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I think this fits well into this thread.
Speaking as someone who frequently talks to multiple right wingers, I get the impression the "Big Mike" meme is actually serious. Every single one of them that mentioned it eagerly brings up new evidence in favor of the theory. It's one of the most annoying memes to me for this reason. Comes across as pointlessly cruel and also pointlessly racist, based on basically nothing. I would probably be similarly annoyed by the Obama birth certificate stuff if I was into politics as much back then.
I dont think that implies theyre serious about it. Or, maybe serious but not literal? Basically, if you need the big guns OP is bringing out, the point is made.
I think it's "I'm not serious but would like to be and use the guise of irony while fishing for the truth."
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I know at least one of them is serious about it because I explicitly asked. The others are generally even more right wing than her. I've had to self censor quite a bit lately.
(I dont mean to argue your experience in person, my experience with this argument was entirely schizo twitter) Wait, do people still talk about this, or has there been some "update" recently?
And, I didnt think of it originally, but you calling it racist is a great example of how it works rethorically. Most onlookers arent gonna know what you mean, it just looks like you call everything racist. And if you do go on to explain... this stereotype of black women being less feminine, I had not heard about before outside this very topic. The version about implictly biased western beauty standards is more common, but also gets into the "nutty demands" territory. Whichever way you roll it, you lose points with those not already in your camp, and it wasnt really necessary to bring it up, either - yet here we go.
It’s been spoken about again more because of popular conservative grifter Candace Owens’ video series alleging that Brigitte Macron is mtf.
this is one of those things that surely can't be true because it requires a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth
Notably, Brigitte macron would have had to disguise himself as a woman decades ago and also be a homosexual groomer. Even if trans, gay, predatory teacher(and even if you don’t think teenaged boys having sex with adults is inherently predatory- let’s face it, most people don’t- I think most people would agree that it is when that adult is his teacher) are overlapping groups, that’s still a series of coincidences. Candace Owens simply went off the tradcath deep end; I expect video series about how Antarctica is actually covered in forests, smoking is good for you, etc in the near term future.
Except, as you yourself have done a good job pointing out, it was the very, very, very online "tradcath" deep end.
I've listened to about half of the SSPX Crisis in the Church Podcast. These are IRL TradCaths who go off the deep end in relation to all sorts of actual theological, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical topics. But it doesn't make for good television. "The Vatican forced Archbishop Lefevbre's hand! He had to do the Econe consecrations!" is a snooze fest from the jump.
Online Tradcaths, being very online and aware of the mechanics of social media, thus decided to release the mixtape of; Flat Earth (Remix), All Them Hoes is Dudes, and (Living in a) Pedophiles Paradise.
I never followed much of Candance Owens' career. A limited background being my caveat, it appears to me she lost some esteem when she went out on her own and has dealt with that poorly.
There are IRL not-online tradcaths who believe and happily explain all sorts of schizo theories about Jews/healthcare/gender/history and geography/etc. It's not a majority but they do exist- those old timers sitting in a corner drinking coffee for hours after mass will probably start with some tamer stuff about the 2020 election, moving into Pearl Harbor truth before going off about the Jews controlling big pharma to cause homosexuality and ending with Antarctica being forested and British control of the Falklands exists to prevent the Argentine military from making this discovery and blowing the lid off of it. Much much less race baiting than online twitterati tradcaths but pretty schizo, even if your median IRL rad-trad conspiracy theory is a snoozefest to everyone except their co-religionists. I'm not paying too too much attention to Candace Owens but she's definitely an active and involved rad trad who would be notable within the community even if she wasn't already a celebrity- she's definitely at least heard the particular actual-schizo cocktail crazy rad trads get into.
As an aside, the SSPX keeps its priests- and important laypeople- on a much shorter leash than the FSSP, and while they have other problems 'letting unrelated schizophrenia spread unchecked' is not one. You want to find rad trads who are into esoteric paranoid schizophrenia in totally unrelated ways, you talk to elderly people at larger FSSP parishes. The society will only tolerate unrelated conspiracy theories if they further the hardline social conservatism- eg women in pants is a masonic plot, the pill causes homosexuality in nearby males, etc.
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There was actually reason to believe that there was something iffy about Obama's birthplace, although at this point it's presumably well-buried enough that we'll never find out exactly what happened there. (Entirely likely that he really was born in Hawaii and the irregularities came from trying to cover up or distract from some other embarrassment.) Michelle being transgender, by contrast, is nonsense, but you're right that lots of schizos seem to be fixated on it; it's like an awful peek into the lumpenprole-right id.
What reason was there to believe that there was something iffy about Obama's birthplace? I don't know if it was public that his parents had a shotgun-courthouse wedding (and that, depending on whether Hawaiian law recognized Obama Sr's Kenyan marriage/claimed divorce, this marriage - and, consequently, Obama Jr - may not have been legitimate), but I don't see how covering that up would create "something iffy" about the record of his birthplace. Also, due to Obama also having jus sanguinis citizenship, him being foreign born wouldn't be disqualifying and there were actual life choices of his to hide, so there would be no point in him participating in a coverup.
There are a lot of things with potentially innocent explanations that are nonetheless in aggregate fishy but can't be investigated because of an early version of what we'd now recognize as the War On Misinformation. Several promotional bios for Obama prior to his presidential campaign state that he was born in Kenya, which was apparently a mistake but one of unclear origin (perhaps Obama or someone close to him was engaging in a foolhardy attempt to inflate his diversity status, a la Warren?). The idea was popular among his family and their community in Kenya, for local pride reasons, and they would claim to remember his birth there (possibly mistaking him for a relative). When Obama did eventually release his birth certificate, it was an easily-tampered-with copy (apparently this is a problem with copy machines in general?) and the bureaucrat who verified it died in a mysterious small plane crash shortly thereafter.
I completely agree that "was Barack Obama ineligible for the presidency" is a narrower target than "was Barack Obama born in Kenya", which is itself a narrower target than "was Barack Obama trying to hide something related to his birth".
Maybe they confused him with his father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.?
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Oh, right - I'd forgotten about that. My guess is that it was a Hanlon's Razor thing: It was written by someone who should have read his book but hadn't and then quoted by others who also hadn't read his book.
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It's easy to forget that before the Trump fan/TDS dynamic, a prototype of the same was already being sketched in Obama followers vs. what should in hindsight be labelled ODS. In the same way in which Trump inspires his adherents but inspires revulsion and a resulting willingness to cling to any smear that makes this feeling of revulsion rationalisable and communicable in his opponents, everything about Obama also clearly elicited visceral disgust in his detractors, who were then just searching for a justification to allow them to continue modelling themselves as sensible people who believe things for good reasons. Why does this president elicit such antipathy in me? Ah, right. He is not who he claims he is, and can't even legally be the president. He is a foreign deep cover agent and secret lovechild of Malcolm X raised to be the perfect political cult leader. His wife is also a man. No wonder I disliked him so much. I always had a good intuition about people.
The Trump counterpart are stories like Russiagate and piss tapes. Both of these are much more compatible with the smart critic's self-perception than "I am disgusted by his outgroup mannerisms and the idea of being subordinate to someone like that makes my lizard brain convulse". From the outside, both seem like extremely flimsy rationalisations to reject an elected president - like, so what if he does not meet some technical condition? It's a democracy, and more than half of voters voted for him. Even if Obama is foreign-born or Trump has to go to jail or whatever, people hypothetically should have been able to get the same politics by voting for a stand-in who promises to exactly implement the original's policies but is not encumbered by the gotchas, in the style of Thailand politics.
Thats a reasonable idea, but I dont think they could have. Maybe they could now, but I doubt it still. Trump has viable successors, in many ways better then him, but theyre clearly not Trump.
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While Obama was likely a turning point in these dynamics, I think they clearly go back much further. The phrase "[President] Derangement Syndrome" was invented for Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, and at the time it was referencing dynamics generally acknowledged to have already existed under Clinton. Reagan and Nixon stand out as facing similar, and it seems entirely likely that Carter got the same at the time and it's just faded in his post-presidency. Johnson? Kennedy? Maybe this is just how people treat presidents.
JFK is today remembered as a mythical ‘good president’, but he had not-otherwise-insane haters too.
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While the specific derangement syndrome indeed originated with W, there was the concept of Clinton crazies before it.
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I was going to say, Hillary was the subject of absurd slander when I was in elementary school. I remember hearing even back then, that Monica was no big deal because you should hear what Hillary does to the men AND THE WOMEN on air force one!
She’s still the subject of absurd slander.
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Wasn't that the era when they had to close down the high school congressional page program because everyone in congress was doing coke and fucking them?
I only remember because one of my friends was in the last batch.
Excuse me what? Is that another rumor or did your friend confirm that was the reason?
Oh no, it's all on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says there was a sex-and-coke scandal in 1983 (uncovering a 1973 incident and a 1980 incident), then a sexting scandal in 2006, and yet the discontinuation of the program (ostensibly because the House was finally sufficiently computer-savvy enough to obsolete "kids running around with documents") was in 2011. Was there an additional scandal they're missing, or is the inference that they wanted to shut down the program in 2006 (or 1983?) but just took 5 (or 28?) years to do it?
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