By Soumya Karlamangla
By Soumya Karlamangla
McClatchy-Tribune
When President Barack Obama marched into the White House briefing room with his Hawaiian birth certificate in April 2011, he said “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”
How right he was.
The release of his long-form birth certificate did not eliminate the “birther” movement, which contends Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although conspiracists demanded its release, once he made public the document, it merely shifted the debate. Some birthers accused Obama of forgery, while others turned their focus to his college transcripts in hopes of proving he applied for admission as a foreign student. (He had not.)
And this week, birthers seized on a plane crash off Molokai that killed one person: state public health director Loretta Fuddy, the woman who verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.
Skeptics turned to social media Thursday to suggest Obama played some role in Fuddy’s death. Twitter posts included: “The WH tying up loose ends?,” “What did she really know?” and “R.I.P. Loretta Fuddy — we’ll know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama, regardless.”
Donald Trump, a longtime doubter of Obama’s birthplace, also weighed in on Twitter: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”
That reaction didn’t surprise those who study conspiracy theorists.
Mark Fenster, University of Florida law professor who wrote a book on conspiracy theories, said adherents will search for evidence to support their beliefs, and each piece of news can give their theory new life.
“The theories themselves are a process of stitching together individual facts to form a larger narrative, and this is just one more fact that gets linked to the chain,” Fenster said.
Fuddy, 65, was among nine people in a Cessna that crashed into the ocean Wednesday, shortly after leaving Kalaupapa Airport on Molokai about 3:15 p.m. The eight others on the plane, including the pilot, were rescued, but Fuddy “remained in the fuselage of the plane,” Honolulu Fire Capt. Terry Seelig told KHON-TV. “It’s always a difficult situation when you’re not able to get everybody out.”
On Thursday, Lt. William Juan with the Maui Police Department said Fuddy’s body was recovered from the wreckage and an autopsy would be conducted.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash, agency spokesman Eric Weiss said, and a preliminary report should be ready in 10 to 14 days.
The pilot of the Makani Kai Air plane did not call for help, officials said, but radio reception is bad in the area.
Fuddy was apparently headed to Honolulu from Kalawao County, a park on the north coast of Molokai and the home of the state’s former leper colonies. The director of the health department serves as the mayor of Kalawao County.
Fuddy was the state’s public health director since March 2011. She approved the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, which is not a public document in Hawaii, at his lawyers’ request.
More recently, she was involved with implementing the Affordable Care Act and the state’s gay marriage law, which took effect Dec. 2.
For Orly Taitz, the leading birther litigator who argued in several federal courts Obama isn’t a natural-born American, the sole fatality was too much of a coincidence.
“Attorney Taitz calls on 8 courts and judges who received her cases to rule expeditiously on the merits and review the evidence of forgery and theft in Obama’s IDs before more people die in strange accidents,” she said on her website.
Taitz has yet to win a case in the matter.
Anyone who believes Obama’s birth certificate is fake will find a way to tie the plane crash to their beliefs, said Dan Cassino, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
It’s unclear how many people ascribe to birther beliefs. But a poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University in January found 36 percent of voters, including 64 percent of Republicans, thought Obama is hiding information about his background.
Conspiracy theories aren’t new, Cassino noted. The birthplace of the 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, became a point of contention in 1881 as rumors spread he was born in Canada.
The Internet made it easier to spread outlandish theories, Cassino said. Thirty years ago, if you tried to tell people about a farfetched belief, they’d ignore you, he said. But online, “you can go and find a community of people who all agree with you.”
This causes a false-consensus effect, in which people overestimate how many people agree with them, he said. Under these conditions, the loudest voices win, and theories become more and more extreme, he said.
Fenster said he didn’t think the Internet increased the number of people who believe in conspiracy theories. But it does provide people with a platform to instantaneously make their beliefs known, and allows theories to develop much more quickly, he said.
Although the number of theories might have increased, Fenster said, the number of people who believe in them probably has not.