With just 24 percent of Tarheel Republicans believing that Barack Obama is a citizen, I think we need to reanimate Sigmund Freud to help us understand what is going on. I also think we should try to figure out who is primarily responsible for spreading this misinformation. How is it being done? And what other crazy ideas are pulsing through the same pipelines?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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The Stupid People are Corporate America’s biggest weapon.
I used to wonder how anyone could vote for Bush. Now I wonder how people manage to clothe themselves.
Maybe their Mommy’s help dress them.
one nation controlled by the media
information age of hysteria
it’s calling out to idiot America
velcro. zippers and buttons are hard work.
I’d like to here from TarheelDem on this.
Look below.
Thanks. Always good to get input from someone on the scene.
How is this information being spread? Through personal networks to friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers who trust the sender. And not just through emails, but through coffee klatches and water cooler chats, chats between Sunday School and church, chats with customers at garages and beauty parlors. Lots of ain’t it awful messaging and then throw this one in all while looking around to make sure there are no blacks or Hispanics in earshot.
And then there’s talk radio–on in the workplaces and the tractor in the fields and the car radio and the service truck radio.
Oh, and the preachers, er just passing on what the deacon said.
Where did it start from? Highly conservative DC GOP operatives of the Atwater-Rove-Ailes School of Communication. In North Carolina, some part of the Art Pope puppetshow empire (John Locke Foundation, Civitas, ….).
Don’t underestimate the role of the military in this, either. Not in an official sense, though there’s probably some of that, too, but just the amazing bullshit grapevine that runs through the services.
Having spent the majority of my life in close proximity to major military bases — Ft. Campbell in TN and Camp Lejeune in NC, plus a little time around the bases in SoCal — I can assure you that the service is an amazingly rumor-rich environment. You have a large number of young people, generally not very well educated, packed densely and extremely bored, moving all over the country pretty much all of the time. And by the very nature of the job, they tend to be rather more paranoid than most civilians. Adding to it, they’re surrounded by state secrets to which the average enlisted man is not privy, but whose presence is inescapable, so a whole bunch of fevered speculation goes on, at least partly to pass the time.
One thing I learned when I was younger and ended up at a lot of parties with soldiers is that there is a certain point — usually after everyone is good and inebriated — when at least one of the soldiers at the party starts telling stories about the most fabulous government conspiracies. That Barack Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate from Kenya is a story would be almost too tame to tell in that kind of situation.
Work with a lot of former military. Many are creationists. Sometimes I think we are entering the dark ages again. I’m floored at the crap people spew. Its not cool to be superstitious and uninformed. Its stupid. Spreading paranoid bullshit about public health care is criminal. The republicans are becoming something along the lines of a revolutionary guard. They are bought and paid for by the oligarchy.
I do think a lot of this starts on talk radio. But I swear there are paid operatives who put this s___ out to others who then forward like crazy. They can easily find Republicans – those emails are collected during political campaigns. And once the ripples start, the wretched believe…
There are three primary sources of this kind of misinformation that I know about:
Finally, polls like this one always make me wonder if the respondants aren’t just having some fun. You know, Repubs saying they don’t believe Obama is a citizen just to make liberals’ heads explode. har. har. Or, they could be giving the answer they think they should, like snobs who say they watch PBS when they actually never do.
#1 is the big one, believe it or not. Remember those emails saying Obama was a muslim? I talked for 1/2 hour to a woman in (I think it was) South Carolina about this. She said she’d heard it from others in her church, and she had seen it in an email. I asked her why she’d believe an anonymous email over the mainstream media. Her answer – the press was in on it, so this was the only way to get the word out. I asked how did she know someone wasn’t just trying to smear Obama. She admitted she didn’t know. I think by the end of the 30 minute conversation she was coming to believe me, but we can’t spend 30 minutes with each of these people, sheesh!
I think we need to infiltrate Free Republic and other such places and post anonymous messages saying careful – these email messages are designed to kill the Republican party by making ‘us’ look stupid. Don’t forward them!
Who knows. Maybe someone will believe it. Their actions are absolutely having that effect, in any case!
There’s another possibility – people who are being polled on the question are trying to influence the poll. I have no doubt that a large swath of those polled actually believe that Obama is not a citizen, but I also have to believe that enough of them are savvy enough to give answers that will skew the poll on a polarizing issue. I know that every poll that I come across I intentionally answer to put Obama in the best possible light (albeit in online, unscientific polls), it stands to reason that politically-active Tarheels may do the same in real polls.
Of course, it could also be yet another indicator of this great nation being transformed into Dumbphuqistan, but that’s another issue altogether.
It’s 24 percent of Republican’s that live in North Carolina. These are the people who would never, ever vote for a black person, believe Adam and Eve were the first humans on Earth, and that Saddam had WOMD.
It’s not shocking to me that there is still residual racism in North Carolina.
How is it being spread?
Church.
nalbar
The other side of it. Why does the story stick? Why do people get taken in by it?
These sort of stories have a contrarian “(whispered) Did you know?” aspect of them that sucker-punches rationality, much like an urban myth does. And an “in the know” payoff like most hard-to-debunk even with facts conspiracy theories.
And once taken in, the person being spun is not open to admitting gullibility.
And like other have said, there are enough sharp Republicans who think it is a stupid question and play it for effect.
I was just wondering much the same thing. There’s one big difference between the left and the right here. The average Democrat tends to think of the average Republican voter as being a dupe. The average Republican seems to think that the average Democratic voter is in on the plot.
While I personally would rather people think I was evil than think I was stupid and ignorant, it’s probably not very helpful to the left as a movement. Forget the leadership, ours and theirs. How do we get our Republican neighbors to remember that we are, in fact, their neighbors, and we are at worst well-meaning but misguided, not actively plotting to murder Sarah Palin’s retarded baby?
Boehner and McConnell will go to their graves trying to demonize us; there’s little we can do about that. How do we re-humanize ourselves in the eyes of our neighbors? It is, after all, up to us to heal the rift: our leaders actively benefit from it, so we can expect no help from them.
maybe you could start by not calling her baby ‘retarded.’
I mean, if you are looking to build some good will and improve communication…
Hm, good point. Do you think “weaponized stupidity” would be less offensive? 😉
Having grown up in NC-10 (home of The Odious Patrick McHenry) I can tell you without a doubt that the 24% number if anything is too high.
http://www.rumormillnews.com/
and associated Truther-type (and UFOs ‘r’ fer reelz dood) sites.
they’ve been pushing larry sinclair’s angle on faux citizenship for maybe a year or more? since election season, if I’m recalling correctly.
plus all the word of mouth networks mentioned above.
makes more sense in the light of the theory of “their” country being lost / racism.
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Sestak Health Care Meeting: Will you let the nut jobs win?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And I’ll say it again.
If the media were to come clean on something as big as the Kennedy assassination, people would start to listen and trust the mainstream again.
So long as they’re part of the cover-up, I do understand why people believe an anonymous mail over the mainstream. It’s crazy, but there is a crazy logic to it, as well.
Here’s the problem. How exactly would you know when the media came clean on the Kennedy assassination?
In order to do that, you would have to have the “real” information. And how do you know your “real” information is real? It is logical and it answers all of the questions? Which questions? The one the media hasn’t answered? And how did those questions arise?
The question at the core of the birther belief system is this one: Why won’t Obama show us his real birth certificate? They say “long form” but they mean the one the doctor filled out. And the answer is:
And the folks who question whether Obama is not a citizen generally are folks who accept the story about the Kennedy assassination. Their skepticism goes back further–the McCarthy assertions that communists were fifth columns seeking to overthrow the US and that they had infiltrated the government during Democratic administrations (essentially since FDR’s inauguration). The shock that sent this one off wasn’t the death of a president nor the election of “one of them”, but the Soviet success in obtaining enough information about the US nuclear program to build their own bomb. And this is why “socialist” and “communist” are also associated with birther mythology.
As for the Kennedy assassination, I don’t know what questions would have to be answered to clear it up. Some information is probably gone forever – notably what relationship, if any, Jack Ruby had with Lee Harvey Oswald. But just like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, no matter how much information comes out, there will be those who think that we haven’t gotten the real story. And we really will have no way of telling whether that is true or not. It goes to Patrick Fitzgerald’s comments about kicking sand in the face of the umpiree.
It’s just a form of personal denial that Obama won the presidency. However, I am sure the same amount of people from NC believe there is a NAFTA superhighway being built so the UN can invade the United States.
I was wondering why the church would be so heavily against a black President. I didn’t realize there is a long history about Hamite teachings. This is at Wikipedia:
“According to Catholic mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, “I saw the curse pronounced by Noah upon Ham moving toward the latter like a black cloud and obscuring him. His skin lost its whiteness, he grew darker. His sin was the sin of sacrilege, the sin of one who would forcibly enter the Ark of the Covenant. I saw a most corrupt race descend from Ham and sink deeper and deeper in darkness. I see that the black, idolatrous, stupid nations are the descendants of Ham. Their color is due, not to the rays of the sun, but to the dark source whence those degraded races sprang” [5].”
I had never heard of this before. Our church doesn’t preach it, but apparently some churches still do. Makes sense then, that so many people who are believers will totally be against a black President. God said so.
I think the LDS church has a history with similar teachings.
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The Hamitic heritage is used as cover for slavery of black African people and the Rwanda genocide. I could fond no evidence for above quote from the life of Anne Catherine Emmerich, except for a wikipedia entry. Even as entry highly controversial.
My conclusion is a racist slur with elements of anti-semitism. See my further findings …
The Catholics have a Black Madonna in Czestochowa, Poland and in Mexico Our Lady of Guadalupe is a black Virgin Mary.
The Nation of Islam’s account of the slave trade, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, presents a multi-layered attack against the Jewish people; it assaults the integrity of the Jewish religion, the meaning of Jewish history, and the foundations of Jewish scholarship upon which the book’s own fraudulent charges are based.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Usually I’m very interested in the question of where this stuff comes from — for example, the “Obama is a Muslim” meme. But we’ve seen enough og these to get the idea where they’re coming from and why, and the birther thing is so utterly stupid that I find the question of origin, or how it is spread, to be secondary.
The interesting thing, rather, is why people believe it. And the answer is, NOT primarily because they are stupid. Lots of stupid people don’t believe it, and lots of people who do believe it, or think it is something they ought to believe, and so for all intents and purposes, do — are NOT actually stupid.
To a considerable extent, people believe what they WANT to believe. This is rule number one of propaganda.
The present case is a superb proof of that proposition, precisely because it is so utterly without subtance. The ONLY reason to believe it is because you want to. There are deep psychological and cultural reasons why a fairly small minority of Americans, overwhelingly centered in the southern states, want and need to believe that Obama is not the legitimate president of the USA. Since the president was elected by a healthy majority of American voters in both popular and electoral college votes, they can’t do anything with that. The birther movement is utterly and totally without substance, it is believed in by people for whom the story is more important than any evidence or logic whatsoever, in other words, Republicans and mainly southern Republicans, in other words, racists.
In my book, logic is something that you have to have a decent innate grasp of if you want to avoid being flat stupid. You can be uneducated and still be smart, but you can’t be devoid of logic and be smart.
The logic of the Birther Theory requires that believers have no understanding of logic or how the world actually works. You have to ignorant AND stupid. Only then can you believe it just because it suits you to believe it.
Just to be clear, my reply box below is in the wrong position, but it was intended as a reply to yours, Boo.
Feelings, emotions, core beliefs, allegiances and solidarity with social peers, can cause otherwise intelligent people to deliberately spit in the face of logic and evidence. From a wider perspective we may call this kind of behavior “stupid,” but it doesn’t mean that anyone who engages in it automtically has a low IQ. It means they are angry and they will believe anything that supports their views and disbelieve anything that contradicts them. It’s about psychology and sociology, not logic. In order to look at real evidence and logic, you have to be WILLING to do so. Even if you can think, you have to be WILLING to think. Admittedly, there are many stupid people who cannot think and will believe whatever they are told. But for many others, the problem is ill will, not stupidity.
Is it really so surprising to find that the highest percentage of racists is in the south? Because it all boils down to that.