every measure, the life chances of the average young man of color is worse than his peers. Those opportunity gaps begin early — often at birth — and they compound over time, becoming harder and harder to bridge, making too many young men and women feel like no matter how hard they try, they may never achieve their dreams.
“And that sense of unfairness and of powerlessness, of people not hearing their voices, that’s helped fuel some of the protests that we’ve seen in places like Baltimore, and Ferguson, and right here in New York. The catalyst of those protests were the tragic deaths of young men and a feeling that law is not always applied evenly in this country. In too many places in this country, black boys and black men, Latino boys, Latino men, they experience being treated differently by law enforcement — in stops and in arrests, and in charges and incarcerations. The statistics are clear, up and down the criminal justice system; there’s no dispute….
“And that’s why, over a year ago, we launched something we call My Brother’s Keeper — an initiative to address those persistent opportunity gaps and ensure that all of our young people, but particularly young men of color, have a chance to go as far as their dreams will take them. It’s an idea that we pursued in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death because we wanted the message sent from the White House in a sustained way that his life mattered, that the lives of the young men who are here today matter, that we care about your future — not just sometimes, but all the time.”
Obama Speaks with David Letterman about Race and the Need to Spend More Money on Programs for Urban Blacks
In a May 4, 2015 appearance on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, Obama said:
* “[F]for far too long, for decades, you have a situation in which too many communities don’t have a relationship of trust with the police, and if you just have a handful of police who are not doing the right thing, that makes the job tougher for all the other police officers out there. It creates an environment in the community where they feel as if, rather than being protected and served, they’re the targets of arbitrary arrests or stops, and so our job has to be to rebuild trust.”
” “[T]his is not just a policing problem. What you have are pockets of poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, all across this country. And too often we ignore those pockets until something happens, and then we act surprised. We have the TV cameras come in. And essentially, we put the police officers in a really tough spot where we say to them, ‘just contain the problem.’ And so if young African-American men are being shot, but it’s not affecting us, we’ll just kind of paper that over. And part of the message that I’m trying to deliver is, look, you’ve got a [crisis] in these communities that’s been going on for years, where too many young people don’t have hope, they don’t see opportunity, there aren’t enough jobs. We’ve created an approach to drugs that leads to mass incarcerations. So, then you have no father figures in these communities. When those folks get out of prison, they can’t get a job because they’ve got a felony record. So, today part of what I did in New York was to announce some different initiatives around what we’re calling My Brother’s Keepers. How can we send a message to young people of color and minorities, particularly young men, saying ‘your lives do matter, we do care about you, but we’re going to invest in you before you have problems with the police, before there’s the kind of crisis we see in Baltimore. We’re going to make sure you’ve got early childhood education, we’re going to make sure that you have an opportunity to graduate, and go to college, you’ve got mentors, and apprenticeships,’ and that kind of sustained effort, I think, is what we have to see in this country, not just the episodic spasms of interest when something tragic happens.”
* [Racism is] a residual factor, but also a buildup of our history, and we can’t ignore that. Look, if you have slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination that built up over time, even if our society has made extraordinary strides, and I’m a testament to that…but, it’s built up over time. So, if you have 100 years in which certain communities can only live in certain places, or the men in those communities can only get menial labor, or they can’t start a particular trade because it’s closed to them, or if they’re trying to buy a house or a car, it’s more expensive. And over time that builds up. You know, that results in communities that — where the kids who are born there are not going to have as good of a shot. And we don’t have to sort of accuse everybody of racism today to acknowledge that that’s part of our past, and if we want to get past that, then we’ve got to make a little bit of an extra effort.”
Obama Makes Reference to America’s Racism and Injustice
In his weekly address to the nation in mid-May 2015, President Obama asserted that unfairness and a lack of opportunity was continuing to hinder the poorest of communities from reaching the American dream. He called for programs that would not only create opportunity, but also build trust between police and nonwhite communities. Said Obama: “What we’ve long understood, though, is that some communities have consistently had the odds stacked against them. That sense of unfairness and powerlessness has helped to fuel the kind of unrest that we’ve seen in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, and New York. It has many causes — from a basic lack of opportunity to groups feeling unfairly targeted by police – which means there’s no single solution. But there are many that could make a different and could help. And we have to do everything in our power to make this country’s promise real for everyone willing to work for it.”
Obama Administration Apologizes to the UN Human Rights Council, for America’s Racist and Overly Aggressive Police
In May 2015 the Obama State Department issued a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) citing a host of alleged human-rights violations by the U.S. According to Breitbart.com, the transgressions cited in the report focused heavily on race- and sex-based injustices. For example:
For the sake of balance, the State Department report cited progress that the U.S. had made in advancing a number of leftist agenda items:
Moreover, the Obama Administration boasted that it had already prosecuted over 400 law-enforcement officials and was committed to taking down those found guilty in the future. Citing several recent high-profile cases of officers killing black criminal suspects, one Obama Administration representative said: “The tragic deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Ohio and Walter Scott in South Carolina have renewed a long-standing and critical national debate about the even-handed administration of justice. These events challenge us to do better and to work harder for progress–through both dialogue and action.”
In response to the American mea culpas coupled with UNHRC criticisms of the U.S., the delegations of several countries mocked the United States. For instance, the Turkish delegation openly challenged America’s human right record; the Pakistani delegation expressed “serious concerns about the human rights situation in the U.S.”; the Iranian delegation called on the U.S. to “protect the rights of African-Americans against police brutality”; and the Russian delegation, voicing concern that “the human rights situation in the [United States] has seriously deteriorated,” offered seven recommendations for improving human rights in America.
Obama Cites American Racism after a White Gunman Kills 9 People in a Black Church
Shortly after a June 2015 incident where a 21-year-old white gunman had shot and killed nine members of a church prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama spoke to the nation, delivering remarks that invoked America’s historical racial injustices and the heated debate over gun control. Among his remarks were the following:
Obama Says Racism and Slavery Are “Still Part of Our DNA”
Discussing the horrific shooting of nine blacks at a Charleston, South Carolina church, Obama was interviewed by comedian Mark Maron on a June 2015 podcast, where he said: “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.” Obama also said that while the country had made much racial progress since he was born, the legacy of slavery “casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”
Obama’s Eulogy for the Pastor of the Black Church in South Carolina Who Was Killed by White Gunman
On June 26, 2015, President Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral of South Carolina state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor who was fatally shot by in his Emanuel AME Church along with eight other African Americans. Among Obama’s remarks were the following:
“The church is and always has been the center of African American life. A place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout ‘Hallelujah.’ Rst stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement.
“They have been and continue to community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harm’s way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter. That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means — our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people in inviolate. There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes.
“When there were laws banning all-black church gatherers, services happened here anyway in defiance of unjust laws. When there was a righteous movement to dismantle Jim Crow, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached from its pulpit, and marches began from its steps….
“For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate Flag stirred into many of our citizens. It’s true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge…. As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now. Removing the flag from this state’s capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races, striving to form a more perfect union. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.
“But I don’t think God wants us to stop there. For too long, we’ve been blind to be way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.
“Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.
“Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and lead us to make sure that that system’s not infected with bias. That we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. Maybe we now realize the way a racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.
“So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote, by recognizing our common humanity, by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born …”
Obama Decries America’s Racist Justice System
In a July 14, 2015 speech to the NAACP’s 106th annual conference in Philadelphia, Obama decried the “explosion” in America’s prison population in recent years, and he called for ending a system that had incarcerated a disproportionate share of black and Latino men for low-level offenses: “In far too many cases, the punishment simply does not fit the crime. In too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men, experience being treated differently under the law…. What is that doing to our communities? What’s that doing to [their] children? Our nation’s being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers.”
Obama Invites Muslim Boy Who Made Clock That Looked Like Bomb, to the White House
Ahmed Mohamed — a 14-year-old Muslim freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas — was suspended from his school on September 14, 2015 for bringing to school a homemade clock that resembled a bomb. When school officials accused the boy of making a fake bomb, he was also temporarily detained and handcuffed by police officers. Within two days, he had received an invitation to the White House from President Obama, as well as support from Hillary Clinton and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama said on Twitter. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Obama’s staff invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night festivities on October 19. “This episode is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Supporting the “Black Lives Matter” Movement
On September 16, 2015, BLM activists Brittney Packnett, DeRay McKesson, Johnetta Elzie, Phillip Agnew, and Jamye Wooten met at the White House with President Obama as well as senior advisor Valerie Jarrett and other administration officials. For Packnett, it was her seventh visit to the Obama White House. After the visit, Packnett told reporters that the president personally supported the BLM movement. “He offered us a lot of encouragement with his background as a community organizer, and told us that even incremental changes were progress,” she stated. “He didn’t want us to get discouraged. He said, ‘Keep speaking truth to power.’”
Releasing Thousands of Prisoners
On October 7, 2015, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was “preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons starting at the end of this month as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and roll back the harsh penalties given to nonviolent drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s, according to federal law enforcement officials.” “The release will be one of the largest discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history,” said the Times, describing it as an “effort to ease the mass incarcerations that followed decades of tough sentencing for drug offenses — like dealing crack cocaine — which have taken a particularly harsh toll on minority communities.”
Said the Washington Post: “The early release follows action by the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal crimes — that reduced the potential punishment for future drug offenders last year and then made that change retroactive. The commission’s action is separate from an effort by President Obama to grant clemency to certain nonviolent drug offenders, an initiative that has resulted in the early release of 89 inmates. The panel estimated that its change in sentencing guidelines eventually could result in 46,000 of the nation’s approximately 100,000 drug offenders in federal prison qualifying for early release. The 6,000 figure, which has not been reported previously, is the first tranche in that process.”
Declaring That Christopher Columbus’s Arrival in the New World Brought Much “Disease, Devastation, and Violence” to the Indegenous Peoples
On Columbus Day 2015, President Obama delivered a Proclamation portraying Columbus’s arrival in the New World as something that unleashed an enormous amount of suffering upon the native populations of North and Central America. While acknowledging that Columbus possessed an “insatiable thirst for exploration that continues to drive us as a people” — something that could be interpreted as an oblique allusion to what Obama views as Americans’ insatiable (and pathological) desire for wealth and power — the president said: “Though these early travels expanded the realm of European exploration, to many they also marked a time that forever changed the world for the indigenous peoples of North America. Previously unseen disease, devastation, and violence were introduced to their lives — and as we pay tribute to the ways in which Columbus pursued ambitious goals — we also recognize the suffering inflicted upon Native Americans and we recommit to strengthening tribal sovereignty and maintaining our strong ties.”
Similarly, in his 2014 Columbus Day Proclamation, Obama had referenced the “history [of] Native Americans” as “one marred with long and shameful chapters of violence, disease, and deprivation.”
In his 2013 Proclamation, Obama had made reference to the ambition for wealth and empire that inspired Columbus’s exploration: “He [Columbus] hoped to discover a new route to the east — opening trade routes for precious spices and paving the way for his patrons, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, to expand their empire. Instead, more than two months later, his crew spotted the Bahamas, and our world was changed forever.”
Obama Says That the Concerns of “Black Lives Matter” Are “Legitimate”
During a White House panel on law-enforcement and criminal justice, President Obama made the following remarks:
Making It Illegal for Landlords to Refuse to Rent to Criminals
In April 2016, President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that a landlord’s refusal to rent a propertry to someone with a criminal record could constitute racial discrimination, given that African Americans are overrepresented among those who have been convicted of crimes. “The Fair Housing Act prohibits both intentional housing discrimination and housing practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect because of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics,” said HUD’s newly-released guidelines. “Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics. While the Act does not prohibit housing providers from appropriately considering criminal history information when making housing decisions, arbitrary and overbroad criminal history-related bans are likely to lack a legally sufficient justification.”
“The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” HUD Secretary Julian Castro said at a meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “When someone has been convicted of a crime and has paid their debt to society, then they ought to have an effective second chance at life. The ability to find housing is an indispensable second change in life.”
HUD said that in order for landlords to be permitted to bar people with criminal records from living in a facility, they would have to prove that such a policy was necessary for protecting the safety of other tenants.
Poll: Obama Has Severely Damaged Race Relations
In April 2016, Investor’s Business Daily reported the following:
A new national survey finds more than 1 in 3 Americans worry a “great deal” about the state of race relations in America. Anxiety has reached new highs under President Obama. That’s no coincidence. He’s rubbed racial sores raw.
Barack Obama was supposed to be a biracial leader who could heal the nation’s racial wounds and bring the country together. But since he took office, national tensions over race have gotten worse than ever, with the share of Americans who worry a lot about race relations soaring to 35% from a bottom of 13% just after Obama took office, according to a shocking new Gallup poll.
In fact, racial strife is the highest it’s been in the poll’s 15-year history.
“The rising concern about race relations as the nation’s first black president completes his last year in office is a retreat from the optimism that swept the country in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s first election win in 2008,” the pollster said. “A Gallup poll one night after Obama won found that 7 in 10 Americans believed race relations would improve because of his victory.”
Of course, the opposite occurred. Race relations have sunk, and Obama bears a large share of the blame.
In virtually every policy and crisis, he has divided Americans by race, pitting groups against each other and even egging on racial violence. He has left race attitudes in tatters by relentlessly focusing on the problems of race in America.
Obama’s open praise of Black Lives Matter — a militant cop-hating group whose leaders he invited to the White House for more than one meeting — is just one of many examples in which the president deliberately chose to fan the flames of racial anger. Black Lives Matter has become the most divisive and destructive bully on the block, now terrifying even schools.
He also sought the counsel of racial opportunist Rev. Al Sharpton. And in case after case of police shootings, he took the side of violent thugs over law enforcement. Obama even lionized a young St. Louis black man who robbed a store and then beat and tried to disarm a cop who had no choice but to fire in self defense.
Obama has viewed virtually every event and issue through a racial lens, acting more like a racial activist than a chief executive.
Obama has branded the entire criminal justice system racist — cops, courts, municipal judges, even jurors. He extends the same false accusation to landlords and employers, along with home lenders, car lenders, payday lenders, credit reporting agencies, debt collection agencies and on and on.
To hear Obama, even the most liberal among us are racist. He claims teachers and principals, who have eagerly embraced multiculturalism to a fault, suddenly are conspiring to shove misbehaving black students into a “school-to-prison pipeline,” where they have no choice but to lead a life of crime, thanks to suspensions and expulsions….
Our own polling picked up on this trend back in 2014, when an IBD/TIPP survey found that a stunning 46% of Americans thought race relations worsened under the man who was supposed to usher in a racially harmonious era, while only 18% said they had gotten better.
Even the left laments that Obama’s “vision of post-racial America looks even further away.”
Only, he never really had such a vision. His racist preacher gave that away long ago.
Obama poisoned race relations to help sell his “social justice” nostrums, unforgivably doing damage to trust in future presidential candidates of color.
Obama Pardons 42 More Prisoners, Bringing Total to 348
On June 5, 2016, the Daily Mail reported:
President Barack Obama shortened the sentences Friday of 42 people serving time for drug-related offenses, continuing a push for clemency that has ramped up in the final year of his administration. Roughly half of the 42 receiving commutations Friday were serving life sentences. Most are nonviolent offenders, although a few were also charged with firearms violations. The White House said many of them would have already finished their sentences if they had been sentenced under current, less onerous sentencing guidelines. The latest group of commutations brings to 348 the total number of inmates whose sentences Obama has commuted — more than the past seven presidents combined, the White House said. The pace of commutations and the rarer use of pardons are expected to increase as the end of Obama’s presidency nears.
Mandatory Bias Training for All DOJ Employees
In June 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that all Department of Justiuce employees (than 33,000 federal agents and prosecutors) would thenceforth br required to undergo mandatory bias training to eliminate “impact biases” in their law enforcement judgment. “Implicit bias also presents unique challenges to effective law enforcement, because it can alter where investigators and prosecutors look for evidence and how they analyze it without their awareness or ability to compensate,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in a memo.
Obama’s Claim That Police Racism Is Responsible for Two Recent Black Deaths, Is Followed by a Mass Shooting of Policemen in Dallas
On July 6, 2016, Obama said the following with regard to the recent shootings of two African American men by white police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana:
The following day, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists held anti-police-brutality demonstrations in numerous cities across the United States, to protest the aforementioned police shootings. In Dallas, Texas, demonstrators shouted “Enough is enough!” while they held signs bearing slogans like: “If all lives matter, why are black ones taken so easily?” Then, suddenly, at just before 9 pm, a black gunman opened fire on the law-enforcement officers who were on duty at that rally (in Dallas). Five officers were killed, and six additional police were wounded.
During a subsequent standoff with police, the gunman made it clear that he wanted to kill white people, especially police officers, and he emphatically declared his solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Obama Compares “Black Lives Matter” to Past Movements for Abolition, Civil Rights, Workers’ Rights, Environmentalism, and Peace
On July 10, 2016, Obama compared BLM to other “contentious” movements that had occurred throughout American history: “The abolition movement was contentious. The effort for women to get the right to vote was contentious and messy. There were times when activists might have engaged in rhetoric that was overheated, and occasionally counterproductive, but the point was to raise issues so that we as a society could grapple with them. The same was true with the Civil Rights movement and the Union movement and the environmental movement and the anti-war movement during Vietnam. And I think what you’re seeing now is part of that long standing tradition.”
Moreover, Obama said that anyone who engaged in violence against police officers was doing “a disservice to the cause,” adding: “Maintaining a truthful and serious and respectful tone is going to help mobilize American society to bring about real change.”
In addition, Obama said: “I would hope that police organizations are also respectful of the frustrations that people in these communities feel and not just dismiss these protests and these complaints as political correctness. It is in the interest of police officers that their communities trust them.”
Obama’s Remarks at Memorial Service for Dallas Police
On July 12, 2016, Obama delivered a eulogy at a memorial service for the five police officers who had been shot and killed in Dallas five days earlier by a black supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. Among his remarks were the following:
On July 13, 2016 — the day after Obama delivered his eulogy at the police memorial service in Dallas — the president hosted three Black Lives Matter leaders at a lengthy White House meeting. Another special guest at the meeting was Obama’s chief adviser on racial matters, Al Sharpton.
Obama Commutes the Sentences of 214 More Prisoners
On August 3, 2016, President Obama commuted the sentences of 214 more federal inmates, the largest number of commutations granted by a U.S. president in a single day since 1900. Said a USA Today report: “With 562 total commutations during his presidency — most of which have come in the past year —Obama has now used his constitutional clemency power to shorten the sentences of more federal inmates than any president since Calvin Coolidge. The early release of the 214 prisoners, mostly low-level drug offenders, is part of Obama’s effort to correct what he views as unreasonably long mandatory minimum sentences. Some date back decades, including 71-year-old Richard L. Reser of Sedgwick, Kan., who was given a 40-year sentence for dealing methamphatamine and firearm possession in 1989…. ‘The more we understand the human stories behind this problem, the sooner we can start making real changes that keep our streets safe, break the cycle of incarceration in this country, and save taxpayers like you money,’ Obama said in a Facebook post.”
In reaction to Obama’s commutation of sentences, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald wrote:
“The vast majority of prisoners [who were granted clemency] exemplify the so-called nonviolent-drug-offender category, a primary focus of ‘criminal-justice reform’ advocates. But a search of the commutation database comes up with 156 hits for ‘firearms’ (some of those hits are multiple counts for the same offender). Wilson Henderson, of Hollywood, Fla., for example, was convicted of ‘use of a firearm during a drug trafficking crime,’ according to the Justice Department press release. Kenneth Evans, of Fort Worth, Texas, was convicted of ‘use and carry firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime and aiding and abetting.’ Mark Anthony Clark, of Rockford, Ill., was convicted of ‘possession of a firearm by a felon/fugitive from justice and aiding and abetting,’ as well as of conspiracy to distribute 100 grams of meth.
“Many of the commuttees possessed stolen firearms or firearms with their serial numbers obliterated. Some were in violation of National Firearms Registration, which can mean possession of a federally prohibited weapon, such as a machine gun, silencer, or sawed-off shotgun. We don’t know how many guns the offenders actually had; a commuttee during a previous batch of commutations had 40.
“Nor does the Justice Department’s press release disclose the actual incidence of firearm possession by these federal convicts. Gun possession can be used to increase a federal sentence under the federal sentencing guidelines without a prosecutor’s actually bringing a formal charge. A gun charge can also be plea-bargained away.
“Many advocates of criminal-justice reform believe in maximum gun control, yet the White House press releases on the president’s commutations have been silent on the widespread incidence of illegal gun possession. It would seem that once someone becomes a member of the oppressed prisoner class, the gun issue becomes irrelevant.
“The Justice Department press release also does not reveal the offenders’ criminal history, history of violence, ties to drug cartels, or the sentencing judge’s recommendation. Written requests to the president from federal attorneys to make the process more transparent have gone unanswered….
“We have been told endlessly by President Obama and the rest of the justice-reform movement that prisons are chock-full of harmless sad sacks whose only offense is getting caught with a little weed. It should have been easy, therefore, to come up with thousands of pacific targets for commutation or pardon. That so many recipients of Obama’s clemency were armed and dangerous shows how distorted the dominant narrative about ‘mass incarceration’ is.
“(Similarly, race activists endlessly charged the New York Police Department with stopping and questioning hundreds of thousands of innocent black males. It should have equally been easy, therefore, to line up hundreds of such innocent victims for the trilogy of class-action lawsuits against the NYPD’s stop-question-and-frisk practices. But the civil-rights attorneys in the suits could rustle up only a handful of named plaintiffs, most of whom had lengthy and serious criminal histories. One of the nine named plaintiffs in Ligon v. New York, one of the three class actions, was federally indicted last December for stomping a 16-year-old gang rival to death in the Bronx.)”
Obama Exhorts Black Voters to Vote for Democrats, in Order to Support “My Legacy”
At a September 17, 2016 Congressional Black Caucus gala, President Obama said that a vote for Hillary Clinton in the November election would help to continue his legacy. “My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot,” he said. “I will consider it a personal insult — an insult to my legacy — if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote,” Obama said to thunderous applause.
Obama References Slavery and Jim Crow
In an ABC interview that aired on September 23, 2016, President Obama mocked Donald Trump’s recent claim that blacks in America were in their worst shape ever by saying: “I think even most 8-year-olds [will] tell you — that whole slavery thing wasn’t very good for black people. Jim Crow wasn’t very good for black people.”
Obama Proposes That Arabs & Muslims from the Middle East Be Classified As a Separate “Race,” Rather Than As “White”
In October 2016, the Obama White House announced a proposal that would add a new racial category to cover people from the Middle East and North Africa in a move the USA Today called “the biggest realignment of federal racial definitions in decades.” Helen Samhan of the Arab American Institute praised the president’s proposal as a “good” and “positive step.” “What it does is it helps these communities feel less invisible,” Samhan said.
The new designation, shortened to “MENA” for “Middle East/North African,” would encompass those living in the region between Morocco and Iran and would include Syrians and religious minorities like Coptic Christians and Israeli Jews, according to the report.
In Pamela Geller‘s assessment, Obama was engaged in “Islamopandering” — i.e., “securing for Muslims the perks that are available for racial minorities.”
USA Today listed some of those special perks:
On December 8, 2016, CNN aired an interview that Obama had done with host Fareed Zakaria. In one particular segment, Zakaria commented: “The president doesn’t see racism in mainstream opposition to him but he does see it on the fringes.” At that point, Obama was shown saying: “There are people who dislike me because they think I’m a liberal. I think there is a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in northern states are very different from whites in southern states. So are there folks who whose primary concern about me has been that I seem foreign, the other? Are those that champion the birther movement feeding off of bias? Absolutely.”
Obama Says “We Have By No Means Overcome the Legacies of Slavery and Jim Crow and Colonialism and Racism”
During a December 12, 2016 television appearance on Comedy Centra, Obama discussed the issue of racism in America. Among his remarks were the following:
* “You know, my general theory is that, if I was clear in my own mind about who I was, comfortable in my own skin, and had clarity about the way in which race continues to be this powerful factor in so many elements of our lives. But that it is not the only factor in so many aspects of our lives, that we have by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism, but that the progress we’ve made has been real and extraordinary, if I’m communicating my genuine belief that those who are not subject to racism can sometimes have blind spots or lack of appreciation of what it feels to be on the receiving end of that, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not open to learning and caring about equality and justice and that I can win them over because there is goodness in the majority of people…. There have been times where I’ve said, ‘You know, you might not have taken into account the ongoing legacy of racism in why we have so many black men incarcerated. And since I know that you believe in the Constitution and believe in justice and believe in liberty, how about if we try this?’… [T]he challenge we face today, when it comes to race, is rarely the overt Klansman-style racism and typically has more to do with the fact that, you know, people got other stuff they want to talk about and it’s sort of uncomfortable.”
Obama Talks At Length About Race and Racism in AmericaIn December 2016, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates published his second interview with President Barack Obama from his series “My President Was Black.” In this installment, Obama made one of his strongest arguments yet for racial reparations in America. Among Obama’s remarks were the following:
* “[A]s a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.”* “Step No. 2, and this is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you’ve got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class. But if, in its application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices. The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South. So reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.”
* “If you’ve got those two things right—if those two things are happening—then a third leg of the stool is, how do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, “Here’s what it takes to succeed. Here’s the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here’s how we support each other. Here’s how we look out for each other.” And it is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you’ve got a vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community’s capabilities to then move forward.”
* “Now, does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we’ve had before when you talk about something like reparations. Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right….”
* “I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader’s ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow. Now, we can debate the justness of that. But I feel pretty confident in that assessment politically. And, you know, I think that part of my optimism comes from the belief that we as a people could actually, regardless of all the disadvantage of the past, regardless of the fact that a lot of other folks got a head start in the race, if we were able to make the race fair right now, and … we were able to make sure that it stayed fair for a long time and that children going forward were not encumbered by some of that same bias of the past, I think it would not take long at all, because we are a talented, resourceful people. Just play this out as a thought experiment: Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America—but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America—is getting a really good education. And they’re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you’re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. So now they’re all graduating. And let’s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I’ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his résumé in, he’s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his résumé in.”
* “Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community? In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. But I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn’t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We’d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you’ve got a whole generation that’s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.” * “And my point has always been: We’re so far from that. Why are we even having the abstract conversation when we’ve got a big fight on our hands just to get strong, universal antipoverty programs and social programs in place, and we’re still fighting to make sure that basic antidiscrimination laws are enforced, not just at the federal level, by the way, but throughout government and throughout the private sector?…”* “[I]t’s a generational project just to get America to live up fully to its ideals and to have the kind of society where everybody has a shot, and every kid is getting a good education, and people are getting living wages, and they have decent retirement. And if we got there and we looked up and we said, “You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it’s not like it was 20 years ago,” then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that’s a high-class problem to have. And to me the question right now is: How do I close that first three-quarters of the achievement gap, education gap, wealth gap? What gives me the best chance to do that? And I’m pretty darn sure that if America is a just society and treating people well right now, irrespective of past wrongs, that I’m going to close a big chunk of that gap. I’ve seen it.”* “This is what I always take away from something like My Brother’s Keeper—it’s almost an analogy. I look at some of the kids that I interact with, and they were born with so many disadvantages. And you could start off in your first interaction with them saying, ‘Unless they get a lot of compensatory help, they’re not going to be able to compete; they’re just so far behind, and they’re wounded and they’re hurt.’ Think about that young man we were talking to: His mother was a drug addict, and his dad is in prison, and he has no sense of direction. And there’s no doubt that the more you did for him, probably the better he would do, but what’s always striking to me is he just got a little bit. He just had a few adults paying attention and telling him he was worth something while he’s in juvee, he’s just got somebody who is willing to pay his community-college fees, and suddenly you’ve got this young man sitting there who is so self-aware …”* “[H]aving as many African American men as we’ve had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they’re 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost. But I know that those gaps can be closed.”
Obama Grants Clemency to Former FALN TerroristOn January 17, 2017, the New York Post reported:
“An imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorist who refused to renounce violence to get clemency in 1999, was among those whose sentence was commuted Tuesday by President Obama. Oscar Lopez-Rivera helped establish the violent Puerto Rican independence group FALN (Fuerza Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, Spanish for Armed Forces of National Liberation). The group is best known for bombing Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan in 1975, an attack that killed four, as well as a 1982 strike on NYPD headquarters.
“López Rivera was arrested in May 1981 and convicted of seditious conspiracy, carrying firearms during the commission of violent crimes and transporting explosives with the intent to kill people. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison. He will now be released on May 17 [2017].
“‘Oscar Lopez is a terrorist who participated in the killing of New Yorkers, and someone who has refused to renounce violence,’ said Councilman Joe Borelli (R-SI). ‘Commuting his sentence proves that Obama and most liberals are out of touch with reality and willing to sacrifice all norms in the name of progressivism.’
“In 1999, President Bill Clinton offered Lopez-Rivera clemency, but he refused because it would have required him to renounce terrorism.”
Obama Commutes the Sentences of 330 More Prisoners, Bringing His Total to 1,715On January 19, 2017, Pix11.com reported: “In his last major act as president, Barack Obama is cutting short the sentences of 330 federal inmates convicted of drug crimes. The move brings Obama’s bid to correct what he’s called a systematic injustice to a climactic close. Obama has now commuted the sentences of 1,715 people, more than any other president in U.S. history. During his presidency Obama freed 568 inmates serving life sentences. The final batch of commutations is the most any U.S. president has issued in a single day. It’s the culmination of a second-term effort to remedy consequences of decades of onerous sentencing requirements that Obama’s said put tens of thousands of drug offenders behind bars for too long.”
To view a list of each of the 330 inmates whose sentences were commuted (and a detailed list of their crimes), click here.
The Deadly Effects of Obama’s War Against the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”
In March 2018, columnist and author Ann Coulter wrote an exceptionally important piece about the deadly effects that Obama’s “school-to-prison pipeline” mentality brought to a Florida school where a young man had recently shot and killed 17 students. Wrote Coulter:
President Obama did a lot of bad things, but pound for pound, one of the worst was the January 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter sent jointly by his Education and Justice Departments to all public schools threatening lawsuits over racial discrimination in student discipline. The letter came after years of his administration browbeating schools for their failure to discipline every race of student at the same rate.As the Huffington Post put it: “American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds.” The evidence? “Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report.”
According to theory, there’s NO WAY blacks and Hispanics are doing things that require more school discipline than whites or Asians. So if more black students are expelled than Asians, well, gentlemen, we have our proof of racism. To comply, schools would have to stop suspending black kids for breaking a teacher’s jaw, but suspend Asians for dropping an eraser. …The “school-to-prison pipeline” argument for racial quotas in discipline was hatched in education schools and black studies departments. What I want to know is: How did they test the idea?To validate the theory that recording students’ criminal behavior produces students with criminal records, we divided students into two groups. Group A we continued to suspend when they acted up; Group B we would not suspend no matter what — even when they engaged in their little mischief, like cracking heads with crowbars, dropping teachers off buildings, using a switchblade to cut other students’ eyes out.RESULT: At the end of the year, Group B had better records. …
[T]he Obama administration said: Wow! That’s amazing. Do you think other schools could replicate those results?
One of the administration’s models was Broward County, Florida. Which is kind of important, now that we know that it was Broward’s official policy to make it impossible to arrest students like Nikolas Cruz, thus allowing him to amass a cache of firearms, walk into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murder 17 people.The “school-to-prison pipeline” nonsense may not be the explanation for every school shooting, but it is absolutely the explanation for THIS school shooting. No matter what Cruz did, no matter how many times his crimes were reported to the sheriff or school officials, there was no way a lad with a name like “Nikolas Cruz” was ever going to leave school with a record.
Broward County’s innovative idea of eliminating school discipline captivated Obama’s Department of Education. It was expressly cited by the department’s Civil Rights Division with the notation: “New model for other jurisdictions?”
Last October — nearly a year into the Trump administration — Broward Schools Superintendent Robert W. Runcie humbly noted that the district was receiving “invitations from around the country, including from The White House and Federal Office of Civil Rights, to share details about the historic reforms” on school discipline.
Either: Liberals truly believe that all races commit crimes at exactly the same level, frequency and intensity; OR they are willing to have people die for their political agenda.
Conservatives didn’t pick this school shooting as the test case for gun control. It was liberals who were going to ride the Parkland shooting all the way to the midterms. They thought they had a beautiful story about the evil NRA.
Not the mass shooting in Orlando — because of the obvious immigration angle. Not San Bernardino — for the same reason. Not Las Vegas — probably for the same reason, but we’ll never know because law enforcement has issued only lies and nonsense about that shooting.
The media did all the hard work of making sure Parkland was the only topic on anyone’s mind, with everyone demanding that we “do something!”
And then we got the facts. Cruz’s criminal acts were intentionally ignored by law enforcement on account of Broward’s much-celebrated “school-to-prison pipeline” reforms.
In March 2018 as well, columnist Paul Sperry wrote the following devastating piece about this same theme:
Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check, and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient.
Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RCI. “He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement.”
Disclosures about the strategy add a central new element to the Parkland shooting story: It’s not just one of official failings at many levels and of America’s deep divide over guns, but also one of deliberate federal policy gone awry.
In 2013, the year before Cruz entered high school, the Broward County school system rewrote its discipline policy to make it much more difficult for administrators to suspend or expel problem students, or for campus police to arrest them for misdemeanors– including some of the crimes Cruz allegedly committed in the years and months leading up to the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at his Fort Lauderdale-area school.
The new policy resulted from an Obama administration effort begun in 2011 to keep students in school and improve racial outcomes (timeline here), and came against a backdrop of other efforts to rein in perceived excesses in “zero tolerance” discipline policies, including in Florida.
Broward school Superintendent Robert W. Runcie – a Chicagoan and Harvard graduate with close ties to President Obama and his Education Department – signed an agreement with the county sheriff and other local jurisdictions to trade cops for counseling. Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses, and other “self-esteem building” exercises.
Asserting that minority students, in particular, were treated unfairly by traditional approaches to school discipline, Runcie’s goal was to slash arrests and ensure that students, no matter how delinquent, graduated without criminal records.
The achievement gap “becomes intensified in the school-to-prison pipeline, where black males are disproportionately represented,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to continue to arrest our kids,” he added. “Once you have an arrest record, it becomes difficult to get scholarships, get a job, or go into the military.”
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel backed Runcie’s plan to diminish the authority of police in responding to campus crime. A November 2013 video shows him signing the district’s 16-page “collaborative agreement on school discipline,” which lists more than a dozen misdemeanors that can no longer be reported to police, along with five steps police must “exhaust” before even considering placing a student under arrest.
In just a few years, ethnically diverse Broward went from leading the state of Florida in student arrests to boasting one of its lowest school-related incarceration rates. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions also plummeted.
Runcie had been working closely with Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the reforms ever since landing the Broward job in 2011, using as a reference the name of the Cabinet secretary, his former boss in the Chicago school system.
Applications for federal grants reveal that Runcie’s plan factored into approval of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding from Duncan’s department.
In January 2014, his department issued new discipline guidelines strongly recommending that the nation’s schools use law enforcement measures and out-of-school suspensions as a last resort. Announced jointly by Duncan and then-Attorney General Eric Holder, the new procedures came as more than friendly guidance from Uncle Sam – they also came with threats of federal investigations and defunding for districts that refused to fully comply.
In 2015, the White House spotlighted Runcie’s leading role in the effort during a summit called “Rethink School Discipline.” Broward, the nation’s sixth largest school district, is one of 53 major districts across the country to adopt the federal guidelines, which remain in effect today due to administrative rules delaying a plan by the Trump administration to withdraw them.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ office did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. DeVos has called for congressional hearings on school shootings. “We have got to have an honest conversation,” she said.
“Broward County adopted a lenient disciplinary policy similar to those adopted by many other districts under pressure from the Obama administration to reduce racial ‘disparities’ in suspensions and expulsions,” said Peter Kirsanow, a black conservative on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. “In many of these districts, the drive to ‘get our numbers right’ has produced disastrous results, with startling increases in both the number and severity of disciplinary offenses, including assaults and beatings of teachers and students.”
For example, in St. Paul, Minn., a high school science teacher was “beaten and choked out” by a 16-year-old student, who allegedly came up behind him, called him a “f–king white cracker,” and put him in a stranglehold, before bashing his head into a concrete wall and pavement. The student, Fon’Tae O’Bannon, got 90 days of electronic home monitoring and anger management counseling for the December 2015 attack.
The instructor, John Ekblad, who has experienced short-term memory loss and hearing problems, blames the Obama-era discipline policies for emboldening criminal behavior, adding that school violence “is still rising out of control.”
In Oklahoma City, which softened student punishments in response to a federal race-bias complaint, “students are yelling, cursing, hitting and screaming at teachers, and nothing is being done,” an Oklahoma City public school teacher said. “These students know there is nothing a teacher can do.”
In Buffalo, New York, a teacher who got kicked in the head by a student said: “We have fights here almost every day. The kids walk around and say, ‘We can’t get suspended – we don’t care what you say.’ ”
Kirsanow said that in just the first year after the Obama administration issued its anti-discipline edict, public schools failed to expel more than 30,000 students who physically attacked teachers or staff across the country. Previously, “if you hit a teach, you’re gone,” he said, but that is no longer the case.
No district has taken this new approach further than Broward County. The core of the approach is a program called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education), which substitutes counseling for criminal detention for students who break the law. According to the district website, the program is “designed to address the unique needs of students who have committed a behavioral infraction that would normally lead to a juvenile delinquency arrest and, therefore, entry into the juvenile justice system.”
The expressed goal of PROMISE is to bring about “reductions in external suspension, expulsions and arrests.” Delinquents who are diverted to the program are essentially absolved of responsibility for their actions. “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem,” the website states.
Additional literature reveals that students referred to PROMISE for in-school misdemeanors – including assault, theft, vandalism, underage drinking and drug use – receive a controversial alternative punishment known as restorative justice.
“Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done,” the district explains. Indeed, it isn’t really punishment at all. It’s more like therapy. Delinquents gather in “healing circles” with counselors, and sometimes even the victims of their crime, and talk about their feelings and “root causes” of their anger.
Students who participate in the sessions and respond appropriately to difficult situations are rewarded by counselors with prizes called “choice rewards,” which they select in advance. Parents are asked to chip in money to help pay for the rewards.
Listed among the district’s “restorative justice partners” is the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Deputies and local police officers, as well as court officials, routinely attend meetings with PROMISE leaders, where they receive training in such emotional support programs.
The program also includes a separate juvenile “system of care,” rather than the regular court system, where delinquents and parents are counseled about the consequences of getting caught up in the criminal system.
Broward’s launch of the new initiative synced up with a discipline policy shift advocated by the Justice Department. “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” asserted Holder in January 2014.
At a press conference in 2015, Duncan described his “good friend” Runcie as courageous for implementing a “new system” to “keep kids in classrooms and out of courtrooms.” “It’s difficult work,” the then-education secretary said, “challenging centuries of institutionalized racism and class inequality.”
Duncan noted that Runcie had partnered with a psychology professor, Phillip Atiba Goff, who has been working with both Broward educators and police officers to become more aware of their “implicit biases” toward minority children.
“Implicit bias exists in all of us,” Runcie said in late 2016, “and we have to be courageous enough to confront it if we are going to meet our goals.” District records reveal Runcie has been putting school leaders and school support personnel through intensive training in “implicit bias, black male success strategies [and] Courageous Conservations about Race.”
Asked to explain the Broward discipline policies, Tracy Clark, the district’s chief public information officer, issued this statement: “There are specific guidelines and School Board policies regarding the non-violent, misdemeanor types of infractions that are eligible for the PROMISE program. Please note that weapons infractions are not eligible for the PROMISE program. Through the PROMISE program, students receive behavioral supports, counseling and mentoring in an environment focused on helping them make better choices.”
However, a 210-page district report on “Eliminating the School to Prison Pipeline,” lists “assault/threat” and “fighting,” as well as “vandalism,” among “infractions aligned with participation in the PROMISE program,” and it states that the recommended consequences for such misdemeanors are a “student essay,” “counseling” and “restorative justice.”
And the district’s legally written discipline policy also lists “assault without the use of a weapon” and “battery without serious bodily injury,” as well as “disorderly conduct,” as misdemeanors that “should not be reported to Law Enforcement Agencies or Broward District Schools Police.” This document also recommends “counseling” and “restorative justice.”
Nikolas Cruz’s rampage suggests the limits of this approach.
A repeat offender, Cruz benefited from the lax discipline policy, if not the counseling. Although he was disciplined for a string of offenses — including assault, threatening teachers and carrying bullets in his backpack — he was never taken into custody or even expelled. Instead, school authorities referred him to mandatory counseling or transferred him to alternative schools.
By avoiding a criminal record, Cruz passed a federal background check in February 2017 before purchasing the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle investigators say was used in the mass shooting. Just one month earlier, he was disciplined with a one-day internal suspension for an “assault” at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and evaluated as a potential “threat.” It was his second offense for fighting in less than four months, but campus police did not make an arrest in either case — as they typically did for repeat offenders under the district’s prior zero-tolerance policies, a review of the official “discipline matrix” used last decade reveals.
The upshot was that the lack of an arrest record made it difficult for police to confirm that Cruz was a proven threat and to intervene when they received call-in tips and complaints from neighbors, classmates and relatives about his stockpiling of weapons and desire to kill people, law enforcement officials say.
A little more than a month before the Feb. 14 shooting, the FBI hotline received a tip about Cruz being a potential school gunman, but it failed to take action. If he had been previously arrested and booked for the on-campus misdemeanors, the FBI intake specialist handling the call would have seen his violent history in the federal National Crime Information Center database, which includes all state arrests, convictions, warrants and alerts.
“Once the agent, or any officer, entered his name in the NCIC system, his history would have been viewed,” Biasello said.
Though he said the call was “specific and urgent” enough to pass the information on to the bureau’s Miami field office, “the message might have been taken more seriously and escalated up the chain of command if the search turned up a police record.”
Another tip from last September, warning the FBI that a “Nikolas Cruz” had boasted on YouTube he was “going to be a professional school shooter,” also fell through the cracks due to a paucity of information in the system. A spokesman for the Miami division explained that “the FBI conducted database reviews [and] checks but was unable to further identify the person who actually made the comment.”
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office received at least 45 calls related to Cruz and his brother dating back to 2008 – including a February 2016 call from a neighbor warning he made a threat on Instagram to “shoot up” the high school, and another last November advising he was collecting guns and knives and appeared to be “a school shooter in the making.” Though deputies visited Cruz at his home, they did not try to recover his weapons, despite requests from relatives who feared he planned to use them on his classmates.
Their inaction reflects the Broward department’s embrace of the school district’s approach to student crime. Even in response to a major crime scene, Sheriff Israel agreed to defer to school officials when “feasible” and employ “the least punitive means of discipline” against the perpetrators.
The Broward school board also revised agreements between the district and the school resource officers assigned by the sheriff to ensure that they no longer intervene in misdemeanor incidents to cut down on the number of “arrests for school-based behavior.” (The board also signed an agreement with Fort Lauderdale police to reduce officer involvement in such campus offenses.)
At the 2013 signing ceremony on school discipline, Sheriff Israel lauded the new goals. He vowed to “demolish” the pipeline allegedly funneling students to jail by changing the “culture” of school-related law enforcement.
“We’ve got to demolish this cycle from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse,” he said, echoing Runcie, who stood behind him. “Our kids need to be in schools, not jails.”
Added Israel: “At the Broward Sheriff’s Office, we’re changing. We’re changing the culture, and what we’re doing is we are gonna make obsolete the term ‘zero tolerance.’”
Yet even though Broward’s crusade has resulted in a more than 63 percent reduction in the annual rate of overall student arrests, Runcie has said he is not satisfied because the percentage of arrests of black students continues to be disproportionately high compared with whites.
So the superintendent has hired Goff, the racial bias expert, to conduct a study to get to the “root cause” of why arrests of blacks are still so stubbornly high.
Funded with an $800,000 grant, Goff’s researchers from the Center for Policing Equity in New York have been actively surveying district administrators and teachers, as well as student resource officers, to gauge their “implicit biases” in dealing with minority students who behave badly. That effort continues, a spokesman for Goff told RealClearInvestigations this week.
3) DIVIDING AMERICANS BY GENDER
Obama Falsely Claims That Women Are Underpaid
Obama Speaks at White House Event on Women and the Economy
Obama Speaks about the Need for “Pay Equity”
The “Gender Pay Gap” Is a Fiction
Obama Himself Has Paid His Female Staffers Less than His Male Staffers
“The War on Women”: Obama Supports Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke’s Demand that Insurance Providers Cover the Costs of Contraception and Abortion
Obama Says the Augusta National Golf Club Should Allow Women to Attend
Obama Speaks at White House Event on Women and the Economy:
At an April 6, 2012 White House event on women and the economy, President Obama said: “When more women are bringing home the bacon, but bringing home less of it than men who are doing the same work, that weakens families, it weakens communities, it’s tough on our kids, it weakens our entire economy.”
Obama Speaks about the Need for “Pay Equity”:
On April 17, 2012, President Obama stated that “women who worked full-time [the previous year] earned only 77 percent of what their male counterparts did.” “The pay gap was even greater for African American and Latina women,” added Obama, “with African American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a Caucasian man.”
Obama Campaign Urges Female Voters to “Vote Like Your Lady Parts Depend on It”
Obama Mocks Romney’s Reference to “Binders Full of Women”
Obama Says Women Are Underpaid
Obama Laments America’s Historical and Continuing Injustice Toward Women
In a December 4, 2013 speech on the U.S. economy, President Obama said: “It’s also true that women still make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men…. It’s time to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so that women will have more tools to fight pay discrimination.”
Obama Says Women Are Underpaid
During his State of the Union address in January 2014, Obama said: “Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work.”
Depicting a Supreme Court Decision As “War on Women”
On June 30, 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that some companies with religious objections could avoid the Obamacare mandate requiring employers to provide their workers with health insurance plans that cover contraceptives and abortifacients.
The Obama administration responded to the decision by characterizing it as anti-woman. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said: “President Obama believes that women should make personal health care decisions for themselves rather than their bosses deciding for them. Today’s decision jeopardizes the health of the women who are employed by these companies.”
DOJ “Transgender Bathrooms” Lawsuit Against North Carolina
On May 9, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the DOJ had filed suit against the state of North Carolina over HB 2, which sought to protect citizens from being intruded upon by transgenders, authentic or fraudulent, in public restrooms by dictating that all people should use the bathroom of their biological sex. At a press conference, Lynch said the following:
“Today, I’m joined by [Vanita] Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. We are here to announce a significant law enforcement action regarding North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, also known as House Bill 2. The North Carolina General Assembly passed House Bill 2 in special session on March 23 of this year. The bill sought to strike down an anti-discrimination provision in a recently-passed Charlotte, North Carolina, ordinance, as well as to require transgender people in public agencies to use the bathrooms consistent with their sex as noted at birth, rather than the bathrooms that fit their gender identity. The bill was signed into law that same day. In so doing, the legislature and the governor placed North Carolina in direct opposition to federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity. More to the point, they created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals, who simply seek to engage in the most private of functions in a place of safety and security – a right taken for granted by most of us.
“Last week, our Civil Rights Division notified state officials that House Bill 2 violates federal civil rights laws. We asked that they certify by the end of the day today that they would not comply with or implement House Bill 2’s restriction on restroom access. An extension was requested by North Carolina and was under active consideration. But instead of replying to our offer or providing a certification, this morning, the state of North Carolina and its governor chose to respond by suing the Department of Justice. As a result of their decisions, we are now moving forward. Today, we are filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina. We are seeking a court order declaring House Bill 2’s restroom restriction impermissibly discriminatory, as well as a statewide bar on its enforcement….
“This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them – indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country – haltingly but inexorably – in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.
“This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. That right, of course, is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution, and in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill in state after state taking aim at the LGBT community. Some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown, and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change. But this is not a time to act out of fear. This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion and open-mindedness. What we must not do – what we must never do – is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.
“Let me speak now to the people of the great state, the beautiful state, my state of North Carolina. You’ve been told that this law protects vulnerable populations from harm – but that just is not the case. Instead, what this law does is inflict further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share. This law provides no benefit to society – all it does is harm innocent Americans.
“Instead of turning away from our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, let us instead learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of our past. Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight. It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference. We have moved beyond those dark days, but not without pain and suffering and an ongoing fight to keep moving forward. Let us write a different story this time. Let us not act out of fear and misunderstanding, but out of the values of inclusion, diversity and regard for all that make our country great.
“Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself. Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead. But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward. Please know that history is on your side. This country was founded on a promise of equal rights for all, and we have always managed to move closer to that promise, little by little, one day at a time….”
Obama Pushes Transgender Rights in Schools
In May 2016, the Obama Administration sent a letter — signed by Justice and Education department officials — to all school districts nationwide. It specified what schools would now be required to do for transgender students. That is, as soon as a parent or guardian notified a public school that his or her child’s identified gender “differs from previous representations or records,” that school would have to comply and treat the child accordingly.
In May 2016, Politico.com reported:
“The divisive and politically combustible issue of bathroom access for transgender individuals is about to become further inflamed, as the Obama administration is expected in coming weeks to aggressively reinforce its position that transgender student rights are fully protected under federal law, sources told Politico. With the Justice Department already locking horns with North Carolina over the state’s so-called bathroom bill, the administration plans to reaffirm its view that robust protections for transgender students are within the existing scope of Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities. Multiple agencies are expected to be involved. It’s a step LGBT advocates have wanted the federal government to take for years. The legal protections include providing transgender students not just access to bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity but also affording them protections from bullying, harassment and sexual violence, and a right to privacy concerning their transgender status and transition.”
In a National Review Online analysis of this issue, author Ed Whelan discussed the implications of the Obama administration’s position: “A young man who says his gender identity is female must be offered a college dormitory room with roommates who are women (irrespective of the wishes of those roommates). An athlete who is biologically male in all respects must be allowed to compete for a position on a women’s sports team if he identifies himself as female. A first-grade girl who thinks she’s a boy can use the boys’ bathroom. And, yes, high-school boys who say they’re transgender girls may use the girls’ locker rooms and showers on the same terms, and at the same time, as the girls do — and vice versa, of course, for girls who say they’re transgender boys.
Whelan then proceeded to expose the logical incoherence of the Obama policy:
Not surprisingly, this insanity has no plausible basis in Title IX. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Ferg-Cadima is right in his first claim: that Title IX actually forbids discrimination on the basis of gender identity. On any coherent account of what discrimination is, that assumption thoroughly defeats, rather than supports, Ferg-Cadima’s claim that “transgender students” must be treated “consistent with their gender identity.”
A person discriminates on the basis of a trait when he takes that trait into account in making a decision (at least when there is no compelling or inherent justification for doing so), and he doesn’t discriminate when he disregards the trait. Similarly, a policy discriminates on the basis of a trait when it makes that trait relevant to how a person is treated, and it doesn’t discriminate when it treats the trait as irrelevant. So, for example, a person discriminates on the basis of race when he factors a job applicant’s race into his hiring decision, and he doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race when he disregards the applicant’s race in making his hiring decision. Likewise, a person discriminates on the basis of gender identity when he factors a job applicant’s gender identity into his hiring decision — when, for example, he refuses to hire a woman because she says she identifies as male — and he doesn’t discriminate on the basis of gender identity when he disregards her gender identity in deciding whether to hire her.
But in the context of single-sex bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers, the concept of discrimination on the basis of gender identity plays out very differently from what the transgender ideologues contend. In this context, a school complies with the (hypothetical) norm of nondiscrimination on the basis of gender identity when it disregards a student’s gender identity and instead assigns the student to the facilities that correspond with his biological sex.
In other words, it is the advocates of transgender access to bathrooms and showers who, under the guise of their nondiscrimination rhetoric, are in fact seeking to discriminate on the basis of — in favor of — gender identity. That’s exactly what a policy of making gender identity override biological sex entails: It makes gender identity determine which restrooms and showers a person is allowed to use, just as a policy of race-segregated restrooms and showers makes race determine which facilities a person is allowed to use….
The unsound proposition that separate facilities assigned by biological sex involves discrimination on the basis of gender identity collapses into incoherence. If a boy who identifies as female has a right under Title IX to use the girls’ restrooms and showers, then it would clearly be discrimination on the basis of gender identity to bar a boy who identifies as male from also using them. After all, the difference between these two biological males is that they have different gender identities. How could one of the males be allowed to use the girls’ facilities and the other be barred from doing so if Title IX bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity? In short, contrary to everyone’s (including the Obama administration’s) understanding of Title IX, the transgender illogic would disallow any system of single-sex facilities to survive.
On May 13, 2016, the Daily Mail reported:
President Obama will order all public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity. The sweeping decree sent to all school districts will not be legally binding but those that do not abide by the new ruling could face lawsuits or lose federal aid…. “There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. “This guidance gives administrators, teachers, and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies,” she added…. The Obama administration letter — signed by education and justice officials — will say schools may not require transgender students to have a medical diagnosis, undergo any medical treatment, or produce a birth certificate or other document before treating them according to their gender identity.
A Complete Timeline of Race Relations Under Obama
By Hugh Khachatrian
January 9, 2017