Barack Obama Endorses Anti-Trump Protests
Former United States President Barack Obama issued a statement through his spokesman on Monday encouraging Americans to publicly protest President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily restricting the immigration of refugees coming from seven Muslim-majority countries known for exporting jihadists.
According to the statement issued by Mr. Obama’s spokesman Kevin Lewis:
President Obama is heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country. In his final official speech as president, he spoke about the important role of citizen and how all Americans have a responsibility to be the guardians of our democracy—not just during an election but every day. Citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.
Two days after President Trump signed his executive order, thousands of demonstrators rallied in more than 30 cities across the nation. Instead of calmly presenting their viewpoint, however, protestors in California blocked traffic in Los Angeles and shut down the international terminal of the San Francisco airport. With influential Democratic Party politicians like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders supporting such protests, it seems increasingly likely that they will develop into a permanent fixture in American society.
As the Trumpet’s contributing editor Brad Macdonald wrote in “Barack Obama’s Eternal Legacy”:
The most fundamental transformation President Obama accomplished can be seen in each of his actions: lawlessness. For eight years, the most important office in the U.S. government was occupied by a man who, rather than upholding the law of the land, chose to uphold the law of Barack Obama. Since its creation, the Constitution has been America’s ultimate authority, more powerful than even the president. Today, the U.S. Constitution remains influential, but less influential than the individual who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office.
America today is a much different organism than it was on inauguration day Jan. 20, 2009, and it’s not going to be easy to transform it back to the way it was, much less to make it great. The easiest path to take will be to reverse some of Mr. Obama’s policies and laws, but to ignore the profound cultural and social transformations that have occurred. The truth is, the Obama years appealed to an ugly, destructive and powerful force: our lawless human nature. Ultimately, the only way to truly roll back the Obama years is to transform the hearts and attitudes of the American people.
The last six presidents—including President Obama—have used executive powers to temporarily ban certain immigrants, but these actions didn’t elicit the same hysterical response because the culture of America hadn’t yet gone through the “fundamental transformation” of the Obama years.
Today, the rule of law has disintegrated to the point where the nation is descending into a civil war between feuding political factions that put their trust not in a legal framework that protects their freedom, but in authoritarian politicians. A grand lesson we can learn from history is that once the habit of disregarding legality begins to spread, the rule of law begins to collapse. The end result is always the tyrannical rule of men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC56Dg4gO_k&t=1m00s