III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 113had been imbibing racist hatred in the pews for 20 years, and exposing his wife and children to the
foul-mouthed tirades of the raving reverend. But he never apologized, never uttered a self-critical
word. Obama is like Bush: structurally incapable of self-criticism. This may in turn be rooted in the
mental defect we find in both of them: megalomania.
A plausible defense for Obama would have gone like this: “I ask the American people to forgive
me for my terrible political opportunism. I came to Chicago and needed to build a political base.
Wright was a popular preacher, and he had a following among the upwardly mobile black opinion
leaders I wanted to meet and to cultivate. He also had a program of church social work which gave
him a veneer of credibility among poorer blacks. I joined the church and brought my wife and
children there. We sat through the “God damn America” two-minute hate tirades and gave Wright
as much as we could afford, over twenty-five grand last year, to get his support and endorsement.
He was mobilizing his national network of black liberation theology ministers for me, and nobody
else could do that for me. Wright drives a Porsche and is about to move into a $1.6 million house,
so he always wanted money. But now Wright has become a colossal political liability, so I am
dumping him. I condemn him and repudiate him, I am quitting his church, and I will never speak to
him again as long as I live. I will never give him another penny as long as I live, and neither will
anyone in my family. I will not allow him anywhere near the White House, and I will not steer
government patronage money his way. This is a clean break, irrevocable and unalterable. No more
Jeremiah Wright. I sincerely apologize to the American people and ask for their forgiveness. I am
guilty of political opportunism, and I will work to win redemption. God bless America.”
This would have been the best possible damage control in regard to Wright, but Obama was
structurally incapable of giving a speech like this, even if he had not meant it and fully intended to
keep Wright in a secret priest hole in the White House to serve as his confessor and spiritual
director for all four years and beyond. This would have involved the three steps of penitence – the
contrition of the heart, the confession of the mouth, and the restitution and satisfaction of works.
Obama could never be a penitent. Instead, Obama reached back to the Carter malaise speech of July
1979.^23
From this speech Obama abstracted the characteristic method of a Trilateral-Ford puppet who is
caught in malfeasance: blame the American people, especially the working class. Backed by a row
of American flags, with his head thrown back (partly in arrogance and partly to facilitate reading off
the glass plates of the teleprompter) Obama attempted to turn reality on its head, and especially to
turn the tables on the critics of Wright. He tried to contort himself from a sleazy Chicago ward-
heeling pol who had been caught in the company of a widely hated extremist, to a moralistic social
critic sagaciously diagnosing the pathologies of the American body politic. The words flickered
across the glass plates of the teleprompter and out of Obama’s yap, rife with Harvardian
modulations. Obama morphed from the defendant that he was into the divine state prosecutor of the
judgment day, reading the American people the list of their sins, original, mortal, and venal: racism,
racism, racism.
It turned out that Reverend Wright was not a satanic huckster projecting the Ford Foundation’s
divide-and-conquer strategy of financier oligarch domination into the realm of pseudo-Christian
theology, oh no. Reverend Wright was a microcosm who reflected the conflicts of American
society, and the chief of these was once again racism. Wright’s specific comments could always be
rejected, but Wright could not be rejected, because he had become part and parcel of Obama’s hard-
won race identity, his völkische Identität. And Wright was not the only one to be tainted by racism:
there was also Obama’s grandmother Toot, who had once been frightened by a potential mugger