Progress Illinois

Each week seems to bring a new round of hateful, anonymous emails to the inboxes of unsuspecting Americans. Recently we saw one of the worst yet, a forward about Barack Obama rife with enough lies and racist stereotypes to make Sean Hannity blush. If you've ever wondered why your conservative uncle (or father, or sister, or co-worker) is constantly sending out crazy chain emails while your moderate or liberal friends don’t seem as addicted to spam, it might be because there are simply many more right wing email hoaxes out there.

In a recent column, the non-partisan Factcheck.org noted that they have not yet seen any anti- John McCain chain emails, but online falsehoods about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton abound:

E-mails about Obama, for instance, have been particularly popular – they now rank as No. 3 on Snopes.com’s list of the 25 Hottest Urban Legends and one rumor holds the No. 1 spot in (Urban Legend reporter David) Emery's top 25. But only one of the e-mails these sites have examined is true – and actually only a certain version of it passes the truth test.

Writing in The Nation last fall, Chris Hayes observed that these "smear forwards" are especially insidious in that they are often anonymous and travel under-the-radar of many media monitors:

For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.

Hayes suspects that some of these anti-Democrat smear emails are the products of concerted efforts by right wing political groups.

Sadly, we can expect to see many more smear forwards in the coming months. As far as separating the truth from the lies, Factcheck.org has some good advice: "assume all such messages are wrong, and you'll be right most of the time."

In fact, they say the more popular a political chain email is, the less likely it is to be true.