Nine degrees of conspiracy kookification: "The Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President"

by Ken

"It was both a good year and a bad one for conspiracy theories and theorists," says The New Yorker's Alex Koppelman in a new blogpost, "2012: The Year of the Attack of the Gay Muslim Kenyan Divorcee President."

For one thing, Neil Armstrong died. That was sad for many reasons; included among them is that now he'll never be able to reveal the secret about the moon landing. On the other hand, it was a Presidential-election year, a particularly fertile time for conspiracy theorizing. People are fixated on an enemy, and they just need to take the next step and imagine all of the diabolical things that enemy could be up to. They certainly did plenty of that in 2012. Here are twelve of the highlights of the year's conspiracy theories. For the record, none of them are true.

Alex ventures that we're "probably familiar with this one already":

1. Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

He has a little more to say about this, but let's come back to that, and for now move on to his first embellished version.You're probably familiar with this one already -- after all, it's been around since at least 2008.

2. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist.

This one, he says, comes from WorldNetDaily, "the 'birther' headquarters," which progressed to the direct-to-DVD documentary "Dreams from My Real Father," advancing the ideat "that Obama's real father is in fact not Barack Obama, Sr., but Frank Marshall Davis, an American Communist who was friendly with Obama's grandfather Stanley." Alex says, "There's no credible evidence for this. But that hasn't stopped the birthers before, so forget about that for a second." He points out that if you accept this notion, it renders "instantly moot" all of W.N.D.'s strenuous efforts to prove its birther theories.

3. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay.

(Assorted crazinesses from assorted sources.)

4. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate.

This courtesy of the ineffably insane Jerome Corsi, the man who gave us the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry. "In at least one instance," says, Alex, "Corsi connected the two theories."

5. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim.

(More pure crackpottery.)

6. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records.

"Some of the birthers," says Alex, "suspect that Obama’s applications and financial-aid records would prove that he was registered as a foreign student, or maybe that his tuition was being paid for by secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate trainers."

7. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle.

In October no less excellent a source than Donald Trump promised a bombshell revelation. "Turns out," says Alex, "that [it] was not, in fact, records that showed the Obamas almost filing for divorce. Let this be a lesson to you all: never, ever take Donald Trump seriously."

8. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers.

Conspiracy theorists on the right tend to believe that the U.S. government is terrible at everything -- except at complex statistical manipulation and at keeping secrets. People like Jack Welch actually believed that the White House would push the Department of Labor to rig the unemployment and jobs numbers to help Obama win reëlection -- and that Labor would then be able to pull off their task with no one blabbing to the press.

As a matter of fact, it seems that various parts of the government were underestimating the economy's performance before the election. Late last month, the Commerce Department revised its estimate of how much the American economy grew in the third quarter of this year up from two per cent to 2.7 per cent, a significant change. For some reason, we didn't hear much from Welch about that.

9. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he's gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he's a Muslim. And there's something suspicious in his college records. Plus, he once almost got divorced from Michelle. So he's going to lose the election, but he's skewing the jobs numbers -- and the media is skewing the polls.

For a little while, it was all anyone in the political world -- campaign staffers, pundits, reporters, observers of all kinds -- could talk about. Suffice it to say that the polls were not skewed and Nate Silver will be inaugurated as the forty-fifth President of the United States on January 21, 2013.

SADLY, ALEX HAS TO TURN TO SOME "ON-THE-ONE-HAND,
ON-THE-OTHER-HAND" PRETEND "EVEN-HANDEDNESS"

Actually, there's already something weird in his discussion of the anti-Obama idiocies. Does anyone think this is a remotely reasonable review of the history of the Obama-the-Kenyan craziness. He does say that "it's been around since at least 2008." He continues, though: "But with the President up for reëlection, it came back in a big way in 2012. Even Mitt Romney was joking about it on the campaign trail."

I'm sorry, but among the people to whom this ridiculous story matters, it never went away. Of course it got more hearing in the election year, because it was, you know, an election year. That's when issues -- whether real or imaginary -- become, at least potentially, campaign issues. Is that really such a difficult concept?

Here's how Alex lays out his case for three more crazy conspiracy theories, these "from the left":

Until now, this list may have made you think that conservatives are the only paranoid people around. Not so! Some people are more prone than others to seeing patterns of malicious intent where none exists, but that's not a left-right thing. True, there have been more conspiracy theories coming out of the right lately, but that's probably more a function of structural factors -- a Democratic President, a conservative media establishment that's built around the idea that conventional sources are lying to you -- than anything else.

That doesn't seem to me at all to explain the birther kooky conspiracy theories, which seem to me quintessential specimens of modern-day right-wing flight from reality, replaced by the movement-conservative doctrine that reality is whatever it makes you feel better to believe it is.

Here then, are his examples of liberal tale-spinning this year:

10. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them.

Here we see one of the real problems that conspiracy theories pose for society. The low tax rate that Romney has paid over the years is a legitimate issue, one that was worth discussing. The suggestion that he was so good at avoiding taxes that in some years he paid none at all, however? With nothing but speculation to support it, it was just a shiny object distracting us from the loopholes and inequities in the tax code that allowed Romney to pay as little as he did. Worse, it was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who was dangling this particular shiny object. But hey, who wants to accomplish something useful when you can fuel conspiracy theories for short-term political gain, right?

Some of this is fine, but Alex has declared at the outset about his 12 conspiracy theories from 2012s: "For the record, none of them are true." Would he care to explain how he knows that no. 10 isn't true? Willard made damn sure we didn't find out, and now may never find out. I think you could make a case that, at least in part, and perhaps in good part, his decision cost him any realistic shot at the presidency.

Which brings us to the pathetically obvious point that the birther craziness is based on nothing factual, and can be explained as the product of ignorance and delusion in an environment of churning rage based on a militant denial of reality. In the case of Willard's taxes, the founding fact is that he staked his political future on his adamant insistence that nobody would see anything more that those two years' worth of carefully manicured returns. And it's not as if this man whose principal qualification for the presidency was supposed to be his CEO's-eye business acumen knew for damn sure how important it is to have a 10-year history of tax returns for vetting a candidate, because all his VP contenders had to supply same. If it makes me a wild-eyed liberal conspiracy theorist to say that it sure looks like there's something really big being hidden in those cloistered returns, well, I guess I'll have to live with that.

11. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated.

"It was a handkerchief, people," Alex explains -- in toto. Well, I'm sorry, this is just bullshit, in now way comparable to the right-wing kookeries.

12. Mitt Romney paid no taxes, maybe for one year, or maybe for a bunch of them. And the only reason he won the first debate is because he cheated. He's got a plan to cheat on Election Day, too -- his son owns the voting machines.

Here's a good -- if not totally foolproof -- way to check if something is a legitimate issue or a conspiracy theory: if it involves the words "voting machines," it's probably just a conspiracy theory.

Well, again, I'm sorry but this one link doesn't for me begin to make a dent in all we know about the quite elaborate conspiracies Republican operatives have been engaging in at least going back to the 2000 election to tilt and where possible steal elections. (It seems worth pointing out that conspiracies that don't achieve all their objectives, or haven't yet, are still conspiracies.) Waving your hand at it doesn't make all this body of information disappear.

(Or maybe it does.)

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