Ben Adler: “Liberals talk a lot about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media that are on the mainstream radar. But liberals and mainstream journalists tend to forget that there is a fever swamp of crazed conspiracy theories and shockingly offensive rhetoric that exists in obscure right-wing websites and viral e-mail chains. As David Frum recently noted on his Daily Beast blog, it is impossible to understand the dog whistles you hear on Fox News if you aren’t familiar with the viral e-mail smears their audience believes in. Specifically, Frum was referring to Fox host Greg Gutfield’s line that “Obama is now out of the closet.… he’s officially gay for class warfare.” That’s a reference to the conservative e-mail meme that Obama is gay. Frum writes: ‘Fox is only the most visible part of a vast alternative reality. Fox’s coverage of the news cannot be properly understood in isolation, but only in conjunction with the rest of that system—and especially the chain emails that do so much to shape the worldview of Fox viewers.’”