Birther

===

promoted to 2nd on 12/17 re-cycling ~ Mueller?

SEE WATTERS 2025

mult nodes (some early overlap with truther?)

proxy for crazy, rt wing, xian?

trIed reboot on kamala?

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WTF?

April 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): We didn't want to kill Barack Obama, we just didn't think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born. And then Hillary, we didn't want to kill, we were just so afraid of her, we thought she'd kill us first.

But we do this in other countries. The CIA literally uses the same exact propaganda to stir up cultures in other countries to topple dictatorships we don't like. Now, we're doing it in our own country, and it's like almost working.

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===

mma

824

Jesse Watters promises to “get the truth” about Barack Obama's birth certificate

08/20/24

===

MMA

It’s 2024, so everyone reading this knows exactly what the deal is with birthers. We know that the Constitution requires anyone running for president to be a “natural born Citizen,” and that Vice President Kamala Harris, having been born in Oakland, California, surely qualifies.

Birtherism must be understood not as a wild conspiracy theory about where Kamala Harris and Barack Obama were born, but rather as a slur against their status as Americans. There are no good-faith legal questions about whether or not Kamala Harris is a natural born citizen, just like there were no good-faith questions about where Barack Obama’s mother gave birth to him. We all know the deal. MAGA pundits are pushing birtherism against Harris now — like they did to Obama before her — in order to signal to their audience that people like Harris and Obama are somehow less American. Regardless of your politics, these claims deserve nothing more than absolute contempt.

The biggest name currently spreading this is Trump associate Tom Fitton. You may remember that Fitton, the Judicial Watch president who is not a lawyer, reportedly advised former President Donald Trump to keep secretive government documents that the former president had stored on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. (Ironically, in 2009 — years before Trump picked up birtherism and used it to help take over GOP politics — Fitton was one of the few right-wing voices who spoke dismissively about birtherism against Obama, saying he had not “seen any credible evidence Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the presidency.”)

CitationVia @TomFitton

Fitton links to an August 14, 2020, piece by John Eastman in Newsweek. Eastman is the intellectual architect of Trump’s attempt to remain in office despite losing the election, which culminated in January 6. (A judge has since ruled that Eastman should be disbarred for his actions.) We addressed this at the time when then-Trump campaign official Jenna Ellis reposted Fitton’s identical tweet.

The following note is on the top of the Eastman column that Fitton now links to:

Editor's note, 8/14: This op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia. We apologize. The essay, by John Eastman, was intended to explore a minority legal argument about the definition of who is a "natural-born citizen" in the United States. But to many readers, the essay inevitably conveyed the ugly message that Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color and the child of immigrants, was somehow not truly American.

The op-ed was never intended to spark or to take part in the racist lie of Birtherism, the conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing Barack Obama, but we should have recognized the potential, even probability, that that could happen. Readers hold us accountable for all that we publish, as they should; we hold ourselves accountable, too. We entirely failed to anticipate the ways in which the essay would be interpreted, distorted and weaponized.

As we said in our earlier note, this essay was an attempt to examine a legal argument about the difference between "natural born" and "naturalized," the latter being ineligible to hold the office of president. In the days since the op-ed was published, we saw that it was being shared in forums and social networks notorious for disinformation, conspiracy theories and racist hatred. All of us at Newsweek are horrified that this op-ed gave rise to a wave of vile Birtherism directed at Senator Harris. Many readers have demanded that we retract the essay, but we believe in being transparent and are therefore allowing it to remain online, with this note attached.

None of this has stopped other MAGA figures online from pushing this ridiculous, bigoted argument now that Harris is poised to be at the top of the Democratic ticket. And yes, free speech gives them the right to spread this bigoted bullshit.

As the late, great Simon Maloy wrote in 2019:

The Obama-era birthers never came anywhere close to proving their accusation, and it didn’t matter one bit. The only thing they cared about was getting people to treat their obvious bullshit with a modicum of seriousness. The country’s most famous birther was challenged repeatedly to back up his outlandish allegations about President Barack Obama; he never did, but flogging the racist conspiracy theory made him a hero to the political movement that eventually elected him president.

===

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only white male xian are real am fit to lead

loomer fever swamp base of escalator

mma 1 24

re-birtherism

On January 8, former President Donald Trump shared a Gateway Pundit post on X falsely claiming that Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is constitutionally disqualified from a “presidential or vice presidential candidacy.”

The false argument, which made its way to Trump through a far-right blog and a notoriously Islamophobic conspiracy theorist, follows a separate, simmering conservative media trend of calling Haley by her first name, Nimarata, rather than the middle name she goes by. Taken together, the two lines of commentary expose the racism behind some of pro-Trump media’s Haley coverage. This attack comes as Haley's polling numbers approach Trump's in New Hampshire.

The Gateway Pundit article the post is based on builds on a post from another pro-Trump blog, American Greatness, which itself pressed the same points as a blog from Rumble host and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer: Since Haley’s parents weren’t U.S. citizens at the time of her birth, these conservative outlets argue, she is merely a birthright citizen, and not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires for presidents and vice presidents.

This is simply not true: Haley is constitutionally eligible for either office, with her South Carolina birth qualifying her as a “natural born citizen.” The immigration status of her parents is legally irrelevant, despite right-wing media’s long-standing hatred for birthright citizenship and repeated attempts to use these arguments against enemy politicians.

On X (formerly Twitter), the author of the American Greatness piece credited Loomer’s “great investigative work” for having “uncovered” the fact of Haley’s parents’ citizenship -- a secret which Haley wrote about in her 2012 autobiography, and shared with a newspaper in 2015. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone also promoted Loomer’s so-called investigative work before it ultimately reached the former president.

The racist claim notably echoes some falsehoods levied against former President Barack Obama who, among the many conspiracy theories about his birth, also faced incorrect allegations that he was ineligible for office because of his Kenyan father. (Right-wing influencers also made similar claims about Vice President Kamala Harris.)

But this is not the only commonality between right-wing media coverage of Obama, Harris, and Haley. During the Obama years, conservative media frequently referred to him by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, in a racist attempt to otherize him for what he called his “funny-sounding name.” Again, similar things happened with Harris. And now, some pro-Trump voices are beginning to deploy a similar playbook against Haley and her birth name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.

Perhaps the most frequent example is Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, who seems to find a certain thrill in using Haley’s first name. “Yeah, that’s right. Her real name is Nimarata,” he once quipped. (Nikki, her middle name, is also her real name.)

Kirk does not exclusively or even mostly use her first name. But for months he has peppered in references to Haley as “Nimarata” while attacking her campaign, warning against her for vice president, or once as an aside while pushing restrictive immigration policy. During an interview with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, he even corrected himself after calling her “Nikki” instead.

American Greatness also had a hand in this trend, with a November debate recap mentioning her squabble with Ramaswamy. The article, which refers to her as Nikki Haley elsewhere, reserves her full name for one brief paragraph that reveals the racist attitudes at the heart of this type of coverage:

Ramaswamy then said something, to which Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley replied, “You’re just scum.” She must be right: after all, Ramaswamy’s the child of people who immigrated from India. Scum indeed!

---

birther redux kamala

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/donald-trump-has-a-long-history-of-questioning-the-citizenship-of-non-white-politicians/

===

11/18 mma

Hannity is absolutely furious that Michelle Obama attacked Trump's birther lies.

The first interesting thing about Gary Johnson is that he decided to set up his campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, just a few blocks away from the HQ of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That’s where Gary Johnson’s main Super PAC is located as well. Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.

The Salt Lake City Tribune also thought it was a little weird, so they asked about it in a story headlined"Ex-New Mexico guv bases his presidential campaign in — Utah?" which begins:

A Republican presidential candidate has landed his national campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, just a couple of blocks from the Utah governor's mansion. But it's not the White House contender you might think it is.

It turns out there’s a simple answer: Gary Johnson’s campaign chief, Ron Nielson, is based here. Ron Nielson runs a conservative polling firm called NSON Opinion Strategies, whose headquarters is the same three-story building on South Temple Road as Johnson’s campaign headquarters, and the same address as Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" nonprofit, which launched his bid for the presidency in late 2009.

Unfortunately, the SLT didn’t pry any further, because this is where things start to get interesting. For one thing, NSOM has a history of working with GOP right-wingers including crotchety Mormon asshole Orin Hatch and ex-witch and masturbation-denier Christine O’Donnell, as well as the Koch’s 'Reason' magazine. They also worked on a smear campaign against Harry Reid in the run up to the 2010 election, but I’ll get to that later.

The point here is that Gary Johnson’s campaign headquarters is located in Romney’s backyard, in a right-wing Republican polling firm’s office. Gary says he likes transparency and believes he should wear his backers’ labels on his jacket like a NASCAR driver. Let me help him into his coat....

According to documents filed with the state of Utah, the person responsible for filing the paperwork to register Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" is Maureen Otis, a Texas attorney with deep roots in the far-right Minutemen movement, and with Republican Party voter-suppression dirty tricks. Otis’s Texas law office is listed as the mailing address for Johnson’s "Our America Initiative."

Maureen Otis has a long history with far-right anti-immigration vigilante groups. Just a few years ago, Otis served as board secretary for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a "nativist extremist" group that "targets individual immigrants rather than immigration policies." That Minuteman outfit collapsed after donation funds went missing, much of it paid to Maureen Otis’s own private company, "American Caging," a company that specializes in "caging as the name implies.

"Caging" was used by Bush operatives to suppress the minority vote in 2000 and 2004. Slate offered this definition of vote "caging":

"Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war)."

Maureen Otis’ clients for American Caging included nonprofits set up for Alan Keyes, a fundraiser for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Alliance, and other assorted homophobic Christian groups.

So what does the attorney who registered Gary Johnson’s "Our America" outfit really believe, the libertarian end of the Republican spectrum that Johnson represents, or the reactionary extremism of the Minutemen and Christian homophobes she serves?

Maureen Otis answered that question herself on her own twitter feed, such as this June 5 tweet followingScott Walker’s win in the Wisconsin recall:

"Great news for WI & start of an important trend for Repub's in the fall. Time for everyone to $$ to Romney campaign."

If Maureen Otis were the only hard-right operative involved in Gary Johnson’s campaign, her confused allegiances might just seem odd. But as you’ll see, extremist right-wing operatives like Otis are all around Gary Johnson, beginning with the "Our America Initiative" nonprofit that launched his campaign.

The lawyer who incorporated the "Our America Initiative" charter documents, an A-list GOP dirty tricks operative from Orange County namedJim Lacy, also worked with and supported the same Minutemen outfits as Maureen Otis. Like her, Jim Lacy also operates a bland-sounding direct-mail business called "slate mail" that targets Democratic voters with mailers purporting to come from fake liberal groups with names like "The John F. Kennedy Alliance" with a soothing photo of JFK on one side, and a slate of supposedly "Democratic" candidates on the other side. In reality, Republican candidates pay to have their names and faces secretly mixed in with the liberal candidates whose names and faces appear to give it a semblance of authenticity. Lacy’s slate order business is, he claims, the largest in the state of California, if not the entire country, and it wreaked so much havoc on California local elections that even Orange County residents revolted with a ballot requiring slate mailers disclose. Lacy fought to have the courts void the will of Orange County’s voters, and the courts agreed, saying that putting restrictions on how badly Lacy could deceive voters violated his First Amendment rights and constituted a form of tyranny.

So both lawyers whose names are on Gary Johnson’s main campaign group since 2009 are not only associated with right-wing extremists and violent nativist vigilantes, but more importantly, both of them specialize in fraudulent vote schemes that help their Republican Party clients win elections by deceiving Democratic Party voters.

Lacy has been poisoning American politics since his radical-right college years when he was national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom. In recent years, Lacy has been a major backer of anti-immigrant Minutemen groups, Islamophobia, and "birther" conspiracy-theory outfits smearing Obama as a foreign-born Muslim.Lacy co-founded a handful of far-right immigrant-bashing outfits with "Birther" leader Gary Kreep, Orly Taitz’s creepier half in joint lawsuits filed to "expose" Obama’s birth certificate as a fake. Both Kreep and Jim Lacy have provided legal help to Minutemen groups in San Diego, when they were at their violent peak terrorizing homeless illegal migrant workers and vandalizing their shanties.

This summer, Jim Lacy opened up his bag of dirty tricks to get Gary Kreep get elected Superior Court judge. How he did it is instructive: On the eve of the San Diego vote, a Lacy outfit bombarded Latinos and Democrats with robocalls claiming that the sitting judge had been releasing drug dealers into their neighborhoods. Kreep won by just over 1,000 votes, and now they might have to someday face a judge who boasts of his pro bono work for the Minutemen.

But Gary Kreep is just a warm-up act. Jim Lacy’s much more serious partner in political dirty tricks operations over the past two decades is Citizen United’s co-founder Floyd Brown, a Republican Sasquatch who gets a lot of credit for the notorious Willie Horton race-baiting ads in 1988, designed to scare whites into believing Dukakis would empty out the prisons on weekends and allow black inmates to rape and rob white women. The ad worked.

As soon as Obama’s candidacy surged ahead of Hillary in 2008, Lacy and Brown unleashed a barrage of birther-propaganda, and they haven’t let up yet.Their National Campaign Fund outfit produced some of the first "birther" conspiracy commercials, including Just days after Obama’s inauguration, Lacy and Brown were running a new campaign, ImpeachObama.com already comparing his first week in office to Hitler and Stalin’s rule.

And here is where the Gary Johnson third party Libertarian campaign begins to cross paths with these Republican dirty tricksters. As the first stimulus bill was being debated, Lacy and Brown announced another smear project, ExposeHarry.com, aimed at weakening Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s support and turning voters against him in time for the 2010 elections. To understand where Harry Reid was most vulnerable, they hired a Republican polling firm out of Salt Lake City. That polling firm, NSON Opinion Research, is the same polling outfit whose offices serve as Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign headquarters, and whose founder, Ron Nielson, is Gary Johnson’s campaign chief.

Ron Nielson later helped create Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" to launch the start of his campaign for 2012. This nonprofit was incorporated by GOP dirty trickster Jim Lacy, and is represented by far-right activist, "voter caging" specialist and Mitt Romney booster Maureen Otis.

It might seem strange to see so many nasty, hard-right dirty tricksters running Johnson’s "principled" campaign, but the notion that Johnson is in any way "liberal" or a friend of progressives is nonsense. Johnson’s liberal creds begin and end with one plank of his platform: legalizing pot.

Johnson’s actual record as governor of New Mexico was that of a law and order authoritarian, on the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party.Johnson ran on a “law and order” platform, stiffening prison sentences (while recklessly privatizing the prisons), along with a broader program of slashing taxes, slashing social programs, and privatizing schools. He was divisive, and his law and order policies led to some of the worst prison violence in decades.

It wasn’t until after Gary Johnson won his second term and final term as New Mexico’s governor, and turned his attention to the national stage, that he had his big epiphany about locking up marijuana smokers. Johnson’s about-face on locking up drug offenders sounded brave and newsworthy to outsiders who didn’t know his record — wow! a pot-friendly Republican governor, how cool! Johnson wanted to make the jump to the national stage, and what easier way than adopting the one popular plank in the Koch brothers’ libertarian political platform, legalizing pot, to make journalists and the public forget about all the grim libertarian policies he’d not only talked about but implemented.

===

Some local talk radio shows and fake news websites are pushing a new conspiracy theory from Infowars that the CIA hacked into a Hawaii state government database to forge former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. One of the radio hosts pushing the conspiracy theory has previously been cited as an analyst on a local ABC affiliate.

On December 12, Jerome Corsi of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars claimed that investigators for former Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, headed by his chief investigator Michael Zullo, had found “evidence that the CIA and or other government entities illegally hacked into Hawaii Department of Health records searching for” Obama’s records. (President Donald Trump pardoned Arpaio in August after he was charged with criminal contempt because of his treatment of undocumented immigrants.) Corsi, who has been a chief figure of the birther movement, added that the “evidence” “strongly suggests the CIA played a role in the forgery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Some local talk radio stations have hyped Infowars’ report. New Orleans talk radio host Jeff Crouere -- a Townhall writer who has been featured as a “political analyst” on ABC’s New Orleans affiliate WGNO -- calledCorsi’s report a “bombshell” on his radio program (which is carried by a station affiliated with Louisiana Public Broadcasting) and said, “I’ve said from the beginning that birth certificate [Obama] released was a fraud.”

[vid]

Some stations have invited Corsi and Zullo as guests on different radio shows and allowed them to push the extremely dubious allegation. Corsi hyped his report on Weekend Wake Up with Chuck and Julie on Denver, CO, radio station KNUS, where Corsi said that the “CIA played a major role in, I believe, creating” Obama’s long-form birth certificate that was released in 2011. Corsi also promoted the conspiracy theory on The Peter Boyles Show, which also airs on KNUS. In response to Corsi’s “report,” Boyles said that Obama’s “social security number is fraudulent” (Boyles has previously allowed guests to push birtherism on his program). Zullo spoke about the article on the showYour Turnon Northwest Florida radio station WEBY, where the host called the report a “bombshell” that’s “shaking the Earth” and lauded Infowars.

Additionally, multiple fake news websites have lauded the report, with some of them also calling it a “bombshell” and claiming that it showed the CIA, “possibly with the help of other government agencies, forged Obama’s documentation.” Some of these fake news websites also used their verified Facebook pages to push the conspiracy theory. The Infowars report was also hyped on the pro-Trump subreddit “/r/The_Donald,” a conduit for conspiracy theories.

This is not the first time this year that an Infowars conspiracy theory citing Arpaio has reverberated in the right-wing echo chamber with the help of fake news websites. In March, the outlet, trying to back Trump’s false claimthat Obama illegally wiretapped Trump Tower, asserted that Arpaio had documents showing that Trump and his family had been surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA) for years. That report subsequently spreadto other far-right outlets and fake news websites, along with The Drudge Report.

Alex Kaplan is a Research Coordinator at Media Matters.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-birther-timeline-20160916-snap-htmlstory.html

no link

What Donald Trump has said through the years about where President Obama was born

Donald TrumpDonald Trump speaks Friday in Washington, D.C., surrounded by Medal of Honor recipients and veterans. (Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images)

By Chris Megerian Barack Obama Donald Trump

Donald Trump stood before television cameras on Friday and acknowledged a well-known fact that he had spent years denying — “President Barack Obama was born in the United States.”

It will be up to voters to determine whether that one sentence can erase years of Trump’s lying about whether Obama was born an American citizen, a long history of the Republican nominee attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s first black president.

Here’s a look at Trump’s history of spreading falsehoods about Obama’s origins.

President Obama's "certification of live birth"

2008: Obama first faces questions about his birthplace

With rumors percolating about whether Obama was born in the U.S. and thus eligible to serve as president — a movement that would be dubbed birtherism — his campaign released a certification of live birth to prove he was born in Hawaii in 1961.

Spring 2011: Trump joins the movement

Three years later, Trump began pushing the issue in television interviews as he was considering whether to run for president in 2012.

“I have some real doubts,” Trump told the “Today” show. He claimed to have sent his own investigators to Hawaii, where Obama was born. "I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding."

Trump raised another falsehood in an interview with "Good Morning America," suggesting Obama was trying to conceal his religion by withholding his birth certificate. “Maybe it says he's a Muslim,” he said. Obama is Christian.

April 2011: Obama releases his long-form birth certificate

After weeks of Trump stirring the pot, the president called a White House news conference to release his long-form birth certificate. Obama called the issue a distraction pushed by “carnival barkers,” an implicit dig at Trump.

In response, Trump bragged about forcing Obama to release the document. He said he was "very proud” of himself and the birth certificate would have to be examined to ensure it was authentic.

Obama got the last word in this chapter.

Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Sign up for the newsletter | The race to 270

At the White House correspondents dinner, in front of high-ranking lawmakers, top journalists, powerful Washington insiders and Trump himself, Obama skewered him.

"Now he can get back to focusing on the issues that matter,” Obama said while the New York businessman sat in the audience, unsmiling. “Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?"

2012: Trump presses birther issue during election

Trump’s campaign claimed in a statement on Thursday evening that he “brought closure” to the issue in 2011 when Obama released his birth certificate. But it’s clear that Trump didn’t consider the matter to be settled while Obama was running for reelection.

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

An 'extremely credible source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.

1:23 PM - 6 Aug 2012

15,324 15,324 Retweets 11,164 11,164 likes

Trump even encouraged Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, to press the issue during a debate. In his tweet, Trump cites a promotional booklet for Obama’s autobiography that inaccurately says he was born outside the U.S.

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

In debate, @MittRomney should ask Obama why autobiography states "born in Kenya, raised in Indonesia."

12:21 PM - 1 Oct 2012

731 731 Retweets 237 237 likes

2013: Trump keeps the falsehood alive

Trump continued to spread conspiracy theories about the birth certificate the year after Obama was reelected, suggesting the death of a Hawaiian official was somehow related to a cover-up of the president’s true origins.

Donald J. Trump ? @realDonaldTrump

How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today. All others lived

1:32 PM - 12 Dec 2013

7,306 7,306 Retweets 5,343 5,343 likes

In an interview with ABC News, Trump said the issue “made me very popular.” Pressed to acknowledge that Obama was born in the United States, he said, “I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

2015: Trump launches presidential campaign

Trump announced in June 2015 that he would run for president as a Republican. A month later, he renewed his doubts about Obama’s birthplace. "I don't know. I really don't know," he said during a CNN interview.

Donald Trump poses with his family after announcing his candidacy for president in New York in June 2015.

Donald Trump poses with his family after announcing his candidacy for president in New York in June 2015. (Christopher Gregory / Getty Images)

Early 2016: Trump dodges birther questions

As he began to inch closer to the GOP nomination, Trump started to shy away from the issue.

“Who cares right now? We’re talking about something else, OK?” he told CNN. “I have my own theory on Obama. Someday I will write a book.”

Summer 2016: Trump’s campaign starts to say he’s changed his belief

In recent weeks, top members of Trump’s campaign began trying to walk back the nominee’s statements. His running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said he knew Obama was born a citizen. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said last week that Trump believes Obama was born in the U.S., and a statement from a senior communications aide late Thursday asserted the same.

But none of those comments came from Trump himself, who declined to answer questions on the topic as recently as Wednesday in an interview with the Washington Post.

September 2016: Trump acknowledges the truth about Obama

Five years after began doing television interviews about Obama’s birth certificate, Trump declared at his new hotel in Washington that the president was born in the United States. Trump did not apologize, nor did he explain why he changed his mind.

At the same time, he claimed it was Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent who ran against Obama in the 2008 primary, who originally raised questions about the president’s birth. There’s no evidence of that.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Twitter: @chrismegerian

Donald Trump finally concedes that President Obama was born in the U.S. after years of promoting conspiracy theory

'Believe me': People say Trump's language is affecting political discourse 'bigly'

buzzfeed ~?

politico no link

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/birther-movement-founder-trump-clinton-228304

No, Clinton didn't start the birther thing. This guy did.

Despite what Trump says, the 2008 Clinton campaign and the candidate herself never trafficked in the rumors.

By KYLE CHENEY 09/16/16

After years of denying the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was only in the midst of his own presidential campaign that Donald Trump began falsely claiming Hillary Clinton was the true progenitor of the “birther” conspiracy theory claiming Obama was not born in the United States.

But that’s swapping one discredited claim for another. Numerous fact checks, reports and interviews — in 2008 and 2011, when Trump revived the controversy — revealed that although some Clinton supporters circulated rumors about Obama’s citizenship, the campaign and Clinton herself never trafficked in it.

“There has never been evidence that Clinton or her campaign started the birther rumors,” said Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who as a POLITICO reporter in 2011 linked the origin of the “birther” movement to a fringe politician in Illinois. Some hardcore Clinton backers circulated the rumors in 2008, but the campaign itself steered clear.

“As we reported, some of her supporters flirted with the idea in 2008 — but it has its origins in the fever swamps beginning in Illinois in 2004,” he said.

In fact, birtherism, as it’s been called, reportedly began with innuendo by serial Illinois political candidate Andy Martin, who painted Obama as a closet Muslim in 2004. That spiraled into a concerted effort by conspiracy theorists to raise doubts about Obama’s birthplace and religion — and essentially paint him as un-American.

Martin, who briefly launched a little-noticed presidential campaign last year, has disavowed the movement he’s often credited with starting, though he still foments similarly discredited doubts about Obama’s religion.

Clinton’s 2008 hands are recoiling at Trump’s revisionism about their role in propagating the lie about Obama’s citizenship. “The suggestion that the Hillary campaign was pushing birtherism in 2008 is bunk. It's fiction,” said Phil Singer, who was Clinton’s 2008 press secretary.

Much of the insinuation that Clinton had a hand in birtherism traces to the role of her then-senior strategist Mark Penn, who issued a memo in 2007 suggesting that Clinton emphasize Obama’s upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia and paint him as fundamentally un-American. The memo never questioned Obama’s citizenship but did suggest highlighting his “lack of American roots.”

Trump diversity director: Obama birther questions 'not a race thing'

By NICK GASS

“[H]is roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote. “I cannot imagine electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

The Clinton campaign never employed Penn’s strategy, and to this day it provokes sharply different perceptions among those who remember discussing it. Two sources with knowledge of the deliberations say Penn’s memo caused a “near-staff revolt” at the time it came up and contributed to factional infighting that would later hobble the campaign.

Another source who recalled the discussion dismissed that perception as revisionist, arguing instead that the memo was barely considered at all. “This memo got about 30 seconds of discussion and the only recommendation was that she emphasize her Midwest upbringing,” the source said. “While the campaign may have disagreed on going negative on Barack Obama, this paragraph had nothing to do with those discussions and it did not in any cause any discussion of his citizenship.”

Later, in the spring 2008, as Clinton’s chances of winning the Democratic primary grew thin, some of her hardcore supporters circulated rumors that Obama may not be a U.S. citizen, picking up on some of Martin’s innuendo and extending it further.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” read one of those emails posted, at the time, by Snopes.com, a site that attempts to debunk internet rumors.

Birtherism reportedly began with innuendo by serial Illinois political candidate Andy Martin, who painted Obama as a closet Muslim in 2004. | AP Photo

On Friday, Clinton’s former senior aide Patti Solis Doyle acknowledged that a volunteer coordinator in Iowa forwarded a birther-related email. “Hillary made the decision immediately let that person go,” she said. “We let that person go. It was so beyond the pale of the campaign Hillary wanted to run and that we as a staff wanted to run that I called David Plouffe who was managing Barack Obama to apologize to say this is not coming from us, that this was rogue volunteer.”

“The campaign nor Hillary did not start the birther movement, period,” she said.

The rumors that Obama was born in Kenya dogged him as he entered the general election fight against John McCain (who similarly steered clear of the issue). Some conservative blogs picked up the rumor as well.To counter the claim, the Obama campaign released a copy of his short-form “certification of live birth” to the liberal Daily Kos.

But it was that gesture that proved the durability of the birther conspiracy theories. Immediately, those who questioned Obama’s birth declared the short-form birth certificate insufficient proof or even a forgery. But the issue had clearly moved even further to the fringe and seemed to dissipate until Donald Trump revived it in 2011, demanding a “long-form” birth certificate.

Donald Trump speaks to the media at Pease International Trade Port in Portsmouth, N.H., on April 27, 2011, about the release of President Barack Obama’s release original birth certificate. | Getty

During a March 23, 2011 appearance on The View, Trump sparred with Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters about Obama’s birth.

“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump said. “I wish he would because I think it’s a terrible pall that’s hanging over him … There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.”

When panelists asked Trump why George W. Bush was never asked to produce his birth certificate, Trump added, “I’m not saying I’m a fan of George Bush. You know that better than anybody. But George Bush was born in this country.”

For the next few months, Trump courted believers in the conspiracy and even advised advocates for state laws requiring future presidents to produce proof of their U.S. birth. Ironically, an Arizona bill on the matter, which Trump specifically advocated for, was vetoed by then-Gov. Jan Brewer – now a top Trump surrogate. Brewer questioned its requirement to force presidential candidates to release “baptismal or circumcision certificates” in lieu of a birth certificate.

At that time, polling showed Republicans were far more inclined to believe that Obama wasn’t a U.S. citizen. At that time, as they do now, the Clintons forcefully disavowed the notion.

Glenn Thrush and Brent Griffiths contributed reporting.

A brief history of Donald Trump's birther past

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories

During Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008 and through his presidency, many conspiracy theories were circulated, falsely asserting that he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States and consequently, under Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, that he was ineligible to be President of the United States.

Theories alleged that Obama's published birth certificate was a forgery—that his actual birthplace was not Hawaii but Kenya. Other theories alleged that Obama became a citizen of Indonesia in childhood, thereby losing his U.S. citizenship. Still others claimed that Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen because he was born a dual citizen (British and American). A number of political commentators have characterized these various claims as a racist reaction to Obama's status as the first African American President of the United States.^[4]

Such claims were promoted by fringe theorists ("birthers"), some of whom sought court rulings either declaring Obama ineligible to take office, or granting access to various documents which they claimed would evidence such ineligibility; none of these efforts were successful. Some political opponents, especially in the Republican Party, have expressed skepticism about Obama's citizenship or been unwilling to acknowledge it;^[5] some have proposed legislation which would require presidential candidates to provide proof of eligibility.^[5]

Expressed belief in such theories has persisted despite Obama's pre-election release of his official Hawaiian birth certificate in 2008;^[1] confirmation, based on the original documents, by the Hawaii Department of Health;^[6] the April 2011 release of a certified copy of Obama's original Certificate of Live Birth (or long-form birth certificate); and contemporaneous birth announcements published in Hawaii newspapers.^[7] Polls conducted in 2010 suggested that at least one quarter of adult Americans said that they doubted Obama's U.S. birth,^[8][9] while a May 2011 Gallup poll found that 13% of American adults (23% of Republicans) continued to express such doubts.^[10]

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Background

Early life of Barack Obama

People who express doubts about Obama's eligibility or reject details about his early life are often informally called "birthers", a term that parallels^[11] the nickname "truthers" for adherents of 9/11 conspiracy theories.^[12][13] These conspiracy theorists reject at least some of the following facts about his early life:

Main articles: Early life and career of Barack Obama and Ann Dunham

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now called Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,^{[14][15][16][17]} to Ann Dunham,^[18] from Wichita, Kansas,^[19] and Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province (in what was then the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya), who was attending the University of Hawaii. Birth notices for Barack Obama were published in the Honolulu Advertiser on August 13 and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on August 14, 1961.^[14][19] Obama's father's immigration file also clearly states Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.^[20] One of his high school teachers, who was acquainted with his mother at the time, remembered hearing about the day of his birth.^[18]

Obama's parents were divorced in 1964. He attended kindergarten in 1966–1967 at Noelani Elementary School in Honolulu.^[14][21] In 1967, his mother married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro,^[14] who was also attending the University of Hawaii, and the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia,^[22] where Obama attended the Catholic St. Francis of Assisi School before transferring to State Elementary School Menteng 01, an elite Indonesian public school in Menteng. As a child in Indonesia, Obama was called "Barry", sometimes Barry Soetoro, reflecting his step-father's surname, and sometimes Barry Obama, using his father's surname.^[23][24][25] When he was ten years old, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and has resided continuously in the United States since 1971.

Origins of the claims

Conspiracy theories about Obama's religion appeared at least as early as his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign in a press release by Illinois political candidate Andy Martin,^[26] and, according to a Los Angeles Times editorial, as Internet rumors.^[27] These rumors about his religion expanded into his values, cultural, and national loyalty, and, by 2008, into conspiracy theories about his citizenship.^[citation ^needed]

From the start of March 2008, rumors that Obama was born in Kenya before being flown to Hawaii were spread on conservative websites, with the suggestion that this would disqualify Obama from the presidency. In April of that year, anonymous e-mails from supporters of Hillary Clinton repeated the same rumor,^[28] including a Clinton Iowa campaign worker, who was fired for sending the e-mail.^[29][30] These and numerous other chain e-mails during the subsequent presidential election circulated false rumors about Obama's origin, religion, and birth certificate.^[31][32]

On June 9, 2008, Jim Geraghty of the conservative website National Review Online asked that Obama release his birth certificate.^[33][34] Geraghty wrote that releasing his birth certificate could debunk several false rumors circulating on the Internet, namely: that his middle name was originally Muhammad rather than Hussein; that his mother had originally named him "Barry" rather than "Barack"; and that Barack Obama, Sr. was not his biological father, as well as the rumor that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen.^[34][35][36]

In August 2009, Philip J. Berg, a former member of the Democratic State Committee of Pennsylvania, brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against Obama, which alleged "that Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya."^[37][38]

In October 2009, an NPR article referred to "Kenyan-born Sen. Barack Obama."^[39] Also that month, anonymous e-mails circulated claiming that the Associated Press(AP) had reported Obama was "Kenyan-Born".^[40] The claims were based on an AP story that had appeared five years earlier in a Kenyan publication, The Standard.^[40][41] The rumor-checking website Snopes.com found that the headline and lead-in sentence describing Obama as born in Kenya and misspelling his first name had been added by the Kenyan newspaper, and did not appear in the story issued by the AP or in any other contemporary newspaper that picked up the AP story.^[40][42]

In 2012, Breitbart.com published a copy of a promotional booklet that Obama's literary agency, Acton & Dystel, printed in 1991 (and later posted to their website, in a biography in place until April 2007) which misidentified Obama's birthplace and states that Obama was "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." When this was posted by Breitbart, the booklet's editor said that this incorrect information had been her mistake, not based on anything provided to her agency by Obama.^[43]

Release of the birth certificates

...

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The two political operatives chosen earlier this month to lead Donald Trump’s presidential campaign after two former managers departed have been members of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), Hatewatch has learned

Longtime Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon,executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News operation, were named on Aug. 17 as, respectively, the Trump campaign’s manager and its chief executive officer. The appointment of Bannon was by far the more controversial choice, given his role at a “news” outlet known for bashing immigrants, Muslims, women and others.

The CNP is an intensely secretive and shadowy group of what The New York Times once described as “the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It is so tight-lipped that it tells people not to admit their membership or even name the group. Revealing when or where the group meets, or what it discusses, is also forbidden. The organization, which can only be joined by invitation and at a cost of thousands of dollars, strives mightily to keep its membership rolls secret.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which publishes Hatewatch, obtained a copy this spring of the CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a closely held document. It shows that Conway was a member of the CNP’s executive committee that year, and that Bannon was a regular member. It is not known if they remain.

The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.

They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi,a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known asWorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

Bannon was already controversial. His Breitbart news operation has specialized in extreme-right propaganda that is summed up in some of the headlines it ran while under his stewardship: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,”“There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews,” “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner Over Religious Beliefs” and so on. Breitbart also recently published a defense of the “Alternative Right” that included defending well-known white supremacist ideologues Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.

It’s not known how their contacts within the CNP may have affected Conway and Bannon. But as the SPLC concluded in its May report on the CNP: “At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.”

That is as true of campaign leaders as it is of political candidates.

===

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio Faces Criminal Contempt Charges

October 31, 2016

Bill Morlin

Joe Arpaio, the tough-talking, controversial Arizona sheriff whose nativist stance rocketed him to national prominence, now faces a criminal charge just weeks before a challenging re-election bid for a seventh term.

HATEWATCH

Revealed: Conway, Bannon Members of Secretive Group

August 31, 2016

Mark Potok

PUBLICATION

Kris Kobach: Lawyer for America's Nativist Movement

November 18, 2016

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been a central figure in the nativist movement for more than a decade and is the architect of Arizona’s notorious “papers please” law as well as a series of other anti-immigrant statutes enacted by states and municipalities in the past decade.

Kris Kobach – Lawyer for America’s Nativist Movement

HATEWATCH

Freedom Watch's Klayman Makes Birther Beliefs Explicit in Radio Interview

May 28, 2014

David Neiwert

HATEWATCH

White Supremacist Sponsors Speech by Black Anti-LGBT Pastor

January 29, 2015

Hatewatch Staff

Texas-based white supremacist and activist Preston Wiginton, best known for bringing racists to college campuses, is at it again, this time sponsoring anti-LGBT pastor James Manning to speak at Texas A&M University next month.

HATEWATCH

Arpaio Considered ‘Citizens Grand Jury’ for Obama Birth Certificate Probe, But ‘It’s a Little Tough’

August 05, 2014

David Neiwert

INTELLIGENCE REPORT

Right-Wingers Depict Ebola Virus as Obama Conspiracy

2015 Spring Issue

March 10, 2015

Americans were badly shaken this fall when missteps by the Texas hospital that handled one of the first cases of Ebola virus on American soil led to a minor outbreak in the U.S.

HATEWATCH

WND Not Happy, Appeals Dismissal of Esquire Suit

June 12, 2012

Ryan Lenz

HATEWATCH

They Came, They Saw, They Went Home Again

November 20, 2013

Mark Potok

Larry Klayman’s Reclaim America Coalition, which converged in a park across from the White House yesterday to begin a “second American Revolution,” didn’t succeed in getting the “tyrant evil fool” President Obama to “come out with his hands up” and agree to “leave town,” as he had promised.

HATEWATCH

Birther Leader Joseph Farah Caught with Loaded Gun at Dulles TSA Checkpoint, Faces Weapon Charge

June 24, 2014

Josh Glasstetter

===

The Joker Known as Ed Klein

The author of the original Obama birther book is back in the game with another book tailor-made for the foreign policy experts who get their news from Fox and the tabs. Klein’s “Blood Feud: The Obamas versus the Clintons” is chockablock with scandalous yarns about the Obamas’ marital discord sourced to servants in Martha’s Vineyard and HRC on a profanity-laced drunken tirade about Obama sourced to “friends” who partied with her in Westchester. The fact that nothing in Klein’s oeuvre is fact-checkable, let alone deemed fact-check-worthy by his publisher doesn’t even cause a blush over at the Daily Mail, New York Post, Fox, the Daily Caller, The Blaze, or the Christian Post, all of whom are polluting the Internet with Klein’s toxic fumes.

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NEW YORK – The typography expert who played a key role in ending the career of CBS News anchor Dan Rather has told WND he has strong suspicions the Obama birth certificate released by the White House is fraudulent.

Joseph M. Newcomer, who exposed the “Killian documents” as fraudulent in 2004, has told WND the Obama birth certificate released by the White House April 27 is a “highly suspicious” document that deserves professional forensic examination.

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“There is something deeply wrong here,” Newcomer told WND. “There are artifacts in the birth certificate document that are strongly suggestive of a forgery. The document screams out that something is wrong.”

Get the New York Times best-seller “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to be President,” autographed by Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.

Birther

Contents

Background

Early life of Barack Obama

Origins of the claims

Release of the birth certificates