With the rise of the Mamdani-style communists has come a widespread narrative that the sudden rise of more openly radical politicians means the Democrats of the last few years or decades are somehow moderate. Depending on who’s telling the story, it’s a harrowing tale about Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries trying to stave off the DSA Marxists; or the “far left” floundering because it doesn’t have its own Fox News; or the party needing a storybook journey home to the moderation of Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
These are all tall tales, of course. Schumer and Jeffries are engaged in a power struggle, but it’s an intramural contest among fellow radicals. Leftists “far” and near have numerous Fox News-scale allies such as CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on and so forth. Biden is anything but moderate, and Obama has arguably done more than anyone to create the radicalism that is now pervasive on the left.
This hasn’t stopped a host of commentators from presenting Obama as a beacon of the political center. In one recent example, former President Obama’s friendly interaction with WNBA superstar Caitlyn Clark went viral in the wake of anti-Clark backlash that included a USA Today op-ed accusing her of sparking racial lynching-level violence … by complaining about referees’ foul calls.
“You’re fantastic!” Obama told Clark. “Don’t let all this nonsense get you down.” His conversation with Clark had all the warmth and rizz that made Obama an effective politician, and his avuncular advice reads like a Solomonic proverb compared to this kind of raving lunacy: “It seems there is a white nationalist faction to Clark’s fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic, made even more so because the WNBA is made up predominantly of Black women, many of them queer.”
Lunacy aside, however, Obama’s sanity in the smile-wave-and-kiss-the-babies campaign trail moment doesn’t erase a tidal wave of evidence that he more than anyone else is the patriarch and pioneer of today’s Democrat Party and Zohran Mamdani’s rising Islamocommunism. Arguing that he’s moderate is similar to saying he’s the most humble man on the face of the earth because he didn’t blurt out “Me!” like Michelle did in this interview:
That tidal wave of evidence begins with the legislation that (unofficially) bears his name, Obama rammed through the biggest government takeover of health care in U.S. history. Did he succeed in establishing the single-payer universal health care system — complete with MAID services when the government runs short of cash — that Mamdani and Co. dream about? Not quite. But he did force insurance companies to cover individuals with preexisting conditions, destroy health care as Americans had known it, and essentially make it a crime not to be insured.
Health insurance premiums have nearly doubled since the passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” and taxpayers are stuck subsidizing a socialistic monstrosity that Obama promised wouldn’t add “a dime” to the national debt. Speaking of other so-called “moderates,” Nancy Pelosi was there every step of the way, explaining that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” And boy, have Americans found out.
Another hallmark of the DSA Marxists that purportedly sets them apart from the “moderates” in the Democrat Party is their associations with other radicals. Mamdani proudly hobnobbed with an imam who called for “jihad” and was alleged to be a co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey congressional candidate likely headed to Washington, D.C., reportedly “once testified on behalf of the mastermind” behind the 1993 attack. DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier helped start a Columbia University group that had the stated goal of destroying Western civilization.
But one might argue that these leftist politicians are simply following in Obama’s footsteps. He notoriously had a relationship with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, which the FBI designated a domestic terrorist group. Ayers has said that “he does not regret setting bombs, he does not consider what he did to be terrorism, and he believes that his conduct wasn’t ‘extreme enough in fighting racism,’” according to Influence Watch. The sketchy connections hardly stop with Ayers. Obama took a chummy photo with and was endorsed by Louis Farrakhan and was a 20-year member of the church of Jeremiah Wright, notorious for his “God D-mn America” sermon and blaming the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks — just as DSA candidate Melot Kiros has done. Obama only separated from Wright as his presidential campaign gathered steam.
Speaking of Wright and Farrakhan highlights the reality that Obama harbored a poorly disguised contempt for his country even as he inflamed the racial tensions on which he would base that contempt — just as the Mamdani Marxists do. He made a point of bashing America in front of other world leaders for “show[ing] arrogance” and being “dismissive, even derisive.” He campaigned on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” much in the same vein as Mamdani’s contention that “America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”
Michelle Obama echoed her husband’s position, asserting, “We’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” After his election, she said that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country,” a comment she would later walk back. In similar statements Barack would characterize the Constitution as “stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery” and berate Americans who purportedly “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Obama was also a forerunner of the DSA socialists when it came to weaponizing race for political gain. In 2009 he quickly weighed in on the mistaken arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., smearing the Cambridge Police for “act[ing] stupidly” and implying racial profiling had occurred, despite “not seeing all the facts.” Three years later he inserted himself in the case of Trayvon Martin, a black teen shot by George Zimmerman, purportedly in self-defense. Obama said, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” a comment that had no bearing on the charges against Zimmerman, who was found not guilty of second-degree murder.
Most notably, when police fatally shot Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Obama called the ensuing riots “understandable. He also opined that “the law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion” — despite evidence justifying law enforcement’s use of force in the shooting. The incident helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement that would cause so much destruction six years later.
Race weaponization and anti-Americanism aside, Obama blazed the trail of far-left, Marxist radicalism on a host of additional issues, such as government bailouts, the trans agenda, abortion, taxing the rich, same-sex “marriage,” lawfare, and mass immigration. Further, Obama’s radicalism is wildly popular on the left, both now and when he left office. Nearly 90 percent of self-described liberals viewed him favorably, according to a June 2026 CNN poll. Among members of the Democrat Party, that number rose to 96 percent, a point higher than when he left office. Put another way, Democrats don’t see him as too moderate or not radical enough.
Which helps explain both why the Democrat Party politicians have been hot on his heels long before the DSA communists appeared and why the narrative about geriatric Dems straining to hold the fort against Gen Z communists is false. Those with memories that last longer than five seconds will recall that Democrats didn’t need Mamdani radicals to help them nix constitutional rights during Covid, declare that men are women, and open America’s borders, often in an effort to replicate Obama’s political success. They were radical enough for the “far left” then, and they’re radical enough now, thanks in large part to their spiritual patriarch, Obama.
The “new” Marxists like Mamdani, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, and Claire Valdez are simply following in his footsteps — and those of the “moderate” Democrats. Are they more blatant and less calibrated to a national campaign? Certainly. Does Obama know his craft well enough to cosplay as moderate and morph as expediency requires? Absolutely.
But make no mistake: Barack Obama is no moderate and neither is his party. There is no war between radicals and moderates; it’s simply a battle over which radicals will rule the party Obama created.
