Wow, there sure are a lot of Obama haters out there.

When America’s National Portrait Gallery revealed the official portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama on Monday, the reactions were mixed.

Some loved both, many preferred one over the other, and a few let leash with wild conspiracies.

The few are the obvious Obama haters, and, according to Newsweek, their theories go a little something like this:

Infowars reporter and author Jerome Corsi claimed that President Barack Obama’s new portrait contained elements of “pedophilia” [sic] and was “bizarre” while he attempted to decode messages on the forum 8chan.

[In case you think that was a typo, 8chan is the somewhat new 4chan, created in 2014 following the GamerGate controversy.]

Corsi, who heads Infowars’ Washington, D.C., bureau, was trying to decipher messages from “QAnon,” who some on the right believe may be a high-ranking official within President Donald Trump’s administration, when he gave his breakdown of Obama’s portrait on a live YouTube chat Monday.

“That is one of the weirdest presidential portraits I have ever seen,” Corsi said according to Right Wing Watch. “It’s a bizarre picture.”

He continued, explaining that there “hidden themes” in the portrait. You’re going to love this:

“It’s a reference to the loss of virginity in terms of a physical sense,” he said. “It’s a very physical reference to loss of virginity…This whole elite globalist pedophilia is a major theme that Q continues to remind us underlies a lot of these globalists that we are dealing with. The fact that they are sitting on flowers and the deflowering could be easily an image of the pedophilia that they’re engaging in or the slavery pedophilia, you know, tend your gardens everybody, their slave gardens.”

Yeah, I don’t know either.

But Corsi’s theory wasn’t the only one doing the rounds.

In fact, it followed another right-wing Obama-hating theory provided by Fox News host Sean Hannity – Surprise! – who went so far as to tweet a link to a blog post he had “written”:

In the blog post, which has since been deleted, Hannity explained that a there’s a supposed sperm etched into Obama’s portrait, reports The Daily Beast:

The article promises “shocking allegations” that the artist behind the former president’s portrait, Kehinde Wiley, “included ‘secret sperm cells’ within the painting and once joked about ‘Killing Whitey’ during an interview.”

The evidence for the former claim comes from a 2008 New York Times article—conveniently not “fake news” when it supports Hannity’s agenda—that reports Wiley’s portraits “initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm.”

Hannity’s piece also included a close up of a vein in Obama’s forehead in the portrait, that someone on his “staff” apparently thinks looks sperm-like:

But it wasn’t even Hannity’s theory to begin with: this one originated on 4chan, from a thread posted on Monday that proclaimed:

“Official Portrait of Obama has SPERM on his face!!!”

Coincidentally, that post happened to include the same close-up of Obama that Hannity used on his site.

Following widespread outrage, Hannity told The Daily Beast:

“Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication. It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down.”

Sure, buddy.

[source:newsweek]