Abstract

The goal of this paper will be to analyze how president Obama's election and his time in office were incorporated into the existing conspiracy narratives. Despite the 44th president's tremendous popularity during his first months in the office, the conspiracy theorists enumerated examples of foul play from the onset. Alex Jones in his documentary The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off (2009) openly named the U.S. president a member of the New World Order conspiracy, and claims Obama not only failed to keep his campaign promises, but will continue the policies of George W. Bush.

The evaluation of the conspiracy theorists' claims will not be the focus of this paper. Rather, it will strive to show how an existing conspiracy narrative, a belief in a clandestine world government, incorporates new elements to remain internally coherent. This process, called “interpretative desire” by Mark Fenster, is the cornerstone of any totalizing conspiracy theory. Such narratives surrounding Barack Obama serve as an illustration of the strength of the “paranoid style” as envisioned by Richard Hofstadter during the Cold War. The conspiracy theorist effectively has to interpret Obama's election as a part of the conspiracy, lest it invalidates his theory.

Introduction

While it would certainly be an oversimplification, one would not be far from the truth when claiming that most of the American presidents were, or are said to be, connected to shadowy schemes or conspiracy theories.