Barack Obama’s policies and rhetoric damaged the country for eight years.
The election of Donald Trump and his subsequent conservative governance have begun to right the ship.
But now Obama is doing something that could be a major setback for the United States.
It’s customary for past presidents to recede into the background, write their memoirs, and embark on speaking terms, allowing the sitting president to do the job.
However, Barack Obama has broken protocol. He’s publicly spoken out against Trump on more than one occasion, including his disapproval of Trump pulling out of the disastrous Paris Climate Accord and the sham Iran nuclear deal.
Obama’s responses were terribly inappropriate and undermined the office of the presidency, but considering the way Obama trampled over the U.S. Constitution, nobody should be surprised.
Obama’s anti-business rhetoric, e.g. “You didn’t build that,” pitted the American people against the job creators who keep the economy going.
Obama also set race relations back decades by stoking the flames of racial tension in several instances, including the incident when black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for breaking into his home and failing to produce identification; Obama could’ve easily diffused the situation, but instead claimed the arresting officer acted “stupidly.”
Now it appears Obama and his rhetoric aren’t going anywhere, as he and Michelle Obama have officially inked a deal with Netflix to produce both scripted and unscripted content.
From The Daily Wire:
Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle have taken the first steps toward their post-presidential careers, inking a multi-year partnership deal with internet streaming service, Netflix, for a number of upcoming projects.
Netflix announced the partnership on Twitter Monday morning. The deal reportedly includes films, documentaries, and both scripted and reality television programming.
President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have entered into a multi-year agreement to produce films and series for Netflix, potentially including scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features.
Neither Netflix nor the Obama camp was willing to give further details, but a New York Times article from March, when the two parties were reportedly first discussing the partnership, seems to give at least an outline of what Netflix and the Obamas have planned.
“President and Mrs. Obama have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire,” an Obama adviser told the paper, according to The Hill. “Throughout their lives, they have lifted up stories of people whose efforts to make a difference are quietly changing the world for the better. As they consider their future personal plans, they continue to explore new ways to help others tell and share their stories.”
An Obama spokesperson also told the NYT that Obama himself planned to remain “engaged” with young people, though he wasn’t interested in pursuing his own media career — so maybe we’ll luck out and the “unscripted” programming won’t be a multi-season reality show that documents the Obama’s post-presidential quest to “save the world” one vegetable and one anti-Trump protester at a time.
Obama has, however, always wanted to be a Hollywood power player, and this is his shot. Netflix has 125 million subscribers, and some of those are bound to be such die-hard Obama fans they’d watch anything he’d produce. But Netflix is taking a risk; the Obamas have inked solid book deals and lots of Hollywood friends, but aren’t experienced content producers.
The corresponding licensed merchandise will be super convenient for virtue-signaling leftists, however.
A recently bygone president should not be streaming heavily biased programming into over one hundred million households. This is tantamount to propaganda. In fact, it might be worse, because it has the veneer of being “entertainment.”
State-run media like South America’s socialist propaganda network Telesur would be proud of comrade Obama.
Before his tragic and untimely death, conservative firebrand and mainstream media critic Andrew Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
The left has understood this for decades, and it’s reflected in the movies and television shows Hollywood produces.
Obama’s deal with Netflix looks like a dangerous attempt to tap directly into the culture. Propaganda hasn’t been this blatant since before the fall of the Iron Curtain.