Topic: WorldNetDaily
Alyssa Farah -- daughter of WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah -- has been working her way up through the Trump administration, first as Vice President Mike Pence's press secretary, then as Pentagon press secretary; last month, she was named White House director of strategic communications. We were the first to report Farah's connection to the birther and conspiracy theory site, noting stories she wrote for WND while studying journalism at homeschooler-friendly Christian school Patrick Henry College.
But a strange thing has happened recently: Alyssa Farah's name has been all but purged from WND.
Farah's archive was intact as recently as July 2019, showing dozens of articles with her byline. But sometime between July and December 2019 -- based on links in the Internet Archive -- her archive was purged, leaving just an author page with only her name and her onetime status as a "special Washington correspondent for WND."
For instance, a 2013 article by Farah in which she channeled anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists by claiming that a vaccine against the human papillomavirus that has been shown to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer "has caused thousands of adverse reactions ... and even death" now carries only a generic "WND Staff" byline.
Similarly, a 2010 article in which Farah pushed misleading claims about then-Supreme Court candidate Elena Kagan also carries a "WND Staff" byline.
It's easy to speculate on why this happened -- her dad runs the joint, after all, and even if he is continuing to recover from a stroke, her stepmother, Elizabeth, was her husband's lieutenant and could easily make that happen. One can easily presume that Alyssa is treating this as an old shame now that she's a Whtie House bigwig and would rather not remind people that she once worked for her dad's (questionably run) conspiracy-theory operation.
But she and WND forget that the internet is forever, and not only do old shames get memorialized, attempts to scrub them do as well.
(Thanks to an alert ConWebWatch reader who informed us about this.)
