The New York Times reports that the ‘Birthers’ – those who believe that President Obama was born in Kenya and his birth certificate fabricated – are becoming more mainstream, most recently being mentioned by Lou Dobbs. This is of course begs the question: who are these people and where do they come from? The United States is no stranger to conspiracy theories; from Roswell to Kennedy, Americans seem unable to accept the truth and don’t seem to recognize that the best secrets tend not to stay that way. More often than not, someone will eventually leak something – state secrets be damned.

Are people’s lives so patently boring that they blatantly ignore irrefutable facts to bring a little adventure into their lives? Because that, essentially, is what these people are doing. Birthers – and I dare say more generally too many Republicans and certainly some Democrats as well – start with a premise and work backwards to find facts to support it. Indeed, as much as anyone’s place of birth can be proved, Obama’s has been. Of course, as the Times post points out, willful ignorance extends dangerously beyond Obama’s place of birth. There is something fundamentally scary about the extreme right’s disconnect from fact and logic on everything from the theory of evolution (fact) to the illegality of torture (fact). What is it about Jacksonian America that allows – nay, compels its adherents to live inside their own little bubble isolated from reality?

Really, it boils down to tradition, anxiety and resentment. While it was a faux pas to say and he was wrong to make a blanket assumption about a large swath of the US, Obama wouldn’t be wrong to suggest that some people “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Well, they cling to all those things and conspiracies too.

Chris Frommann is the director of public relations and the former director of new media.

Tags: Birthers

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 11:00 and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.