Last Saturday, Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum addressed the South Carolina National Security Action Summit, an event thrown by the conservative Secure Freedom, Breitbart News, and High Frontier.
While speaking, kinda-sorta-maybe 2016 candidate Santorum took a question that sounded like it sprang from the logical depths of a demented C-SPAN caller.
“Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator [Barack Obama] destroy my country?” the attendee inquired. “Y’all know what he is, and I know what he is. I want him out of the White House. He’s not a citizen. He could have been removed a long time ago. ... He’s trying to destroy the United States. The Congress knows this. What kind of games is the Congress of the United States playing with the citizens of the United States? … I don’t think the country will be around for the next election. Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago, and the three admirals and generals—he has totally destroyed our military. He’s fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn’t fire on the American people, if you asked them to do so, if he wanted to take the guns away from them.”
There’s a lot going on in that last paragraph. (Fortunately, Bloomberg reporter Dave Weigel penned a helpful rundown for you.)
Okay. Santorum believes some crazy shit, but he doesn’t appear to buy into this. But some people do. Here’s why.
Since late 2013, fringe online “news” outlets, such as Alex Jones’s Infowars, have been pushing the rumor that President Obama wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb in Charleston, S.C., as part of a false-flag operation. Brave officers refused to go along with Obama’s flashy mass-murder scheme, so he canned them.
Motives and plot points vary depending on how many times this tale has bounced around on the Internet. Obama wanted to pin the devastating attack on a foreign enemy in order to gain popular support for an American war in Syria or elsewhere, some allege. A nuclear assault on U.S. soil would finally allow Barack Hussein Obama to seize the absolute power he has long lusted after. Sometimes George Soros is thrown into the mix. Sometimes slaughtered dolphins are involved.
Fascination surrounding this deranged-president narrative—one tailor-made for Hollywood production—has resulted in some long, charming YouTube videos:
The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding the president’s supposed plot to obliterate Charleston. SO WHAT IS OBAMA HIDING?????
Anyway, for more riveting theories about President Obama, below is a diagram I helped make for Mother Jones magazine in 2012 that charts nearly every single Obama-related conspiracy theory ever. (You can check out the full breakdown here.)
It includes everything from a teenage trip to Mars, to a murder-orgy cover-up:
