No, Obama didn't say he wants ordinary people to 'surrender to powerful sovereign'

By: Ishita Goel
August 14 2023

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What is the claim?
A clip of Obama is viral on social media claiming that he thinks ordinary men and women are "too small-minded to govern their own affairs" and they should "surrender to a powerful sovereign." In the viral clip, we can hear Obama saying, "and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build...Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign." Archived links to the posts are here and here. 

Source: (X/Altered by Logically Facts)

However, the audio has been edited from a speech Obama gave in 2014 that has since been shared to connect Obama to the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory.

 The narrative is viral since 2014 on X and on Facebook (Source: X/Facebook/Altered by Logically Facts)

What are the facts?
Using a reverse image search, we found that the video is from 2014. On March 27, 2014, The Obama White House posted a longer version of the clip, captioning it, "President Obama Speaks at Palais Des Beaux Arts." The description reads, "President Obama delivers remarks at Palais Des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Belgium. March 26, 2014." We found the transcript of the video posted by the Washington Times on March 26, 2014, with the headline "President Obama gives speech addressing Europe, Russia on March 26."

(Source: YouTube/The Obama White House)

Using the original video and transcript, Logically Facts has determined that two separate sentences from the speech have been edited together. Obama said the first sentence -for the international...to build at the 1:34 mark and the second sentence -Ordinary men and women...sovereign at the 3:22 mark.

In the original speech, Obama praised the cooperation of the EU, NATO, and the U.S. Further, speaking about the relationship between the state and individuals and solving the conflicts between them. 

He mentions the example of Europe and states through “centuries of struggle......belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose, the belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding. And those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonialists across an ocean, and they wrote them into the founding documents that still guide America today, including the simple truth that all men and women are created equal.”

Obama's mention of an "all-powerful sovereign" was in reference to outdated views of power. At 3:07, he argues, "Those ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power. This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign. Often this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others and that individual identity must be defined by us versus them, or that national greatness must flow not by what people stand for, but what they are against."

The verdict
The viral clip shows an edited version of Obama’s speech which has distorted his statements. He never said he wants people with "small minds" to "surrender to a powerful sovereign." We have therefore marked this claim as false.