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Jim David Adkisson really hated liberals. He hated them so much he wanted to start killing them en masse. So one day he did.

On July 27, 2008, Adkisson—a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville, Tennessee, suburb of Powell—drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, which had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Adkisson walked inside the church carrying a guitar case packed with a shotgun and seventy-six rounds of ammunition.

The congregants were enjoying the opening scene from the church’s production of the musical Annie Jr. when Adkisson, in a hallway outside the sanctuary, abruptly opened the guitar case, pulled out the shotgun, fired off a round that alerted everyone to his presence, then walked into the sanctuary and began firing randomly, while saying “hateful things.” Linda Kraeger, sixty-one, a grandmother and retired schoolteacher, was hit in the face with a shotgun blast. Greg McKendry, sixty, got up to shield others from the attack and was hit in the chest.

A group of men began to surround Adkisson. When he stopped to reload, three men tackled him and wrestled away his gun. Pinned to the ground, Adkisson complained that the men were hurting him.

Greg McKendry was dead at the scene. Linda Kraeger died the next day. Seven other congregants were wounded.

In his Ford Escape, Adkisson had left a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”

A detective who interviewed Adkisson and examined the manifesto reported to his superiors that Adkisson targeted the church “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”

Adkisson explained to the detective that he’d decided that since “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them into office.”

At Adkisson’s home in Powell, scattered among the ammunition, guns, and brass knuckles, investigators found a library straight from the right-wing canon: Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, by Michael Savage; Let Freedom Ring, by Sean Hannity; and The O’Reilly Factor, by Bill O’Reilly, among others.

Adkisson’s manifesto read like an angry and twisted regurgitation of the rhetoric ladled out by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, boiled down to its logical conclusion.

Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them …

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence …

I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me … Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

Adkisson’s rampage shattered the congregation. “People were killed in the sanctuary of my church, which should be the holy place, the safe place. People were injured,” Rev. Chris Buice told PBS’s Rick Karr a couple of weeks later. “A man came in here, totally dehumanized us—members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?”

Eliminationism had become an established component of right-wing rhetoric, both in the mainstream and among extremists, during most of the preceding decade and longer. One of its most powerful effects is to create an atmosphere of permission for acts of violence and intimidation; over time, enough such rhetoric will cause some people to commit hate crimes and worse.

The year 2008 was when eliminationism ceased being mere rhetoric and started bubbling up into the real world. Incidents of right-wing domestic terrorism, such as Jim Adkisson’s murderous spree, suddenly doubled compared to 2007. Racially motivated hate crimes, particularly those directed against Hispanic victims, also increased. Militia organizing, which had tapered off to minuscule numbers for the previous eight years, also more than doubled.

There were a number of reasons for these changes, but one sequence of news events in particular appears to have inspired this upswing: the announcement, in February 2007, by Barack Obama that he intended to run for the presidency of the United States, followed by his extraordinarily popular and successful campaign in the succeeding months.

Right from the start, the old racist right made clear its hatred of Obama. In June 2007, the grand dragon of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Railston Loy, predicted, “Well, I’m not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down South is going to take him out … If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.”

But as Obama’s candidacy advanced, old-line racists began facing the prospect of the election of a black man to the presidency—in so many ways another major defeat for their ideology. In short order they began changing their tune. In fact, they began claiming that the election of Barack Obama would be a good thing for them. August Kreis, the national director of the Aryan Nations, told an Associated Press reporter, “Obama’s done my group a lot of good. He’s polarizing Americans, black and white … Especially in Florida, affiliates have increased recently.”

Tom Prater, Florida spokesman for the white power group Euro, said, “I’ve gotten more calls in the last two months about interest in our organizations than I got in all the years in the past.”

Don Black, owner of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, was optimistic when interviewed by the Washington Post about the opportunities offered by Obama’s candidacy: “I get nonstop e-mails and private messages from new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected,” Black said. “White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we’ve lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it’s bringing them over to our side.”

Mainstream conservatives chose to race-bait more subtly, through the use of “dog whistles”—code words that race-baiting politicians and pundits use to refer to red-meat issues for the rabid right, audible only to those who have ears already attuned to the frequency. Conservative pundits in short order began referring to Obama by his middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness and also to create an association with the Iraqi dictator American forces had not so long ago toppled. Rush Limbaugh ran a ditty with the title “Barack the Magic Negro,” whose lyrics suggested his entire candidacy was built on a foundation of white guilt. In the Washington Times, the columnist Steve Sailer, who has often espoused eugenicist ideas, wrote, “While some whites envisage Mr. Obama as the Cure for White Guilt, blacks are in no hurry to grant the white race absolution for slavery and Jim Crow, since they benefit from compensatory programs like affirmative action.” In their eyes, Obama’s candidacy was all about race—and for the duration, that’s all it ever would be.

At mainstream news websites, things quickly became ugly. CBS. com had to shut down comments on any Obama story on its website because the stories inevitably attracted vicious race-baiters and death threats. In real life, matters were even worse; Obama’s campaign attracted so many threats he was assigned a Secret Service detail earlier in the campaign than any other candidate in history.

The intensity of the racial and ethnic animus directed at Obama picked up after he secured the Democratic Party nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, on August 28. An early warning sign that this might occur came on August 24, one day before the convention, when three men who turned out to have white-supremacist backgrounds were arrested in a nearby suburb for allegedly plotting to assassinate Obama (in the end no charges were brought).

Obama’s nomination probably influenced the outcome of the Republican National Convention, which took place a few days later in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the ensuing campaign. The Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, selected as his running mate Alaska’s governor Sarah Palin, a populist bomb thrower popular with the religious right. Palin now entered the national stage as America’s newest right-wing heroine. Upon hitting the hustings the week after the convention, Palin began lobbing rhetorical grenades in Obama’s direction, accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” a reference to his association with William Ayers, a onetime Weather Underground leader. She also emphasized that the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain—and herself, of course—was that they, being good Republicans, preferred to campaign in “pro-American places.” She didn’t hold back on rabble-rousing red meat meant to emphasize Obama’s foreignness and his supposed radicalism.

And the crowds responded, shouting out “terrorist” in reference to Obama and, at one rally, “Kill him!” in reference to Ayers. An Al-Jazeera camera crew caught the honest sentiments of many McCain-Palin supporters as they were leaving an Ohio rally—that Obama was anti-white, that he was a terrorist, or, more basically, that he was a black man:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Negra running for president, you need a first stringer. [McCain’s] definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep—or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to be honest with you. And I believe Palin—she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda—a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but … I dunno, it’s just kinda … a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash … because we’re not!”

Such sentiments weren’t unique to Ohio. In Las Vegas, the videographer Matt Toplikar interviewed McCain-Palin supporters as they left a Palin rally. One camouflage-capped fellow captured the spirit of the event, declaring, “Obama wins, I’m gonna move to Alaska. Haven’t you ever heard that the United States is gonna be taken down from within?” he continued. “What better way to get taken down from within than having the president of the United States be the one that’s going to do it?”

Another man warned, “Don’t be afraid of me! Be afraid of Obama! Obama bin Laden, that’s what you should be afraid of!” When accused of being a racist, he responded, “Yes, I am a racist. If you consider me a racist, well [unintelligible]. Those Arabs are dirt-bags. They’re dirty people, they hate Americans, they hate my kids, they hate my grandkids.”

On Election Day, 2008, much of the nation celebrated the election of the first African American to the country’s highest office. John McCain’s supporters naturally felt the usual loser’s bitterness and disappointment.

For many Americans, however—especially those who had opposed Obama on racial grounds—the reaction went well beyond despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it, or thought they knew it.

So maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that they responded to that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American right.

In Texas, students at Baylor University in Waco discovered a noose hanging from a tree on campus the evening of Election Day. At a site nearby angry Republican students had gathered a bunch of Obama yard signs and burned them in a big bonfire. That evening, a riot nearly broke out when Obama supporters, chanting the new president’s name, were confronted by white students outside a residence hall who told them: “Any nigger who walks by Penland [Hall], we’re going to kick their ass, we’re going to jump him.” The Obama supporters stopped and responded, “Excuse me?” Somehow they managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.

On the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, some students spent Election Night spray-painting graffiti messages such as “Let’s shoot that Nigger in the head” and “Hang Obama by a Noose.” The university administration protected the students’ identities and refused to take any legal action against them or discipline them in any way.

But such student antics were just a warm-up. On Staten Island, New York, on Election Night, four young white men “decided to go after black people” in retaliation for Obama’s election. First they drove to the mostly black Park Hill neighborhood and assaulted a Liberian immigrant, beating him with a metal pipe and a police baton, in addition to the usual blows from fists and feet. Then they drove to Port Richmond and assaulted another black man and verbally threatened a Latino man and a group of black people. They finished up the night by driving alongside a man walking home from his job as a Rite Aid manager and trying to club him with the police baton. Instead, they hit him with their car, throwing him off the windshield and into a coma for over a month. The last victim was a white man. All four men wound up convicted of hate crimes and spent the duration of Obama’s first term in prison.

There were cross burnings and even arson. The morning after the election, in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, a black man taking his eight-year-old daughter to school emerged from his front door to discover that someone had burned a six-foot-tall cross on his lawn—right next to the man’s banner declaring Obama president. That had been torched too.

Another cross was burned on the lawn of the only black man in tiny Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania, the night after the election. A black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground the night of the election; eventually, three white men were arrested and charged with setting the fire as a hate crime. On election night, a black family in South Ogden, Utah, came home from volunteering at their local polling station to discover that their American flag had been torched.

Obama’s inauguration on January 21, 2009, brought more haters out of the woodwork.

Two days before the big event, arsonists in Forsyth County, Georgia, set fire to the home of a woman who was known as a public supporter of Obama. Someone painted a racial slur on her fence, along with the warning “Your black boy will die.”

On Inauguration Day, someone taped newspaper articles featuring Obama onto the apartment door of a woman in Jersey City, New Jersey, and set fire to it. Fortunately, the woman had stayed home to watch the inauguration on TV and smelled the burning, and she was able to extinguish the fire before it spread.

The next day, a large twenty-two-year-old skinhead named Keith Luke in Brockton, Massachusetts, decided it was time to fight the “extinction” of the white race. He bashed down the door of a Latino woman and her sister and shot them both; one died. Police apprehended and arrested Luke before he could pull off the next planned stage of his shooting rampage, at a local Jewish synagogue. According to the DA, Luke intended to “kill as many Jews, blacks, and Hispanics as humanly possible … before killing himself.” When he appeared in court a month later, Luke had carved a swastika into his forehead with a razor blade.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counted more than 200 “hate-related” incidents around the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. The SPLC’s Mark Potok stated: “I think we really are beginning to see a white backlash that may grow fairly large. The situation’s worrying. Not only do we have continuing nonwhite immigration, not only is the economy in the tank and very likely to get worse, but we have a black man in the White House. That is driving a kind of rage in a certain sector of the white population that is very, very worrying to me.

“We are seeing literally hundreds of incidents around the country—from cross burnings to death threats to effigies hanging to confrontations in schoolyards.”

The spike in racially motivated violence was accompanied by a sharp increase in business for white-supremacist websites such as the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. It collected more than 2,000 new members the day after the election—so much traffic that the site crashed. One Stormfront poster, a North Las Vegas resident going by the moniker Dalderian Germanicus, reflected the consensus sentiment at the site: “I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs’ come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.”

In Georgia, a middle-aged man expressed to an Associated Press reporter the typical view on the extremist right in the days and weeks after the election: “I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades, and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.”

The rise in right-wing media such as Fox News and other openly pro-conservative media and the spread of their dubious news values into the mainstream media played a powerful role in creating an epistemological bubble for the audience: for every news event, these outlets were able to provide a right-wing, anti-liberal spin on it. More often than not, that spin was not just factually dubious, it was outrageously false. Their audiences were able to create a Patriot-style alternative universe for themselves that they could confirm by turning on their TVs. They would disregard information that didn’t fit in their universe.

The massive growth of the Internet, especially as it spread to the older and more rural American population, also played a significant role in the expansion of this alternative universe. Suddenly a vast ocean of dubious information was available to all, and it quickly filled with anonymous and phony smears, a floating island of garbage about Barack Obama that suddenly appeared, as if from the depths, and rapidly spread through what became known as the “viral email.”

Everyone with an email account in America seemed to be receiving these emails containing “true” information revealing Obama to be an America-hating Muslim radical. There were dozens of permutations on this theme, everything from fake claims that Obama had the American flag removed from his jet and that he refused to wear flag lapel pins to theories that he was secretly raised a Muslim at a madrassa in Indonesia, and that in reality he was born not in Hawaii, but in Kenya. Another favorite was a Photoshopped Obama portrait that transformed him into a bearded bin Laden type, captioned “So America, you want change? … Just wait.”

The viral anonymous email became such a fixture of the campaign to undermine the president’s legitimacy that Obama’s campaign was forced to create a website devoted specifically to debunking the false information the emails spread. In a story in the Nation, “The New Right-Wing Smear Machine,” Chris Hayes detailed how movement conservatives—using far-right Web publications such as NewsMax and WorldNetDaily as bases of operations—spread rumors and wholly fabricated nonsense about Obama to millions of email readers, some of whom eagerly accepted it as gospel.

Thus was born the “Birther” meme, the conviction that Obama was not an American citizen.

No one’s exactly certain where it originated, but somewhere in those forwarded emails appeared the suggestion that Obama was not really an American citizen because of the circumstances of his birth. Some claimed that Obama had been born in Kenya; others, that he had been born in Indonesia.

The Obama campaign responded to this and other disinformation by setting up a website, Fight the Smears, specifically to counter the wild rumors that were circulating. At the site was posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Anyone born in Hawaii would present the same type of document when undergoing a security review or obtaining a passport.

For the conspiracy-mongers of the fringe right, though, that wasn’t good enough.

Some of them noticed that the posted document was what the State of Hawaii calls a certification of live birth—which is basically the state’s short-form version of a person’s original birth certificate. It includes time of birth, city, parents, and so on, but lacks medical details and the name of the hospital. To get those details, you have to get the original certificate. Obtaining a copy of it requires making a special request to state officials.

Naturally, a fresh round of conspiracy theorizing erupted—the birth certificate on display had been digitally altered with Adobe Photoshop. It also lacked a stamped seal of the state, a certain sign of forgery. Jerome Corsi—the coauthor of the “Swift Boat” hoax that played a critical role in sinking John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, and more recently the author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality—went on Fox and Friends and told Steve Doocy that “the campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website… It’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the website right now, and the original birth certificate, the campaign refuses to produce.”

The Obama campaign invited FactCheck.org to come see the certificate for themselves, and it subsequently reported their definitive conclusion: “Obama was born in the USA. Just as he has always said.”

Hawaii state officials subsequently confirmed that the state held Obama’s original birth certificate on record, noting that “there have been numerous requests” for copies, but explaining that the state’s records department was prohibited by state law from releasing it to “persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record.”

Of course, there are always the births listed in local newspapers—and sure enough, both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (on August 13 and August 14, 1961, respectively) published a birth notice for Barack Obama, listing the home address as 6085 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu. Contrary to later suggestions, these birth announcements were not paid announcements—a much later practice—but were collected by staff reporters assigned to make the rounds of area hospitals.

With all these dubious claims and theories floating about, the atmosphere was ripe for Alex Jones and his army of conspiracists to step up and make their presence felt.

Jones and his fellow “Truthers” had largely been consigned to the fringes of mainstream discourse for most of the Bush years, but that did not mean they had grown stagnant. Rather the contrary.

Even though right-wing media generally declined to even give their theories the time of day, the audience for Jones’s always-expanding universe of conspiracies kept gaining steam throughout the first decade of the new century.

Jones’s audience kept multiplying as 9/11 theories mushroomed, and as he churned out new “evidence” and claims in order to keep up. These included theories that Building 7, situated next to the Twin Towers and demolished when they fell, had actually been destroyed by hidden bombs, and that Flight 93, brought down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to invade the pilot’s cabin to wrest control from the terrorists, was actually shot down by military jets, and that phone calls to family members by people on the airliner before it went down had been faked.

In addition to the Zeitgeist films produced by the far-right activist Peter Joseph, a number of other independent conspiracists kept offering their own takes on who and what was behind the terrorist attacks, including a British anarchist, Charlie Veitch, and a New York writer, Nico Haupt. The competition among the theories became fierce and internecine warfare soon broke out, with Jones accusing Haupt of being a secret FBI agent trying to undermine the movement. Veitch, promoted initially by Jones on his show, later announced he had become skeptical of certain core claims, causing Infowars fans to descend upon him viciously.

Infowars began drawing hundreds of thousands of daily hits, and his radio-show rants, uploaded to YouTube, began spreading quickly, especially as more people began sharing them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. By 2009 Jones’s YouTube channel had garnered over 60 million views.

By March 2009, Jones had produced one of his “documentaries” titled The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off, which portrayed the new president as a “corporate creation of the banking elite” who would enact the agenda of the military-industrial complex and eventually enslave Americans. Among other signs of the looming takeover, Jones pointed to Obama’s early musings about the possibility of creating a public-oriented “national civilian service” to fill domestic needs, as military service fills our international needs, as proof that he intended to make young Americans into a compulsory army of brainwashed slaves, described on Jones’s Prison Planet site as a “Stasi.”

In August 2009 Jones got on the Birther bandwagon, which had already been joined up by a number of his fellow 9/11 conspiracists. Jones’s Infowars site finally chimed in with a piece by Jones’s contributor Paul Joseph Watson, headlined “Shocking New Birth Certificate Proof Obama Born in Kenya?” It soon emerged that this birth certificate was a hoax.

The convergence of old far-right conspiracists and the new anti-Obama fanatics gave birth, in the weeks after the election, to a campaign to prevent Obama from taking the oath of office in January, fueled in part by a pair of fringe right-wing lawyers named Leo Donofrio and Orly Taitz, who tried to take legal action to prevent Obama from being sworn in. The Supreme Court briefly considered Donofrio’s lawsuit challenging Obama’s US citizenship—a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by the birth-certificate conspiracy theorists ( or “Birthers,” as they came to be known)—but peremptorily dismissed it.

Online campaigns arose: RallyCongress.com, which gathered over 125,000 signatures demanding Obama’s birth certificate, and WeMustBeHeard.com, which organized sit-ins outside the Supreme Court building in Washington. The right-wing webzine WorldNetDaily, which has a long history of promoting right-wing conspiracy theories dating back to the 1990s, organized a similar petition drive. A longtime far-right tax protester named Bob Schultz—whose “We the People” organization later ran into serious legal problems for promoting a tax scheme predicated on old far-right “constitutionalist” theories that the federal income tax is illegal—purchased full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune asserting that Obama’s birth certificate was forged, that his “grandmother is record[ed] on tape saying she attended your birth in Kenya,” and that Obama had lost his citizenship by virtue of his mother’s second marriage to an Indonesian man.

By the time of Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, however, all these efforts had come to naught. But that didn’t mean they had subsided. Rather the opposite: the Birther theories continued to bubble and build, thanks in no small part to the mainstream media.

Orly Taitz filed a fresh lawsuit in July 2009 on behalf of Stefan Cook, an Army Reserve soldier, who claimed he could refuse deployment orders to Afghanistan because the president wasn’t an American citizen. When the Army responded by simply rescinding Cook’s orders, Sean Hannity reported about it on his Fox News program by describing Cook as a victim of crude political discrimination. Hannity shied away from any similar reports from then on.

Rush Limbaugh, too, briefly referenced it on his radio show: “God does not have a birth certificate, and neither does Obama—not that we’ve seen.” Afterward, he made little mention of it. Eventually, though, the Birthers found an ardent supporter of their claims in the mainstream media: CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

Dobbs kicked off his coverage of the birth-certificate controversy in mid-July on his syndicated radio show by hosting Orly Taitz and asserting repeatedly that Obama “needed to produce” his birth certificate. However, filling in for Dobbs on his own program a few days later, CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim ran a report debunking the theories.

Dobbs shrugged it off, asserting on his CNN broadcast the next night that Obama’s birth-certificate questions “won’t go away.” He featured a video clip of a town-hall attendee berating the Republican congressman Mike Castle of Delaware about Obama’s birth certificate: “He is not an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya!” Dobbs commented: “A lot of anger in the audience, and a lot of questions remaining—seemingly, the questions won’t go away because they haven’t been dealt with, it seems possible, too straightforwardly and quickly.”

The comments created an uproar. Chris Matthews, on MSNBC’s Hardball, suggested that Dobbs was “appeasing the nutcases” by reporting the claims as if they had any credibility. Rather than back down, Dobbs doubled down, going on CNN and charging that Obama could “make the whole … controversy disappear … by simply releasing his original birth certificate.” On his radio show he similarly persisted: “Where is that birth certificate? Why hasn’t it been forthcoming?”

When the resulting public firestorm produced calls from civil rights and Latino organizations to remove Dobbs from his anchor position, CNN’s president, Jon Klein, defended his coverage as “legitimate”—but he sent an email to Dobbs’s staff to inform them that the birth certificate story was “dead.” That night, Dobbs reiterated that Obama could “make the story go away.” As the controversy raged on other channels—Fox’s Bill O’Reilly knocked Dobbs for his credulousness, but defended him against his attackers anyway—Dobbs claimed that he really didn’t believe the theories: “All I said is the president is a citizen, but it would be simple to make all this noise go away with just simply producing the long-form birth certificate.” Dobbs eventually lost his job at CNN, in part over the Birther controversy.

But the conspiracist alternative universe kept expanding into the mainstream media. That was mainly due to a fresh new face at Fox News: Glenn Beck.

By 2009, Limbaugh was the elder statesman of the incendiary pundit set. Yet as divisive and conspiracist as his rhetoric often became, he was overtaken that year in both those qualities by the hot new face on the right-wing scene, the boyish-looking Beck. Beck built on and amplified the central themes established during the 2008 campaign —that Obama was a foreigner, a leftist, an America-hating radical who wanted to destroy the American way of life. In the process, he opened up a whole new frontier in the transmission of right-wing extremist ideas into mainstream American discourse.

Beck already had an established reputation as a bomb thrower, first from his years as a radio “shock jock” at a number of stations around the country, and then from his tenure, beginning in 2006, at CNN Headline News, where he was noted for such antics as asking newly elected Representative Keith Ellison, the nation’s first Muslim congressman, why he, Beck, shouldn’t consider him to be working for the enemy. He also was open in his sympathy for right-wing extremists and their ideas; while credulously interviewing a John Birch Society official about a possible conspiracy to create a North American Union, Beck said, “Sam, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts. However, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”

Beck announced he was making the leap to Fox News in October 2008, though his show did not begin running regularly until January 2009. Still, he gave the public a preview of where he was going with his new show in a mid-November appearance with Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, in which he ranted at length about the public’s evident tolerance—judging by election results—of a presidential candidate who had “palled around” with terrorists like William Ayers. Beck explained away the election as the result of “cakes and circuses and too many dumb people. I mean, we should thin out the herd, you know what I mean?” He also set the table for what was to come:

This is a total outrage, Bill. There is a disconnect in America. We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance, and I think we’re at a crossroads here. We’re still about here [points to spot on hand], where the roads are just starting to split, but pretty soon, this side and this side are not gonna understand each other at all, because we’re living in different universes.

It became clear early on that Beck was interested not in bridging this gap but in exploiting it. No sooner did his show, Glenn Beck, get started on Fox than he began focusing on the ideological aspects of Obama’s supposed radicalism. The show also featured an unusually maudlin tone; in his Fox debut on January 19, Beck became teary-eyed talking about Sarah Palin’s candidacy and how it made him feel like he “was not alone.” A few nights later he featured a segment in which he had the camera zoom in around his eyes as he delivered his monologue. When Stephen Colbert parodied it hilariously with a zoom camera operated by a proctologist, Beck came on and explained that he had done it because “we don’t look each other in the eyes” enough these days. A few weeks after this, in an hour-long program set up like a town-hall meeting, Beck again got choked up. “I just love my country—and I fear for it!” he blurted out.

Beck devoted most of his energy to the theme that President Obama was a far-left radical who intended to remake America into a totalitarian state. He had a problem, though, in figuring out just what kind of totalitarianism Obama was bringing: socialist, communist, or fascist. Over the course of the next several months, Beck began using all three terms to describe Obama’s agenda, often interchangeably—terms which by anyone’s lights but Beck’s actually represent profoundly different and distinct ideologies.

Beck’s show also featured an overarching apocalyptic sensibility. At various times, different dooms confronted the nation, according to Beck. He frequently fretted about the epidemic of violent crime by Mexican drug cartels south of the border, and hosted a hysterical discussion with the right-wing maven Michelle Malkin about the existential threat this posed to the United States. At other times he saw a global nuclear apocalypse looming in the form of a potential Middle East confrontation with Iran. But consistently the greatest threat to America was President Obama and his administration.

Soon Beck’s paranoia began reaching a fever pitch—he even flirted with the conspiracy theories that Obama was using the Federal Emergency Management Administration to secretly prepare concentration camps into which conservatives were about to be rounded up. Beck announced he was investigating claims: he told his audience that “we can’t disprove” the FEMA concentration camps story.

The FEMA camps claims dated back to the Militia of Montana and later gained traction under the auspices of Alex Jones’s radio rants. Patriot-movement leaders had been claiming since the 1990s that black helicopters had been spotted—their mission unclear but much speculated on; such stories were based purely on fabricated “evidence.” This, eventually, is what Glenn Beck reported back to his audience on his April 6, 2009, show, which featured a ten-minute segment with Jim Meigs, a Popular Science journalist, who looked into the claims and found them utterly spurious.

Beck was hardly chastened by the episode, and continued promoting beliefs held by militia groups in other arenas. On March 24 he had invited John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador, on his show for a discussion of the globalist propensities of the Obama White House. During the discussion Beck lurched off on his own tangent: “I mean, I think these guys—these guys, they’ll take away guns, they’ll take away our sovereignty, they’ll take away our, our, our currency, our money! They’re already starting to put all the global framework in with this bullcrap called global warming! This is an effort to globalize and tie together everybody on the planet, is it not?”

Taking away guns—that was one of the militias’ chief sources of paranoia in the 1990s, and now Beck was making the charge against Obama, too. Beck regularly warned his audience that “our rights are under attack,” including “the right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

The notion that Obama and his administration intended to go on a gun-grabbing spree became a recurring theme on Beck’s show. Twice he featured the president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, in segments with a large chyron titled “Constitution Under Attack.” In April 2009 LaPierre suggested on Beck’s show that administration support for international efforts to adopt strict gun-licensing standards amounted to a United Nations plot: “They’re trying to pass, basically, a global gun ban on all individual possession of firearms ownership.”

The paranoia whipped up by the NRA (as usual with the gun-rights crowd) had no known basis in reality. In the list of thirteen priorities for action in Obama’s first year and beyond that was leaked to the New York Times, jobs and the economy completely predominated. Gun control was not on the list. Nor was there even a whisper of it from any Obama administration official in 2009.

Which, for the paranoid at heart, only proved once and for all that something nefarious was afoot.

Whether he was grounded in reality or not, Beck was tapping into something very real by promoting gun paranoia. In fact, one of the remarkable ways the fringe hysteria manifested itself in the real world after the election was in the astonishing surge in gun sales.

The initial spike occurred before the election, when firearms groups began noticing a surge in federal background checks for new gun purchases. In November alone, the number, 378,000 checks, was 42 percent greater than for the same month a year before. One gun-friendly outdoor news service named the new president its “Gun Salesman of the Year.”

The only time gun rights really made their way into the news was during the confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, the nominee for attorney general, where one of the voices testifying against his confirmation was a “gun rights expert,” Stephen Halbrook. Halbrook had authored a recent book about the Second Amendment. What upset the gun crowd about Holder was his support of the gun ban in DC, as well as an op-ed piece he had written in October 2001 for the Washington Post, “Keeping Guns Away from Terrorists.” The article largely was an eminently sensible column about closing up gun-sales loopholes used by many terrorists to obtain weapons.

Nonetheless, the fears that Obama was a closet gun-grabber secretly plotting against them became widespread, particularly in the rural areas where the right to bear arms is traditionally prized. Obama’s election produced a lightning bolt of fear among many, and they responded by a run on both guns and ammunition and even gunpowder.

“Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in history —bar none,” the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. Warnings like that—as well as Glenn Beck’s paranoid musings with Wayne LaPierre—produced predictable results among gun owners. “They’re like, ‘Hey, maybe I should buy one of these before they become illegal,’” one gun-shop owner told a reporter. “If you look in any NRA magazine or you’re into guns, you see a lot of bills that are in the works.”

At the NRA’s big annual convention in Arizona that May, all the talk was about the spike in gun sales. The footage coming out of Arizona was striking for the level of paranoia. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned for the camera: “Whenever they can, wherever they can, the Democrats want to take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to own and purchase a gun, a right that is guaranteed under the United States Constitution.”

Leonard Junker, a fifty-six-year-old trucker and Republican Party organizer from Tucson, told reporters, “Right now is a pivotal time in our history with a president and a total administration that is anti-gun. I truly believe that they want to disarm us.”

People were driven to buy guns not just from fear of Obama but also fear of the social chaos they believed would result from his administration. Video footage from the NRA convention featured a number of white conservative women who were drawn to the organization via fearmongering. In one video, a woman talked about how women were buying guns partly out of a fear that society was about to fall apart. Glenn Beck’s apocalyptic scenarios of a dog-eat-dog society obviously had struck a chord.

One year later in Arizona, that paranoia would strike home in a blizzard of bullets.