If nothing else, 2015 offered a rolling reminder of the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency with its numerous parallel events and template-setting episodes that have now come to a full head of hateful steam in the emergent American Serbia of the mind, if not deed. The embodiment is Donald Trump, presidential candidate, notorious birther, resident American fascist and bomb-thrower.

If hope and change were the Obama buzzwords in 2009, the lesson of 2015 is that a bunch of overstimulated, hopelessly right-wing pseudo statesmen haven’t changed, grown up, dropped the sub rosa race-bait narrative—even as Obama delivered on his fair share of what he promised way back when.

Don’t ask me why Obama’s race is still an issue; ask Lou Dobbs. The immigrant-bashing news anchor blabbed to the Fox masses about how Obama only became president because he played the “race card,” a curiously timed outburst given that Dobbs made it just two weeks ago.

One suspects the true motive for the race-card redux politics has to do with an inevitable pivot to the gender card embodied by Hillary Clinton. To beat Clinton, goes the takedown logic, you must first lynch Obama all over again.

Having failed its first black president, is America ready for its first woman president? Not if Trump has anything to do with it, as the GOP frontrunner’s sick and weird comments about Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate would indicate.

Trump’s obsession with genitals was one of the more telling developments as the year wound down and the GOP establishment continued to grapple with a Trump beast of its own unleashing. Trump’s fallback position when it comes to women is to be grossed out by simple bodily functions, and his emergence as a legitimate candidate for president in 2015, as party standard-bearer at 39 percent in the polls and rising, signals the arrival of an acceptably visceral politics of disgust, disgrace and demeaning language—with all the wink-nod whiffs of malice and conjecture about that Kenyan socialist dictator ever at the ready, because it’s all his fault.

The conflation of Islamophobia and Obamaphobia is the persistent backdrop that defines a reactionary and highly personalized politics around Obama, and that dynamic really took off this year in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks.

When Trump says that Hillary got “schlonged” by Obama as he did last week, he is invoking the racial slander of the Old South, in which accusations of black men raping white women were used to justify lynchings. Trump is not alone in vowing a phallocentric outburst of ISIS carpet-bombing to settle the score.

But why is that anything new?

The first year of Obama’s presidency was dominated by efforts to hold off the collapse of the American economy and undo the damage wrought by the smirking failure who previously occupied the White House. As he rolls into his last year as president, Obama appears to have largely succeeded on that front, but you’d never know it.

Then as now, Obama and his accomplishments are drowned out by the pugnacity, the sneers, the lies and the anger that regularly emits from so-called victims of Obama’s presidency and their enablers in the political-media establishment—blue-collar workers of the white persuasion left in a new-economy wilderness of shifting demographics. They are content to gloat about their anti-intellectualism as those voters continue to cling to the guns and religion that made them hate Obama in the first place.

The most recent outburst from the ramparts of dumbed-down America came in the form of a classroom lesson, a Virginia school and a teacher who had offered a lesson in calligraphy late in 2015 that utilized Arabic text. Parents were outraged, they were disgusted, and they were scared, and a compliant mainstream media gobbled up an all-too-familiar set piece that gives credence to the foolish vagaries of spittle politics.

In 2009, Obama thought it would be a good idea to tape a pep talk for kids headed back to school that September, and made available a speech for schools to show students if they chose to do so. Many did not, as fearful white parents freaked out at the idea and demanded that their children not be exposed to the half-white, non-legitimate menace. There’s a timeless quote from a Colorado parent that made the rounds back then that continues to resonate, six years later: “Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me,” Shanneen Barron told CNN. “I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now.”

That all sounds familiar, and the subtext was obvious: Maybe those people’s kids need to hear that garbage from Obama, but not mine. And when the feared socialist-indoctrination speech turned out to be some pretty wholesome stuff about staying in school and doing your homework, the fear-lovers and schlong-mongers of the right just blew it off and moved to the next available outrage—over whether the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting was an act of terrorism and why didn’t Obama say as much, even though he did say as much.

This obsession over that word, and its deployment, was in full force late this year, which found some of the media at its absolute desperate worst following the San Bernardino shootings. The Los Angeles Times flagrantly champed at the “Is it terrorism?” bit for days as it reported on San Bernardino, until such time as it was able to offer fear-jacking teasers like this: “Follow the Times‘ latest coverage of the worst terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.”

The implication was obvious, even if the fact patterns couldn’t have been more starkly different. In one attack, a coordinated group of fanatical Saudi Arabians hijacked four jet airplanes, killed 2,996 people and brought down some of the most iconic buildings in the world. In the other, 14 people were murdered at a holiday party. If that’s the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11, then someone’s doing a pretty good job at limiting these sorts of things.

But no, the shrieking narrative that followed was that Obama has totally failed to keep Americans safe for the past seven years. And yet when last spotted on Twitter in 2013, Barron was selling Napa wines in her home state of Colorado and appeared to have survived Obama and his regime of terror.

Twenty fifteen was also the year that Black Lives Matter emerged as a much-needed movement against a segregationist criminal-justice system. It was no surprise that the reaction to BLM was furiously reactive.

The blacks are getting militant, Bill O’Reilly just wet his pants in fear, and don’t you know it but all lives matter. My favorite Internet meme of 2015 addressed this idiocy by noting that just because you want to save the rainforest doesn’t mean to hell with all those other trees.

But the sort of over-Tweeted, table-turning, first-thought, worst-thought reactions that met the BLM movement served only to distract from the real menace: the mean-season undertone held Black Lives Matter as a bunch of thugs, possibly of the Muslim persuasion, who should shut up and get back to work at McDonald’s. Therefore, Obama was consorting with Muslim thugs and he hates cops. If you don’t want to get shot, comply.

That particular cake was also baked in 2009, during the infamous Henry Louis Gates arrest, and its aftermath. Gates, an esteemed and elderly Harvard professor, who happens to be black, was arrested on disorderly conduct charges after getting uppity with a white police officer who had detained him, or tried to, in Gates’ own home—the officer had followed up on a call that someone had broken into the house.