Obama and Hillary Are All Too Happy to Coerce Acceptance of Their Agendas

Rich Terrell

Victor Davis Hanson  "What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively.

"Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations.

"Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure “correct” public attitudes about Obama’s agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion, and cultural issues.

"How, then, do politically correct planners force the people to think and act properly when they push back?

"Extra-legal executive orders can help a president bypass supposed troglodytes in Congress and among the public.

“We’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”
— President Obama

"Obama granted blanket amnesties, proposed rules that would lead to the closure of many coal plants, and arbitrarily chose which health or labor statutes should be enforced and at what times. A filmmaker was even jailed on a trumped-up probation charge after making a video about Islam that was deemed unhelpful to the official administration Benghazi narrative. The IRS hounded nonprofit groups considered insufficiently progressive.

"In a recent rant about conservative Fox News — which has a fraction of the combined audience of the liberal mainstream networks ABC, CBS, and NBC — Obama warned that the media are going to have change the very way they report news. Presumably, Obama believes that Fox tricks the unknowing masses into thinking wrong thoughts, especially about the relationship between the poor and government assistance.

"As Obama put it: “We’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like.”

"Given the First Amendment, how can the president “change” the media? Should the Federal Communications Commission pick and choose acceptable news outlets in the same manner that Lois Lerner ran her exempt-organizations division at the IRS?" Full article here.