FACT CHECK: Was Barack Obama Pictured Wearing An Aleister Crowley T-Shirt?
An image shared on Facebook purportedly shows former President Barack Obama wearing a t-shirt with British occultist Aleister Crowley’s face on it.
Verdict: False
The image has been digitally manipulated to include Crowley’s face on Obama’s shirt.
Fact Check:
Crowley, an occultist who died in 1947, founded a new religious order and was once called “the wickedest man in the world” by a newspaper in the 1920s, according to the U.K. National Trust. Check Your Fact previously debunked the false claim that former First Lady Barbara Bush was Crowley’s daughter.
A Feb. 22 Facebook post shares an image of Obama standing in what looks like a gym with a young child while wearing a grey t-shirt emblazoned with Crowley’s name, likeness and the statement “AC 2012.”
“Aleister Crowley – known Satanist on Obama’s t-shirt. All out in the open,” the post’s caption states. (RELATED: Did Hillary Clinton Send This 2011 Email To Barack Obama Discussing ‘The Pizza Arrangement’?)
The image, which Snopes debunked in 2015, appears to have been digitally manipulated. The unaltered photo can be found in a 2011 post on an archived version of the website USS Kirk The Untold Story and shows Obama wearing a plain grey t-shirt. The now-inactive post seems to have been written by the boy in the photo, who described meeting Obama at a Decorah, Iowa, physical therapy center.
The altered version of the image with Crowley’s face on the shirt was also published on the website AC2012 on April Fools’ Day in 2012. The website describes itself as promoting “Aleister Crowley’s political philosophy with humor, controversy, blasphemy, and pop culture.”