The New Yorker:

From 2009: Rumors in an age of unreason.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

This past June, Representative Mike Castle held a town-hall meeting at a community center in Georgetown, Delaware. Castle, a Republican, is the state’s only House member, and he had invited half a dozen health-care experts to take questions from his constituents. A woman in a red shirt spent most of the meeting with her hand in the air. When Castle called on her, she rose from her seat, clutching a ziplock bag filled with papers and a miniature American flag.

“Congressman Castle,” she began. “I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I’m an American citizen. With a seal on it. Signed by a doctor. With a hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date. I want to go back to January 20th and I want to know: why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?”

“Yeah!” a man in the audience shouted. The Congressman appeared flummoxed. The health-care experts looked on, impassively.

“He is not an American citizen,” the woman in red went on. “He is a citizen of Kenya.

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