of them noticed that the posted document was what the State of Hawaii calls a certification of live birth—which is basically the state’s short-form version of a person’s original birth certificate. It includes time of birth, city, parents, and so on, but lacks medical details and the name of the hospital. To get those details, you have to get the original certificate. Obtaining a copy of it requires making a special request to state officials.
Naturally, a fresh round of conspiracy theorizing erupted—the birth certificate on display had been digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop. It also lacked a stamped seal of the state, a certain sign of forgery. Jerome Corsi—the coauthor of the “Swift Boat” hoax that played a critical role in sinking John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, and more recently the author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality—went on Fox and Friends and told Steve Doocy that “the campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website… It’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the website right now, and the original birth certificate, the campaign refuses to produce.”
The Obama campaign invited FactCheck.org to come see the certificate for themselves, and it subsequently reported their definitive conclusion: “Obama was born in the USA. Just as he has always said.”
Hawaii state officials subsequently confirmed that the state held Obama’s original birth certificate on record, noting that “there have been numerous requests” for copies, but explaining that the state’s records department was prohibited by state law from releasing it to “persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record.”
Of course, there are always the births listed in local newspapers—and sure enough, both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (on August 13 and August 14, 1961, respectively) published a birth notice for Barack Obama, listing the home address as 6085 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu. Contrary to later suggestions, these birth announcements were not paid announcements—a much later practice—but were collected by staff reporters assigned to make the rounds of area hospitals.
With all these dubious claims and theories floating about, the atmosphere was ripe for Alex Jones and his army of conspiracists to step up and make their presence felt.
Jones and his fellow “Truthers” had largely been consigned to the fringes of mainstream discourse for most of the Bush years, but that did not mean they had grown stagnant. Rather the contrary.
Even though right-wing media generally declined to even give their theories the time of day, the audience for Jones’s always-expanding universe of conspiracies kept gaining steam throughout the first decade of the new century.
Jones’s audience kept multiplying as 9/11 theories mushroomed, and as he churned out new “evidence” and claims in order to keep up. These included theories that Building 7, situated next to the Twin Towers and demolished when they fell, had actually been destroyed by hidden bombs, and that Flight 93, brought down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to invade the pilot’s cabin to wrest control from the terrorists, was actually shot down by military jets, and that phone calls to family members by people on the airliner before it went down had been faked.
In addition to the Zeitgeist films produced by the far-right activist Peter Joseph, a number of other independent conspiracists kept offering their own takes on who and what was behind the terrorist attacks, including a British anarchist, Charlie Veitch, and a New York writer, Nico Haupt. The competition among the theories became fierce and internecine warfare soon broke out, with Jones accusing Haupt of being a secret FBI agent trying to undermine the movement. Veitch, promoted initially by Jones on his show, later announced he had become skeptical of certain core claims, causing Infowars fans to descend upon him viciously.
Infowars began drawing hundreds of thousands of daily hits, and his radio-show rants, uploaded to YouTube, began spreading quickly, especially as more people began sharing them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By 2009 Jones’s YouTube channel had garnered over 60 million views.
By March 2009, Jones had produced one of his “documentaries” titled The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off, which portrayed the new president as a “corporate creation of the banking elite” who would enact the agenda of the military-industrial complex and eventually enslave Americans. Among other signs of the looming takeover, Jones pointed to Obama’s early musings about the possibility of creating a public-oriented “national civilian service” to fill domestic needs, as military service fills our international needs, as proof that he intended to make young Americans into a compulsory army of brainwashed slaves, described on Jones’s Prison Planet site as a “Stasi.”
In August 2009 Jones got on the Birther bandwagon, which had already been joined up by a number of his fellow 9/11 conspiracists. Jones’s Infowars site finally chimed in with a piece by Jones’s contributor Paul Joseph Watson, headlined “Shocking New Birth Certificate Proof Obama Born in Kenya?” It soon emerged that this birth certificate was a hoax.
The convergence of old far-right conspiracists and the new anti-Obama fanatics gave birth, in the weeks after the election, to a campaign to prevent Obama from taking the oath of office in January, fueled in part by a pair of fringe right-wing lawyers named Leo Donofrio and Orly Taitz, who tried to take legal action to prevent Obama from being sworn in. The Supreme Court briefly considered Donofrio’s lawsuit challenging Obama’s US citizenship—a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by the birth-certificate conspiracy theorists ( or “Birthers,” as they came to be known)—but peremptorily dismissed it.
Online campaigns arose: RallyCongress.com, which gathered over 125,000 signatures demanding Obama’s birth certificate, and WeMustBeHeard.com, which organized sit-ins outside the Supreme Court building in Washington. The right-wing webzine WorldNetDaily, which has a long history of promoting right-wing conspiracy theories dating back to the 1990s, organized a similar petition drive. A longtime far-right tax protester named Bob Schultz—whose “We the People” organization later ran into serious legal problems for promoting a tax scheme predicated on old far-right “constitutionalist” theories that the federal income tax is illegal—purchased full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune asserting that Obama’s birth certificate was forged, that his “grandmother is record[ed] on tape saying she attended your birth in Kenya,” and that Obama had lost his citizenship by virtue of his mother’s second marriage to an Indonesian man.
By the time of Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, however, all these efforts had come to naught. But that didn’t mean they had subsided. Rather the opposite: the Birther theories continued to bubble and build, thanks in no small part to the mainstream media.
Orly Taitz filed a fresh lawsuit in July 2009 on behalf of Stefan Cook, an Army Reserve soldier, who claimed he could refuse deployment orders to Afghanistan because the president wasn’t an American citizen. When the Army responded by simply rescinding Cook’s orders, Sean Hannity reported about it on his Fox News program by describing Cook as a victim of crude political discrimination. Hannity shied away from any similar reports from then on.
Rush Limbaugh, too, briefly referenced it on his radio show: “God does not have a birth certificate, and neither does Obama—not that we’ve seen.” Afterward, he made little mention of it. Eventually, though, the Birthers found an ardent supporter of their claims in the mainstream media: CNN’s Lou Dobbs.
Dobbs kicked off his coverage of the birth-certificate controversy in mid-July on his syndicated radio show by hosting Orly Taitz and asserting repeatedly that Obama “needed to produce” his birth certificate.
