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Fox News host Jesse Watters resurrected conspiracy theories falsely accusing Barack Obama of not being born in the US just hours before the former president’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
It’s been 16 years since baseless, racist rumors surrounding Obama’s heritage first swirled – which were proven unequivocally false.
The birther movement, better known as “birtherism”, emerged when false rumors spread that Obama’s birth certificate was forged and that his birthplace was in Kenya or Indonesia, not Honolulu, Hawaii.
Despite the widely disproven theory, according to the loose description in the constitution, only a natural-born citizen who is at least 35 years old and has been a resident of the US for 14 years or more can be president.
On Tuesday’s live episode of The Five, Watters took a stab at Obama hours before the former president’s electrifying DNC speech where he slammed Donald Trump, praised Joe Biden for his service and threw his support behind Kamala Harris.
“He’s definitely going to interfere in this election,” the Fox News host claimed, pulling rhetoric often used by Trump.
“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny [producer on The Five] to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate,” Watters told viewers. “This time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.”
Co-host Greg Gutfeld intervened saying that the producer must get his passport, before Watters retorted: “To go to Kenya.”
“I meant to Hawaii, just to see him do it. Ask him what the exchange rate is for the Hawaiian dollar,” Gutfield sniggered.
Today, some conspiracy theorists still subscribe to birtherism, despite the release of Obama’s birth documents and confirmation of his birth by the Hawaii Department of Health before the 2008 election.
They go hand-in-hand with a slew of other baseless claims that Obama secretly practices Islam, with others attesting he’s the antichrist.
By 2010, approximately one in four Americans doubted Obama was born in the US, according to a CNN poll.
By March 2011, Donald Trump began casting so-called “real doubts” about whether Obama had a US birth certificate. Days later, he claimed that he sent a team of investigators to Hawaii and said he’d donate $5m to charity if anyone could convince him Obama was born in the US.
After the release of Obama’s long-form official certificate of live birth in April 2011, just over one in 10 Americans believed in the birther movement, according to a Gallup poll.
In 2012, Trump continued to peddle the conspiracy theory and wrote on X, then Twitter, that an “extremely credible source” told him the certificate was a fraud.
After years of attacking Obama, in 2020 Trump took aim at another political heavyweight’s heritage: the new vice president Harris. Yet again, this was proved completely false.
“I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said at a press conference in August 2020, before adding: “But that’s very serious, you’re saying that, they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.”
Trump did admit at the time that he didn’t know for sure if that was right – before doubling down that “they’re saying” Harris doesn’t fit the criteria to be president.
Last month, Trump launched into another attack on Harris’s ethnic background while speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists – claiming that the vice president had only recently “happened to turn Black” and she only previously leveraged her Indian heritage.
Harris, who is both of Jamaican and Indian heritage, has regularly – and proudly – talked about her Black heritage in public, including during a 2006 panel of emerging Black leaders.
