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. However, filling in for Dobbs on his own program a few days later, CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim ran a report debunking the theories.
Dobbs shrugged it off, asserting on his CNN broadcast the next night that Obama’s birth-certificate questions “won’t go away.” He featured a video clip of a town-hall attendee berating the Republican congressman Mike Castle of Delaware about Obama’s birth certificate: “He is not an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya!” Dobbs commented: “A lot of anger in the audience, and a lot of questions remaining—seemingly, the questions won’t go away because they haven’t been dealt with, it seems possible, too straightforwardly and quickly.”
The comments created an uproar. Chris Matthews, on MSNBC’s Hardball, suggested that Dobbs was “appeasing the nutcases” by reporting the claims as if they had any credibility. Rather than back down, Dobbs doubled down, going on CNN and charging that Obama could “make the whole … controversy disappear … by simply releasing his original birth certificate.” On his radio show he similarly persisted: “Where is that birth certificate? Why hasn’t it been forthcoming?”
When the resulting public firestorm produced calls from civil rights and Latino organizations to remove Dobbs from his anchor position, CNN’s president, Jon Klein, defended his coverage as “legitimate”—but he sent an email to Dobbs’s staff to inform them that the birth certificate story was “dead.” That night, Dobbs reiterated that Obama could “make the story go away.” As the controversy raged on other channels—Fox’s Bill O’Reilly knocked Dobbs for his credulousness, but defended him against his attackers anyway—Dobbs claimed that he really didn’t believe the theories: “All I said is the president is a citizen, but it would be simple to make all this noise go away with just simply producing the long-form birth certificate.” Dobbs eventually lost his job at CNN, in part over the Birther controversy.
But the conspiracist alternative universe kept expanding into the mainstream media. That was mainly due to a fresh new face at Fox News: Glenn Beck.
By 2009, Limbaugh was the elder statesman of the incendiary pundit set. Yet as divisive and conspiracist as his rhetoric often became, he was overtaken that year in both those qualities by the hot new face on the right-wing scene, the boyish-looking Beck. Beck built on and amplified the central themes established during the 2008 campaign —that Obama was a foreigner, a leftist, an America-hating radical who wanted to destroy the American way of life. In the process, he opened up a whole new frontier in the transmission of right-wing extremist ideas into mainstream American discourse.
Beck already had an established reputation as a bomb thrower, first from his years as a radio “shock jock” at a number of stations around the country, and then from his tenure, beginning in 2006, at CNN Headline News, where he was noted for such antics as asking newly elected Representative Keith Ellison, the nation’s first Muslim congressman, why he, Beck, shouldn’t consider him to be working for the enemy. He also