Barack Obama owes his position to his membership in a class that is destroying America: the intellectualoids -- shallow people able to fool others into believing they possess superior intellects.

In his 2007 book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele did an excellent job of explaining how and why such a small man might have been on his way to making such big history. Although Mr. Steele’s final assessment of what the outcome was going to be was incorrect, he nevertheless coined two important cultural terms -- Challengers and Bargainers -- that were polite enough to be used in a benign sort of way when categorizing the two main types of officiating blacks that have defiled our civic square. According to the Challenger-Bargainer theory, Barack Obama was one of the most attractive, articulate, and “bookish” Bargainers that America had come across since the Civil Rights movement, ergo his successful candidacy.  

Shelby Steele concluded that Barack Obama was a Bargainer because he did not necessarily hold the sins of slavery and Jim Crow against white Americans. He was a black person willing to give whites a pass on transgressions of the past so long as they did not “see” his color when he sought to become a member in any one of their proverbial country clubs. And of course in his case, it didn’t hurt that he was half white. This as opposed to Challengers, especially those working in politics, media, and academia, who not only delighted in using left-leaning institutions to taunt whites with the sins of their assumed past, but who had also figured out how to make sizable incomes from such bullying tactics. We now know that Obama was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He had been a Challenger all along.     

Now when I had previously referred to Barack Obama as a small man, I meant his intellect, or more specifically his poorly trained mind. I believe that Obama is a fundamentally slothful person, with an intellect to match, who has been allowed to hide this vice from everyday people because of Ivy League pageantry. He is an example of an “intellectualoid,” someone with the general appearance of a man or woman of deep learning, but lacking the breadth of knowledge and depth of reason to generate new ideas of utility and significance.

During his 2008 campaign, people who understood the tenure track culture of American higher education knew that there was no way that Obama could have been a constitutional law “professor” at the University of Chicago without having had published a single article for a scholarly journal, like the one his father had written for the East Africa Journal in 1965, or a book on constitutional law; nor do we have any record of Obama presenting papers at academic conferences or being awarded research grants for his work.  Despite all of this, New York Times white intellectualoid Nicholas Kristof’s musings on candidate Obama exhibited the exact nonsense that had people taking Obama seriously in the first place.

If Obama is elected as now seems likely, he’ll be the first real out-of-the-closet intellectual in the White House in many years.

But at this point, trying to convince the obtuse masses of this fraudulence is hopeless. Although Obama’s posing as an esteemed academic was and continues to be one of his most egregious deceptions, I believe that it’s now best to focus on the rest of the intellectualoids, especially the black ones, that Obama’s presidency has enabled and will leave behind.  

Intellectualoids are fairly easy to recognize. They are the “best and the brightest” in our society, people with top degrees and social connections who have positioned themselves (or been positioned) to have a great impact on our culture of politics, race, education, and economics. But at the same time, intellectualoids have severe knowledge deficits when it comes to understanding the great religious and intellectual traditions (Judeo-Christianity and the seven traditional liberal arts) that have built their civilization. They have a knack for coming up with catchy turns of phrase and sounding articulate about what they believe are their own original concepts. Minimal investigation usually reveals that they are only one or two steps ahead of the general public regarding their depth of knowledge.  Ultimately, their exclusively secular knowledge is just that -- temporal, belonging only to the present world.  These are people who would never be able use extended reasoning to make cogent arguments for the progress of Western Civilization based on an inter-disciplinary understanding of its history.     

Higher education has been producing intellectualoids who have been raiding the riches of our civic square for decades.  But it may be the rabid race-obsessed blacks among them that have made the most gains from the fall of American intellectual culture. Black intellectualoids have been allowed to profit from their race-obsessions because of a complicit white progressive establishment that views their university-certified intellectual status as uniquely profound. Their intellectual inferiority tends to be more pronounced than that of their white counterparts because of racial policies that enforce lower entry standards for blacks into various public and private institutions, especially higher education. The black intellectualoid, especially in this age of Obama, is now an unfortunate cliché of American mainstream society.

Black intellectualoids can be either Challengers masquerading as Bargainers or just unabashed Challengers. To qualify, they must hold at least two degrees (ideally the degrees should come from a combination of an Ivy League university and a prominent HBCU, i.e., Historically Black College or University).  When they are not able to make the cut for law school (even with the help of Affirmative Action policies), they either major or have advanced degrees in any one of the dubious cultural sciences that most universities have now reduced themselves into offering like: Africana/Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, or LGBT Studies. Eventually, their unspectacular post-secondary work leads to some sort of professorship at a top-tier university that needs to show that blacks are equally represented at their institutions. If they become university chairpersons, they can only do so for newly created and unserious cultural studies departments. (This is why the white progressive establishment made such a huge deal about Obama being president of the Harvard Law Review. They wanted to show that he did not fit the same pattern of the typical black intellectualiod.)

The most unintelligent of the pack will almost always major in Education, partnering up with Big Gay to found charter schools in inner-cities where the aggressive implementation of “tolerance and diversity” enhanced curricula goes unnoticed because of higher than average state-test scores. Their numbers are also now increasing in what used to be our nation’s best seminaries, where they prepare to become ordained to spread over-the-top religious heresy that compliments their political heterodoxy.   

To become regarded as public intellectuals, they must have achieved all of the requisite bona fides in order to lay the groundwork for their cult of personality. With the help of various agents, they begin to export their experiences of dealing with bigotry and hatred in the mainstream to the white middle classes by means of public radio and glossy magazine interviews, film documentaries, autobiographical books, and symposium type speaking engagements, where more often than not, they pose as Bargainers to sell their product successfully.

If the whites give the project the thumbs up, then the black middle classes, the hordes of working and lower class blacks and their media outlets are invited to join in, thus turning the cult of personality into a “movement.”  At this point it becomes all too necessary for the Bargainer to shift gears and to begin challenging the very whites who gave him a seat at the table in the first place. Black people who choose to opt out of all of this are immediately labeled as Uncle Toms, Aunt Jemimas, or self-hating blacks suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

This trap is set and laced with poison; and it is only a matter of time before the careless or unsuspecting are caught and prominently displayed for public shaming and rebuke. Sometimes, violence ensues if those being shamed do not offer immediate apologies and make themselves ready for public retribution. The careless are those, usually whites, who publicly or privately (not knowing that they were being taped) dared to call into question the self-righteous indignation of the black intellectualoid by asking for an explanation regarding his way of thinking about public things. The unsuspecting are those who dared to use millennia-old authoritative standards when assessing the judgment of the black on a host of civic issues that are fundamental to our nation’s well being. In short, the rebuked dared to reason with the black intellectualoid, which they found out was a big mistake. The black intellectualoid is not interested in logic. He is not interested in the well-being of this country. He is not interested the consequences that those falsely accused will have to face -- vandalized property, probable job loss, or death treats. He’s interested in money.                        

In the end, it’s all theater and sport. This is just about people, the black intellectualoids and the people who support them, making a profit. Both groups are deeply morally deformed. But what is all of this costing us? How many more race riots and police killings will be organized around unproven law enforcement brutalities? How many more social media uprisings against innocent targets? How many more public K-12 social justice schools that produce students who cannot read or write properly? How many more children will be called racist for posting pictures of themselves with tans?

If we are to lose America, must we lose it like this? 

Reach L.E. Ikenga at: https://www.facebook.com/edgeconversations