How deranged anti-Obama conspiracy theories led America to Donald Trump

[marmar]

How deranged anti-Obama conspiracy theories led America to Donald Trump
Folklorist Patricia Turner on how unhinged right-wing paranoia about the first Black president tore America apart

By KATHRYN JOYCE
Investigative Reporter
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 6, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) In 2007, a widely forwarded email went viral, claiming that then-candidate Barack Obama hoped to replace the national anthem with Coca-Cola's 1971 advertising campaign song "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)." The email claimed that Obama had actually said that during an appearance on "Meet the Press," while explaining why he didn't wear an American flag pin and refused to put his hand over his heart when the anthem was played, suggesting that if the Coke jingle replaced the anthem, "then I might salute it." According to the email, Obama went on to say the U.S. flag should be redesigned; that the U.S. should disarm "to the level of acceptance to our Middle East Brethren"; and that when he was president, "CHANGE" would quickly "overwhelm the United States of America."

From the distance of 15 years, it's easy to chalk that viral email — whose text was originally intended as satire — up as the same kind of "fake news" that proliferated during Donald Trump's presidential campaign, with Facebook posts and Macedonian-owned websites claiming that Obama had just banned the Pledge of Allegiance or the pope had endorsed Trump. After two years of moral panic around critical race theory, it's also easy to recognize the subtext that a Black person is unpatriotic by definition.

Yet that story is just one among dozens of similar examples: Obama was accused of disowning the Boy Scouts, court-martialing Christian service members or plotting to kill white people with Ebola. He was called a secret Muslim, a secret Kenyan, a secret Indonesian or secretly gay. As the conspiracy theories expanded to Michelle Obama, she had allegedly ordered that a picture of her in royal garb be put on a postage stamp, or was a Black nationalist or perhaps transgender.

All of this was more than just an early example of the disinformation age that became impossible to ignore a decade later. According to Patricia Turner, a professor of African American studies and folklorist at UCLA and author of the new book "Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century," the sort of folk legend represented by the anthem email directly helped pave the way for Trump and today's political climate.

....(snip)....

Most people, if they've thought about it all, tend to date the start of our new conspiracy theory era back to around 2016, with the arrival of things like Pizzagate. You trace a far longer lineage, to well before Obama was elected.

I kind of expected that Barack and Michelle Obama would trigger this kind of thing when they burst on the scene in 2004. They arrived at the same time as social media and all the ways the internet democratized voices and access to a wide swath of the public. So there were two parallel things: the first prominent African-American couple likely to move into the White House, at the same time that people could express how they felt about that, good or bad, in more and more ways, more and more frequently on their computers. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/06/how-deranged-anti-obama-conspiracy-theories-led-america-to-donald/

[Midnight Writer]

1. I went to work the morning after Obama was elected and never in my life have I heard

the N-word being thrown around like that.

One sweet woman was crying because she said Obama would make it legal for black men to rape white women.

Folks who couldn't even tell you the name of the State's Governor suddenly became "experts" at all things political.

Empty vessels that the RW filled with lies.

[bahboo]

3. they all showed us who they were....

[Bayard]

2. The fear was incredible

I think it started with trump's birth certificate nonsense. He was turned into a complete boogeyman, with accompanying lies. The right never got over Obama's presidency even if he'd walked on water.