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The rules are ambiguous as to which thread should be used for culture war related/adjacent small questions, but I'll take a guess that the mods would prefer questioners err on the side of the culture war roundup, so I'll ask this here:
How much of the "Michelle Obama is transgender" conspiracy theory is genuine vs trolling? And, among those who genuinely believe it, what are the proposed explanations/is there a consensus for the Obama daughters' parentage? Adoption would be too difficult to cover up, but so would Michelle being transgender, to begin with, so I suppose that's not a great threat to the theory. If the full amendment history of the relevant section of Illinois legal code is available online, finding it would require more effort than I care to make, but "the exception that implies the rule" indicates that it was the Illinois Gestational Surrogacy Act enacted in 2005 that allowed pre-birth orders for putting intended mothers on Illinois birth certificates:
"Birthers" didn't hesitate to demand the release of Barrack Obama's own birth certificate - what about his daughters' birth certificates? (Or is the conspiracy theory all trolling or are those who genuinely believe it the kinds of people who wouldn't consider even its immediate implications or ...?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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