When President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was an immediate controversy surrounding his office. The famed birther movement questioned whether the president was actually born in the United States, and some took it a step further by questioning not only his nationality, but his religion and political ideology. A reasonable person would assume that this type of conspiracy would be restricted to the Facebook page of your estranged gun-toting uncle, but we aren’t talking about rationality.

Senators, congressmen and conservative media alike all latched onto the concept, and the birther movement spread like one big, spectacular, politically motivated fire. A Pew Research poll from 2009 said that 80 percent of those surveyed had heard of the conspiracy. Later on in May 2011 (a month after Obama released his birth certificate), a Gallup poll showed that 23 percent — nearly one of four — of self-identified Republicans still believed that Obama had not been born in the U.S. and was therefore ineligible to be president. 

But the birther movement was simply the beginning; the meteoric rise of ISIL a year before the 2014 midterms proved to be a chance for politicians to cater to the worries of the lowest common denominator and gain votes by fear mongering. Our very own Sen. Thom Tillis ran attack ads showing footage of ISIL, mentioning that Kay Hagan’s absence from Armed Forces’ committee meetings led only to DANGER. This type of attack ad was commonplace in the 2014 election cycle — an Arizona GOP hopeful, Wendy Rogers (R), even ran an attack ad against her foe showing ISIL-beheading footage.

The presence of ISIL was not the only opportunity to spread fear. Back home, as the illegal immigration debate became a key talking point in federal elections, the rhetoric toward undocumented immigrants became ominous. In 2014, Rep. Steve King (R. Iowa), as well as 13 other Republican congressmen (including North Carolina’s own Virginia Foxx), introduced bill H.R. 140 to stop the apparently rampant usage of a loophole in our constitution allowing women give birth to what King described as “Anchor Babies.” For those of you who don’t know, “Anchor Baby” is a term to describe when undocumented women purposefully immigrate to the U.S. and give birth just to exploit the fact that their children are technically natural-born citizens of the U.S. Needless to say, the “Anchor Baby” concept was offensive, and, as it turned out, had almost no basis in truth.

Now, the average person would be able to distinguish fear mongering and conspiracy from fact, and I agree with you. I still believe that a large part of the Republican Party is reasonable, and this column isn’t about that portion; this article is about the portion of the party that has been pushed into a fearful, crazed frenzy. This article is about the portion of the party that is, frankly, ignorant. You heard me. We need to stop ignoring the fact that anyone who believes that Mexicans are rapists, the great wall of Trump is possible (let alone that Mexico will pay for it), that it is acceptable to just “bomb the s—” out of the Middle East or that it is appropriate to constantly insult your peers is anything less. After years of fostering xenophobia, bigotry and catering to the fears of the lowest common denominator, the Republican Party has created a decent-sized base of people just scared and ignorant enough to vote Trump. But some, I assume, are good people.