Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  OBAMA DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

  Obama is Hitler. Obama is a Communist. Obama is Muslim. Obama is not a citizen. Obama is the Antichrist.

  If you agree with any or all of these statements, go see a doctor. You might be suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome—pathological hatred of the president often mistaken for healthy patriotism.

  It’s a hydra-headed hysteria—cut off one accusation and another emerges in its place. The condition is apparently contagious, communicable through a steady diet of hyper-partisan talk radio and Wingnut Web sites. Its ugliest manifestation has led some to call—and even pray—for the death of the president. The fury of Obama Derangement Syndrome’s emergence shocked even the most jaded political observers.

  The day after Election 2008 ended, the Obama resistance began. The Drudge Report had been featuring ominous black-and-white photos of candidate Obama on its popular home page for days. Now banner ads on the site announced the beginning of an organized “Patriotic, Resilient, Conservative Resistance” to the president-elect at the Grassfire Nation Web site, bridging the ugliest rhetoric of the campaign with what would erupt in the Tea Party protests and town halls.

  Wealth redistribution and higher taxes? We Resist! Government takeover of more and more of our lives? We Resist! Open borders, amnesty and undermining of our uniquely American culture? We Resist! Taxpayer-funded abortions and a radical anti-life agenda? We Resist! The weakening of our military and retreat in the war on Terror? We Resist! Socialized health care? We Resist! The end of marriage and the exaltation of LGBT rights? We Resist! International taxation and submitting our nation to the ideals of “global citizenship”? We Resist! The Courts stacked with leftist judges who betray our Constitution? We Resist!1

  Obama’s opponents were already invested in a nightmare vision of the future, a far-left socialist dystopia opposed only by a small band of militant patriots. This fear-based appeal drew half a million visitors in its first month online and succeeded in registering a quarter million people before Inauguration Day.2

  The word “resistance” is loaded with history: It was invoked by white opposition to Reconstruction after the Civil War, it was reborn as an organized policy of “massive resistance” during the southern desegregation battles a century later and more recent militia movements proclaim the virtues of armed “leaderless resistance.” But this call to arms was relatively civil compared to the raw expressions of hate incubated down at the netroots.

  Only minutes after the election, a death threat was posted to the Fox News Web site FoxForum—“Let’s have a huge parade . . . How about Nov 22 . . . in Dallas . . . Barack can ride in the back of a convertible with his wife . . . they could drive by the School Book Depository.”3

  Over at fringe Web site American Sentinel, an unhinged culture warrior named Michael Eden fired off his own welcome to the White House: “Barack Hussein Obama and his Democratic lackeys get to wear the bull’s-eyes on their foreheads for the duration of the next election cycle . . . don’t let a bunch of appallingly blatant hypocrites tell you that you owe Obama one more iota of respect than they gave Bush . . . It’s time to start burning down their houses and salting their fields.”4

  A white supremacist Web site, Stormfront, founded by a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, reported 2,800 new users in the first twenty-four hours after the election.5 One poster on the site—identified as Dalderian Germanicus of North Las Vegas—wrote, “I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs’ come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.”6

  The crazy extended right into the halls of Congress. It was a Republican from Georgia named Paul Broun who got first dibs on the post-election comparisons of Obama to Hitler and Soviet dictators. In an interview with the AP, Broun referenced Obama’s proposal for a civilian reserve corps—an idea endorsed by the Bush administration to handle postwar reconstruction efforts, but which had become a fearful talking point on the far right with Obama in power. “That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.” Broun clarified his statement by saying, “We can’t be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany.”7 Broun’s office refused to issue an apology.

  Even churches couldn’t offer safe harbor. The Sunday after the election, the Rev. Jay Scott Newman told his South Carolina parishioners they should not take communion if they voted for “Barack Hussein Obama” because “our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president” and that “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”8

  It might be tempting to dismiss these statements as the work of a few well-placed cranks, congressmen and clergy. But the Secret Service reported more threats against Obama than any other president-elect.9 The politics of hate has a trickle-down effect, as the residents of Madison County, Idaho—which voted 85 percent for McCain-Palin—found out days after the election when a schoolbus full of second- and third-graders chanted “assassinate Obama.”10

  All these incidents occurred in the week after the election—so much for a presidential honeymoon.

  Praying for the President’s Death

  “I hate Barack Obama. You say, well, you just mean you don’t like what he stands for. No, I hate the person. Oh, you mean you just don’t like his policies. No, I hate him . . . I am not going to pray for his good. I am going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.”11

  Here endeth the lesson at the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. That’s where Pastor Steven L. Anderson fired off a straight-to-the-point sermon on Sunday, August 16, 2009, titled “Why I Hate Barack Obama.”

  “Obama is overturning the U.S. Constitution, overturning everything we believe as a country, overturning some 200 years of history,” Anderson thundered from the pulpit. “He is the revolutionary and it’s a socialist/ communist revolution. We are the counter-revolutionaries saying no, we don’t want a change.” He even offered parishioners a view into his own private Obama prayer: “Break his teeth, oh God, in his mouth; as a snail which melteth, let him pass away; like an untimely birth of a woman—that he thinks—he calls it a woman’s right to choose, you know, he thinks it’s so wonderful, he ought to be aborted. It ought to be, ‘Abort Obama,’ that ought to be the motto.”12

  Anderson can be dismissed as a deranged fringe figure, Elmer Gantry on a hate bender. Pastor Wiley Drake over in Orange County, California, is a more troubling phenomenon. He served as a second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2006 and 2007. In 2008, he received 47,000 votes as the vice presidential nominee of the American Independent Party, alongside conservative activist Alan Keyes. But that’s not what he’s best known for these days.

  Pastor Drake first surfaced on the national political radar when he declared that the death of Kansas abortionist George Tiller—murdered in church on May 31, 2009—occurred because he had prayed for it. “George Tiller was far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler,” Drake told Fox’s Alan Colmes, “so I am happy. I am glad that he is dead.” Then he took a deeper leap into infamy by calmly announcing that he was also offering imprecatory prayers for the death of “the usurper that is in the White House . . . B. Hussein Obama.”13

  I wanted to see what a man who prays for the president’s death is like in person, so I arranged to meet him on his home turf. The encounter provided a surprising portrait of someone living with a full-blown case of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

  Drake’s First Southern Baptist Church stands less than a mile from an amusement park, Knott’s Berry Farm, in Orange County. It’s a beige cinderblock building constructed in the 1950s. In its front yard, a broken wooden set of Ten Commandments juts out of a rock. A sign reading “ETERNITY” hangs o
ver a flickering Coke machine.

  Out back, a genial gray-haired man greets me, looking every inch the western grandfather of five. He’s wearing a red shirt with black suspenders and a senior citizen-friendly big-buttoned cell phone hung on a string around his neck. This is the man who is praying for President Obama’s death.

  Wiley ushers me back into the empty church, past a sign saying “God Bless America,” and we sit in the front pew. Hard-core haters are rarely friendly, their lives rarely fascinating, tending instead toward bitter isolation. But Wiley Drake’s life story, it turns out, has a Forrest Gump quality.

  Wiley at thirteen, shouting as nine African-American students are escorted by armed U.S. soldiers into a Little Rock, Arkansas, school: “2-4-8 we’re not gonna integrate!” (“I grew up with the prejudice like everybody else did and thought I was right for a number of years,” he says regretfully.) Wiley at eighteen, on the USS Kitty Hawk when the captain said on the loudspeaker, “We’ve been ordered to go to the South China Sea and to furnish air support for what’s going on in a place called Indochina.”

  The late sixties found Wiley married and ministering to the poor at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles and to Jesus Freak hippies on Huntington Beach. Incongruously, he also joined the John Birch Society and got a degree in communications from the University of Southern California. A brief stint in the private sector working for global manufacturing conglomerate Ingersoll Rand found Wiley at the U.S. Embassy in Iran days before the gates were stormed and hostages taken. He was already souring on his fellow Southern Baptist in the White House. “Carter began to have cocktails in the White House, and that to me was a dead giveaway,” Wiley sniffs. “He wasn’t as strict as he thought he was.”

  Back in Arkansas and back in the church, Wiley was part of a group of pastors approached by Bill Clinton as he tried to regain the governor’s mansion in 1982. “He said, ‘I lost because I didn’t have the support of the church,’ and he said, ‘I want to put morality back in the governor’s mansion.’ . . . I said, ‘Hey, this guy sounds good.’ So I literally helped Bill Clinton get re-elected as the Comeback Kid. I very quickly found out that I had been flimflammed and sold a bill of goods; so then it was my desire to come back to Southern California.”

  Like many a fundamentalist, Wiley is a biblical literalist with a fondness for the Old Testament: “Just because man changed the law doesn’t mean God’s law is changed,” he explains. “The Bible says that if a man lays down with a man, or a woman with a woman, it deserves death—and that’s why the average homosexual only lives about less than 50 years of age on either side, man or woman. And now we’re being told that we can’t preach the Bible and that if we do it’s a hate crime.” This is the Right-Wingnut’s vision of Big Brother—a liberal oppressor in conflict with God’s law.

  But strict readings of the Old Testament have been used to justify slavery and segregation from pulpits in the past. Where would Wiley draw the line today? “Do you believe then that disobedient children should be stoned, like it says in the Old Testament?” I asked. Wiley hesitated and chose his words carefully. “Yes, I believe that if a child is continuing to be totally disobedient, totally reprobate, then stoning would be biblically correct and legally correct.”

  As Wiley sees it, his devotion to speaking the word of God is what’s caused all this controversy. “I’m known as a Birther, you know. I don’t believe Obama was born in this country. He’s an illegal alien and so forth. And so I began to pray what the Bible teaches us to pray and that is imprecatory prayer.

  “An imprecatory prayer is very strong. Imprecatory prayer in Psalms 109 for example says if you have an evil leader above you, you pray that Satan will stand by his side and you ask God to make his children fatherless and his wife a widow and that his time in office be short . . . Other psalms say when they speak evil, God will break out their teeth and when they run to do destruction, God will break their legs.”

  To those offended by the idea of praying for death, Wiley shrugs. “I’m praying the word of God. I didn’t write it. Don’t get mad at me.” But threatening the president’s life is a felony, and when word got out about Wiley’s imprecatory prayers he says the feds came over for a visit. “Within a week I had Secret Service people knocking on my door at the house saying we want to talk to you. And I said no; I’m not talking to you. I don’t have to talk to you. I have freedom of speech. You want to talk to me, see my attorney.”

  After the election, Wiley became one of the first to file a lawsuit alleging that Obama was constitutionally ineligible for office because he was born not in the United States but Kenya. Drake says that Obama had been on his radar even before the campaign. “When he was still in Chicago, I had heard that the Communist Party had chosen him to be the one that they would bring about in this nation. I heard a testimony of a businessman who had been at a meeting overseas where they said, ‘We’re gonna bring a man to America that’s going to be the next president and he’s gonna be coming from Africa’ and so forth. They said, ‘In fact, we even know his name—Barack.’ So I had heard early on that he was the proverbial Manchurian candidate.”

  And what do you think will happen to America if Barack Obama is in office for a full two terms?

  “I think most preachers like me are going to be in jail,” says Wiley. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with H.R. 645, but it is the bill to set up at least a half a dozen encampments around the country, and one of the reasons . . . is to have a place to intern those that are faith-based organizations.”

  “Where do you get your information?” I ask.

  “Well, the Internet, of course . . . WorldNetDaily is one of my favorite Web sites.”

  Having hit the Manchurian candidate and government plans for concentration camps in short order, I decided to go down the Obama Derangement Syndrome checklist with Wiley.

  “Do you believe Obama’s a Muslim?”

  “Oh absolutely. No doubt about it. No doubt in my mind he’s a Muslim . . . he sort of likes Christianity, but he is primarily a Muslim.” Check.

  Next. “Some people call him Hitler or call him a communist. They use words like ‘treason’ or ‘traitor.’”

  “Well, those are all terms in my opinion that fit,” says Wiley. “If you look at how Hitler used children, he came up with the whole idea of kindergarten to brainwash the children. And Obama has come up with this whole concept of getting the children to chant and to literally worship him. He’s followed Alinsky and others. He’s very much following their pattern: to take over the country, to take us down economically. He knows that if he can take us down economically, then when the people are poor, the people will follow almost anyone, anyone that holds out any hope.”

  One final question: “Do you think that Barack Obama is the Antichrist?”

  Wiley sighed and furrowed his brow. “In my opinion, and my theological understanding of the Scripture, there will be one last days, in the last days there will be one Antichrist, but there will be several that lead up to the Antichrist, and I’m of the opinion that Barack Hussein Obama is the Antichrist.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Well, you know, in reference to the fact that the Antichrist will be the one that’s going to want to be the savior of the world, not through Jesus or God, but being the savior [himself]. We have to have medical care for everybody. We have to have all of these bailouts—control and own and operate. He has come as close to an Antichrist as anybody ever has in this country because, you know, it’s not General Motors anymore. It’s Government Motors. And he’s taken over the banks and he’s taken over everything.”

  So, to be clear, you believe that President Obama is going to bring about the end of the world?

  “Absolutely, yeah. I don’t have any idea how and when. But I think there’s going to be some resistance . . . We’re just seeing a resistance movement. We’re seeing a group of people that are saying, ‘Enough is enough. We’re not going to let Congress do this.’”

>   The prospect of a cleansing Armageddon is pleasing to this grandfather of five. “People are finally waking up. One of the things that the Bible indicates about the Antichrist is that he will force the issues so much so that there will indeed be one last big war. And I think we’re headed for that war.”

  How Obama Became Hitler, a Communist and the Antichrist

  You never forget your first Obama-is-the-Antichrist e-mail. Mine came in July 2008, with the subject header “This Should Open Our Eyes.” What opened my eyes most was that it was sent sincerely by a generally sane local attorney and family friend. We’ve had presidents called Hitler, a Communist and even the Antichrist in the past, but no president before Obama has hit the full insanity trifecta so fast. Which got me wondering: How did this happen?

  In search of answers, I wandered through the Wingnutsphere and found out how these contradictory conspiracy theories took flight from the fringe to mainstream consciousness—from e-mails and talk radio to cable news and then a protest near you. It shows the evolution of an idea, a genealogy of hate and hyper-partisanship in our time.