Michelle Obama doesn’t have to take a backseat to her husband in stoking racial divisions.
She is every bit the race baiter he is.
However, one of the stories she used to claim that America is racist has been exposed as a flat-out lie.
In 2012, she told a story on David Lettermen’s show about a particular time she was shopping at a Target.
A shorter woman had asked for her help with getting something off a shelf, clearly not recognizing who she was.
Writing in Conservative Review, Michelle Malkin describes the scene:
“Back in 2012, you may remember, Obama sat down with David Letterman in one of her endless, popularity-enhancing pop culture appearances. She bragged about her ability to shop incognito at Target (does she get a secret commission every time she mentions the store?) and told a warm and fuzzy story about helping a fellow customer who didn’t recognize her. The shopper innocently asked Obama to retrieve laundry detergent from a high shelf.
“I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down,” the first lady recounted, and the shopper joked, “Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.” Obama beamed as she told Letterman: “I felt so good” doing an everyday good deed. Letterman’s audience cheered at the “first ladies, they’re just like us!” theater.”
However, Malkin notes that as the years went on and the Black Lives Matter protests kicked into high gear, Michelle Obama morphed the story into one of racial bigotry.
In her new telling, the woman asked her for help because of racism, assuming black people worked at the store and couldn’t be real shoppers.
Malkin writes:
“Just a few years later, however, the encounter morphed into a tall tale of rampant racism, which she cunningly reshaped for People Magazine in 2014 during the aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri riots and Black Lives Matter protests.
“Even as the first lady,” she moaned, “not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me” at a Target store “was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf.” The headline of the article? “The Obamas: How We Deal With Our Own Racist Experiences.” ABC News added that Michelle Obama claimed such “incidents are ‘the regular course of life’ for African Americans and a ‘challenge’ for the country to overcome.”
Last year, Obama persisted in plying and fine-tuning her false narrative at Tuskegee University’s commencement ceremony — decrying the “sting” of “daily slights” she blamed on racism, including unnamed “clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores.”
Her new story is a lie.
But it was a useful lie for Democrats.
In order to fire up their voters, Democrats wrapped both arms around the Black Lives Matter movement and embraced their claims of systemic racism in America.
But this isn’t the first time Michelle Obama has engaged in racially charged rhetoric.
She offended many Americans when she gave a speech about how she wakes up every day in a house built by slaves.
The Obamas are, thankfully, leaving the White House.
And many Americans will not miss their race baiting and brand of grievance politics.
