According to Heather MacDonald in her City Journal article, the troika of Obama, Duncan, and Holder are convinced that black disciplinary problems in the school system can be the result only of racism.  As a result, they have launched a policy which will predictably result in great harm to teachers and minority students and in fact exacerbate the problem.

And so the Departments of Education and Justice have launched a campaign against disproportionate minority discipline rates, which show up in virtually every school district with significant numbers of black and Hispanic students. The possibility that students' behavior, not educators' racism, drives those rates lies outside the Obama administration's conceptual universe. But the country will pay a high price for the feds' blindness, as the cascade of red tape and lawsuits emanating from Washington will depress student achievement and enrich advocates and attorneys for years to come.

MacDonald brings up the important issue of Obama's conceptual universe.  According to MacDonald, it is simply inconceivable to Obama and his surrogates that there is any other explanation for the educational performance of black students.  Their minds are closed on the issue.  Their conceptual universe is sealed against taking any contrary ideas seriously.  Their minds have been loaded and locked.  Loaded and locked with what else? one wonders.

Frank Marshall Davis, an important operative in the American Communist Party, was Obama's mentor from his adolescence until his departure to Occidental College.  Davis's last admonition to Obama was:

"They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s---."

Loaded and locked with the idée fixe that talk about equal opportunity and the American way is all a bunch of s---? 

D'Souza (2016) sees Obama's mindset as locked into the anti-colonialism meme of his dream identification with his forbears.

The basic precept of the anti-colonialist worldview is that the great disparity of wealth between the West and "third-world" countries is a result of imperialism, colonialism, and expropriation -- in other words, theft.  Whether or not Obama buys into the anti-colonialist worldview primarily through identification with his reconstruction of his roots or whether that is just one factor is open to debate.  But D'Souza's documentary, nonetheless, makes a strong case that the anti-colonialist worldview is very much a part of Obama's mindset.

Charles Krauthammer points out that Obama persists in the belief in an illusory international community and that the concept of an international community is at the center of his foreign policy

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community. What community of interest is there between, say, the United States, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Burma?

Obama's mind is made up. An illusory international community is the font of his foreign policy, and he is impervious to empirical evidence that no such community exists.  And he cannot or will not conceive of the fact that making an illusory body the centerpiece of his foreign policy has resulted in a trajectory of failure.

Jenifer Rubin, the "conservative" commentator for the NYT,  thinks that Obama's mind is loaded, locked and impervious to empirical evidence on many other issues as well, including health care and job-creation.

Backing up D'Souza's thesis, the distinguished economist and political commentator Thomas Sowell writes that it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that Obama had his mind made up at an early age -- that he knew then as he knows now the real truth about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s---.

After reading Barack Obama's book "Dreams from My Father," it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth - and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.

That being the case, even though Obama purports to value open discussion of alternative views -- and he does seem to listen to contrary views with a polite disdain or bemused indifference -- it is really all just a parlor game to convince the American public that he has an open mind.

Thomas Sowell goes on to call Obama's arrested development "confident ignorance."

Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence.

But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.

Thomas Sowell further points out, as have others, that Obama used his college and graduate studies to further cement the worldview he imbibed in his pre-college days.  He picked up the verbal and intellectual armory of trans-national, anti-colonialist, critical race theory-peddling professors and teachers.  In college and graduate school, Obama sought out only the professors who reinforced his set views and ran with only a crowd of like-minded students.  His conceptual universe was and is frozen -- frozen with the idea that America is an innately racist, imperialist nation and that the only cure is that American power be diminished and American sovereignty be subsumed under world governance of some (illusory) international community.

Of course Obama does not state and defend his vision for America.  The American public is too brainwashed by talk of equal opportunity and the American way and all that s--- to understand his vision.

"Outside his conceptual universe."

"Impervious to empirical evidence."

"Confident ignorance."

The qualities one looks for in a president?