In times of yore, summer was synonymous with the slow news cycle. But that was all before an unprecedented number of voters elected a president that made Right America feel wronged. And when right-wing Republicans – they of the party that supposedly mythologizes acting like responsible adults and being “realistic” about the the world around them – feel wronged, they revert to being two-year-olds and operate under the assumption that if they yell “No!” loudly enough, they’ll get what they want. Some react from an even more primal source, one as old, if not older, than mankind itself: fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the other, fear of a black president. And in that thick stew of fear, irrationality is the dominant flavor.
The lunatic fringe of the right was all-too-visible in the waning days of the 2008 election – and despite hopes to the contrary, after their party was soundly defeated, they and their ideas only grew in prominence. The April 15th tea party protests were incontrovertible proof of this. Worse, they weren’t a last gasp, but an acceleration of public displays of extremism. The pernicious idea that Barack Obama Can’t Be One Of Us Real Americans took hold with such fervor that six months into his presidency, town halls were being disrupted, prominent Republican politicians refused to dispel the birther conspiracy and over half of party rank-and-file turned off their minds and embraced the crazy. And it wasn’t just the forged birth certificate nonsense that spread through the conservative body politic like sepsis.
In an environment of intimidation, violence and mass hysteria – where, indeed, there are forces that consider a shift towards these tactics to be in their best interest – truth is hostage to one whackadoo idea after another. Such as: FEMA is running reeducation camps for conservatives. Cash For Clunkers is a scam the government is pulling so it can spy on its citizens. Obama’s health care reform proposal calls for senior citizens to be put to death – or maybe he’ll just be setting up a “death panel” so that Republican superstars can’t have any more children. The conspiracies are furiously bubbling to the surface, filling up the summer with the sickly-sweet stench of the finest paranoia America has to offer.
Here’s the rub: the history of the world is littered with conspiracies – actual, proven plots hatched in secret; some successful, some not. Real conspiracies are happenings in governments, in the private sector and with so-called everyday people. But there’s a world of difference between this reality and the negative feedback loop of easily disprovable ideas that is dragging the GOP into the hell of utter irrelevance. Aware that these conspiracy theories start at a slow burn before they engulf the grassroots like wildfire, Re:Generator did a little digging to find out which fringe ideas will soon be attracting the media’s attention as they’re yelled, with no consideration for the more fine-tuned hearing of others, by demented geriatrics and Glenn Beck-obsessed Kool-Aid drinkers. This is what we found:
Obama was actually born in Waterloo. This theory relies on the assumption that Congressman Jim DeMint was communicating to the birther movement in a code only they could understand when he made the controversial statement that health care reform could be “Obama’s Waterloo.” As birthers understand it, DeMint has the inside track on the president’s true birth place, and was benevolently trying to steer them away from the red herring of Kenya to Waterloo, Belgium, where Napoleon Bonaparte was once defeated by the Duke of Wellington. Birthers are hesitant to leave American soil to investigate, so until one of them does, this there’s know way of knowing how valid the idea is – just the way birthers like it.
Ironically, Obama’s father wasn’t really born in Kenya, but Boise, Idaho. His Kenyan parents quietly covered up their shame and hid his true origins. Idaho is a cultural wasteland known for exactly two things: Its potato recipes, and having a cultural environment that made it possible for it to be the home base to Aryan Nations from the 1970s until the mid-2000s. It may be the only state in the union that makes Utah look cool by comparison. The thinking goes that during a trip to Idaho in 1936, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.’s Kenyan mother went into labor, but because a strong hatred of America is coded in the Obama family DNA, his parents hid the fact that he had been born until they were safely back in their mother country. This peculiar conspiracy theory doesn’t change the facts of president Barack Obama’s legal status one way or the other, but does give its subscribers more of an excuse to hate Obama’s entire extended family.
Barack Obama’s white side is descended from a Merovingian prince, and Obama is carrying on Jesus Christ’s lineage. With the popularity of books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, the idea of a bloodline stretching back to the Christ appeals to many. The theory states that the Holy Grail is in fact the children of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and after Christ’s crucifixion at the hands of the Pharisees and Sadducees, the children were whisked off to the south of France, where they married into the royal Merovingian bloodline. The new twist on the theory has been know to cause certain theorists heads to explode at the thought of a black man being a descendant of the clearly white Jesus. Others argue this could possibly make him the Antichrist.
Obama can’t be president because he lost Puerto Rico to Hillary in the primaries. Adherents contend that in a heretofore ignored clause in the original draft of the constitution, it clearly states “Only that person which canst seduce that dark temptress of a commonwealth, Rico’s Puerto, shall be permitted to steer fair America in ports yonder.” Besides the quotation in question clearly being made up, the fact remains that Puerto Rico was not a territory of the United States until 1900, and not a commonwealth until 1952.
Michele Obama has a level 80 Shaman on Gurubashi in World of Warcraft and rarely leaves her computer. The well dressed woman we see in public is her political double. Started after an obscure gaming magazine erroneously reported that the first lady considered herself a WoW fanatic, the rumor was quickly corrected by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in a White House press briefing. Gibbs’ explanation, true believers agree, does not account for the fact that no woman can be possibly be as perfect as Michelle Obama’s public persona makes her out to be. In their alternative version of history, the Obama campaign replaced Original Michelle after No Quarter’s Larry Johnson announced he had seen a video where Michelle referred to Caucasian Americans as “Whitey”. Panicked that this very real evidence of her “Reverse Racism” would surface, they sent OM to an underground bunker with an Alienware gaming computer, a robust high-speed Internet connection and a copy of World of Warcraft. Also, an actress was hired and the owner of the video was kidnapped and killed, chunks of his body disposed throughout the four corners of the globe.
Sasha and Malia are adopted. Barack and Michelle are actually a gay couple, with Michelle in drag. That’s why “Michelle” shows his arms so much. Similar to the the “Michelle Obama is a level 80 Shaman” business, this next conspiracy theory presumes the first lady is not what she seems – but in a much more elaborate facade than simply hiring an effective double. When much ado was made about Michelle’s baring of arms, it led some on the right to label the fashion statement overly masculine. It was all the invitation some needed to draw the same conclusion many on the left have been making about Ann Coulter since her rise to prominence: she’s a man, baby. This of course would make president Obama a secret homosexual, an orientation that some (not least of all Larry Sinclair) still think disqualifies a politician from being commander-in-chief.
Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance because doing so breaks the spell his black magics has over America. As every good quite possibly racist fringe loon knows, Barack Obama and his cadre of witch doctors cast a spell over usually good, hard-working Real Americans, compelling them to select the voodoo prince over the feisty POW and the thrilla from Wasilla. The only force on earth that has the power to undo the harm his satanic army has wrought upon the country is for the originator of the evil to corrupt his spell with the power of pure goodness; in this case, the entire text of the pledge, with special emphasis on “Under God” and “Liberty and justice for all.” This would also have the effect of melting Obama – who, as mentioned before, is possibly the Antichrist – into a steaming puddle of iniquity, a la the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz.
Barack Obama is secretly a Scientologist. Together with Brooke Shields, Tom Cruise and Beck they plan to completely destroy Medicare and replace it with positive thought and auditing. National health care is more insidious than you thought. The 1993 acceptance of Scientology as a tax-exempt entity only set the stage for a further revolution in America. Longtime detractors of Western medicine, or any medicine really, Scientologists are waiting all over the world for Obama to fully dismantle Medicare, forcing millions of people who oppose socialized medicine but nevertheless use it into their awaiting arms. Beck has promised to write a song praising the move, while Cruise has promised to personally jump on every couch in America.
When Obama bowed to the Saudi King Abdullah, it was actually an Illuminati rite signaling that the pan-American highway will be modified to include prominent symbols of Islam. According to opponents to the pan-American highway, funding for the modifications can be found in the stimulus package, a project which, naturally, is “shovel ready.” King Abdullah is investing matching funds in the groundbreaking roadwork, which means that once it’s completed, he will own the entire west coast of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Sharia Law will be imposed on American soil in short order: women will be forced to wear burkas, men will be mandated to grow beards, and Congress will pass a bill that requires all Americans to turn to the East and pray five times a day.
Obama is going to take our guns and give them to the Mexican army, who will invade America so it can be more multicultural. Especially popular among people who have never actually met or talked to Hispanics for any length of time, it combines one current fear popular on the right (that Obama will take everyone’s guns, possibly going door-to-door to personally collect them himself) with an oldie but goodie from Bush’s failed immigration reform days (The Mexicans! They’re invading! And they might have leprosy!). With this heady twofer, the America the right knows and loves will literally be destroyed by the two things they hate the most, thereby giving them what they view as justifiable reason for preemptively ratcheting up rhetoric and action against them.
An obscure provision in the cap and trade bill allows for the wholesale genocide of white people in the Appalachians so that vacation condos for black intellectuals can be built. Prior to Obama’s ill-chosen comments on the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates by white police officer James Crowley, even most inhabiting the fringe thought this sounded a little nutso. Now, anyone who has harbored suspicions that the black man would have his revenge once he got in power is frantically making arrangements to bus xenophobic yokels out to the Midwest to save them from Obama’s racially-motivated secret murder squad.
John McCain was replaced by a Vietnamese robot. The real McCain died in a tiger cage in the 1970s. It’s no secret that John McCain endured agonizing torture during his time as a POW in ‘Nam. What is a secret is that after succumbing to the awful practices of the Vietcong, McCain was replaced with a sophisticated robot built by the Japanese and given to the Vietnamese in order to infiltrate the highest levels of American politics. It was programmed with several goals in mind: to run for Congress, win, serve a respectable number of terms, then run for president and deliberately blow the race against whoever he ultimately faced off against; and after returning to Congress, to secretly collaborate with the man who bested him, using their combined powers to destabilize America. If one is to lend credence to such allegations, the McCainbot is right on track.
The brew Joe Biden drank at the beer summit had alcohol in it, and he’s fallen off the wagon. Soon, he will be unable to fulfill the functions of the office of vice president and will be replaced by a recently freed up, and secretly Democrat, Sarah Palin. This theory neatly explains all the weird behavior of the woman who nearly had Biden’s job. Like her former running mate, Palin’s been a double agent working for the left to undermine America all along. Think about it. There’s no way a Republican is walking around with a body like hers. If she was really conservative, she would be overweight with leftover McDonald’s french fries hiding in the folds under her breasts. This theory does appeal to us, if only because it gives Vice President Biden a chance to enjoy a beer and lets the man cut loose a little.
Sonia Sotomayor is secretly a suicide bomber for La Raza and B. Hussein Obama. People of a certain worldview are convinced that upon the start of the new Supreme Court session, newly sworn-in Justice Sotomayor will scream “Empathize with this!” and blow herself and all other Justices up. This will clear a path for Obama to replace the entire court with ethnic minorities, homosexuals and socialists, whose first decree as a court will be to find the Republican Party, National Review, Free Republic and Orly Taitz unconstitutional.
Obama is covertly shutting down the military so the money can be spent on late-term abortions. Conservative activists, literally afraid that Obama is Hitler but unconcerned by a burgeoning military-industrial complex that needs wars to sustain itself, fear that Obama’s support of the Senate’s move to defund the useless F-22 fighter jet is only the beginning. In their estimation, the president and his cronies in Congress will disassemble the military piece by piece, redirecting the money into training camps to create more abortionists who are taught to worship Tiller the Baby Killer as a God. While America is defenseless, the aborto-industrial complex will covertly enforce a China-style one child rule, usually without consulting the mother first.
When Obama said he wanted to bring “change” to America, it was code for “mandatory sex changes,” which he will inflict on all citizens young and old once his health care reform is enacted.* Proponents of the meme insist that Obama will facilitate gender confusion by requiring the elective genital mutilation of every man, woman and child so boys can be girls and girls can be boys. The girls who have already become boys and boys who have already become girls will be forced to have additional surgeries. Everyone will then be legally required on threat of imprisonment to go to the Barbie website as register their sex as “other”. All this, just to confuse Americans, as the populous has to be confused to keep a Democratic president in office.
*Postscript: When I initially came up with the “mandatory sex change” theory, I couldn’t have known that less than 24 hours after its conception, a right-wing organization would in all seriousness issue a press release alleging the very idea I thought I was so clever for thinking of. Sometimes, reality is stranger, and swifter, than satire.
