Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  The permanent dissatisfaction was evident in the succeeding blizzard of Birther minutiae that struck the Internet. Obama’s teenage mother, Stanley Ann Durham, had registered for a college course in Seattle ten days after the supposed date of birth of her son, and how likely was that? The address in the newspapers was discovered by sleuths to be one where the Obamas had never lived; it had been rented by Barack Obama’s maternal grand-parents and therefore might have been a fraudulent attempt to provide a Hawaiian address for a baby born elsewhere (the clear problem here being the health-department-generated announcements). As to the question of how the supposed birthplace forgers managed to have such prescience concerning the need, several decades later, to supply the infant with the credentials necessary for a run at the U.S. presidency, Birthers replied that perhaps the original object had simply been to furnish the boy—unhappily born abroad—with American citizenship.

  The Farah and Corsi Show

  Mainstream journalists in the United States and Europe receive all kinds of e-mails from PR companies and lobbyists promoting products, events, books, even arguments. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, an “M. Sliwa” would send me—and hundreds of other writers—e-mails drawing our attention to various disobliging analyses of Barack Obama. My first, cursory thought was that M. Sliwa was a political lobbyist for someone supporting the Hillary Clinton campaign. When, however, the Democratic primaries were over and the e-mails kept coming, I began to think this was a Republican source. In the summer of 2009, I noticed that M. Sliwa was promoting the Birther cause.

  M. Sliwa turned out to be Maria Sliwa, an ex-policewoman and—exotically—sister of the red-bereted New York Guardian Angel subway vigilante Curtis Sliwa. She was running a PR company in New York, serving a number of clients in various walks of life. I wrote to her and asked whether she would be willing to be interviewed on the subject of Birtherism. She replied that the best person to talk to was her client Joseph Farah, founder, editor, and CEO of the Internet news agency WorldNetDaily. Once based in Oregon, WND now had its offices near Washington, D.C., where about twenty employees mostly published medium-length pieces on its highly professional-looking site, WND.com. It also published books and sold related merchandise.

  Farah was unwilling to be interviewed in person, but he agreed to discuss Birtherism over the telephone. He was persuasive and affable, with a hint of a laugh in much of what he had to say. The personality on the phone seemed to fit in with his most widely used publicity photograph: a handsome man with tanned skin and a black mustache, displaying a wide smile of very even white teeth.

  He had first heard about the birth certificate issue, he told me, during the early part of the election campaign. “Obama is an unusual guy,” said Farah. “He lived in Indonesia, his father was a Kenyan, he was born in Hawaii—so there were a number of questions. . . . There were also no records from his university and college career. So what we knew about him was what we got in his autobiography—and that was the official version.” Even so, despite what Farah considered Obama’s “unusual” background, he did not focus on the question, nor did his agency, until one of its writers, Jerome Corsi, forced him to. “Jerry began talking about some of the unanswered questions, and about how no one knew anything about the birth—no doctors, no nurses, no living person—and it seemed implausible to me. That was late September, October 2008. And we didn’t get serious about it till just before the election.”

  But when Farah got serious, he got serious. “Our focus shifted to activism. I considered this issue was so critical, because the country had taken a major step toward ignoring the constitution.” WND began to argue that the electoral college should not formally permit Obama’s election until it was “proved” that he was constitutionally eligible. WND was the source of the birth-certificate-seeking billboards and some of the bumper stickers.

  Where, I asked, did Farah believe Obama had been born, if not in Hawaii? “I don’t know. I’d be very surprised if he was born in Kenya. We don’t know if he was born in the U.S., either. But you know, his mother gives birth to him in Hawaii and fourteen days later she’s in Seattle and Barack Obama, Senior, is in Honolulu. That’s not part of the official story. So you see these holes, and you say, What else is there? And all the other records, school and college, remain sealed.”

  In Farah’s version, Obama becomes a man of almost impenetrable, perhaps dangerous mystery. What in another person’s past might seem fairly interesting questions for a committed biographer are translated here into the outward signs of something unhealthy. After all, if Obama is hiding things, then they can’t be good.

  That there is more to Farah’s questioning than mere curiosity is given force when you know more about Jerry Corsi, his associate and employee, and author of “the New York Times number-one bestseller,” The Obama Nation, which could most kindly be described as a critical biography, published in 2008 with the admitted intention of opposing Mr. Obama’s candidacy. “The Obama Nation,” Farah mused, “I gave him the title of the book.” Being British and long in vowel, I hadn’t noticed the play on words before Farah pronounced the title. I was amazed, and Farah was amused. The title of a book about the U.S. president sounded—on purpose—like “The Abomination.” I wondered (though didn’t ask) whether Farah was aware of the meaning of the word. Abomination doesn’t connote something just undesirable or even hateful, but something loathsome or disgusting.

  I turned to the book. Jerome Corsi is a soft-spoken, florid, round little man, who insists on being given his full title—Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.—a Harvard qualification he wears like a knighthood. He has written many books, five of which have enjoyed the accolade “New York Times bestseller”—a more promiscuous category than many book buyers may realize. Two—The Obama Nation and the coauthored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry—coincided with presidential election campaigns (2008 and 2004, respectively), and were unflattering about senior Democrats. Most of the others are, in effect, hugely extended paleoconservative opinion pieces, usually warning against some disaster about to befall America as a consequence of its politicians’ venality and lack of patriotism. These tomes include The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada; Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil; Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians; and Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders. In his columns for WND, Dr. Corsi opines on how the “wider Panama Canal would aid [the] Chinese,” on the global-warming “hoax,” and on whether “the dollar’s collapse [could] prompt a new currency.” (The last question was posed in 2006; the answer appears to have been in the negative.)

  The claim for The Obama Nation, with its subtitle, Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, was as a “definitive source for information on defeating Barack Obama—not by invective and general attacks, but by detailed and documented arguments that are well-researched and fact-based.” But an early flavor of how such research and how these facts were to be deployed could be gleaned from clues such as the title of Corsi’s third chapter: “Black Rage, Drugs and a Communist Mentor.”

  Corsi builds a tower of insinuation, rather than fact, giving full weight to what other writers might consider incidental, and in so doing sends a series of signals to primitive sensors in the oldest and darkest parts of the white American brain. He makes sure that the reader notes an odd propensity of Obama’s white mother for nonwhite “mates,” first in the shape of Obama Sr. and then in Lolo Soetoro, young Barack’s Indonesian stepfather. Corsi mentions several times that Obama Sr. was a polygamous drunk. He repeatedly invokes signs that Obama sides with his “African blood” as a matter of preference, rather than as someone might who gradually discovers himself to be black. He strenuously overemphasizes the role of Islam in Obama’s early life, and then just as deliberately interprets Obama’s links to a Kenyan politician as favoring the pro-Islamization of Kenya. There are numerous errors of fact, all of which
lead in broadly the same direction. The overall impact is to suggest that Obama is a foreigner who wishes, for atavistic reasons of his own, to undermine the old (white) USA. Obama is an abomination. If Corsi’s preoccupations have antecedents, they seem to be in the paranoias of the 1950s, which, as we’ve seen, fostered McCarthyism and which, at the cultural level, were visible in numerous films about alien infiltration and invasion. Corsi’s Obama is a political body-snatcher.

  Naturally, in the early twenty-first century, it is unfashionable to wear such prejudices too openly, and fortunately the Internet provides opportunities to express them in more covert fashion. But not, perhaps, as covertly as everybody might like. After the publication of The Obama Nation, Corsi himself was the target of scrutiny, and it was discovered that in the recent past, while contributing to the website Free Republic, the doctor had delivered himself of some fruity opinions. “Isn’t the Democratic Party,” he had asked, “the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA?” Of Muslims he wrote: “RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters—it all goes together.” “After he married TerRAHsa,” he demanded, “didn’t John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm [sic]? He also has paternal gradparents [sic] that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?” Kerry became “John F*ing Commie Kerry” in subsequent posts, while Mrs. Clinton was “Hellary,” the “fat hog,” who couldn’t keep “BJ Bill” satisfied. “Not lesbo or anything, is she?” Corsi speculated. There was much more in this vein.

  Unfortunately for Corsi, several of his media appearances to promote the Obama book were plagued by the presence of liberal commentators who pointed out what lay behind his claims to dispassion. Corsi’s replies were peculiar examples of infantile evasion. “You haven’t mentioned all my apologies for those statements,” was his standard, slightly plaintive response, rather as a child might crossly insist that he had said he was sorry for hitting his sibling—while fully intending to do it again.5

  This, then, was Farah’s Corsi. But what about Corsi’s Farah? It soon became clear to me that the agreeable Farah, with his outwardly professional organization, was something of a shark in guppy’s clothing. First there was his tendency toward exaggerated theses based on unreliable evidence. Take this exchange from an interview conducted in the summer of 2005 with Jamie Glazov for the Internet magazine FrontPage, titled “An American Hiroshima?” Farah is arguing that Al Qaeda not only has a nuclear weapon, but has already smuggled it into the United States.

  FARAH: Several reporters and top intelligence analysts, people including me . . . have been working quietly and independently for years on this issue of al-Qaida’s acquisition and plans for nuclear weapons . . . and, based on the evidence, I believe some of that arsenal has already been delivered to this country.

  GLAZOV: Could you expand a bit on the sources for this information? How do we know they are reliable?

  FARAH: About 90 percent of the information I have gathered on this plan is from publicly sourced documents available to you and anyone else who wants to spend the time looking for them. It’s only the analysis and interpretation that requires skilled—and sometimes unnamed—intelligence sources.

  In other words, it’s all on the Internet, if you know where to look and you’re as clever as I am. But it begs the obvious question, which Glazov then asks.

  GLAZOV: Why wouldn’t the Bush administration secure our borders? What are the advantages of leaving them unsecured? Is it too politically incorrect to secure them?

  FARAH: No, I believe there is another more sinister reason. There is a master plan for global governance being plotted in meetings of groups like the Council on Foreign Relations. You can read its reports. And I believe this open-borders policy is a direct result of those plans, which have been secretly adopted by our highest leaders, including President Bush.6

  To recapitulate: Farah argues that the Bush administration will not deal with an imminent threat of terrorist nuclear attack in the United States because of a secret scheme for global governance. And Joe Farah can be even madder than that. In a 2003 article for WND, he praises a woman, Clara Harris, who murdered her unfaithful orthodontist husband in front of his teenage daughter by running him over several times in her Mercedes. “If I were on that jury,” Farah concluded, “I would find Clara Harris not guilty. After she was sprung, I’d give her a medal. She did the world a favor. She may have acted emotionally. She may be sorry for what she has done. But, frankly, she did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.”7

  Perhaps more significant, though, was a story run by Farah in February 2008. Under the headline “Sleaze Charge: ‘I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex with Obama,’ ” it detailed the claims of a Minnesota man, Larry Sinclair, who alleged that in 1999 he had met Obama “in an upscale Chicago lounge.” They supposedly got into Sinclair’s limousine, where Obama smoked crack cocaine and Sinclair snorted powdered cocaine given to him by the future president. It was also in the limousine, said Sinclair, that the sex took place. The photograph accompanying the story depicted a man of limited physical charms, suggesting either that the drugs were very powerful, or that Sinclair had gone into a decline in the intervening years.8

  The real significance of the Sinclair story—consisting as it did of an utterly uncorroborated and unlikely series of accusations—was Farah’s readiness to run it, and to report it in such a way as to give it credibility. In this the report recalled a series of accusations leveled a decade and a half earlier at the last Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, accusations in which a younger Joseph Farah had played a role.

  I had heard Farah speak about this period on a far-right radio show, when he had mentioned in passing the toll that his part in the campaign against Clinton had taken on him. In our interview I asked him what he had meant. Back then, he told me, he was operating out of Sacramento, as head of an organization called the Western Journalism Center. The WJC had been active in publicizing a series of scandals purportedly involving Clinton, all of them far more serious than the Lewinsky affair. “The Clinton scandals got rolled up into the one—Lewinsky—that was least significant,” Farah maintained. “With the real issues, none were fully answered. Like Vince Foster [the Clinton aide who died of a gunshot wound in July 1993]—to conclude that he committed suicide, that takes faith!”

  Having drawn attention to this and a number of other supposed Clinton crimes, Farah believed that he was targeted for harassment by authorities operating at the command of the White House. “Twice my offices were broken into in 1995 [and 1996]. Nothing was stolen. We were in a big complex, with various businesses and several suites, yet only our office was burglarized. Then the IRS came and announced an audit. I asked why. ‘It’s a political case, and it’s a national decision,’ I was told. It took nine months. We gave ’em a desk and in the end got a clean bill.” But the result was to make Farah feel threatened, and not just financially. “I went down [to Arkansas in the late nineties] to testify at the ‘boys on the tracks’ case [this case, described later, concerned two boys found dead on railway tracks] and”—he laughed—“I thought my life was at risk. I wrote about it beforehand, I wrote, ‘I’m going to Arkansas, and this might be my last article!’ ”

  Going to Arkansas

  Farah, the son of Christian Lebanese immigrants, started his political life in the center left. The way I heard him tell it, he was one of those who then swung to the right when Ronald Reagan was president—a “Reagan Democrat.” However, it is clear that Farah’s journey took him beyond the fiscal conservatism and sunny patriotism that characterized the former California governor to a position of intense hostility to those forces he saw as undermining the moral center of America. When he was editor of the Sacramento Union (now defunct, but then described as the “oldest newspaper in the West”; Mark Twain worked for the paper in the mid-1860s), Farah presided over an agenda that was avowedly antiabortion, antifeminist, anti-gay rights, and pro-faith. In 1991, after Farah’s stance failed to prevent a slide in circulati
on—despite his employment of a new front-page columnist, Rush Limbaugh—he left the paper.9

  Farah’s next project, the Western Journalism Center—a hybrid of activist organization, news agency, and publisher, issuing a newsletter, Dispatches—was an almost perfect forerunner for the structures that would soon prosper on the nascent Internet. Among the board of advisors were such then mainstream conservative luminaries as Marvin Olasky and Arianna Huffington—whose capacity for political reincarnation has been kabbalistic. Money was raised from a number of right-wing sources, including James Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union and a coeditor of the Strategic Investment newsletter.

  But not until after the defeat of George H. W. Bush by Bill Clinton in November 1992, and the miasma of rumors and alleged scandals that rose to surround the new administration, did the WJC begin to achieve significance. Farah’s organization funded research, journalism, and advertisements in mainstream newspapers championing work that appeared to accuse President Clinton of involvement not just in minor acts of corruption but in murder as well.

  Farah joined a group of media lobbyists agitating for public acceptance that in Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, the nation had opted for one of the most morally flawed, if not criminal, politicians in the history of the republic. It was in Clinton’s Arkansas past, this group believed, that the evidence of the president’s unique character defects was to be found—an assertion given wider credibility by the tortuous, complex, and sapping process of the public inquiry into the so-called Whitewater Affair, the supposed cash-and-land scandal whose origins dated back to the late 1970s. It was the investigation of the Whitewater Affair that led, bizarrely, to the celebrated Starr Report on President Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky nearly twenty years later. In journalistic terms Whitewater was conjured into life on the pages of the New York Times, but once there it mutated into an extraordinary series of books, website postings, radio shows, and videos, most of them containing one or more conspiracy theories concerning the Clintons and Arkansas. What eventually took Farah to the southern state was a libel action at the tail end of one of these theories.