Obama's 'JV Team' Built a Caliphate, Premiums Doubled and the FBI Chased a Russia Hoax

Ask conservatives what changed in America under Barack Obama and a familiar list comes back: ISIS, Black Lives Matter, antifa, a war on police, a law that opened the door to government messaging at home, the Russia hoax, pricey Obamacare and Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Here is what the record shows on each one, from the government's own files and Obama's own words.

ISIS: from 'jayvee team' to caliphate

The group that became ISIS was not born under Obama. It began as al-Qaida in Iraq, and the State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization in 2004.

What happened on Obama's watch was its comeback. In December 2011, as the last U.S. troops left Iraq, Obama told soldiers at Fort Bragg, "we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq."

Two years later, the group had taken Fallujah. Asked about it by The New Yorker's David Remnick in January 2014, Obama answered: "The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant."

In May 2014, the State Department added the name Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to the group's terrorist listing. In June, it seized Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, and declared a caliphate. In August, Obama was asked in the White House briefing room about striking the group in Syria.

The record: ISIS's roots go back to 2004, but it rebuilt itself, took Mosul and declared its caliphate under Obama, after U.S. troops left Iraq.

Black Lives Matter

By its own account, Black Lives Matter began in 2013. Three organizers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, started #BlackLivesMatter after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin.

Obama did not stay out of it. Six days after the verdict, he went to the White House briefing room and said, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago."

It was not the first time he weighed in on a local police case. In July 2009, six months into his presidency, he said at a televised news conference that "the Cambridge Police acted stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own home. In the same answer, he admitted, "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that."

After Ferguson in 2014, organizers from 18 cities went home and started Black Lives Matter chapters, according to the group's history.

The record: Accurate. Black Lives Matter is a product of the Obama years.

The war on police

In 2016, Obama's last full year in office, 66 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty, according to the FBI. That was up from 41 the year before, a jump of 61%. Seventeen of the 66 were ambushed.

The worst came that July. On July 7, 2016, a gunman killed five officers in downtown Dallas at the end of a protest march against police shootings. Ten days later, three more officers were killed in Baton Rouge.

At the Dallas memorial, Obama warned against painting all police as bigoted. He also told the grieving city, "America, we know that bias remains."

The record: "War on police" is a political phrase, but the FBI's numbers are not. Officer killings by criminals jumped by 25 in a single year.

Antifa

Small antifa groups were around before Obama. According to the Congressional Research Service, U.S. antifa activism traces back to the 1980s, and Portland's Rose City Antifa, founded in 2007, is the oldest U.S. group to use the name.

What changed in Obama's final year was the scale and the violence. A June 2017 joint bulletin from California's State Threat Assessment Center and the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center found that clashes between antifa and right-wing extremists in the state had "escalated in violence" from February 2016 to May 2017.

It started in Anaheim on Feb. 27, 2016, where, the bulletin says, "Several dozen Antifa extremists initiated an altercation" with Klansmen "that led to multiple injuries and three stabbings." On June 26, 2016, a white nationalist rally at the state Capitol in Sacramento ran into antifa extremists, "resulting in a clash involving knives, bottles, bricks, and chunks of concrete." The bulletin added that some of those turning up "probably are traveling to these events from outside cities and possibly other states."

Then came Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2017, the day Obama left office. Federal prosecutors said more than 200 people formed a "black bloc" in masks and dark clothing in downtown Washington, some "armed with hammers, crowbars, wooden sticks, and other weapons," and moved about 16 blocks through the city. Police arrested 234 people. The first to plead guilty to a felony admitted breaking windows and throwing "a brick, large rock, or piece of concrete" at uniformed officers.

By August 2017, CRS says, antifa groups had gained prominence following the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va. And in September 2025, the White House said antifa "uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide."

On Sept. 22, 2025, President Trump designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and ordered federal agencies to "investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations" tied to it.

The record: Antifa's roots are older, but it grew from scattered local cells into a high-profile nationwide movement starting in Obama's final year. Trump is the president who went after it.

The 'propaganda' law

On Jan. 2, 2013, Obama signed the 2013 defense bill. Tucked inside was Section 1078, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act.

For decades, material that the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, produced for foreign audiences had to stay abroad, with only narrow exceptions. Section 1078 rewrote that. It lets them "make available, in the United States," the films, video, audio and other material they put out overseas, and it says nothing bars them from any form of communication just because "a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed" to it. It took effect in July 2013.

The law did keep a line saying no funds "shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States." So "legalizing propaganda" is how critics describe it, not the law's own wording. But it did take down the wall between government messaging made for foreigners and American audiences.

That agency, renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media, is the one Trump ordered in March 2025 to shrink to "the minimum presence and function required by law."

The record: The law is real and Obama signed it. The word "propaganda" is the critics', not Congress's.

The Russia hoax

On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane, its investigation of the Trump campaign. Special Counsel John Durham's 2023 report found the FBI moved on "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence." FBI records, Durham wrote, showed that at the time "the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials."

Durham also found that on Aug. 3, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and other top officials on intelligence about an "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services." The FBI, Durham wrote, never opened any inquiry into it.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had already found "at least 17 significant errors or omissions" in the FBI's applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In July 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released records showing that after a Dec. 9, 2016, White House meeting, intelligence chiefs were tasked with a new assessment on Russia "per the President's request." Gabbard called it "a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government."

The record: The Trump-Russia collusion case started under Obama, on intelligence Durham called raw and uncorroborated.

Obamacare's price tag

In June 2009, Obama promised the American Medical Association: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period."

Then came the bill. A May 2017 analysis by HHS's planning office found the average monthly individual-market premium in the 39 Healthcare.gov states rose from $232 in 2013 to $476 in 2017, an increase of 105%. In 62% of those states, 2017 premiums were at least double the 2013 average. In Alabama they more than tripled, from $178 to $575.

The report said the new market's older, sicker mix of customers and "adverse selection pressure" were likely "a significant cause" of the jump.

The record: Accurate. Premiums roughly doubled in four years.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

The phrase is a remix of "Bush Derangement Syndrome," which columnist Charles Krauthammer coined in December 2003. The Trump version took hold after Trump entered the race in 2015, in Obama's final years, and the Russia case that began on Obama's watch kept it going long after he left.

The record: Fair, as timing.

The bottom line

All eight hold up on the record, with three footnotes: ISIS and antifa both have older roots, and "propaganda" is the critics' word, not Congress's. Antifa's leap from local cells to a nationwide movement began on Obama's watch, and Trump has since designated it a terrorist organization.

Obama ran on hope and change. By his own government's numbers, the change included a caliphate, a 61% jump in police killed by criminals, premiums that doubled and an FBI case opened on raw, uncorroborated intelligence.