President Obama launched an extraordinary, gratuitous attack on Fox News at a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University on May 12, 2015.  That portion of his remarks has received considerable media attention, particularly from Fox itself.  But the most disturbing part to me came shortly after that assault when he said (according to Real Clear Politics’ report), “And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues…” (emphasis added).

So, Obama wants to compel the media to change how it reports on social issues in order to force his political opponents to change the way that they think.  Let that sink in.  Is that a policy a president should advocate?  Is that the way our media should operate?

It might be easy to ignore or shrug off this remark, but one should consider its context.  Not only have their been numerous calls on college campuses to limit discourse considered unhelpful to the “progressive” agenda, through free speech zones, broad bans on topics (as at Harvard), or banning speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Obama himself called for limiting free speech in a forum at Harvard Law School as long ago as 1991.

This would not be a surprise at all to people who have researched his radical past, such as Stanley Kurtz and Joshua Muravchik.  Kurtz literally wrote the book on Obama’s radical past, exposing relationships with Marxists and other denizens of the far Left much deeper and more extensive than mainstream reporters had bothered themselves to uncover.

Muravchik independently corroborated those findings and concluded that “Obama comes to us from a background farther to the Left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever.” He then immediately and presciently predicted, “This makes him an extremely unlikely leader to bridge the divides of party, ideology, or, for that matter, race.”

When Alinskyite Obama, the farthest Left president in our history, talks about how “we’re going to have to change how the media reports,” we should all sit up and listen – and take due precautions to prevent him from doing just that.  He evidently wants the news media to be even more obedient and supportive than it has been so far, which is chilling.