"I believe the most compelling explanation of Obama's actions is that he is, just like his father, an anti-colonialist"
About this Quote
D'Souza is doing something more aggressive than political critique: he's writing a motive story that turns biography into indictment. By framing Obama as "just like his father", he smuggles in heredity as destiny, inviting readers to treat ideology as bloodline rather than a set of choices made in public, under scrutiny. The move is rhetorically tidy and morally loaded: it bypasses policy argument (what did Obama do, and why?) and replaces it with an origin myth (who is he, really?).
"Anti-colonialist" is the key piece of branding. In a different mouth it could signal solidarity with liberation movements or skepticism toward empire. Here it's coded as suspicion: a suggestive label that can imply resentment, disloyalty, even hostility to the American project, without having to say so outright. It's a way of making certain policy decisions - diplomacy, multilateralism, critiques of US power, domestic redistribution - feel like symptoms of a single, foreign-rooted agenda.
The context matters: this kind of claim flourished in the Obama era's anxiety economy, where questions about belonging and legitimacy were constant background noise (birtherism, "real America" rhetoric, and the obsession with Obama's middle name). D'Souza's intent is to consolidate those diffuse suspicions into a clean narrative hook. The subtext is less "Obama holds postcolonial views" than "Obama is driven by inherited grievance against the West", a framing designed to make disagreement feel like self-defense rather than politics.
"Anti-colonialist" is the key piece of branding. In a different mouth it could signal solidarity with liberation movements or skepticism toward empire. Here it's coded as suspicion: a suggestive label that can imply resentment, disloyalty, even hostility to the American project, without having to say so outright. It's a way of making certain policy decisions - diplomacy, multilateralism, critiques of US power, domestic redistribution - feel like symptoms of a single, foreign-rooted agenda.
The context matters: this kind of claim flourished in the Obama era's anxiety economy, where questions about belonging and legitimacy were constant background noise (birtherism, "real America" rhetoric, and the obsession with Obama's middle name). D'Souza's intent is to consolidate those diffuse suspicions into a clean narrative hook. The subtext is less "Obama holds postcolonial views" than "Obama is driven by inherited grievance against the West", a framing designed to make disagreement feel like self-defense rather than politics.
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| Topic | Freedom |
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