Rummel was critical of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, alleging that they were seeking to establish an authoritarian, one-party state. He believed that global warming was "a scam for power" and opposed Obama's carbon-trading scheme. Rummel thought that Obama killed off a democratic peace that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been pursuing. Rummel argued that there was a leftist bias in some parts of the academic world that selectively focused on problems in nations with high political and economic freedom and ignored much worse problems in other nations. Related to this, he also criticized the tenure system.