the new president’s name, were confronted by white students outside a residence hall who told them: “Any nigger who walks by Penland [Hall], we’re going to kick their ass, we’re going to jump him.” The Obama supporters stopped and responded, “Excuse me?” Somehow they managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.
On the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, some students spent Election Night spray-painting graffiti messages such as “Let’s shoot that Nigger in the head” and “Hang Obama by a Noose.” The university administration protected the students’ identities and refused to take any legal action against them or discipline them in any way.
But such student antics were just a warm-up. On Staten Island, New York, on Election Night, four young white men “decided to go after black people” in retaliation for Obama’s election. First they drove to the mostly black Park Hill neighborhood and assaulted a Liberian immigrant, beating him with a metal pipe and a police baton, in addition to the usual blows from fists and feet. Then they drove to Port Richmond and assaulted another black man and verbally threatened a Latino man and a group of black people. They finished up the night by driving alongside a man walking home from his job as a Rite Aid manager and trying to club him with the police baton. Instead, they hit him with their car, throwing him off the windshield and into a coma for over a month. The last victim was a white man. All four men wound up convicted of hate crimes and spent the duration of Obama’s first term in prison.
There were cross burnings and even arson. The morning after the election, in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, a black man taking his eight-year-old daughter to school emerged from his front door to discover that someone had burned a six-foot-tall cross on his lawn—right next to the man’s banner declaring Obama president. That had been torched too.
Another cross was burned on the lawn of the only black man in tiny Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania, the night after the election. A black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground the night of the election; eventually, three white men were arrested and charged with setting the fire as a hate crime. On election night, a black family in South Ogden, Utah, came home from volunteering at their local polling station to discover that their American flag had been torched.
Obama’s inauguration on January 21, 2009, brought more haters out of the woodwork.
Two days before the big event, arsonists in Forsyth County, Georgia, set fire to the home of a woman who was known as a public supporter of Obama. Someone painted a racial slur on her fence, along with the warning “Your black boy will die.”
On Inauguration Day, someone taped newspaper articles featuring Obama onto the apartment door of a woman in Jersey City, New Jersey, and set fire to it. Fortunately, the woman had stayed home to watch the inauguration on TV and smelled the burning, and she was able to extinguish the fire before it spread.
The next day, a large twenty-two-year-old skinhead named Keith Luke in Brockton, Massachusetts, decided it was time to fight the “extinction” of the white race. He bashed down the door of a Latino woman and her sister and shot them both; one died. Police apprehended and arrested Luke before he could pull off the next planned stage of his shooting rampage, at a local Jewish synagogue. According to the DA, Luke intended to “kill as many Jews, blacks, and Hispanics as humanly possible … before killing himself.” When he appeared in court a month later, Luke had carved a swastika into his forehead with a razor blade.
The Southern Poverty Law Center counted more than 200 “hate-related” incidents around the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. The SPLC’s Mark Potok stated: “I think we really are beginning to see a white backlash that may grow fairly large. The situation’s worrying. Not only do we have continuing nonwhite immigration, not only is the economy in the tank and very likely to get worse, but we have a black man in the White House. That is driving a kind of rage in a certain sector of the white population that is very, very worrying to me.
“We are seeing literally hundreds of incidents around the country—from cross burnings to death threats to effigies hanging to confrontations in schoolyards.”
The spike in racially motivated violence was accompanied by a sharp increase in business for white-supremacist websites such as the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. It collected more than 2,000 new members the day after the election—so much traffic that the site crashed. One Stormfront poster, a North Las Vegas resident going by the moniker Dalderian Germanicus, reflected the consensus sentiment at the site: “I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs’ come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.”
In Georgia, a middle-aged man expressed to an Associated Press reporter the typical view on the extremist right in the days and weeks after the election: “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades, and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.”
The rise in right-wing media such as Fox News and other openly pro-conservative media and the spread of their dubious news values into the mainstream media played a powerful role in creating an epistemological bubble for the audience: for every news event, these outlets were able to provide a right-wing, anti-liberal spin on it. More often than not, that spin was not just factually dubious, it was outrageously false. Their audiences were able to create a Patriot-style alternative universe for themselves that they could confirm by turning on their TVs. They would disregard information that didn’t fit in their universe.
The massive growth of the Internet, especially as it spread to the older and more rural American population, also played a significant role in the expansion of this alternative universe. Suddenly a vast ocean of dubious information was available to all, and it quickly filled with anonymous and phony smears, a floating island of garbage about Barack Obama that suddenly appeared, as if from the depths, and rapidly spread through what became known as the “viral email.”
Everyone with an email account in America seemed to be receiving these emails containing “true” information revealing Obama to be an America-hating Muslim radical. There were dozens of permutations on this theme, everything from fake claims that Obama had the American flag removed from his jet and that he refused to wear flag lapel pins to theories that he was secretly raised a Muslim at a madrassa in Indonesia, and that in reality he was born not in Hawaii, but in Kenya. Another favorite was a Photoshopped Obama portrait that transformed him into a bearded bin Laden type, captioned “So America, you want change? … Just wait.”
The viral anonymous email became such a fixture of the campaign to undermine the president’s legitimacy that Obama’s campaign was forced to create a website devoted specifically to debunking the false information the emails spread. In a story in the Nation, “The New Right-Wing Smear Machine,” Chris Hayes detailed how movement conservatives—using far-right Web publications such as NewsMax and WorldNetDaily as bases of operations—spread rumors and wholly fabricated nonsense about Obama to millions of email readers, some of whom eagerly accepted it as gospel.
Thus was born the “Birther” meme, the conviction that Obama was not an American citizen.
No one’s exactly certain where it originated, but somewhere in those forwarded emails appeared the suggestion that Obama was not really an American citizen because of the circumstances of his birth. Some claimed that Obama had been born in Kenya; others, that he had been born in Indonesia.
The Obama campaign responded to this and other disinformation by setting up a website, Fight the Smears, specifically to counter the wild rumors that were circulating. At the site was posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Anyone born in Hawaii would present the same type of document when undergoing a security review or obtaining a passport.
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