Topic: WorldNetDaily
The only "news" article WorldNetDaily did on Hillary Clinton's calling out Donald Trump's connections to white nationalists, white supremacists and the alt-right was one that simply reproduced her speech. That seems like an admission that WND couldn't use the "news" part of its website to respond to it, even with its very loose journalistic standards.
That means WND had to find a commentator whose factual standards are, shall we say, less than journalistic to go wild in the commentary section.
And Farah delivers in the lengthy screed that serves as his Aug. 25 column. Here's how he started it:
In delivering one of her patented conspiratorial screeds in Reno, Nevada, Thursday, Hillary Clinton started by saying she had intended to talk about her desire to help small businesses and entrepreneurs, cut red tape and taxes.
“Because I believe that in America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it,” she said.
Those were her first lies – unless you count her first words: “Thank you, Reno! It’s great to be back in Nevada.”
Hillary Clinton never met a tax she didn’t want to raise, a government regulation she thought was too lenient, or a small business she couldn’t care less about.
Remember what her former boss Barack Obama said: “You didn’t build that.” To them, only government builds things.
More to the point, Hillary was never going to talk about cutting taxes and red tape and helping small businesses. Let me take you back to 1993, when Hillary was secretly crafting the government takeover of the U.S. health-care system. When it was pointed out to her the devastating consequences some of her plans would have for small businesses, she famously screeched: “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized entrepreneur in America.”
Those 10 words say more about her utter contempt for the free market than any 10 words she has ever spoken. Spoken spontaneously, without scripting, they revealed the true Hillary.
But, as Hillary said, that’s not what she went to Reno to talk about. What she did say was carefully scripted, well-planned and even coordinated with her friends in the press, who had been laying the groundwork for the attack speech in which she did what she always does with her adversaries according to the rulebook of her smear-artist mentor, Saul Alinsky.
As you might have guessed, Farah's column is pure projection, accusing Clinton of engaging in behavior he and WND have been reveling in for years. If there's anyone who know his way around conspiratorial screeds, it's Farah.
True to dishonest form, Farah not only gets the Clinton quote wrong -- she apparently actually said, "I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America," though we have yet to find the original -- he pulls the Obama "You didn't build that" quote out of context.
Farah deftly avoids discussing the specifics that Clinton offered in support of her claims. He does take exception to Clinton's references to birtherism, though:
The pattern continued through the amazing speech: “And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called ‘birthers,'” she said. Oh really? It wasn’t a Democrat apparatchik of Hillary’s who played the so-called “birther” card against Obama in 2008 Democrat primary? Of course it was. She just didn’t want to get her hands dirty by making a constitutional case on eligibility. Trump courageously did. And, as a result, Obama was forced to release what he claimed to be his “birth certificate” after refusing to do so for nearly his entire first term in office.
But Hillary’s lies got more vicious.
“He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black president,” she claimed.
Trump never said that. I don’t know anyone who claimed he was not an American citizen. The question raised was legitimate: Was Obama – and is Obama – constitutionally eligible for the presidency as a “natural-born citizen”? A whole different criteria. And, again, Trump didn’t start the controversy – Hillary did, in her desperate bid for power.
Nope, Joe, Hillary did not start birtherism. And it would have died with renegade Clinton supporters if right-wing Obama-haters like WND and Trump (whom WND fed birther stuff behind the scenes) hadn't picked up the baton and so enthusiastically embraced it as a way to personally destroy Obama.
It seems Farah is still wavering on how proud he should be about being a birther. He still won't admit the whole birther movement has been discredited -- note his wording about Obama releasing "what he claimed to be his 'birth certificate'" -- but last month he insisted the "eligibility issue" ended in "late 2011," when WND was plotting to sleaze Joe Arpaio's incompetent "cold case posse" into existence.
As far as Farah claiming "I don’t know anyone who claimed he was not an American citizen," he might want to check with his own website and his favorite incompetent attorney, Larry Klayman. He declared just two years ago in a lawsuit to deport Obama, in an article published by WND, that Obama "falsified documents, such as his birth certificate and Social Security number, to qualify for the privileges of American citizenship such that his citizenship, which is based on false pretenses, must be nullified."
Farah then dubiously professed innocence about the alt-right movement Trump has embraced:
For weeks I had been getting calls from those in what we euphemistically call “the mainstream media,” including the Washington Post. They wanted to talk to me about the “Alt-Right.” I had never heard the term. But that didn’t stop them.
I asked them to define it for me, but none of them could. Apparently, according to Hillary’s speech, it had been defined by the Wall Street Journal as “a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”
When one reporter got to the racist angle, all I could say was: “Well, that is detestable. I consider any form of racism an abomination.”
What I am suggesting here is that Hillary’s friends in the media – and they are legion – were attempting to help her create a new bogeyman.
But nationalism is not racism. Being for borders is not racism.
But WND has been doing a lot of alt-right activism without the name. It's long railed against multiculturalism and threats to white identity like "black mob violence" to the point that WND can credibly be accused of helping to inspire a couple of mass shooters: Anders Breivik in Norway (who cited WND six times in his manifesto) and Dylann Roof in Charleston (who shared some WND writers' lament for the end of apartheid).
Farah bellowed in his closing rant:
This is a sick, sick woman, full of hate herself, someone who is ethically challenged more than anyone who has ever run for the presidency, a woman who was “co-president” in the 1990s when her husband used the Internal Revenue Service to target his and her political enemies – myself prominently among them.
She does not deserve another chance. She is unfit. She is disqualified. Many who breached national security as she did as secretary of state are serving prison time. She and her husband have never been held accountable for their crimes – many of which were committed when they served in the highest offices in the land.
Don’t give her another chance, because she will surely do it again.
Again, projection. Farah is at least as unfit and disqualified to be a journalist as he claims Clinton is to be president, and he has rarely been held accountable for his journalistic crimes (except that one time). You'd think the fact that Farah had to beg for money from readers to keep WND afloat -- evidence that readers are, in fact, passing judgment on his brand of so-called journalism and finding it wanting -- would have been a sufficiently humbling experience to him that he would change his (and WND's) ways and start acting in a responsible manner that relies less on conspiratorial rants and more on fairly and accurately reporting facts.
Apparently not.
