WND Remains Obsessed With Obama: The Conspiracy Theories

WorldNetDaily wants you to believe Barack Obama murdered his chef as well as the rantings of his bitter half-brother, and it thinks the completely discredited Larry Sinclair is telling the truth about an alleged long-ago drugs-and-sex encounter with Obama.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/4/2024

Joe Kovacs

The coverage began with a July 25 article from the Western Journal -- an organization descended from a nonprofit WND editor Joseph Farah founded in the 1990s -- noting the Obama family's statements on the drowning of chef Tafari Campbell. A July 30 article republished from the notoriously unreliable and libel-infested Gateway Pundit, however, heavily pushed the murder angle:

Just a week following the unexpected and rather tragic death of their personal chef and friend, Tafari Campbell, the Obamas were spotted out and about, seemingly unscathed and unaffected.

Barack and Michelle Obama were spotted at the Vineyard Golf Club and Farm Neck Country Club, respectively, according to exclusive photos obtained by Daily Mail. The pictures are the first public glimpse of the Obamas since the loss of their dear friend and personal chef.

Dressed in a green polo shirt and white shorts, Barack Obama was seen engaged in a round of golf at the exclusive Vineyard Golf Club. The former president, noticeably bearing bandaged fingers, which causes speculations online.

Citizen journalist Travis of Flint, Michigan wrote, “just days after his personal chef and friend died in a very mysterious paddle boarding accident, Barack Obama appears to have injured fingers and a black eye. We still don’t know who the other person was and Obama loves paddle boarding. I think we can all guess what happened at this point!”

The story was accompanied by a WND reader poll that asked, "Do you suspect Barack Obama's injuries are somehow related to the death of his personal chef?" A total of 94 percent of readers said yes.

WND followed this with an Aug. 1 article from the only slightly less unreliable Western Journal, which repeated some of that bogus speculation:

The identity of a second paddle-boarder with former President Barack Obama's chef when he drowned at Martha's Vineyard has been partially revealed.

The U.K. Daily Mail reported Monday, "A female staff member of Barack Obama had been with chef Tafari Campbell when he tragically drowned while paddle-boarding in a pond beside the former president's estate" on July 23.

"The woman, who was on a separate paddle board, had tried in vain to reach Campbell after he had fallen off but was ultimately forced to return to shore to summon help," the news outlet added.

[...]

There was speculation online that perhaps former President Obama had been with Campbell when he drowned.

The Daily Mail reported that all the members of the Obama family -- Barack, former first lady Michelle Obama and the couple's daughters Sasha and Malia -- were away from the estate when the accident happened.

Meanwhile, state officials have ruled Campbell's drowning to be an accident. But conspiracy theories have always been more important than the truth at WND, so it published an Aug. 27 article from the Western Journal all but accusing the Obamas of a cover-up of some kind:

If Barack and Michelle Obama were actually trying to build up conspiracy theories around the still-murky death of the family's personal chef in July, they couldn't be doing a much better job.

As the Boston Herald reported on Tuesday, the office of the Massachusetts Medical Examiner last week officially ruled the death of Tafari Campbell an accidental drowning, but so little information has been released about the circumstances that First Amendment advocates and conservative critics are engaged in an outrcry over what is still being withheld.

And there's plenty to make the most fair-minded observers suspicious.

Campbell, 45, was found dead July 24, a day after disappearing while paddle boarding in Edgardtown Great Pond near the Obama estate on tony Martha's Vineyard.

That's obviously a tragedy for Campbell, who left behind a widow and twin sons. But drowning accidents happen every day, even in enclaves for the rich and famous like Martha's Vineyard. The race goes not to the swift, after all.

The story could be told in day, causing a ripple in the ebb and flow of the news cycle, but then left largely to the friends and family who survived to carry on the important business of living, while the rest of the country moved on.

Instead, it appears that a veil of secrecy has dropped over the death, shrouding what should be simply mundane details in an aura of mystery.

Officials have still not publicly identified the woman who was paddle boarding with Campbell. She's been known to have been a fellow Obama staffer and the Daily Mail reported last week that she was 26, but other than that, she's a cipher.

His toxicology report -- which would give an idea whether drugs or alcohol played a role in the death of a man whose body was found only 100 feet from shore -- has not been released, thanks to Massachusetts law.

If Campbell was inebriated or suffered from some sort of medical condition that made it impossible for him to save his own life, the public hasn't been informed, and that's a major question.

Even people who can't swim will struggle mightily to keep themselves alive, and 100 feet, under the calm conditions needed to go paddle boarding in the first place, should have been do-able for a man who knows how.

And that mystery feeds the idea that there's more to Campbell's death than a simple accident in a resort area at the height of summer.

This isn't tinfoil hat stuff either.

Actually, it is. But that's not going to keep Western Journal writer Joe Saunders from walking right up to the line of suggesting that Obama murdered Campbell:

The fact that a crime in South Boston might go unsolved is important to South Boston, and maybe the whole city, but it would be tough to find an American outside of the New England area who would care.

However, Democrats and the establishment media still haven't shaken their regard for former President Barack Obama as a kind of messianic figure of the New Socialist Age, and his wife, Michelle, is still considered presidential material in some quarters.

Massachusetts owes the country more. The Obamas owe the country more.

And when they don't pay up, they're forcing even the most non-conspiracy-minded American to ask: "What do they have to hide?"

Funny, we don't recall WND and its affiliates of ever accusing Donald Trump of having something to hide, even when he did in the form of this tax returns.

Despite the utter lack of proof behind that narrative, Joe Kovacs tried to revive it anyway in an Oct. 22 article:

Three months after Barack Obama's family chef died in a mysterious drowning off Martha's Vineyard, newly released records reveal the former president's presence at the emergency scene.

The disclosure comes from Judicial Watch, which announced Friday it "received 40 pages of records from the Massachusetts State Police that indicate the presence of Barack Obama for a witness interview in the death investigation of the Obamas' personal chef Tafari Campbell."

The heavily redacted records indicate Barack Obama arrived at the emergency response scene via motorcade. A short time later, a cold, wet woman, who was a witness, arrived. The next morning, the eyewitness was interviewed in the Obama residence, again with Barack Obama present. The records also detail the existence of a Secret Service video of Campbell and his paddleboarding companion entering the water, and the Secret Service emergency response in the immediate aftermath of the drowning. The state police records show they concluded "no foul play" in Campbell's "accidental" death.

The fatal incident took place on Sunday, July 23, and the documents were provided to Judicial Watch in response to a July 25 Massachusetts Public Records Law request for all records relating to the death of Campbell.

Just days after the mystery incident, Obama was photographed with bandaged fingers, as WND reported.

Again, there is nothing "mysterious" about Campbell's drowning -- it was ruled an accident. He fell off his paddleboard and wasn't wearing a life jacket, and he drowned in eight feet of water. That Obama later arrived at the scene of the drowning proves nothing except to conspriacy theorists and Obama-haters like Kovacs. Further, the "bandaged fingers" of Obama that Kovacs noted and which WND previously hyped was actually golf tape designed to prevent blisters and split calluses while golfing, and Obama has been previously photographed wearing it.

Kovacs put "extremely murky" in the headline of this article in an apparent bid to increase suspicious about Obama; in fact, the phrase appears in the article only as a description of the water Campbell drowned in, not anything Obama did or has been accused of doing.

We'd call all this highly irresponsible on WND's part, but we know that lying to its readers and falsely smearing its political enemies is standard operating procedure there -- something that public rejection of its journalistic approach, in the form of years of begging for money to stay alive, surprisingly has not changed.

Bitter grifter half-brother

Malik Obama is a bitter attempted grifter who has been angry for years that his half-brother Barack -- with whom he has infrequently interacted -- has done much better than him and won't send some unearned cash his way. He's been lashing out at Barack for years over his failure to be able to ride Barack's coattails to fame ... and, of course, WND has lapped it up because they hate Barack Obama even more. WND started out hating Malik, though, due to guilt by association; in 2014, for example, he was attacked for allegedly wearing a Hamas-linked scarf (thought the accusation came from Obama-hater and apparent fabluist Walid Shoebat).

It touted in 2015 how Malik did an interview with discredited charlatan filmmaker Joel Gilbert (though it also noted that Malik "has been accused of collaboration with Sudan’s radical Islamic regime, using money raised in his father’s and brother’s name for personal profit, and partnering with a cult leader."In 2017, it made a big deal out pretending to be a responsible birther by admitting that a purported birth certificate for Barack released by Malik was a "fraudulent document," though it had spent two months claiming otherwise wen it first surfaced in 2009.

After that, though, it started treating Malik's anti-Barack rants as credible:

• In 2019, WND cheered how Malik bashed Barack as a "narcissist" (as if Malik isn't one by constantly running to right-wing media to make attention-getting rant).
• The same year, WND also hyped how Malik asked, "Is Michelle Michael?"
• It touted in 2020 how Malik endorsed Donald Trump for president, something he also did in 2016.

(Newsmax has also promoted Malik's rantings as well.)

Recently, Malik was apparently feeling a little desperate for attention again, so he started hurling more insults at Barack, and WND once again bit. Joe Kovacs dutifully wrote it up in an Aug. 7 article:

Barack Obama's brother is again going public with his assertion the former president is a homosexual.

Sunday night on Twitter, Malik Obama tweeted: "This guy must be gay," referring to Barack's public support for keeping pornographic books in libraries.

Just weeks ago in mid-July, Malik made a similar comment on the same issue his brother was addressing.

Barack had tweeted on July 17: "Today, some of the books that shaped my life – and the lives of so many others – are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives. And librarians are on the front lines, fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas available to everyone."

Barack Obama was alluding to graphically explicit books including "Gender Queer," which is replete with pornographic images.

Kovacs offered no evidence that "Gender Queer" is pornography as defined by law. He also didn't mention that Barack has a wife and two children, which most people would consider evidence that he isn't gay (and that Michelle is not a man).

As Malik continued to rage, Kovacs gave his shitposting another platform in an Aug. 14 article:

In the wake of his recent accusations that Barack Obama is homosexual, Malik Obama, the ex-president's brother, is launching a fresh attack, calling Barack "Fake ass a snake" and a "traitor," also suggesting the recent catastrophic fires on the Hawaiian island of Maui may have been intentionally set to pave the way for a buyout of all property owners.

Sunday evening, Malik tweeted a photo of himself with Barack, noting: "Me and Fake ass a snake (President Barack Obama) when he was a nobody."

He later added, "Before he became a SNOB."

Malik wrote many follow-up comments about Barack, including:

"That guy thinks he's GOD."

"Fake ass a snake is a TRAITOR!"

"Power totally corrupted him. NERO."

Additionally, Malik tweeted a photo of himself sporting a red baseball cap emblazoned with the simple message, "F Biden."

His further disdain for Joe Biden was evinced in his comments such as, "Cast your vote for President Trump!"

[...]

Malik Obama also retweeted online speculation about the devastating fires in Maui, saying: "I [k]new something was up considering the silence of FAKE ass a snake (President Obama)."

Kovacs didn't mention that even people back in Malik's native Kenya have pointed out what a bitter grifter Malik is, with one news outlet noting, "While Africans have the Ubuntu spirit of rising together, that does not mean sitting pretty and waiting for handouts from a successful relative. It also does not allow you to hate and besmirch the character of your successful relatives when they do not send as much resources as you would wish."

Gay sex obsession

WND's flareup of ODS was helped along when an interview with author James Garrow appeared in the right-wing Jewish magazine Tablet talking about his seven-year-old book on the early career of Barack Obama -- with lots of emphasis on salaciousness in the form of an long-ago letter to an old girlfriend that he dug up in which he supposedly claimed that "I make love to men daily, but in the imagination." WND first republished a Daily Caller article about it, followed by a reprint of a column by charlatan anti-Obama filmmaker Joel Gilbert from right-wing website American Thinker under the titillating headline "Barack Obama's gay fantasies and the gay men in his life."

Obama obsessive Jack Cashill chortled about this and more with co-host Loy Edge on their Aug. 31 podcast. They started by speculating about the accidental death of Obama's chef (which WND tried to falsely blame on Obama, as noted above), then moved to Seth Rich conspiracy theories, followed by whining that the Obama administration was largely scandal-free. Finally getting around to Garrow's book, Cashill mildly mocked Garrow for finding former girlfriends to talk to: "I thought that he was making them up entirely," Referencing the "composite girlfriends" Obama used in his memoir to protect their identities, Edge sneered, "It kind of sounded like a 12-year-old guy making up what his girlfriend was like." Cashill then salivated over the letter; Edge mocked Obama for talking about it to a girlfriend. Cashill then complained that one of his own Obama conspiracy theories wasn't getting mentioned, huffing that "Garrow knows that Obama and Bill Ayers are tight, and yet in his book he refuses to acknowledge or even mention -- even to discredit -- my theory that Bill Ayers was the one helping Obama with 'Dreams From My Father.'" Cashill didn't mention that actual professional literary analysts debunked him.

Cashill then grumbled that Garrow said "hostile critics" like him insisted that a poem a teenage Obama wrote was about Frank Marshall Davis, not his grandfather as non-Obama-hating people believe, going on to rant: "OK, the poem is transparently about the guy that Obama and all his buddies call 'Pops.' If he was writing about his grandfather, he'd call it 'Gramps.' Come on, it's in your face. Now, Garrow knows I'm right, but like so many other authors at that level, they refuse to acknowledge work done by people at another level."

Edge later joined in ranting "I knew exactly what he was" from the beginning and that "We knew stuff about him that would have gotten him in prison, let alone not elected before the election." Cashill then went off on the story of Obama's birth and what role his father played in it and his life, and Edge joined him in whining that the media supposedly didn't dig deeply enough into it.

They concluded by speculating about why this is all resurfacing now. Cashill claimed that Garrow says Obama's presidency was a "total failure, adding: "With the possibility of a Michelle Obama candidacy looming, this may be Garrow's way of putting a knot in that plan. ... Obama's afraid of him, and Garrow says this openly. He's afraid of what Garrow knows." They then deduced that the Clintons may be working to kneecap the Obamas.

This was followed by the resurfacing of Larry Sinclair, who got some right-wing press in 2008 -- much of it from WND -- when he claimed to have a sexual encounter and done drugs with Obama way back when. Never mind that Sinclair never had any credibility; he failed polygraph tests administered by a right-wing website (which even WND noted), has a long criminal record and couldn't back up his claims at a press conference he held (then was arrested for another crime afterwards). Joe Kovacs teased the interview Sinclair planned with Tucker Carlson in an Aug. 30 article:

Tucker Carlson is now teasing a potentially explosive interview with a man purporting to be Barack Obama's homosexual lover when the former president was a state senator in Illinois.

During an appearance on "The Adam Carolla Show," Carlson dug up the case of Larry Sinclair, who was ridiculed by many in the national news media after allegations he smoked crack cocaine and had sex with Obama in 1999.

"In 2008, it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack," Carlson began.

"A guy came forward, Larry Sinclair, and said 'I'll sign an affidavit' and he did, 'I'll do a lie detector' and he did," Carlson added. "'I smoked crack with Barack Obama and had sex with him.' Well, that was obviously true."

[...]

When Carolla asked if Carlson believed the allegations actually transpired, Tucker responded: "The Larry Sinclair story? That definitely happened. Oh, for sure. I talked to Larry Sinclair about it. Definitely it happened."

"Larry Sinclair has been in and out of prison 40 years ago, he's got a criminal record by definition and he's poor, he's got a disordered life, he's missing a tooth.

"I think he has a record of deception but this story, if you listen to it in detail, is clearly true."

Kovacs hyped the interview again in a Sept. 5 article:

Tucker Carlson's highly anticipated interview with Larry Sinclair, the man purporting to be Barack Obama's homosexual lover when the former president was a state senator in Illinois in 1999, is now scheduled for broadcast Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. Eastern on X, formerly Twitter.

On Tuesday, Carlson posted numerous video clips from the discussion, as Sinclair goes into details of crack cocaine use and sexual relations with Obama.

[...]

Regarding most of the national media's suppression of Sinclair's allegations during Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, Carlson said: "The guy's running for president and credible information comes out that he's smoking crack having sex with dudes. That seems like a story."

Sinclair answered: "Well, it would be a story if the media really cared about telling people the truth."

In neither article did Kovacs inform his readers that Sinclair has been thoroughly discredited. When the interview was made public, WND put it on its website.

The fact that even people like right-wing garbage human Dave Portnoy and fabulist congressman George Santos believe Sinclair is a liar didn't stop WND from continuing to obsess over the story. Obama-obsessed WND columnist Jack Cashill started his Sept. 5 column gushing over Sinclair's original 2008 stunt accusation:

In watching it years later, I am impressed by how well Sinclair understood Obama's hold on the media.

If you asked a question about a black man who chose to run for president, Sinclair observed, "All of a sudden you're called a racist, a bigot."

A genuine character, Sinclair acknowledged up front the various crimes he had committed in years past. He wanted to take that cudgel away from the media.

Sinclair then explained in exquisite detail the nature of his alleged 1999 interaction with then state senator Obama.

He provided dates, the name of the hotel, the name of the Muslim limo driver who arranged the assignation, the specifics of their sexual interlude, as well as insights into his more recent phone conversations with Donald Young, a member of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church and an alleged lover of Obama's.

More than once during the question and answer period, reporters asked Sinclair, given his "tremendous credibility problem," why they should take him seriously.

In turn, Sinclair asked the reporters "to do your jobs and find facts." He provided them several useful leads and challenged them to follow up.

Cashill offered no evidence that he himself ever investigated any of that. He then built a conspiracy theory around Sinclair getting arrested following his press conference on an outstanding warrant:

Wired, meanwhile, ran an article celebrating those leftist bloggers who succeeded in getting Sinclair arrested on an on an "out-of-state warrant" just as he was leaving the Press Club.

The state in question is Delaware. The attorney general of the state in 2008 was Beau Biden. The media saw nothing suspicious about the arrangement.

Sinclair also had an outstanding warrant in Colorado at the time, but Cashill didn't mention that. He also didn't mention that Sinclair claimed in a 2004 affidavit to be "terminally ill," an assertion that clearly didn't age well even as Sinclair himself continued to age. Nevertheless, Cashill continued to vouch for Sinclair's credibility:

The messenger in this case had to be attacked, exposed, eliminated as a threat, and that he was. Until this week, few have ever heard of Sinclair. Fewer still have heard of the late Donald Young.

Thanks to Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, that is about to change. Here's hoping Carlson gets into the really treacherous stuff.

Peter LaBarbera followed up in a Sept. 7 article:

Thanks to Tucker Carlson's interview with a man who claims he did drugs and engaged in oral sodomy with then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama – plus newly surfaced proof in his own words that Obama fantasized about gay sex as a young man – more Americans than ever are learning that there is another side to the 44th president that liberal media could have reported, but refused.

Carlson's shocking X video interview Wednesday with Larry Sinclair had surpassed 27 million views by publication time. Even on Fox News, which stunned conservatives in April by firing Carlson, Obama's sordid partying behavior never received anything close to the full airing he just gave it on X. Sinclair, a homosexual, had tried to get the media to fairly cover his telling of an alleged 1999 drug-induced tryst with Obama since the 2008 election. Very few did.

Yet in one fell swoop, Tucker Carlson bypassed the left's "narrative control" celebrating Obama and ended 15 years of enforced media silence on the subject of Sinclair's allegation – thus showing the promise of independent media platforms, like Elon Musk's X, that are committed on principle to free speech.

Of course, if LaBarbera was really concerned about Sinclair being treated fairly, he would have mentioned that Sinclair has an extensive record of criminality and lies. Instead, he slipped into Obama Derangement Syndrome:

Preparing the way for Biden, Obama made advancing the LGBT revolution a top priority of his administration, even famously using colored spotlights to turn the White House into the politicized "rainbow flag" colors to celebrate the Supreme Court's imposition of homosexual "marriage" on the nation in 2015.

In Obama's case, the backstory behind his sexual-left agenda is likely the most perverse and dysfunctional of any U.S. president: Mentored by an actual card-carrying Communist with a perversion problem; smoking pot with his school "Choom Gang" friends whose adult supplier was a 29-year-old bisexual man who had a thing for showing them porn; and even growing up with a cross-dressing nanny.

Add to that the fact that Obama had a father who abandoned him and a mother who left him for long periods of time to pursue her career, and it could have been a formula for producing a future president who, more than any other (arguably, pre-Biden), would advance an agenda at war with the natural family – the so-called Gay Revolution, which has now morphed into the Transgender Revolution.

LaBarbera also quoted Joseph Nicolosi claiming that "The father plays a pivotal role in a boy's normal development as a male." Nicolosi founded the homophobic group NARTH, which advocated the discredited practice of conversion therapy to attempt to force gay people to stop being gay. LaBarbera, meanwhile, runs his own anti-gay group, Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, though he's moonlighting as a WND reporter because homophobia apparently doesn't pay as well as it used to.

The fact that even people like right-wing garbage human Dave Portnoy and fabulist congressman George Santos believe Sinclair is a liar hasn't stopped WND from continuing to obsess over it.