[Kleon]

You insinuate a huge conspiracy theory there ... like there was this chunk of the population called birthers that got together at a super secret location and decided to launch a natural born citizen campaign against Obama and picked a November 2008 date as the D-Day. That's pretty crazy.

Nobody is insinuating that. I'm not saying they all got together, but they were being fed the same arguments by people like Leo Donofrio around the end of 2008, and that changed the tone of birther threads pretty suddenly.

[so_real]

but they were being fed the same arguments by people like Leo Donofrio around the end of 2008, and that changed the tone of birther threads pretty suddenly.

I appreciate your argument, but it completely ignores historical figures (ie. Bingham, Wilson, etc) echoing the same sentiment : "born of citizen parents within U.S. jurisdiction". Certainly Donofrio, et al., could not have influenced their opinions from 150+ years later. But it is reasonable, logical, for the understanding of that day to be passed forward through the generations. Donofrio did not invent this understanding; he too likely recalled it from his own education, formal or informal, and saw fit to raise awareness. Nor is Donofrio is not the sole purveyor of this information. Many like-minded people contributed research to assist him. I see no reason to doubt anyone who jumps on board saying this is their understanding as well. Furthermore, until a birth certificate came forward that named a father, and put an end to the Frank Marshall Davis conspiracy theories, the tone of the birther threads would naturally center around the birth certificate debacle. And the Obama administration did an excellent job playing the strings with the arguably falsified documents to keep the focus off lineage. I don't see any of this being unusual; it seems a pretty natural sequence of events.