Obama’s Red Guard: The Poisoning of America’s Youth
Everything we’re seeing on campuses throughout America today – the contempt for America’s founding, the embracement of censorship, the sneering dismissal of Western democratic values, the outright celebration of savagery – all of it goes back to Barack Obama. Those chanting ‘From the river to the sea…” everywhere from Harvard to Berkeley were just entering grade school when Obama took office, and by the millions they came of age accepting his self-presentation as a transformational figure, on the right side of history and fiercely dedicated to the social good. Too, they absorbed – or were groomed in – his brand of charm-laced ideological vitriol.
Nor was any of it accidental. More than any other leftist figure who’d come before, Obama grasped the importance of hooking them into “social justice” early, and since his days organizing on Chicago’s South Side, he’d flashed his particular gift for appealing to the credulous and hyper emotional.
In his first presidential campaign, his pitch to the nation’s young was passionate and full-throated. “I want you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” he declared as the 2008 race neared its finish. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”
The result was what the Christian Science Monitor termed a “seismic generational shift in American politics.” Obama carried fully two-thirds of voters under thirty.
As the Monitor noted, the Obama campaign used “tech-savvy tactics that elude older generations…(T)hey sent text messages, blogged, instant-messaged, posted YouTube videos, designed Obama iPhone applications, and mobilized online support for the man who represents two things that young people thrive on: hope and change...
“…. In many primary states, the organization began at the high school level, with local ‘Barackstars’ groups formed to bring supporters together. The Obama campaign created a campaign social networking site (MyBO) where young people could communicate, plan their own activities and become involved in the campaign. Then, when the primary day approached, they merged this campaign with old-fashioned door-to-door canvassing.”
Doddering opponent John McCain, meanwhile, didn’t even know how to use a Blackberry.
Fewer than eight months into his first year as president, Obama did something no other president had ever done before. On September 8, 2009, during the school day, he gave a speech to 56 million kids nationwide as they sat, a captive audience, in their public-school classrooms.
Though the speech was largely platitudes about the importance of education and the need to work hard, what rightly had many parents worried was that Obama’s purpose was far from benign. Indeed, his Department of Education had drawn up lesson plans to accompany the speech, the one for the younger children (K-6) urging them to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," a suggestion right out of the authoritarian strongman playbook.
And in the lesson plan for grades 7-12, the DOE urged teachers to read aloud from Obama's speeches on education and ask their charges "Why does President Obama want to speak with us today? How will he inspire us? How will he challenge us?"
Hardly incidentally, the speech itself took for granted that his audience shared his ideological goals and his view that more government was how to achieve them. “You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment,” as he concluded. “You'll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free…”
In short, in its way it was even more ominous than candidate Obama’s earlier scornful comments about working class desperate clingers: now, from the nation’s bully pulpit, Obama was coming for the kids.
As observed Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, the speech was “an invasive abuse of power,” intended to “indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.” Conservative commentator Tammy Bruce mockingly called it “Make September 8 Parentally Approved Skip Day,” tweeting, “You are your child’s moral tutor, not that shady lawyer from Chicago.”
Needless to say, the media’s coverage of Obama’s early outreach to the young was overwhelmingly positive. It was left to Stanley Kurtz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, to suggest what Obama might actually have in mind for American kids and their schools. Kurtz’s piece looked back on Obama’s largely hidden relationship with ex-Weatherman and turned purported “educational reformer” Bill Ayers, and their work together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. “The CAC's agenda,” Kurtz wrote, “flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism... External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education… The point, says Mr. Ayers in his (book) Teaching Toward Freedom, is to ‘teach against oppression,’ against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.”
And, indeed, Obama and his team moved decisively to put key elements of that radical agenda into practice. Most notably, there was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s infamous "Dear Colleague Letter" on school discipline. Dispatched to school superintendents across the country, it warned that racial disparities in suspension rates would be grounds for finding school districts in violation of federal anti-discrimination law, and therefore at risk of losing federal funding.
The Education Secretary was right “that African-American students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than white students,” noted Gail Heriot, a conservative holdover on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. “Although he did not mention it, it is also true that white students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than Asian American students, and that male students are disciplined at higher rates than female students.” Moreover, she added, “by failing to consider the other side of the coin — that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms — its policy threatens to do more harm than good even for the group Secretary Duncan was trying to help… school discipline is important and… the Department of Education’s policy has contributed to the problem of disorderly classrooms, especially in schools with high minority student enrollment.”
Another of the Obama DOE’s Dear Colleague letters, this one from its Office of Civil Rights, was directed at colleges and universities. An outright sop to radical feminists, it relied on the activists’ fraudulent statistics that one in five women is sexually assaulted during her college years. This was the reasoning it used to direct administrators, under the authority of Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination (originally intended to guarantee women equal access to participation in sports) to crack down on sexual assault cases or risk loss of their federal funding.
The result was the creation at colleges throughout the nation of vast new bureaucracies, that in turn set up Star Chamber proceedings in which men accused of sexual impropriety were presumed guilty and often suffered dire consequences, including expulsion, with nothing remotely resembling due process. In a preview of the MeToo movement, the horror stories ran rampant.
Later, to her credit, Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rolled back the rules and provided more just treatment of the accused. But upon taking over, Biden’s Department of Education immediately reinstated the Obama regulations, this time with modified language to include sexual orientation and gender identity for LGBTQI+ students.
By the end of Obama’s presidency, the nation’s colleges and universities, doing as much indoctrinating as teaching, were well on the way being the snake pits of vicious ideological conformity and reflexive hatred of out-of-favor groups that we see today.
And nowhere was this more the case than at America’s allegedly premiere educational institutions, populated by our supposedly best and brightest, destined to lead the country into the future Radicals primed to overturn the system, at places like Yale, they no longer hesitated to act out even against professors they thought stood in their way.
This was the generation nurtured by the 44th president, they are Obama’s Red Guard. According to surveys, eight in ten college students supported the BLM riots.
As the veteran conservative commentator (and ex-leftist radical) David Horowitz observes, “The source of our current ills – the lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our borders, the racist ‘equity’ policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke” derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural Marxism.”
In today’s colleges and universities, Barack Obama might no longer be front and center in the students’ daily thoughts , but he is their spiritual father. Having unleashed his vision on the world, it is self-perpetuating, and fueled by those who came of age under his sway.
“Why the fuck did you accept the position?!” screamed an infuriated young black woman at Yale, inches from the shocked face of a white professor old enough to be her father. “Who the fuck hired you?”
One only wonders where she is now, seven years later.
Perhaps she joined with BLM, the Marxist outfit born in the wake of the firestorms over Ferguson and Trayvon Martin so heedlessly fanned by Obama. Obama’s own daughters took part in BLM protests in 2020, and he proudly declared them "so much wiser, more sophisticated and gifted than I was at their age."
Or maybe that young woman’s rage led her to align with Antifa, that other tip of the activist spear, offering even more immediate opportunity to build the new society by torching buildings and assaulting cops.
But most likely, and in its way more chilling, like most students from elite colleges, and others also, she’s continuing the revolution from the inside. For today there are multiple paths the young may take to commit social justice -- through academia, media, Hollywood, the corporate world, the courts, even from within the military.
Scott McKay is the publisher of The Hayride, an award-winning culture and politics site that covers Southern and national current events. In addition, his work can be found in the American Spectator, where he has been a regular columnist since 2012. McKay's prior book, The Revivalist Manifesto, outlined how a revised conservative movement is essential for a national rebirth. McKay's writing career started in 1997 with the launch of Purple & Gold, a sports magazine devoted to college athletics at Louisiana State University. He resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
