By Hank Berrien
As far back as 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”
Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, former President Barack Obama disingenuously said he could not understand why America got so “toxic and just so divided and so bitter.”
“I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter,” he mused. “I get why sometimes people just don’t want to pay attention to it. And we all have friends like that; we have family members who are just like, “Ahh, y’know, it’s all a circus out there.”
Barack Obama: “I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter.” pic.twitter.com/OWj3uicQ1o
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 22, 2024
Yet Obama’s own rhetoric and that of other Democrat leaders has fanned the flames of division before and during the time he was president. As a July 2016 Rasmussen poll taken six months before Obama left office noted, 60% of Americans felt race relations had gotten worse since Obama’s election.
In 2016, campaigning for president, Democrat Hillary Clinton offered her deathless remark, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
In April 2008, when he was running for president, Obama infamously said, “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.”
More Obama:
2008: “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.”
2009: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry.”