Obama has always had a talent for talking out of both sides of his mouth.  On one hand, as Nina Bookout catches for Victory Girls, he’ll say things like this, reminiscent of the Democrat convention speech that put him on the national political map:

Right now, it’s easy to focus on what divides us, and there are plenty of people out there who benefit from driving us further apart. But our future depends on our ability to actively resist those forces; to look past our differences and understand that we want the same things for ourselves, our families, and our communities. … The more we can focus on what we have in common — whether we’re Black, White, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or anything else — the better off we’ll be.

On the other hand, he’ll follow up with declarations like:

Former President Obama said “certain right-wing media venues” are stoking “fear and resentment” among White Americans toward the increasingly diverse population.

He’s referring to the pushback against Critical Race Theory (CRT), regarding which he follows the standard progressive line that it’s just a way to honestly acknowledge the role of racism in American history.

That, of course, is the trick.  To get to Obama’s “focus on what we have in common,” to achieve “a common set of facts and distinguish between what’s true and what’s false” white people have to acknowledge, in Bookout’s words, that “our skin color, our WHITE skin, is bad.”

CRT is pure, unadulterated racism, and Obama is setting a Kafkatrap, as William Jacobson articulated it back in 2013 on Legal Insurrection:

Make an outlandish statement about White people.

Watch White people react in denial.

Use denial reaction as proof you were right all along.

Thus, as American schools infuse their students with guilt over the color of their skin and an opposition emerges, our former President insists those parents are stoking “fear and resentment.”  Sarah Hoyt responds well, on Instapundit: “Why would anyone resent having outrageous lies [told] about them”?

As for fear, one justification for that emotion is that progressives have now been reinvigorating racism for long enough that young adults actually cannot remember a time when it was not like this — when it actually looked like we could achieve the dream of a colorblind society.  That was the condition when the country elected the first Black president and all those people on the Left who actually (as Obama accuses conservatives) “exploit [racial division] for their own political gain” realized they had to switch things up to keep their scam going.

They certainly went big.  Rather than trying to chase down the evaporating remnants of actual racism, they flipped the board over and demanded that it’s not possible only to be not racist; one is either racist or anti-racist, so that denying racism became proof of racism.  Being colorblind is racism; justice demands that we see race in everything.

As surreal as these propositions may be, they are supremely profitable to practitioners, and they give divisive demagogues like Obama a well manured field to sow.

Featured image cropped from Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash.