I think it's important to highlight just how malicious this thread is, but I don't think I'll be able to do it without referencing Obama's latest book - self-indulgent paean that it is.

So here goes.
(Thread) https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1351175956992548870

In A Promised Land, Obama reveals a couple of things in his writing that isn't quite as obvious in his previous two memoirs.

1) He has a very odd tendency to brush aside considerations from the people he claims to agree with, and

2) His self-importance bordering on narcissism

Early on, in talking about his life while growing up, Obama joins together a few disparate thoughts. His response to racism, his grandfather's lackadaisical patriotism, and his own idea of America.

This is where these tendencies leap out.

Here, Obama vaguely foreshadows a prevalent theme in the book: how he responds to the social limitations of his Blackness

Note the juxtaposition. That he, a racially aware & pragmatic young man, had the discipline not to "claim victimhood" as other Black people reflexively would

It isn't possible for him to simply say he learned to swallow his anger, pridee, or whatever. To make his strength of character pop, he has to contrast himself against the undisciplined and emotionally immature Black people who see a threat in every cracker they come across

Next be talks about patriotism in his family. While he pivots to compliment his grandfather's patriotic morals, be begins by backhandedly insulting his granddad's surly and cynical tendencies (this comes up a lot when speaking about his grandfather)

Again, note the contrast

Now here is the most egregious part. Read these paragraphs and see if anything leaps out to you.

To make it clear: the genocide of Indigenous people, enslaving Black people, imperialism abroad (i.e. The occupation of the Philippines, the annexation of Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Guam, the plunder of Latin America), the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Iraq Wars...

"Yeah yeah, I got all that."

On the other hand, Walden Pond, an airplane taking flight, and a country singer performing for prison inmates.

The material reality of America and the lives it ruins matters not at all in Obama's imagination. What's important is what he thinks America is, or should be.

And in his mind, the people who point out America's evils are simple buzzkills. Gnats flitting around, taking his mind off the America that *explains* him.b

Back to the tweet.

Obama sees himself not in Dr. King the man, but Dr. King the *idea* that explains him. The man who withstands beatings, racial slurs, and a bullet in the mouth to help make America the idealized version of itself that makes sense in his own mind

And if Dr. King could hack it, so should we.

Violence, even in self-defense, cannot make America what it could become. Which puts the responsibility on the Good People of America to stand by peacefully while they are neglected, brutalized, starved, and worked to death.

*That's* your America.

The America that explains Barack Obama is the America that might today, tomorrow, or next week be the death of you.

Don't worry though.

He gets that.