WND



WND (originally an initialism for WorldNetDaily, or as it was affectionately known to its fans as WingNutDaily or WhirledNutDaily ) is a far-right webshite founded by the impressively mustachioed Joseph Farah in 1997 as a project of his "Western Center for Journalism". The site espouses a fundamentalist, Christian, creationist worldview with a healthy dose of jingoism, and its coverage provides multiple sides of issues: the very conservative viewpoint and the ultra-conservative viewpoint. Basically, it makes Fox News look positively moonbatty in comparison. Managing editor David Kupelian claims:

We serve as your watchdog on government 365 days a year. We guard your priceless freedoms by aggressively exposing corruption and evil everywhere, and by championing good.

While they present themselves as news, WND is basically a tabloid for radical right-wingers. Their publishing standards are rock-bottom, and they have run stories from extremely questionable sources on many, many occasions. It's also one of the earliest and longest-running publishers of Ann Coulter's insipid columns, as well as editorials from such august political analysts as Chuck Norris, Pat Boone, Andy Schlafly, and The addition of editorials by disgraced baseball bigot  and an obsession with so-called "black mob violence" marked a shift from their less-than-subtle dog whistles into more overt racism.

The scary thing is, this bilge is actually slightly influential, with its made-up bullshit making its way out the mouths of wingnut Congressional Representatives and cable TV pundits far too often. Most notably, WND became ground zero for the Birther movement during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Corporate structure
Although its website lists Washington, D.C. as the location of its corporate and marketing headquarters, WND is actually headquartered in Medford, Oregon, which it lists as the location of its accounting office. For decades, Medford has been a mecca for survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and others of the paranoid-unhinged persuasion; it is also candidate to become the capital of the State of Jefferson, should that state ever become a reality. The other offices listed are an "operations" office in Long Beach, California, and a "customer service" office in the Kansas City suburb of Blue Springs, Missouri; in 1999, it was incorporated in the tax haven state of Delaware. In fact, the address in Washington, D.C., that WND claims is their corporate headquarters is actually a UPS store.

Advertising
While WND obviously has to pay its costs somehow, advertising on the site is done in a particularly tacky way. Entire articles and editorials are nothing more than promotions for books and tours. When an article isn't solely dedicated to selling crap from their store, you can be sure it'll contain at least two hypertext links to the store disguised to appear as links to other relevant sources. Ads are placed on the front page using the same sensationalist headlines, fonts, and formatting as articles, making it difficult to distinguish them from actual content. One of the best examples of this was in November 2011, when, under the banner of "WND Exclusive", was an article titled "Obama hasn't destroyed 'that time of year,' at least not yet..." Clicking on this apparent "shocking" headline led you to an article plugging WND Superstore's Christmas selection.

Banner advertising on the site at least at one time into two broad categories: passive weight-loss techniques and survivalism-related products. Basically, advertisers think WND's readers are nothing but fat slobs who want to lose weight without effort or paranoid nut jobs who think America is going into a second dark age and that the only way to survive is to preserve one's own food and generate one's own power. This is not that different than the Infowars Store's emphasis on supplements and "prepping". Since 2021, the WND Superstore has focused more on Christianity, nationalist pseudohistory and prepping.

Commentary and columnists
I really should send Joseph Farah a gift for putting together a publication that goes above and beyond the call of duty to provide me with maximum fodder for this blog.

Farah writes endlessly daily on his three favorite topics: how the media is liberal, how the liberal media is ignoring his latest venture, and defending his latest venture from the media's attacks... because they're liberal. He also frequently brings up how he has been in the media for thirty years, and that when he started out, the media "just reported the truth" and similar fantasies. As of 2019, Farah's daily editorials are exclusively focused on begging his readers for money and attacking social media. Farah appears to be upset that "news" stories from his wholly unreliable and completely biased tabloid no longer appear on the first two pages of a Google search.

The list of former and current weekly columnists reads like a Who's Who of the wingnut set: • 3

In 2010, WND temporarily ceased publishing Ann Coulter's columns and disinvited her from a conference over her involvement in the gay Republican event HomoCON. Farah went on a gay radio show(!) to accuse Coulter of believing that "sodomy is just an alternate lifestyle", and stated that he no longer considered himself a conservative due to what he perceived as the right's "embrace" of homosexuality. In response, Coulter called him a "swine", a "publicity whore", and a "fake Christian". Despite all that, WND quickly resumed publishing her columns, and Farah is as much a wingnut conservative than he's ever been.

Email to the Editor
This section is basically a chance for readers to tell Farah how right he is. On rare occasions where they do post letters disagreeing with WND's editorial stance, it is usually threatening and offensive, reflecting poorly on the letter writer. They post five letters a day, and it's not hard to believe they receive a lot more than that, so they are obviously choosing only the ones they want.

Unfortunately, there's no archive or permanent links to emails, so we can't show you any highlights. However, to give you an idea on the well-informed views you're missing out on, one day we had: a long, ranty, birther letter; a comparison of healthcare reforms to Soylent Green; a letter saying that all socialists are Nazis; a letter complaining that Robert Gibbs starts sentences with "The American people want..." despite the fact that Tony Snow also used that phrase; and a person fawning over how great their columnist Burt Prelutsky is.

Forums
The best batshit craziness is to be found on the "forums" of the site. They're only called "forums" because that's only the name WND has given them, even though they're actually a comments thread on a blog without a blog piece to comment on. These are started by the site admins rarely, and there is no ability to link to posts. Annoyingly, the newest post goes first, and to follow any conversation, you have to work backwards, trying to connect the blue quote text to the original post. Forum moderators are easy to spot, as they are the only ones with a signature, and it is about 15 lines long, trying to explain how their convoluted forum system works. There are actually only fifteen threads on the forums, currently available for commenting, not counting the polls, which are a lot more fun.

Polls
WND runs polls daily, which typically never have fewer than eight options, running the full gamut of the political spectrum from far-left to far-right, as well a few wingnut options that lie nowhere in the spectrum (or reality). Occasionally, the truth sneaks in with options such as, "No, this is all just sour grapes from right-wingers", but they receive few votes. Polls are mildly restrictive, since you have to register before you can participate. However, you may view the embarrassing results without registering.

Previous poll results include the following:
 * "Is Obama's eligibility issue a concern to you?" — 17 options. Top result, 36%: Yes, he's already proven he's not qualified. Now let's find out if he's eligible. (The top 8 results were variations on yes, totalling 99% of the votes).
 * "Why do you think the national media avoided the July 4th tea parties? — 15 options. Top result, 70%: They're driven by ideology and are completely in the tank for Obama and the Congress.
 * "Do you believe mankind evolved from lower species?" — 13 options. Top result, 63%: No, I believe the Bible account of creation.
 * "Where exactly do you think President Obama was really born?" — 10 options. Top result, 72%: Kenya.
 * "What would you like to give Obama for Christmas?|" — 25 options. Top result, 25%: A court ruling booting his ineligible self from office.
 * "Who's your pick for 2012 GOP presidential nominee if you could vote today?" — 27 options. Top result, 21%: Ron Paul. Second, 19%: Sarah Palin.
 * "What do you make of the recent spree of earthquakes?" — 10 options. Top result, 35%: It's the beginning of the end-time birth pangs, as the Bible puts it.
 * "Sound off on Michelle Obama's comment that Barack's 'home country' is Kenya." — 15 options. Top result, 62%: She spilled the beans. Barack was really born in Kenya, his home country.

Videos
WND also hosts several video series, but they're all tragically awful and should be avoided like the plague. Here are just a few:

For The Record
By amateur filmmaker Jason "Molotov" Mitchell. Some of the videos surpass WND's usual standards of offensiveness, such as when Mitchell actually argues in favor of the, citing a commandment in the book of Leviticus as his reason. (Molotov admits to having a Christian tattoo, apparently ignoring, wherein the Lord explicitly forbids tattoos.)

News! News!
A painfully unfunny "" knock-off produced by "Molotov" Mitchell and hosted by D.J. Doulce (basically an ersatz Christina Hoff Sommers). Every episode ends with the line "That is all the time we have for this week's News! News!, next week we may all be dead". Only if there is a merciful God.

The Ultimate Jew
The newest member of the The Avengers Hosted by stand-up comedian and formally living fossil,. Not funny, just kind of preachy. Imagine Krusty the Clown's father repeating all the current conservative talking points.

Living Waters
Ray Comfort and his life partner young ward Kirk Cameron ambush college co-eds to ask deep philosophical questions. When their startled victims fail to provide irrefutable proofs for answers, our two heroes declare that atheism and evolution are proven false... or something. Who knows? What do you expect from these two?

Just the Facts
Probably the driest of the five(!) series hosted by Richard Rives. His videos usually focus on Christianity and how the founding fathers were Christians (protip, Richy Rich: many weren't), and he seems to be anti-established churches.

The Heavens Declare
David Rives, son of Richard Rives, is an amateur astronomer and young Earth creationist whose videos present all the usual arguments for a 6000-year-old universe, with a focus on irreducible complexity. Rives also appears to believe that most (if not all) modern scientific discoveries were predicted by the Bible. Dave comes across as a wimpy Ray Comfort.

Red Elephant's Cafe
A "drama" series about a small town in the US called Liberty. The villain of the piece is the government, the characters talk in Tea Party talking points, and everything will be better if, um... God.

WND Superstore!
Everyone knows how to make money on the web, right? You give away stuff free and sell T-shirts on the back of it. They have Bibles! They have other books! They have a Reagan Store! They have their WorldNetWeekly magazine! (All material you could have read free on the site every day!) They have CDs and DVDs! They have a Tea Party store! They have a Birth Certificate store! And of course, they have T-shirts.

WND's store also features a "Preparedness" section, where the intrepid doomsday prepper can find low prices on items like 36 buckets filled with nearly five-thousand servings of vacuum sealed meals, the "Ebola Survival Handbook", and an authentic Russian gas mask.

Obama birth certificate "controversy"


The election of Barack Obama in 2008 really sent Farah and his cronies over the edge. During the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, the vast majority (if not all) of WND's headlines were about the so-called "birther controversy"; it was willing to post any article that could possibly point to Obama being ineligible to be president, regardless of its absurdity. Despite the fact that a high quality picture of Obama's birth certificate is readily available on the Internet and there is no doubt at all about his mother's citizenship, WND still believes he is ineligible, because:
 * 1) He was born in Kenya, his Grandma said so.
 * 2) He was born in an unnamed hospital in Hawaii, which does not claim credit.
 * 3) They only showed his birth certificate to a "select few media outlets", not to us, so it could still be fake.
 * 4) Even if it is real, that certificate is a "Certificate of Live Birth" not a "Birth Certificate", so it proves nothing.
 * 5) Even if he has a "long-form" birth certificate, he lived in Indonesia for some years and gave up his American citizenship.
 * 6) Even if he lived in Indonesia without giving up his US citizenship, his father was Kenyan and so does not meet our the Constitution's definition of "natural born citizen", because both parents have to be US citizens.



Just to show their determination to get that black Democrat out of the White House uphold the Constitution, they claim to have raised more than $65,000 to erect billboards around the country with the message, "Where's the Birth Certificate?" Interestingly, WND was mostly silent on the eligibility of John McCain, who caused a slight stir due by being born in the Panama Canal Zone.

Farah has also expressed doubts as to who Obama's mother really is. Appropriately, Ed Brayton quipped that the next step would be for Farah to declare his belief that Obama is actually a reptilian (David Icke, take note!); Farah was sure to come up with something just as silly if a lizard-man vibe strikes him as being inappropriate for his birther conspiracy theory of the week.

In addition, Jerome Corsi has also used WND to spread rumors that Obama is secretly gay, used to frequent Chicago gay bars, and is secretly married to a former male roommate.

Proving that stupidity is frequently non-partisan, the eligibility of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz (a dominionist wingnut tailor-made for WND) was occasionally questioned by WND columnist and noted crazy person Larry Klayman. Seeing as Cruz was the son of a Cuban refugee and born in Calgary, Farah stuck to his guns as a seeker of constitutional truth, and… endorsed Cruz in the Republican Primaries for the 2016 election.

Difficulties with the truth
WND has had some difficulties telling the truth over the birth certificate controversy. On August 2, 2009, when Orly Taitz presented them a photograph of what was reportedly Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, they clearly stated in their article:

WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.

However, the birth certificate turned out to be a fake based on an Australian birth certificate. WND was caught doing what is commonly called lying, and was not helped by the fact that they defended glaring errors in the document, such as Kenya not being a republic at the time, which were pointed out before the hoax was exposed.

In August 2010, WND published an article claiming that then-Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had helped to cover up Obama's birth certificate. In fact, they had only found nine Supreme Court cases mentioning Obama and Kagan (considering she was US Solicitor General at the time, meaning her entire job was arguing cases before the Supreme Court, that was perfectly normal), none of which had anything to do with the birth certificate controversy, most of which were filed well before Obama became President and merely "carried over", and only one of which was even related to the election. So WND took the action of any brave journalistic organization and deleted the story without explanation. The link remained broken for days, but WND eventually reactivated the links, replacing it with a story that had only a small connection to the original and an acknowledgement of their initial error.

Racism


WND regularly runs stories engaging in base racism, typically focusing on their readers' (i.e. racist white people) fears of "violent" brown people. The site regularly features the work of journalist and alleged human being Colin Flaherty, who has "done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse". Some choice articles from Flaherty and other people who can type who were employed by WND include:

The site also advertises Flaherty's book White Girl Bleed a Lot, which argues that "groups of black people have been roaming the streets of America – assaulting, intimidating, stalking, threatening, vandalizing, stealing, shooting, stabbing, even raping and killing."
 * "White Girl: I'm Tired of Being Looked At Like Prey."
 * "Take a stroll, wake up in hospital thanks to black mob"
 * A scoop that "Corpulent women of color" in the are molesting white people as revenge for the murder of Trayvon Martin.
 * "PACK OF BLACK YOUTH TERRORIZE CITY"
 * "Combat soldiers no match for black mob…
 * "BLACK-ON-WHITE BEATINGS LEAVE MORE DEAD"
 * "BLACK-MOB VIOLENCE DESTROYS U.S. LANDMARK"
 * "Black Mobs Plague Nightclubs Coast to Coast"
 * "It's only new if you have been aggressively ignoring the epidemic of black mob violence."
 * "Whistleblower: Philadelphia flooded with black mob violence."

It got to the point where Google Ads cut off service to them and labelled them as a "hate site".

And that's not all
In addition to claims that Obama is actually a Kenyan who gay-married a Muslim and that hordes of African-Americans are rampaging in your neighborhood and/or spreading Ebola, WND has advanced plenty of other sanity-deprived ideas.


 * The attack by Anders Behring Breivik was invented by the Norwegian Labour party in order to gain sympathy. "This is likely a fabrication of the Labour Party, who needs to hold onto power to enforce their multiculturalist, Muslim-favoring, anti-nationalist views", according to Michael Savage.
 * Soybeans and soy milk will make your penis shrink and turn you gay.
 * Obama is planning on building a Death Star. Seriously.
 * Whenever WND uses the word gay or gay marriage, they employ scare quotes.
 * Obama will not leave office after 2016.
 * Editor and impersonator Joseph Farah blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on secularism and the removal of mandatory prayer from public schools, and warned that if gun control measures were established, God would punish us more.
 * WND published a highly hagiographical report about a visit of Peter Popoff to Washington, D.C.
 * A minute-by-minute recounting of the execution of Saddam Hussein.
 * Burt Prelutsky even once made an article calling for the Ka'aba to be nuked.

Is Barack Obama the Devil?
A reoccurring theme at WND is just asking the question "Is Barack Obama literally, non-metaphorically, Satan?" With stories about Obama's similar appearance to a guy who played the Devil on TV, the fact that a landed on his face at some point or that a lens flare demon was recorded with him while in Kenya, the only conclusion a moron regular reader of WND could come to is: yes, Barack is probably Old Scratch.

WND Books
Under the WND Books imprint, WND publishes IMPORTANT INFORMATION on subjects relevant to its informative mission. Along with being an outlet for Farah's fine volumes, it also prints books by such intellectual greats as Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, and of course, Chuck Norris. Mostly, though, the authors are WND staff writers producing hyper-partisan screeds against liberals and RINOs.

You would have to be blind to miss the latest WND Books release, since there are advertisements for it all over the site. There is usually an interview with the author, an article on how well it is selling on Amazon and an article by Farah complaining about how nobody wants to interview his author. Any story that can possibly be linked to the book is, and will dissolve into a plug for the book by the time you pass the annoying flashing GIF advertisement in the middle.

In December 2015, WND proved their publishing standards are equal to their journalistic standards by acquiring the rights to crank pseudohistorian David Barton's wholly discredited book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. The book was pulled from shelves by its original (conservative) publisher, Thomas Nelson, after a group of ten evangelical Christian professors from prominent U.S. universities released a report calling assertions made in the book "unsupportable" and that Barton was frequently guilty of taking statements and actions out of context. The History News Network voted it "the least credible history book in print". WND.com columnist Michael Thompson advertised editorialized that Barton's evangelical critics are simply not conservative enough to correctly interpret history, despite being actual historians with fancy stuff like advanced degrees and decades of study. Barton's only degree is a bachelors in Christian education from Oral Roberts University.

Joseph Farah notes the wide respect accorded to WND's publications in the mainstream media: • 2

Mailing list
WND maintains a mailing list of readers who have signed up to have their mailbox filled with the same sort of crap that the website is filled with. Various organizations have rented the WND list, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and more significantly, the Republican National Committee. Right-wing blogger Jon Henke, who considers birtherism and its conspiracy theory "hideously embarrassing" for sane conservatives, contacted the latter and got a complete non-answer as to why the Republicans would wish to rent the email list of a fringe group of loonies like WND. This may be because WND-reading nutjobs are now the Republican base…

Eating their own
WND has a long history of sloppy accounting, being chronically late in paying bills, ripping off authors, and high-level executives making personal purchases off of the company credit card. All of this mismanagement primarily hurts the people that support it: kooks, Christian fundamentalists, and co-grifters. WND seems to be in a downward spiral, with the book publishing arm devolving from free publishing for authors with unfulfilled promises of royalties to stright-up vanity publishing via World Ahead Press ($10,000 up front from the author to get published). Farah blames WND's dire financial situation on the lack of promotion of the site's fake news stories by Google/Facebook/Twitter (who he calls the "Digital Cartel"), rather than WND's complete lack of journalistic standards and long history of conspiratorial and inflammatory content. Remaining WND devotees can prepare for WND's end times, when the wingnut comes unscrewed, by buying a Russian gas mask on the WND website when the stink of internal rot becomes more apparent.