During my book "tour," radio hosts are forever asking me whether I believe that Obama is intentionally attempting to destroy America. It's a fair question, especially given the title of my book and because so many people legitimately believe he is.
I have never been too receptive to conspiracy theories, and I'm not particularly enamored of ones circulating about Obama. But unlike many other such theories, this one is about a truly unprecedented assault on the American idea and on those first principles that have made America the unique experiment in constitutional governance that it has been.
Ordinary people -- not just a small fringe group of zealots -- are really afraid today. They see the country they adore being attacked at all levels; they see their freedoms under assault, their life savings genuinely in jeopardy, an endlessly anemic economy, a longer period of sustained unemployment than we've experienced in a half-century and a national financial crisis, born of world-historic national debt, that this president will not help avert.
These are extremely troubled times. The government is on course to gobble up our health care system; businesses are afraid to hire because of the uncertainties caused by new taxes and regulations that will be unleashed with Obamacare -- along with the largest tax increase in the nation's history, which is already awaiting us in January. Small businesses see an administration that not only is at war with the private sector but also appears to be on a mission to punish and obliterate our domestic energy sources and waste billions more in borrowed federal dollars on green energy projects doomed to fail.
Why? How can anyone explain this insanity? Does Obama truly harbor a grudge against America? What did he mean when he said he wanted to fundamentally change America? What did his wife mean when she said she'd never been proud of America in her adult life before he rose to power? What possesses Obama to deride and apologize for America? What drives him to instinctively distrust business and the private sector and to believe that federal planners ought to have enormously more discretion in how our income and wealth are distributed? What drives him to reject the American concept of equal opportunity and promote the notion of equality of outcomes? Why is he determined to energize labor unions and encourage a permanently adversarial climate between labor and management? Why is he so adamant about the United States deferring to international bodies in the conduct of its foreign affairs? Why is he hellbent on downscaling our nuclear and conventional forces and dismantling our military space program and our missile defenses?
Are people not wholly rational in wondering just what in the world is going on?
My personal belief is that Obama, like so many leftist radicals, has a strong distaste for pre-Obama America and that he believes that the United States has been an imperialistic international bully, that we've consumed too much of the world's resources, that we've been an environmental felon and that our capitalistic system unfairly and inequitably distributes income and wealth -- and I think he means to effect wholesale change to rectify those sins.
Do I believe that he wants to "destroy" America, as such? No. In his mind, as warped and foreign as I think it is, he doubtlessly believes he is helping to create a better America -- a utopia of sorts. That is, he is intentionally trying to fundamentally transform America into something that he believes would be better but that most Americans -- and infinitely more if they understood the full scope of what he is up to -- would consider horrific, an America that we would barely recognize as the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
On the financial front alone, Obama is single-handedly preventing entitlement and discretionary spending reform, without which -- as I've said dozens of times -- America will face financial catastrophe. There is less than zero question that he is doing that on purpose, regardless of whether you think he is otherwise intentionally damaging America. There is no question that he is acting as though he has a vendetta against the oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power industries. There is also little question that he is intentionally dividing Americans on the basis of race, economic class, gender, sexual orientation and, sometimes, religion.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize the damage Obama is doing to the republic, and we haven't even touched on his unconstitutional and lawless usurpations of authority. The question isn't whether he is intentionally destroying America. The question is whether he is intentionally pursuing a set of policies that are definitely damaging America, irrespective of his motives.
The answer is -- irrefutably, emphatically -- "yes."