The Right's Safe Space: Attacking The Black President

Barack Obama Forever Lives Rent Free In The Right's Nightmares

Barack Obama Celebrates A Socialist Victory At Connect Four

Disgraced former Fox News host turned pathetic online influencer Tucker Carlson, via his Elon Musk-backed videos, wanted the world to know this past week that he had a scoop: Barack Obama had some gay sex.

Granted, this is a claim that is based on a specious at best source and is being made in a world where adding bisexual to the list of things the right has said about Obama - a Kenyan, Muslim, Socialist, Black Nationalist, Pro-Jihad, Gun Grabbing, Corrupt leader who is part of the Globalist One World Government movement and the secret power behind Joe Biden’s presidency - is a plus, not a minus.

But what the pathetic bid for attention truly exposes is the right’s blinding hatred of Blackness, as embodied by the iconic stature of Obama. Beating up on Black people is sport for the right, it’s what makes them feel safe and secure and like everything is right with the world. It is their ultimate safe space, the area of escape that they love to taunt the left with so often.

The particular spectre of Obama haunts them. They have told themselves lies about Black people for so many years, decades layered upon decades of delusional insults and myths, and along came Obama to not only debunk their mythology but he absolutely shattered them.

The right still believes in Black inferiority. They pay lip service to notions of racial equality (along with gender) because they know society will look down on them for it, but in their heart of hearts they still believe it. They don’t think Black people are as smart as they are, that Black families are more chaotic and criminal than their own, and that Black people have a role in the underclass but they certainly aren’t fit to lead. It’s the same attitude embraced by Southern whites in the Reconstruction era, when they told themselves how impossible it would be for the savage slaves they once owned to assimilate as full human beings, even legislating in Congress.

President Obama busts this myth in so many ways. He is more educated and eloquent than the average American, Black, white or otherwise. His public image is much more along the lines of compassion and a delicate nature, rather than the Black “brute” and “thug” that consumes so much of the right’s shared imagination. And when it comes to the ability to lead, Obama absolutely crushed the two Republican standard bearers who fit the image of traditional white leadership, John McCain and Mitt Romney, earning far more public support than either man.

And his presidency was easily more successful than the white man who proceeded him, George W. Bush, and the one who succeeded him, Donald Trump. Obama lives in their heads more than six years after he left office and will likely live in there for the foreseeable future.

Barack Obama, Literally Spinning

Trump’s rise was supposed to serve as a corrective to the Obama “mistake.” If a Black could be president, the group mind surmised, the job couldn’t be that hard — after all they believe in Black inferiority. So why not elevate a serial charlatan and the host of Celebrity Apprentice to the position? If a Black guy could sit behind the Resolute desk without the world descending into chaos, surely any white guy — especially this moral black hole of a white guy — could do the job, right?

But Trump showed from early on that he wasn’t up to the job. What was effortless for Obama was a monumental struggle for Trump. Obama communicated with ease, juggling domestic crises and foreign policy chaos at the same time. Whether Obama succeeded or failed, there was never the overwhelming sense that the job of president was well above him, that he couldn’t understand the basic, fundamental operations of the United States and how the whole government works.

With Trump, every day began with the concern that he would forget how to operate a doorknob, and it just got worse when crises like government shutdowns and COVID-19 rose. Trump showed America that the presidency was as hard as we had always believed it to be, and that his Black predecessor was way better at it than the right’s white standard-bearer.

Even worse, Obama’s ally and white subordinate Joe Biden became the beneficiary of America’s trust of the Black president and soundly defeated Trump in 2020. With Biden’s victory, the Black man of their nightmares won again. As Trump would say: Sad!

So much of the vitriol targeted towards Biden is leftover Obama hate. The byzantine corruption conspiracy that Republicans are now ready to impeach Biden over, when you peel back their spittle-covered ranting, reaches back to Obama. They’ll argue that when Hunter Biden supposedly became the financial mastermind sucking in both Chinese and Russian money, he was empowered by his father’s vice presidency which ultimately flowed from — you guessed it — the Evil Black, Barack Obama.

Thanks, Obama.

They’re not over it. And thanks to continued public support of Obama and Michelle Obama, it doesn’t look like they will ever be over it. Their hatred of Obama is not shared by Democrats or independents. It is another manifestation of how abnormal conservatism is compared to the mindset of normal Americans, twinned with their cultish devotion to Trump. Trump never sat a day in office with a level of public support as high as Obama achieved (or Biden, by the way). At his highest, their answer to the Black president, will never achieve the acclaim of Obama. Obama’s presidency was not perfection, but he was superior to Trump in every way.

That’s why bottom feeders like Tucker Carlson are still rolling in conspiratorial mud, nostalgically resurfacing homophobic attacks on Obama designed to give right-wing viewers an endorphin rush. It’s a way for them to recapture that moment in late 2008 when they thought they had the Black man beat, and in 2016 when they felt they had repudiated the mistake of his two-term presidency.

But they are being left behind. Following Obama, America has now elected its first woman, Black, and Asian person to the vice presidency with Vice President Kamala Harris. More people are in the pipeline behind Obama and Harris, a diverse array of people across the spectrum of race, gender, and sexual orientation proving that the dominance of the straight white male is eroding — slowly, but eroding nonetheless.

While the right sets itself up for another round of straight white male grievance, apparently ready to nominate two-time popular vote loser Trump as its presidential nominee, most Americans are not in their camp. They don’t reflexively hate Black people and Black success, and they don’t care about salacious attacks meant to tear down and undo Obama’s eight years in the White House.

I don’t pity conservatives for having these racist hang-ups. I accept them for the filth they believe in and I look forward to watching the country continue to evolve past their sad and sick bigotry.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977/Bluesky @owillis

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