Obama Is in No Position to Lecture Us About Decency

David Harsanyi on Feb 20, 2026

In a recent interview with "No Lie" podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen, former President Barack Obama claimed that conservatives do "the mean, angry, exclusive, us/them, divisive politics. That's their home court. Our court is coming together."

This is a jaw-dropping contention coming from a man who began his presidential aspirations accusing Americans who refused to embrace his brand of progressive politics of being "bitter" and clinging "to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."

Is there any group of people in the country who exude more "antipathy to people who aren't like them" than progressives?

Virtually every poll taken on the issue finds Democrats are far less inclined to accept Republicans as friends or family members. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's witnessed the screeching moralistic anger of the average leftist activist -- a disposition popularized during the Obama era.

Obama's entire scandal-ridden supercilious presidency was focused on coercing, browbeating and, ultimately, slandering the bitter clingers. In the former president's vernacular, "coming together" simply meant accepting Obama's worldview as incontrovertible truth.

And one of the most grating habits in this regard was Obama's turning every tragedy and political event into a sermon about our collective failings.

Obama, the only president to that point to belittle the notion of American exceptionalism, would go abroad and tell the world that the "future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

Slandering Christians in the United States, on the other hand, was no problem. The Obama administration spent years trying to destroy the Little Sisters of the Poor for their faith-based objections to paying for condoms. The Obama-era Democrats normalized the legal war on orthodox Christianity, meant to chill speech and compel progressive cultural supremacy, a cause that's not abated to this day.

The inclusive Obama, who had hitched his career to Black Liberation theologians like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and flirted with the Nation of Islam (a picture of a smiling Obama meeting with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan was hidden during his presidency), was the first president to engage in anti-Jewish dual loyalty tropes against Americans who opposed his obsession with rewarding Iran with nuclear weapons.

But perhaps worst of all, the first black president in history, Obama, did everything he could to roll back 40 years of progress on race relations.

There seemingly wasn't a single "racial" incident anywhere in the country that Obama wouldn't exacerbate and exploit for political purposes.

It began with his contention that "Cambridge police acted stupidly" after local police arrested historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was seen breaking into his own house, and continued with the killing of Trayvon Martin in an altercation with a neighborhood watch volunteer. Obama implored 350 million Americans, none of whom had anything to do with the case, to do "soul-searching."

"If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon," Obama said. "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." The implication, of course, was that young black men were being killed solely due to their color. Martin's shooter, George Zimmerman, was found not guilty by a jury, and Obama's Justice Department did not file civil rights charges.

Nothing, however, tops Obama's detestable speech at the funeral of five Dallas police officers, murdered by a racist anti-cop extremist at Black Lives Matter protest in 2016. "None of us are entirely innocent" when it comes to "racial discrimination," the president noted, "and this includes our police departments."

Obama invoked the names of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men who had been recently shot by police, not only creating a false equivalency but also basically rationalizing the anger of the shooter.

It's worth remembering that neither of the investigations into Sterling and Castile had even been concluded at the time. In 2017, Obama's Department of Justice didn't charge the police in the killing of Sterling.

By 2016, Gallup found that 46% of Americans believed race relations had worsened during his presidency, compared with 29% who felt they improved. A 2016 New York Times poll found 69% of Americans described race relations as "generally bad."

Obviously, Americans are divided because we have deep-seated, legitimate and meaningful disagreements about the future. That's why politics exists. The political "unity" that Democrats claimed to strive for only exists in dictatorships. The inability to accept this made Obama the most divisive president of the modern age.

Which isn't to say that subsequent presidents brought us together. Far, far from it. It's to say that Obama changed the way presidents spoke about and to their constituents. It was Obama's systematic subversion of norms that made Donald Trump possible.

We don't need any more of his lectures.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "How To Kill a Republic," available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.

----