Because of Course They Are: Right Freaking Out With Obama Chef Conspiracy Theories

The death of former President Barack Obama’s personal chef has—as is now the usual—launched a wave of far-right conspiracy theories.

Tafari Campbell died while paddleboarding near the former president’s home in Martha’s Vineyard over the weekend, according to Massachusetts state police. Police received a call on Sunday evening about a male paddleboarder “who had gone into the water, appeared to briefly struggle to stay on the surface, and then submerged.” Campbell’s body was finally recovered on Monday.

But with little evidence on hand, several major right-wing accounts have ginned up some bizarre accounts of Campbell’s death, implying that something nefarious was actually at play.

Ian Miles Cheong, known for his role in GamerGate and for promoting truly deranged policy proposals (like capital punishment for all shoplifters), tweeted that Campbell’s death was “strange.”

“What do you think really happened?” he asked of his nearly 700,000 followers.

Liz Crokin, a Trump supporter and QAnon follower, implied that Campbell met an untimely end because he was “employed at the White House for Obama’s private party where they flew in $65K worth of hotdogs and pizza.”

Without getting too into conspiracy theory weeds, this argument, naturally, is not just about hot dogs and pizza—rather, it is yet another popular right-wing theory loosely rooted in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy of yesteryear. Many QAnon believers think that Obama actually spent $65,000 on child prostitution, based on an unsubstantiated and leaked email chain from 2009 between employees of a private company that provided food for an Obama-hosted Super Bowl party held at the White House in 2009. (You can read a full debunk here if you’re really interested in all of the complicated mental gymnastics involved.)

Turning Points USA’s Benny Johnson held an entire Twitter live session on Tuesday titled: “Obama Lied?! Democrat ‘Body Count’ Exposed.” Johnson’s unhinged views are far too voluminous to fully summarize here: He has called affirmative action “Nazi-level thinking,” demonized trans people, and claimed Covid-19 was a “woke virus” meant to target Trump.

But more than anything else, Johnson loves a good Obama conspiracy theory. In 2017, the conservative news site The Independent Journal Review demoted Johnson after he claimed that Obama pressured a Hawaii federal judge to rule against Trump’s Muslim ban.

“No matter what the government or media reports about Obama’s chef who died on his property—I won’t believe a word of it,” said the right-wing internet troll Catturd to his nearly two million followers. “Why would they start telling the truth now?”

Again, these right-wing accounts have not actually surfaced any evidence to back up their odd claims about Campbell’s death.

Massachusetts state police noted that multiple agencies assisted in the search for Campbell, including “Edgartown Fire and all other island fire departments; local police; State Police patrols, Air Wing, and detectives, the Dukes County Sheriff’s Department and the Coast Guard.”

But the right is far too invested in its conspiracy theories about the country’s first Black president to accept that Campbell’s death might be more ordinary than their fevered imaginings.

Obama has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories, most prominently that his birth certificate was fake, he was really born in Kenya, and he’s actually a practicing Muslim. Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican Party, helped push this birther movement for years, including well into his presidency.

Elon Musk has tried to whip up excitement for his decision to rename Twitter, but it looks like he may only be whipping up legal challenges, as nearly 1,000 other companies have already trademarked the new name.

Musk announced Sunday afternoon that he was rebranding Twitter to “X,” and true to form, the rebrand has not gone well. The new website URL kept redirecting to a hosting platform instead of the homepage, and people are saying that they don’t intend to use the new name anyway. Musk also didn’t get permits for street equipment to remove the “Twitter” sign from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, so city police shut down the project before it was completed.

And now, it looks like Musk will have to prepare for a legal battle over the new name. There are hundreds of trademarks on the letter X for business logos.

“There’s a 100 percent chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” trademark attorney Josh Gerben told Reuters. Gerben said he counted 900 active U.S. trademark registrations for the letter X across multiple industries.

Two of those trademarks belong to Microsoft, related to its Xbox gaming system, and Meta, which owns Twitter rival Threads. Neither technology titan is likely to sue Twitter, according to Gerben, but there are still 898 other companies that could.

It will also be hard for Musk to defend any exclusive claims to the letter X as a logo, because the letter is so popular for branding. (The new X logo is also near impossible to differentiate from several porn sites.) So he’s actually diluted Twitter’s brand power by trying to change the name.

Musk seems to have a great affinity for the letter X, perhaps more so than other people. He had previously insisted on using the name “X” for what would become PayPal, a sticking point that led to internal disagreements and reportedly contributed to his ousting from the company in 2000.

He has included it in the name of his rocket design company, SpaceX, and even named one of his sons “X.” It seems that X is rapidly becoming Musk’s personal brand—and as it turns out, it’s not even that original.

The DeSantis team is facing blowback after reports that a campaign staffer over the weekend shared a video of the presidential candidate with a Nazi symbol.

The short clip, reportedly first posted by the Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter account, shows a “doomer” looking unhappy as he reads news stories on things like Donald Trump’s inaction on immigration, his promotion of Covid-19 vaccines, and his support for the LGBTQ community.

Then DeSantis enters (through an eerily small doorway), and the doomer is happy.

Images of the Florida governor are spliced together with alligators, rockets, and women in bathing suits, in a bizarre compilation reminiscent of another very bad DeSantis campaign ad released earlier this month.

But one scene caught a lot of people’s attention: an image of DeSantis, a Nazi symbol interposed over the Florida flag, and soldiers marching toward it.

The far-right circular symbol is known as a “sonnenrad,” a symbol co-opted by Nazis in their attempt to claim an “Aryan heritage.” Today, it’s often found in white supremacist literature and the manifestos of far-right mass shooters.

And apparently, it’s also found in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Ron DeSantis Fancams Twitter deleted the video shortly after reports that a campaign staffer who regularly engages with the account reshared the video.

Florida Democrats pounced on the news, noting that DeSantis “has been given every chance to denounce neo-Nazis and what they stand for, and he refuses to do it. His administration has already attempted to rewrite the history books on slavery—is the Holocaust next?”

Florida Representative Maxwell Frost also attacked DeSantis. “When I first started calling [Ron DeSantis] a fascist, I got blowback from folks in both parties,” Frost tweeted. “Now, he’s being so overt about it that people are coming around.

“Calling DeSantis a fascist isn’t hyperbole, it’s defining what he is.”

Last week, Florida’s Board of Education approved new academic standards for African American history in public schools, requiring middle schools to teach students how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis has defended the move.

Also on Sunday, The New York Times reported that the DeSantis campaign had created that bizarre, homophobic video from earlier this month—but planted it in a fan account so it wouldn’t seem like the campaign was actually behind it. That report led people to wonder if the campaign did the same thing again, but this time with a video including a very large Nazi symbol.

The far right is constantly warning that if you go woke, you’ll go broke. But when it comes to the new Barbie movie, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Barbie, which follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbie Land to explore the real world, earned a whopping $162 million in its opening weekend, Variety reported Monday. This is the biggest opening weekend of the year, and the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever.

The film had already made $22.3 million at the domestic box office from Thursday previews, the biggest preview haul of the summer. It blew the previous record of $17.5 million (made by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May) out of the water.

Barbie has consistently made double the take of Oppenheimer—which opened opposite it and spawned the “Barbenheimer” meme—which made $10.5 million in previews and $82.4 million over the whole weekend.

All of this success comes despite conservatives trying their absolute hardest to smear the film as propaganda, either woke or Chinese. Far-right activists Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro slammed the film for featuring a transgender actress and dismantling gender norms (Shapiro was roundly mocked online for his review).

Representative Matt Gaetz and his wife went to the movie premiere, after which Ginger Gaetz declared the film highly skippable because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family” and features “disappointingly low [testosterone] from Ken.” Some film critics have branded Barbie “anti-man.”

Other Republican lawmakers waded in, insisting the movie shows Hollywood is just a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. In one scene in Barbie Land, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.

China has used the nine-dash line to mark its controversial territorial claims in the South China Sea. Over the years, Beijing has tried to claim sovereignty over 90 percent of the region. Even though The Hague ruled in 2016 that China has no legal basis for its claims, the country has pressed on, building military installations on otherwise uninhabited islands in the sea. Republicans insisted that the shot was a clear indication that Barbie is just Communist propaganda.

But given Barbie’s explosive success just on opening weekend, it would seem all these far-right efforts simply are not Kenough.

Elon Musk has rebranded Twitter to “X.com”—but it seems a lot of people can’t actually make it to the new website.

Musk announced Sunday afternoon that “X.com” would redirect to “twitter.com” and unveiled a new logo for the rapidly tanking website. He had previously insisted on using the name “X” for what would become PayPal, a sticking point that led to internal disagreements and reportedly contributed to his ousting from the company in 2000.

Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017, and apparently has been saving it for this momentous occasion (his site crashing and burning before our very eyes).

Much like everything else since Musk took Twitter’s reins, the rebrand rollout has not exactly gone smoothly. Ryan Mac and Brian Merchant, the tech reporters for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times respectively, both tweeted that X.com actually redirected them to GoDaddy, a domain-hosting platform.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey also experienced the website malfunction. When he tweeted about it, a current Twitter employee blamed the problem on the domain name system, or DNS. Supposedly, X.com’s data storage system was showing old data to some users.

The only problem is, that was Sunday night. Users who type “X.com” into the URL bar are still being directed to GoDaddy on Monday afternoon.

Musk has not commented further on the issues. He has said he wants X to be “the everything app,” but it’s pretty hard to be someone’s everything when nothing works.