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  • 2016-09-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Clinton Supporters Start the 'Birther' Movement? (en)
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  • On 16 September 2016, after years of being the most visible and outspoken exponent of birtherism — the notion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and thus his presidency is illegitimate and his allegiances suspect — GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump stepped up to the podium at a televised campaign event and completely reversed his stance on the matter — but not before trying to lay blame for the long, drawn-out smear campaign on someone else. Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it, Trump said. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. A press release issued by Trump's campaign staff elaborated on the accusation: The statement is correct when it suggests that the claim that Hillary Clinton invented birtherism isn't new. It had been made in 2015, for example, on the MSNBC Morning Joe program: Though it's true that the specific allegation that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. first reared its head during the 2008 presidential race, rumblings about Obama's otherness had been percolating since long before that. In 2004, a political gadfly named Andy Martin issued a press release calling Barack Obama a complete fraud who had misrepresented his heritage in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and is a Muslim who has concealed his religion. The theme was pushed further in December 2006 by conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel, who published an article entitled Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim, which stated that Obama has a 'born-again' affinity for the nation of his Muslim father, Kenya. In March 2007, Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn proposed attacking Obama on the basis of his lack of American roots. And, in December 2007, a Clinton volunteer county coordinator in Iowa was fired for forwarding an e-mail making the by-then familiar claim that Obama is a Muslim. The idea that Obama was born elsewhere, specifically Kenya, was first floated in April 2008, according to a 22 April 2011 Politico article by Ben Smith and Byron Tau on the origins of birtherism: That Hillary Clinton supporters circulated such an e-mail isn't in question, but the claim that that's the moment the birther theory first emerged simply isn't true. The likeliest point of origin we've been able to find was a post on conservative message board FreeRepublic.com dated 1 March 2008 (which, according to a report in The Telegraph, was at least a month before Clinton supporters got on the e-mail bandwagon): The same rumor was repeated, with elaborations, four days later on the conservative blog Ruthless Roundup: The conspiracy theory was already fully formed at this point. Clearly, the Clinton supporters accused of spreading it via forwarded e-mails knew good ammo when they saw it, but, as the above posts show, they deserve neither credit nor blame for the invention of birtherism. (en)
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