Former President Obama sat down for a Q&A session for students the other day with a professor at Hamilton College, and the MeidasTouch Network got the exclusive video of that interview.
Obama theorized what the media and Congress’s reaction would have been if his administration banned Fox News because they criticized one of his policies. He also criticized Trump’s fascist attacks on protected free speech, especially Trump’s policy of “ferreting out” student protesters for deportation, which he characterized as an attack against our fundamental American values.
Obama, who was a student at Columbia (B.A.) then Harvard (J.D.) decades ago, also slammed his almae matres and prestigious law firms that have hastily capitulated to the anti-democratic demands of Trump’s regime for the sake of appeasing his illegal executive orders. He said that both universities have large endowment funds with enough resources to sustain the elite standards of their academics and rigorously fight against Trump’s harassment of their students, faculty and campus policies. And the former president, who was an effective constitutional lawyer before serving in elected office, said law firms should stand up, take risks, be litigious and make the case for our civil liberties in the face of Trump’s escalating inconceivable tyranny.
Obama ends the Q&A with a call for more disaffected citizens to speak up and resist the attacks on our values at home and those we defend around the world. The former president also reiterated that we, the people, became complacent and took our constitutional norms for granted and now we have a maladministration that does not respect the rule of law at all. So we, the voters, must educate ourselves, engage with our neighbors and be willing and ready for the battle to dismantle Trump’s idiotic broligarchy. Only then can we rebuild and strengthen our democratic institutions to prevent another fascist takeover like this from ever occurring again.
President Obama’s speech was powerful. And it’s encouraging for our national resistance to have a great leader of the Democratic Party say out loud, how most of us feel about our current authoritarian predicament. You can watch the full video here.