Politics & Power Quote by Jon Voight

Voight’s sentence is engineered less as an argument than as a chain reaction. It begins with the softening preface, “It seems to me,” a folksy disclaimer that signals humility while smuggling in a sweeping accusation. Then it flips a presidential choice into an apocalyptic transfer of control: if Obama wins, “then” a lineup of polarizing figures “will gain power.” The certainty of that causal “then” is doing all the work; it turns association into inevitability.

The roll call itself is the payload. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers, Pfleger: names curated not for policy relevance but for how they sound in the American political imagination - race, radicalism, anti-war militancy, fiery sermons. Voight compresses them into a single composite villain, implying Obama is either their proxy or their permission slip. It’s classic guilt-by-proximity dressed up as concern.

The phrase “need to demoralize this country” adds a psychological charge: the threat isn’t just bad governance, it’s national humiliation. That’s why the final kicker, “help create a socialist America,” lands like a genre cue rather than a program. “Socialist” here functions as a moral label, not a description of legislation, meant to trigger Cold War anxieties and culture-war reflexes.

Context matters: this kind of rhetoric spiked around 2008 as celebrity political speech migrated into talk-radio logic - simplified villains, emotional certainty, and the promise that you can read the whole future off a few scandal-linked associations. Voight isn’t trying to persuade skeptics; he’s trying to harden an audience into vigilance, turning a vote into a referendum on national identity.