Topic: WorldNetDaily
Via Orcinus, we learn that there's a major rift in the Minuteman organization is undergoing a major split between co-founders Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox. Further, questions have been raised about how the group's donations are being accounted for -- even Joseph Farah's former buddies at the Washington Times have made note of it.
Why won't you read about this rift and funding question at WorldNetDaily? Because it has a book to sell -- specifically, Gilchrist's version of the Minuteman story (with an assist from bigot and terrorist enabler Jerome Corsi). A July 21 WND article designed to juice early sales of the book lets us know what we're in for when there are two highly misleading, if not outright false, statements in the promo copy.
The article claims that the book will show that "The real number of illegal aliens in the country is not 12 million, which the federal government claims, but closer to 30 million." WND's Joseph Farah was caught peddling this same claim a few months. There appears to be no real-world evidence to support it.
The article also quotes Gilchrist as saying, "The terrorist hijackers on 9/11 were in this country illegally." In fact, all 19 hijackers entered the U.S. legally, though two had overstayed their visas and were thus technically illegal. It's a staple of anti-immigration folks who want to link 9/11 to the current immigration debate by claiming, like Peter Brimelow at the "white nationalist" VDARE.com, that "Every one of nineteen 9/11 hijackers was an illegal immigrant by definition. None of them told the U.S. immigration authorities what they intended to do."
The article further makes the claim that "What the ACLU called [the Minutemen] can't be published on a family-friendly Internet news site." Look for unsupported hearsay to support that claim, because the record doesn't. Even WND's own articles about ACLU monitoring of the Minutemen (here, here and here) fail to note any non-family-friendly comments by the ACLU, just an anonymous person purportedly quoted as saying that "They give us the middle finger every chance they get to try to get us to react."
UPDATE: Despite Corsi's co-authorship, WND did not publish the Gilchrist-Corsi book; World Ahead Publishing, best known for its questionable book of purported Hillary Clinton quotes that WND previously plugged the heck out of, did.
