Barack Obama’s presidential library isn’t even open yet, and one MAGA pastor is already treating it like a supernatural warning sign.
Todd Friel, a right-wing radio host and pastor, launched into a bizarre rant this week about the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, arguing not only that the building contains a hidden “diabolical” message, but that Obama wasn’t even supposed to be around to see it open.
“Barack Obama just opened an homage to himself,” Friel told his audience. “Color me confused, but I thought you were supposed to die and then people build monuments for you. You’re not supposed to still be alive and build monuments to yourself to the tune of $850 million.”
For most people, that’s called a presidential library. For Friel, it’s evidence that something is deeply wrong.
The Obama Presidential Center, scheduled to open later this month in Chicago, includes a museum, a public library branch, gardens, athletic facilities, a playground, and community gathering spaces. The Obama Foundation describes it as a civic and educational campus designed to inspire community engagement and preserve the history of Obama’s presidency.
But Friel sees something much darker.
According to him, the building itself is communicating a hidden message.
“It’s intended to say this country is bad, it needs to be brought down, it needs to be fundamentally changed, and God doesn’t exist,” he claimed.
That’s quite a conclusion to draw from a library.
Friel spent much of his program arguing that architecture itself is political and that the Obama Center’s design represents an attack on traditional values.
“You don’t walk into a building and decide what it means,” he said. “The building decides what it wants you to feel about reality. Because buildings preach.”
Apparently, the building is preaching now. And according to Friel, it’s preaching Marxism.
The pastor went on to describe the center as “atheistic,” “anti-Christian,” and “Marxist,” insisting that Obama is still trying to “fundamentally transform America” through architecture.
At one point, the rant became so abstract that it sounded less like a discussion of a museum and more like an attempt to decode secret messages from a concrete structure.
“He no longer speaks with his lips,” Friel said of Obama. “He speaks with architecture.”
The claim that Obama wasn’t supposed to live to see the project open was perhaps the strangest part of the entire tirade.
Presidential libraries are typically established after presidents leave office, not after they die. In fact, every modern president from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Bill Clinton has seen his presidential library open during his lifetime.
But somehow Obama’s library has become the latest object of outrage in a political movement that increasingly seems capable of turning almost anything into a conspiracy.
A museum? Suspicious. A library? Dangerous.
A former president attending the opening of his own presidential center? Apparently proof that civilization is under attack.
The Obama Center opens later this month.
Watch the vide below:
