Both conspiracy theories aim at the foundation of the respective president’s claim to history—Obama’s importance as the first African-American president and Bush’s leadership after 9/11. Both claims try to undermine the presidents’ essential legitimacy by writing an alternate history, one that would reveal them to be monstrous frauds with dictatorial ambitions. Proponents of the Big Lie cast themselves as populist truth tellers taking on powerful interests, but their ultimate goal is to bring down their political opponents while proving that the American people are easily duped, making their own efforts seem both misunderstood and heroic.
While some Wingnut claims take place in political theory, like casting Obama as a communist, the Big Lie often poses as scientific inquiry. Countless hours have been wasted pouring through data, learning alternate histories and ignoring the obvious while trying to get to the truth behind the Big Lie. The obsessions of the more extreme Wingnuts are impermeable to reason. Back in the eighteenth century, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, identified why: “You cannot reason someone out of something he has not been reasoned into.”
Those on the periphery have always peddled the Big Lie. What’s different now? As the fringe blurs with the base, and the Internet provides an effective platform, more people in American politics are beginning to buy into it.
The Birthers
“I don’t want this flag to change! I want my country back!” screams the lady in red at Republican Congressman Mike Castle’s Delaware Town Hall.
With brown hair pulled back and wearing an oversized red T-shirt, she’s waving her birth certificate and a tiny American flag in her left hand with a microphone in the right. “I want to go back to January 20. Why are you people ignoring his birth certificate? He is not an American citizen!” Her voice rises an octave and cracks with anger. “He is a citizen of Kenya!”1
The crowd goes nuts with screams of support. The woman known to locals as “Crazy Eileen” has brought a small army, and they have the place packed.
Mike Castle seems taken aback. After a bit of circuitous stammering, he says, “If you’re referring to the president, he is a citizen of the United States.” He is shouted down in tones that recall the crowd in Monty Python and the Holy Grail yelling, “Burn the witch!” Castle continues, “You can boo, but he is a citizen of the United States.” Crazy Eileen then led the crowd in rowdy rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance.
A video of the confrontation soon went viral and America was introduced to the “Birthers”—conspiracy theorists committed to undoing the 2008 presidential election by trying to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
To them, this president is not just anti-American but constitutionally ineligible for office. It’s the ultimate fright-wing paranoid fantasy—we have a Muslim illegal alien in the White House.
It’s all part of a carefully constructed plot: “The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out. What better way to start than at the highest level, through the President of the United States, one of their own!”2 Or so said an e-mail chain during the 2008 campaign. At the same time, Internet rumors were making the case that Obama was born not in the United States but in Kenya—his Muslim father’s home country. The ideas got linked: A poll in Tennessee found that one-third of respondents thought that Obama was either “definitely” or “probably” a Muslim or born outside the United States.3
But these Manchurian candidate myths seemed too ridiculous to mention in mainstream media until the Birther Town Hall video clip revolt crystallized a subterranean effort to raise the issue, reaching talk radio, cable news, the armed services and even the halls of Congress.
The rumor has its roots in the original Obama Haters, the PUMAs—Party Unity My Ass. It was a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter fifty-state Bataan Death March to the Democratic nomination.
In the early summer of 2008, message boards on sites like PUMAParty.com began indulging in the ultimate reversal-of-fortune fantasy—that the party nomination could be overturned on constitutional grounds. “Obama May Be Illegal To Be Elected President!” read one e-mail: “This came from a USNA [U.S. Naval Academy] alumnus. It’ll be interesting to see how the media handle this. ... WRITE TO YOUR LOCAL newspaper editors etc. Keep this out there everyday possible. Also write to the DNC too!”4
In June, the Obama campaign released his birth certificate on its Web site as part of its “fight the smears” effort. Factcheck.org and other organizations examined the document in person and declared it genuine: “Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.”5 But posters at the PUMA sites were unimpressed: “Nobody believes it’s for real, except the Kool-Aid drinkers themselves.”6
A Hillary supporter from Texas, Linda Starr, was particularly fired up by what she called “the daily misogynistic hate speech against Hillary” during the primaries. As a Democratic precinct captain in Medina County, she had volunteered for the Clinton campaign during the hotly contested June Lone Star state primary and been a Hillary delegate at the state convention. But Linda’s real talent was as an amateur opposition researcher—she’d dug up information against Republican congressional leaders like Dan Burton and Bob Livingston during the Clinton impeachment hearings of the late 1990s and was cited as a key source for CBS’s discredited 2004 investigation into George W. Bush’s National Guard records that led to Dan Rather’s replacement after twenty-four years as the evening news anchor.7 After Hillary’s concession, Linda Starr turned her attention to Barack Obama. “I determined that I was going to start digging up every bit of dirt that I could find on him,” she told me, “and that hopefully that I would find something against him that would convince the Democratic Party to dump him and make Hillary the nominee.”8
In the first week of August, as the Democrats were getting ready for their convention in Denver, Philadelphia attorney Philip Berg got a call from Linda offering a challenge. “She called me up and said, ‘Have you heard about Obama not being national born?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Well, now it’s for real, and you’re the only attorney in the country with brass balls enough to sue Obama.’”9
Berg is a Democrat and he’d also been a Hillary supporter. But he was best known as a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania and a serial unsuccessful campaigner for statewide office with a reputation as an enthusiastic litigant. In 2004, he filed a 9/11 Truther lawsuit against President Bush alleging that the government allowed 9/11 to happen and that the World Trade Center was destroyed from within.10 Now he had a new conspiracy to push.
On August 21, Berg filed the first Birther lawsuit, asking for an injunction to stop the convention from going forward, alleging that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. He faxed notices to the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and Obama campaign headquarters. He launched the Web site Obamacrimes.com the next day with Linda’s assistance. The lawsuit went nowhere. Berg told me: “[DNC chair] Howard Dean at that point should have called Obama and said ‘What’s the story, are you natural born or not?’ . . . Obviously there was collusion there and I think when it’s all said and done they should all be tried and put in jail.” The media ignored it as well. “I wish I could sue them,” says Berg, of the media. “If the American public knew what was going on here Obama would be out of office or we never would have had him in office.”
In July 2009, soon after Crazy Eileen’s shout-down of Mike Castle went viral, a U.S. army major, Stefan Frederick Cook, brought the Birther story its first national headlines when he refused deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that President Barack Obama might not be a natural-born citizen and therefore would be constitutionally ineligible to give orders as commander in chief. Major Cook, a distinguished combat veteran, appears to have been a willing pawn in the Birthers’ efforts to bring attention to their cause. He had volunteered for Afghan deployment in May, with the intention of carryi
ng out the political performance-art litigation.
The military shrugged and said since he volunteered to go to AfPak he was within his rights to change his mind. No lawsuit was needed. An e-mail or a phone call would have been fine. But they issued a statement just to be clear: “This in no way validates any of the outlandish claims made by Major Cook,” and a judge threw out the case. Unfazed, the Birthers celebrated it as a smoking-gun victory.
WorldNetDaily trumpeted the news as “Bombshell: Orders Revoked for Soldier Challenging Prez.” Cook’s lawyer, an Orange County dentist with an on-line legal degree named Orly Taitz, subsequently announced there were 170 more soldiers willing to file similar protests against the president. The blond middle-aged mother of three was on a mission.
Taitz first stumbled across the controversy while surfing the Internet. As a native of the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, she sniffed a communist conspiracy. Or maybe it was Nazi. “I realized that Obama was another Stalin,” she said. “It’s a cross between Stalinist USSR and Nazi Germany.”11 On October 25, 2008, two weeks before the election, she e-mailed the California secretary of state’s office, asking about the “eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama.” On the field inquiring how she became aware of this problem, Taitz typed “native intelligence.”
She may be crazy, but she’s not stupid. Taitz became the face of the Birther lawsuits in the media, making twenty-nine trips across the United States in 2009, filing more lawsuits and doing more than 100 interviews. WordNetDaily profiled her generously: “Meet Fierce Blonde Behind Obama Eligibility Lawsuits.”12 And she’s got the snappy name-calling sound bite down: “Obama should be in the Big House, not the White House!”13 On her blog, the tone gets a wee bit more unhinged, repeatedly calling the Obama administration the “Gestapo-SS establishment,” extending the metaphor with a call for investigation and execution: “They all should and would be tried in Nurenberg (sic) style trials for harassing, intimidating, blackmailing and terrorizing fellow citizens, for defrauding the whole country.”14
Fox News’s Sean Hannity picked up the torch, and so did another mainstream heavyweight Lou Dobbs, who had her on his radio show and segued into a CNN segment on the Cook case by saying, “New questions are being raised about Obama’s eligibility to serve as president.” 15 Dobbs, whom Taitz refers to as a “supporter,” has since resigned from the network and appears to be contemplating a political career.
With her 15 minutes of fame ticking, Taitz appeared on CNN alongside co-litigant Alan Keyes to debate the issue. I was tapped to take them on alongside my friend Errol Louis, a columnist for the New York Daily News. Taitz and Keyes were beaming in remotely via satellite, but I got to watch their pre-game rituals: Keyes had his eyes closed as if in prayer; Taitz was jumpy and pie-eyed.
Anchor Kitty Pilgrim went through a semi-exasperated three-and-a-half-minute dismantling of the Birther arguments, including the long-ago issuance of Obama’s August 1961 certificate of live birth, its validation by Hawaii’s Republican governor, Linda Lingle, and two birth announcements published in Honolulu papers.
Asked what more he needed to be convinced, Keyes’s response was an instant classic in the clueless overconfidence of conspiracy theorists: “Some evidence.”
My on-air summation was also four syllables: “You guys are nuts.”
The eleven Republican members of Congress who co-sponsored the so-called Birther bill apparently disagree. In response to the hysteria, H.R 1503 would require presidential campaigns to provide “a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate.” When asked whether Obama “is a U.S. citizen,” bill co-sponsor Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) gave a Texas two-step reply: “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him produce documents that would say one way or another.”16
But in a refreshing break from the “no enemies on the right” straightjacket, some conservatives knew that things were getting indefensibly overheated. Michael Medved memorably denounced the Birthers as “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” who are “the worst enemy of the conservative movement” and “make us look sick, troubled and not suitable for civilized company.”17
With the Birther controversy ingrained in the Wingnut history of the first year of Obama, I flew to California to reacquaint myself with birther queen Orly Taitz, this time face-to-face.
Nestled in the hills of Rancho Santa Margarita, Taitz’s law office and dental practice stand in a Spanish mission-style office park. In their cluttered corridors, she balances the demands of a small private practice with an effort to prove that the president of the United States is constitutionally ineligible for office.
Taitz greets me at the door wearing a bright purple and orange dress. She seems engaging and friendly to her employees, concerned about her clients and highly organized. Details of the full conspiracy are copied and filed inside black binders with colored tabs.
On the walls of her office are pictures of her three sons wearing their Tae Kwon Do uniforms from years past. When asked to describe herself, she says, “I am a proud mother of three sons and a wife and a professional woman who’s been working all her life.” In any other context, she would be a classic American immigrant success story, but over the span of one year she has placed herself at the forefront of a massive conspiracy theory.
“I’m just concerned that our constitutional freedoms are being taken away,” she explains. She’s established the Defense of Freedom foundation and blogs on her Web site.17 She talks about the hundreds of e-mails she gets from supporters who want to help with her work, and the death threats that are coming in daily. To show her depth of secret support, she says Sarah Palin has friended her on Facebook, along with Newt Gingrich, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Net - anyahu. Then it’s time to get down to business.
The conspiracy goes deep, and so does the paperwork. She hands me a fifty-page packet that she says is a copy of what she has sent to Attorney General Eric Holder. It is a hodgepodge of letters and legal documents, Web site homepages and data lists.
Taitz shows me Obama’s official certificate of live birth and contrasts it with the long-form certificate. She presents an oft-touted piece of Hawaiian legislation, Act 182, which makes it possible for children born out of state to receive birth certificates, but the bill itself indicates that it didn’t take effect until 1983.
She’s got two copies of Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth certificate, which she says were sent to her anonymously. “So I had both the registrar copy and a hospital copy from Kenya but yet there wasn’t one proper birth certificate from the United States.”
Then she hands over the mother lode, her newest project: “I have put together a database showing he used thirty-nine different Social Security numbers. . . . This is a felony. For those kind of criminal activities, for those kind of felonies, people spend years and years in prison. And when you multiply this by thirty-nine, we’re talking a life sentence.” She shows me a new affidavit from an Ohio private investigator swearing that Barack Obama’s social security number—which she gives me digit for digit—was issued in the state of Connecticut in the mid- 1970s but actually belonged to a man born in 1890.
“This is mind-boggling that we have the president and commander in chief of all U.S. military who is using a stolen Social Security number. I did investigation to find out where he got it and what I found out was that his grandmother, Madeline, volunteered in Oahu Circuit Court in Probate Department. Now, Probate Department is the department where you get the Social Security numbers.” That’s right. Obama’s grandma stole him a social security number back in the ’70s.
When you’ve got that many different ways to say that someone is an evil psychotic fraud, it’s possible there is some projection going on. And then there’s her legal record to date—a perfect .000 batting average. Phil Berg had warned me about Taitz in paranoid hall of mirror terms, saying, “I really think she’s a plant. I think she’s
been put there to disrupt everything to make us look like fools.” But could an otherwise intelligent, sincere and accomplished woman be so single-issue insane, like the political equivalent of a functioning alcoholic?
When I got to the Long Beach airport I began paging through the full fifty-page packet full of documents and screen shots that she gave me. I started to read her open letter to Attorney General Holder, which was cc’d to fifty state governors and the entire U.S. Senate. It demanded “investigation and immediate action” into fourteen counts of “criminal activity/crimes,” among them: cyberspace crimes, impersonation of a military officer, libel, defamation of character, intimidation, harassment, interference with judicial proceedings, breaking into the computer system of the Supreme Court, voter fraud and forgery.
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America Page 17