Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily still can't quite bring itself to publicly disassociate from anti-Semitic white nationalist Paul Nehlen, whose book "Wage thte Battle" WND published last year. But it's ever-so-slowly taken another step in disappearing him from its website.
Sometime in the past week -- perhaps moved by Nehlen tweeting an image of Prince Harry fiancee Meghan Markle's face photoshopped onto Cheddar Man, an early Briton recently revealed to be dark-skinned, and the Wisconsin Republican Party subsequently dissociating itself from him and Twitter indefinitely suspending him -- WND Books removed the page for "Wage the Battle" and Nehlen's author bio from its website; both URLs now return 404 errors.
WND has yet to announce whether it is formally withdrawing Nehlen's book from the market -- or make any other statement about the state of its relationship with Nehlen. Indeed, new copies of both the paper and e-book editions are still available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, so it still appears to be available.
That's a problem. WND is indisputably tied to Nehlen; until last September, it enthusiastically touted Nehlen's campaign for the Wisconsin House seat currently held by Paul Ryan. About the time WND stopped promoting him, Nehlen was spouting anti-immigrant rhetoric and immersing himself in the alt-right movement. Those views were not that far from what WND has advocated, so it's unclear how WND came to view him as a pariah.
Because WND has no public statement on Nehlen, we don't know why WND was first attracted to him enough to publish his book, why it stopped promoting him in September, or why it's taken so long to back away from him. Our emails to WND asking for comment have gone unanswered.
WND has not handled this well, and certainly not with any sort of moral clarity. That may be another reason why it does not deserve to live.
