Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

And so in 2011 he turned on Obama, flirting provocatively with birtherism in a March 2011 interview on Good Morning America while doing his traditional pretending to run for president. He was hardly the first to do so—politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann all flirted with it to various degrees. But he was by some margin the most rawly famous person to indulge in the conspiracy theory, and Good Morning America was among the highest platforms the theory had ascended to. This got him attention, and by mid-April he was getting daily briefings on the “conspiracy” from WorldNetDaily founder and general conspiracy nut Joseph Farah. It’s hardly surprising that he loved the attention. He always loves attention, after all. If a rush of people cheer on something he says he’s basically incapable of not saying it again or of pushing it further to get more and louder cheers. But it’s a mistake to treat this as a cynically strategic pandering to what would eventually become his electoral base. There was nothing strategic about it. It was nothing more or less than the inevitable consequence of his particular pathologies set loose in the particular political context of the first black president slamming rich real estate speculators.