Whatever happened with that crowd in Michigan, Obama really couldn't handle it

"Our free press" is struggling to present the moment as a moral victory for Obama and "civility," answering a heckler (or two hecklers) with Sweet Reason; but it did not quite look that way

Yesterday Obama was in Michigan, ostensibly to move the party faithful to go vote for Gretchen Whitmer on Election Day. With her Trumpesque opponent, Tudor Dixon, breathing down her neck, the glassy-eyed Covidienne needs all the help that she can get; and that, reportedly, is why Obama showed up yesterday, two weeks after Kamala Harris went to Michigan to cackle on the governor’s behalf. Unlike Harris, or anybody else who smells too strongly of Joe Biden’s White House (including Biden, who also flew out there, which also didn’t help), Obama (according to CNN) “remains a national Democratic figure who can motivate the party’s base while also appealing to moderate voters,” to bring them all together, so that they’ll turn out on Election Day, and so save Michigan from Donald Trump’s “red tide.”

Now, let’s take a closer look at what Obama said at that event, and how “our free press” “reported” it. What his riffs, and their coverage, tell us is that he probably was not in Michigan simply to “get out the vote” for Gretchen Whitmer. On the contrary: Obama seemed to be in Michigan to lay more groundwork for a post-election propaganda drive hysterically defining every Democratic “victory” as honest, and tarring all who argue otherwise—no matter what their evidence—as Nazis.

Such was, of course, the propaganda takeaway from “January 6,” which has “the left” now deeming it a terrorist offense to question any Democratic victory (or “victory”) at the polls (just as they regard it as a crime against humanity to question any of the lethal “COVID measures,” “vaccination” most of all). The notion that it’s somehow dangerously “anti-democratic” to insist on clear forensic proof of any seeming victory at the polls is itself dangerously anti-democratic—as in Pete Buttigieg’s chilling “seven words on democracy,” lately hailed by “our free press”: “When you lose, you accept the outcome”—which is another way of saying, “You win when we say you win; and if we say you lose, you lose. So shut up.” From there it’s quite a small step to tar anyone objecting to that quasi-Nazi diktat as a Nazi—which is arguably what Obama went to Michigan to do, with “our free press” as his accomplices.

Here’s how the New York Times “reported” the event:

Barack Obama Lamented the Attack on Paul Pelosi. Then He Got Heckled.

October 29, 2022

Mr. Obama was reflecting on the level of hostility in American politics when a man in the crowd at a rally for Democrats in Detroit shouted at him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/us/obama-detroit-pelosi-rally.html

Note how the Times’ Neil Vigdor, and his editors, played the moment for the propaganda purpose of turning up the heat on all “election deniers”:

Former President Barack Obama was twice interrupted by hecklers on Saturday at a campaign rally in Detroit for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other Democrats, a reminder that it is easier to call for civility in American politics than to achieve it.

In the first incident, less than 10 minutes after Mr. Obama took the stage, a man in the crowd shouted at him while he was lamenting Friday’s attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi, and the rise of violent political rhetoric.

“We’ve got politicians who work to stir up division to try to make us angry and afraid of one another for their own advantage,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes it can turn dangerous.”

Moments later, the man, who was not identified, shouted “Mr. President” at Mr. Obama, creating an off-script exchange that the former president tried to use to drive home his point. The rest of what the man said was not picked up by microphones or cameras.

“This is what I mean,” Mr. Obama said. “Right now, I’m talking. You’ll have a chance to talk sometime.”

Mr. Obama told the man, “You wouldn’t do that a workplace [sic]. It’s not how we do things. This is part of the point I want to make. Just basic civility and courtesy works.”

About seven minutes later, another heckler interrupted Mr. Obama, who later said that the current lack of respect in political discourse was different from when he first ran for president in 2008. At the time, he said, he could visit Republican areas and engage in a positive dialogue with those who disagreed with him politically.

But that’s not the case now, said Mr. Obama, who juxtaposed the concession of Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent for president in 2008, with former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“American democracy is also on the ballot,” Mr. Obama said. “With few notable exceptions, most Republican politicians right now are not even pretending that the rules apply to them. They seem to be OK with just making stuff up.”

Here’s what we’re supposed to think, from that portentous headline, and Vigdor’s poignant lede: As he “lamented the attack on Paul Pelosi,” Obama suddenly was “heckled” for it; and as Obama went on calling earnestly for “basic civility and courtesy,” the more he was assailed by those egregious “hecklers,” who don’t believe in “basic civility” or “courtesy,” the way Obama and his party do. Thus the Times presents a tragic image of the “former” president, trying his level best to lower the troubling “level of hostility in American politics,” only to be “shouted at” (by Trump people) for his pains.

That’s quite a neat little story—too neat, in fact, for us to buy it without question. First of all, why was Obama “shouted at” as he “lamented the attack on Paul Pelosi”? Did what that first heckler “shout” have anything to do with that “attack”? The fact is we have no idea, since, as Vigdor (quietly) makes clear (and as much other coverage of the moment reconfirms), no one knows what that “heckler” said—or what the second one said, either. Rather than make any effort to convey what either of those two obstructive peons had to say, the Times (and all the rest of “our free press”) just let the “former” president talk over them, passive-aggressively rambling on and on about the value of “civility” and “courtesy” so as to drown them out, and so define whatever they were trying to say as incivility, discourtesy—the opposite of his exemplary behavior as a guardian of American democracy.

So tidy is that propaganda story in the Times (essentially the same one told by Reuters, MSNBC and several other choristers) that we might go beyond observing how dishonestly it handles those two “hecklers,” to wondering how much of that whole incident might have been staged to make the necessary point, just like “January 6”—and maybe other aspects of the story out of Michigan. Where better to mount such a bit of “anti-Nazi” theater than Michigan, and who better to have there on the stage behind Obama as his lady in distress, than Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, target of a fake kidnapping plot by “Nazi” types manipulated by the FBI? And, for that matter, how much do we really know about that “attack on Paul Pelosi,” other than its marvelous convenience as a further illustration of how “dangerous” (Obama’s word) things are today—when “politicians stir up division and try to make us angry and afraid of one another” (as Obama piously intoned in Michigan, as if Trump [only] does that sort of thing, whereas he never, ever would, nor, surely, would Joe Biden)?

The heavy implication there is that, with Trump and his cohorts having, for the last two years, plied their explosive “base” with “conspiracy theories” and “election denial,” some “lone nut” may go berserk under the pressure. That scenario, which harks back to the propaganda portraits of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, is in the air again today, and has been since Trump landed in the White House. Some two months after that election, Edgar Maddison Welch, allegedly unhinged by “Pizzagate,” strode into Comet Ping Pong with a rifle and shot up the place (or maybe only aimed the gun) in search of little kids to rescue from the clutches of John Podesta—a most convenient story, which enabled many cautionary headlines on the “danger” of “conspiracy theories.” (“The Pizzagate gunman is out of prison. Conspiracy theories are out of control,” screamed the Seattle Times last year.) The same scenario appears to be in play now in the case of Paul Pelosi (whose “woke” attacker has been tagged as “racist” and “transphobic,” and a devotee of “conspiracy theories”); and it is more than likely to pop up again, especially after the election, when it might be deployed yet one more time to liken dissidence, however rational, to random acts of crackpot violence.

In any case, Obama’s pose as Democratic calmer-of-the-waters was, as you would not know from the Times, a total failure; for his sermonette on the importance of “civility” and “courtesy” had no effect whatever on the multitude assembled there to see him, whereas they loved it that he shut those “hecklers” down (and that each of them was instantly “escorted” out the door by beefy guards). The Times piece makes no mention of that crowd’s ferocious glee, their shouts of “Get him out!” and “Get him!”—catcalls strongly reminiscent of what happened at Trump’s rallies, when he came down on Democratic “hecklers” there. Whereas Trump said nothing to cool out the crowd at those events, Obama tried and tried to quiet down his fans in Michigan—and could not do it, as the Times et al. did not report, although it was, by far, that evening’s most dramatic moment, which is highlighted here:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/29/barack-obama-struggled-to-control-michigan-crowd-after-heckler-interrupts-his-speech/

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/teach-him-barack-rally-crowd-goes-wild-as-obama-scolds-heckler-right-now-im-talking/

foundationnews @foundationnews1

#Obama trying to get the crowd to pay attention to him after getting heckled reminds me of a student teacher trying to control a classroom 😂

No matter what may happen next, in this election or thereafter, American democracy will be impossible if we can’t question what the government-and-media unanimously scream about our ludicrous elections, or on any other subject; nor can we ourselves survive if we keep snapping at each other’s throats, as both the parties and “our free press” want us doing.

A fake version of the tumult at the rally, edited to give the misimpression that the crowd in Michigan was chanting “Fuck Joe Biden”:

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/119/112/040/playable/8f2ad6136f05c059.mp4