In June, Barack Obama appeared at the Connecticut Forum for an extended conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. I became aware of the event via this tweet:
Barack Obama says the quiet part out loud — it’s time to “experiment” with “new forms of journalism” with “government regulatory constraints.”
“Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use social media in ways that… pic.twitter.com/Rp7TENsqmE
— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) October 29, 2025
Curious about the rest of the conversation, I tracked down a transcript of the event. It reveals Obama as hopelessly old-fashioned when it comes to media and access to information, and either childish or sinister–take your pick–with regard to freedom of speech.
Obama regrets the current media landscape with its diversity of voices and perspectives:
What is done is we’ve lost a monoculture. We’ve lost everybody watching Walter Cronkite. We’ve lost everybody watching M*A*S*H, or Mary Tyler Moore, or All in the Family, or Roots. We’ve lost everybody getting a Time magazine, and on the cover is this new novel or new novelist, so everybody’s got to read that book.
That monoculture was liberal, so Democrats rue its passing. Instead, we now have diversity. Obama doesn’t like it, because lots of people disagree with him:
One of the most important challenges I think our democracy faces is how do we regain some common sense of truth, not absolute truth, but rough basic truth. In 2020, one person won the election, and it wasn’t the guy complaining about it.
This is Obama’s #1 example of falsehood in the public domain, but is he right? There is evidence that, at a minimum, there were several million inexplicable votes cast for Joe Biden–the most popular presidential candidate in history, apparently–in 2020. Barack Obama has no interest in addressing this evidence, and may not even be aware of it. He just wants to smear the man who followed him as president.
[F]acts are important! I think one of the most pernicious things that has happened is we have a situation now where we’re not just arguing about policy, values, or opinions, but basic facts are being contested. That is a problem because then the marketplace of ideas or the democracy don’t work.
Of course we are arguing about facts! That is the whole point. I did nothing but litigation for 41 years, and in every case, the parties disagreed about the facts. The ultimate decision can be characterized as an opinion–was the product defective, was the contract breached, was the Sherman Act violated–but that opinion always depended on the facts. If I could have written the facts, I would have won every case. But the main point of a lawsuit is to determine whose version of the facts is correct, or, at least, closer to the truth. The same thing holds in politics.
This is where Obama’s childish approach becomes dangerous:
We’re now in a situation in which we are having these just basic, factual arguments, and that further undermines trust.
Those in power, those with money exploit that space in which nobody knows what’s true.
What Obama doesn’t mention is that it is his party that has the money. Now it gets worse:
It doesn’t matter if everybody believes it, it just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying, “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.” That’s what’s happened. That’s what’s happened in one of our major political parties, you have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true, but we will pretend like it is.
Obama thinks that “one of our major political parties” is the Republicans, but it was the Democrats who used the Russian Collusion Hoax to disable the first Trump administration, and lies about Joe Biden’s corruption, as disclosed on Hunter Biden’s laptop, to grease the skids for Biden in 2020. Democrats knew these claims were false–the Russia Collusion Hoax was concocted and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee–but they rode them relentlessly to victory, and Obama was in on it up to his ears.
Now Obama gets to the point:
But part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism, and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion; we don’t want diversity of facts. …
By the way, it will require, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models ….
If we don’t want “diversity of facts,” it means that the government is allowed to dictate “facts” that all Americans are obliged to believe–or at least pretend to believe, as happened in Communist countries. We then will be living in a totalitarian state. Which is, I think, the increasingly overt goal of the Democratic Party.
