Pressure is building for Republican presidential hopefuls to repudiate Rudy Giuliani's accusations that President Obama doesn't love America and harbors an “anti-colonial” worldview -- claims that, while extreme to moderate media consumers, have become commonplace in the far-right media circles that will help shape the GOP primary season leading up to the 2016 elections.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani sparked controversy this week when he told attendees at a fund-raising event for Wisconsin governor and 2016 presidential hopeful Scott Walker that Obama does not love America. Giuliani went on to defend his remarks in an interview with The New York Times, denying any racial element to his attack with the excuse that he merely believed Obama's worldview is symptomatic of “socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.”

The comments have been condemned by many in the mainstream press. On the set of MSNBC's Morning Joe, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson called on potential Republican presidential candidates to denounce Giuliani's stance, saying the comments were “racist and ...frankly kind of unhinged.”

In contrast, conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh rushed to justify Giuliani's claims, a defense which foreshadows 2016 hopefuls' predicament -- GOP candidates who want to appeal to mainstream voters must now navigate a rhetorical minefield if they hope to avoid attacks from the right-wing pundits who will help shape the opinions of conservative primary voters.

Race-baiting attempts to link Obama to anti-colonialism (and along with it the utterly bizarre attempts to redefine anti-colonialism as a negative trait) have been commonplace in right-wing circles for the better part of a decade, popularized by disgraced filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza's use of the phrase as a means of suggesting Obama bears origins or philosophical allegiance to Kenya, his father's birthplace.

Current CNN contributor and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich took the baton from there, telling National Review in September 2010 that Obama pretends to be normal while actually being engaged in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”

This framework has been repeatedly parroted by right-wing media who use it to suggest the president doesn't love the United States and in some cases is actively and deliberately attempting to undermine the nation's success.  Glenn Beck embraced the narrative with glee, saying that D'Souza “really gets it” while assuring skeptical listeners that “this doesn't have anything to do with race.”

As recently as September 2014, radio host Laura Ingraham suggested to listeners that Obama was willing to expose American military personnel to Ebola in order to atone for colonialism.

Yet the racial element is not only present in anti-colonial dialogue, it's barely even disguised. Conservatives have frequently framed the smear as a conflict between Obama and Kenya on one side and British people and the white American power structure on the other. D'Souza, The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer and others illustrated this with false claims that Obama once returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the United Kingdom because he “hates” Churchill for his role as the “prime minister who cracked down on an anti-colonial uprsising in Kenya.”

Beck has claimed Obama resents the British because they tortured his Kenyan grandmother and previously said that Obama “chose to use his name Barack,” rather than Barry, “to identify not with America” but with his father's Kenya. Another conservative radio host alleged that Obama “is an African colonial” who “hates” the British.

Obama is “more African in his roots than he is American,” declared Rush Limbaugh, who once went on to claim that Obama's economic role model is Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe because he “took the white people's farms.” In 2012, Limbaugh told listeners that Obama's plan is “payback” against the “white Europeans” who “illegitimately founded” the United States.

Diane Roberts said it best in a 2010 op-ed for The Guardian, noting that conservatives who apply the “other” label to Obama with anti-colonial imagery are just blowing a “racist dogwhistle”:

Back when Newt Gingrich was calling Bill and Hillary Clinton “enemies of normal Americans”, conservatives actually had to try hard. Now, they just blow the racist dogwhistle. Claiming that Obama is some kind of crypto-Mau Mau, lurking in the White House till he can bring down the Anglo-Saxon state, western capitalism and, for all we know, motherhood and apple pie, is daft enough. But since when is being anti-colonialist a bad thing? Surely, the United States was born out of anti-colonialist sentiment, a desire to free ourselves from our British masters. But then, the Founding Fathers were white.

So far, at least one GOP contender has already refused to distance himself from Giuliani's sentiment, as Robinson noted on MSNBC. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said he stands by the “gist” of what Giuliani said, adding, “If you are looking for someone to condemn the Mayor, look elsewhere.” Meanwhile, according to MSNBC's Mark Halperin, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told MSNBC that he believes the president loves America.