Fox News host Jesse Watters is reviving the racist birther conspiracy theory about former President Barack Obama, and defended the idea Wednesday by arguing birthers “didn’t want to kill” the ex-commander in chief — but merely didn’t believe “where he was born.”
The subject was broached awkwardly on “The Five” after co-host Greg Gutfeld cited last year’s attempted assassination of President Donald Trump to argue conservatives have more empathy than those on the left. Watters agreed and doubled down with a baffling comparison.
“We didn’t want to kill Barack Obama; we just didn’t think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born,” said the right-wing anchor. “And then Hillary [Clinton], we didn’t want to kill, we were just so afraid of her, we thought she’d kill us first.”
“But we do this in other countries,” Watters continued. “The CIA literally uses the same exact propaganda to stir up cultures in other countries to topple dictatorships we don’t like. Now, we’re doing it in our own country, and it’s like almost working.”
Watters has long contributed to the divisive rhetoric he seemed to denounce Wednesday and has repeatedly pushed the debunked birtherism idea suggesting Obama was born in Kenya — rather than Hawaii.
“He’s definitely going to interfere in this election and that’s why we’ll be sending [Fox News producer] Johnny [Belisario] to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate,” Watters said in August. “This time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.”
Watters previously floated the idea in June after Obama argued the Titan submersible disaster was dwarfed by a then-recent shipwreck in Greece that killed hundreds — by arguing Obama is “never really looking at things from an American perspective.”
“When you are a citizen of the world, you always think about the world instead of the United States,” Watters said at the time. “Remember, this is a guy whose father has roots in Africa. This is a guy who spent a lot of his childhood in Southeast Asia.”
Only one of the five Titan victims, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, was American.
Trump was once the loudest proponent of the debunked birther theory, even after Obama released a full copy of his birth certificate in 2011. Trump, who had repeatedly claimed it was fake, acknowledged only in 2016 during his first presidential campaign that it wasn’t.