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That same day, in a since-deleted tweet accessed by NBC News through the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, the conservative podcast host Jack Posobiec urged his 1.7 million followers to buy T-shirts that say “Boycott Groomers, bring ammo” and incorporate the famous Disney castle logo and signature font. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took things a step further, tweeting that “Democrats are the party of killing babies, grooming and transitioning children, and pro-pedophile politics,” in reference to the legislation. Ron DeSantis tweeted that anyone who opposes the bill “is probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Several days later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked her millions of viewers, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?” In early March, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Nonetheless, polls as recently as this year have found a majority of Republicans questioning Obama’s citizenship.The national war of words over whether students should learn about LGBTQ issues in school - ignited by a recently enacted Florida law that critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill - has taken a charged, and some say dangerous, turn over the last several weeks. That claim, too, is bogus, contradicted by a raft of evidence, including Obama’s birth certificate and contemporaneous birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers. citizen who is ineligible for the presidency.
More banally, many people have claimed that Obama is a Manchurian candidate (or a Manchurian president, perhaps), a non-U.S. The conservative writer Andrew McCarthy argued in a 2010 book that Obama was part of a conspiracy with radical Islamists to subvert the U.S. What is unprecedented here is that the claims are coming from a major party’s presumptive nominee for president, but unhinged beliefs about Obama are not especially new, nor are they nearly so fringe. The fringe radio host Alex Jones has already labeled Orlando a false flag, offering a sense of who Trump’s allies are on this issue. So, too, are those who have claimed that mass-shooting events such as the Sandy Hook massacre are “false flag” attacks, designed to drum up support for gun-control measures. There’s no substantiation for those claims, and the people who hold them are generally viewed with derision. Bush was either involved in or turned a blind eye to the 9/11 attacks. For example, some “Truthers” argued that President George W.
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Such conspiratorial beliefs are not unheard of in American politics, but they are typically banished to the margins.
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The idea the president is a Manchurian candidate, a mole or agent for jihadism is a stunning accusation, even by the standard of a presidential campaign in which Trump has delivered a series of breathtaking statements, from comparing a rival to a child molester to being unable and unwilling to differentiate one of his policy ideas from Nazi policies. There’s something going on.ĭuring an interview on NBC’s Today show, Trump offered a slightly softer version of the accusation, suggesting Obama was willfully blind: “There are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it.” People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. And the something else in mind-you know, people can’t believe it. Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.