Beyond Paul Nehlen: WND's White Nationalism Problem

Two more WorldNetDaily-published authors have shown their true colors of support for white nationalism and/or anti-Semitism. But WND has been flirting with white nationalists and race-baiters for years.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 10/17/2018

In 2017, WND's book division published "Wage the Battle," a book by Nehlen, best known at the time for running a quixotic campaign against powerful House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan in 2016 in the Republican primary and was getting heavy promotion from WND proper in another planned run against Ryan in 2018. WND also began selling in its online store a Nehlen-produced anti-Muslim film called "Hijrah." WND effectively became one big in-kind contribution to Nehlen's campaign in mid- to late 2017, with the WND-published book as its manifesto.

Then Nehlen began a public descent into white nationalism and virulent anti-Semitism. WND stopped promoting Nehlen but even as other conservative commentators and media outlets publicly distanced themselves from Nehlen's offensive comments, WND stayed silent despite being a major backer, and it continued selling his book. It took until January of this year -- months after Nehlen's white nationalist and anti-Semitic rants went public -- for WND to pull "Hirjah" and "Wage the Battle" from its online store and another month for WND to scrub Nehlen from its book-publishing website.

Meanwhile, after all these months, WND still has not spoken publicly about its relationship with Nehlen. Meanwhile, to this day, new copies of both the paper and e-book editions are still available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It turns out that Nehlen is not the only WND author whose dips in the cesspool of white nationalism and anti-Semitism have come to light this year.

Scott Greer

The Atlantic's Rosie Gray reported in September that Scott Greer, a former editor at the conservative Daily Caller, wrote anti-Semitic and white nationalist articles under a pseudonym for the Radix Journal, published by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

Last year, WND published Greer's book "No Campus for White Men," which WND Books claimed "shines a bright light on the growing obsession with diversity, victimization and identity politics on today's college campuses, and shows how it is creating an intensely hostile and fearful atmosphere that can only lead, ultimately, to ever greater polarization in American society." Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who was abandoned by most conservatives after he was caught defending pedophilia, wrote the foreword.

(WND had a little trouble quitting Yiannopoulos. A fawning 2016 article by Jerome Corsi touted his "vision for the future as Millennials emerge to reshape politics over the next few decades" and gushed that "Milo made clear he is preparing for a long and successful career." After the pedophilia scandal broke, then-writer Cheryl Chumley complained that the whole thing was media-driven, even though the video in which Yiannopoulos made his controversial comments first rose to prominence on a conservative Twitter account.)

WND had been giving Greer a platform for his racial grievances as early as 2013, when he cited none other than WND columnist Jack Cashill -- whose best-known foray into racial relations is to denigrate Trayvon Martin as a thug and elevate George Zimmerman to a hero for kiling him -- in claiming that the film "12 Years a Slave" could "heat up racial tensions." As with Nehlen, WND folded book promotion into its "news" coverage, such as a February 2017 article featuring Greer complaining that some Trump White House aides "are closely associated with white nationalists" -- not because it wasn't true, but because the label is "menacing" to conservatives.

As with Nehlen, WND has made no public statement yet about Greer as of this writing, his pro-white, anti-Semitic past has not been reported on the WND website, and the e-book version of "No Campus for White Men" is still for sale at the WND online store.

Walid Shoebat

Walid Shoebat was a rock star at WND in the early 2000s. As ConWebWatch documented, WND loved the right-wing-friendly story he told about being a Palestinian terrorist who became a "Christian Zionist" (never mind the scant evidence that his terrorist past ever actually happened) -- not only did WND editor Joseph Farah write a fawning profile of him and touting his new self-proclaimed mission "to go to Americans and churches and anywhere I can go and explain God’s plan for the state of Israel, and how God intended Israel to be a light unto the nations, and how all of our hatred toward Israel is really evil." Shoebat was also the star attraction in the 2008 WND-published anthology "Why We Left Islam," and one of the few contributors to be given a full bio.

Well, Shoebat appears to have soured on the whole "Christian Zionist" thing to the point where he's gone full-blown anti-Semitic. Israel National News reported in August:

Walid Shoebat’s foundation has a website, Shoebat.com that would expose persecution of Christians and Jews in the War on Terror. I hadn’t looked at the site in a while but when I went there I was greeted by a headline that read, “Judaism is Satanic”. It also featured a strange trailer from either the Arab miniseries A Horseman Without A Horse which is based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and was used to foment pogroms since the 19th century on Jews or else from Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ which is just as bad.

When I scrolled down on the website I was besieged with all manner of mendacious lecturing by Walid’s son, Theodore, describing the Talmud and Judaism as Satanic devices, also spewing out attacks on gays. The messages were the same as those on militant Islamist websites or those of Neo-Nazis, yet declared to be true representations of Christian doctrine and “telling it like it is” about the Jews who “killed God.” Some readers even carried on further: The Jews in Israel aren’t real Jews; The Talmud teaches ideas from the Devil; The Church revealed the devil worship of the Jews and on and on. Readers can see all this by visiting the website. I recommend viewing it on the Internet Archive here in case it has been removed by the time you read this article, but it was up at this writing.

At first, I thought maybe the site was hacked or that Walid wasn’t aware of what his son, Theodore was doing; the attacks on Judaism and Jews, the attacks on gays, his militant and almost persecutorial representations of Christianity that were Taliban-like behavior. But Walid told me everything was right, or so he said, and followed his 27 year-old son’s ideas. Now, the Shoebats say the Jews, not the Romans, killed Christ, and how Judaism is a Satanic cult. Walid and son described me as a “money grubbing Jew.”

Walid asked me if I wanted to do an interview with his son. But when his son called me he began insulting me with obscenity-laced accusations and nonsense.. The Palestinian militant came out, it seems, in both Walid and his son. This wasn’t a misunderstanding of Judaism, this was every bit as anti-Semitic as Hamas.

Hohmann didn't report how Shoebat was a onetime WND star featured in a book it published, but it did quote Farah lamenting Shoebat's attack: "I have always considered Walid a good friend. Normally good friends call one another when they have a problem with the other. That’s what Matthew 18 is all about. Instead, he seems to be lashing out in anger and rage at both friends and at people like Jonathan and Mark Biltz whose only offense is bringing people to the Lord and to repentance and to the Bible. You expect anger and rage from people hostile to the Gospel, but not from friends who profess to be believers." Farah gave no indication that he or anyone else at WND reached out to Shoebat for a chance to respond.

Meanwhile, "Why We Left Islam" is still for sale at the WND online store at this writing, albeit heavily discounted to $2.99.

WND and white nationalism

WND won't admit it, but it's been flirting with white nationalism and its kissing cousin of race-baiting for years, as ConWebWatch has already documented:

• It gave copious space to the race-baiting rants of Colin Flaherty, who specialized in fearmongering about "black mob violence," and it also republished his book on the same subject, called "White Girl Bleed A Lot." It only backed away when Google threatened to cut off revenue from its ad space on WND ... which forced more refined race-baiting and gave us Farah's ludicrous insistence that "the term 'black mobs' as used in WND is not a pejorative term."
• WND also obsessed periodically over the state of whites in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition to publishing a columnist, Anthony LoBaido (for whom ConWebWatch's Slantie Award for craziest ConWeb commentary is named), who hung out with pro-white paramilitary groups in the country and has had as an opinion columnist Ilana Mercer, a South African native who's still wistful for the days when black people weren't running the place, it danced on the grave of Nelson Mandela and invented quotes from an expert on genocide to claim that blacks in South Africa were perpetrating one against the white population.
• When Anders Breivik massacred dozens in Norway in 2011, his 1,500-page manifesto filled with anger at Muslims, feminism and multiculturalism cited WND six times.
• And when Dylann Roof killed nine blacks in a South Carolina church in 2015, his grievances about violent blacks and post-apartheid South Africa echoed the pages of WND.

That's not all. Longtime WND writer Jerome Corsi was quite comfortable in the white-nationalist realm, to the point that he appeared on a white supremacist's radio show to promote his 2008 anti-Obama book while a WND employee.

In 2013, as ConWebWatch also documented, WND publicist Tim Bueler was also an official with a group called TeaParty.org, serving as its secretary and media director. TeaParty.org also published commentaries by Corsi; Bueler also accompanied Corsi on his ill-fated 2008 trip to Kenya, where they were briefly detained and Corsi brought back fraudulent documents he used to try and falsely smear Obama before the 2008 election.

TeaParty.org, also known as the 1776 Tea Party, was headed by Dale Robertson, who is best known for carrying around a sign at a 2009 rally with the (misspelled) N-word on it. Other tea party groups couldn't run from Robertson fast enough -- but not WND's publicist.

Meanwhile, Bueler and TeaParty.org executive director Stephen Eichler had another nefarious connection: They used to work with the Minuteman Project, the border vigilante group founded by Jim Gilchrist. (Corsi was a big supporter of Gilchrist as well -- he also wrote a book about the guy -- until Gilchrist endorsed Mike Huckabee in the 2008 election, whom Corsi deemed insufficiently anti-immigration.) The Minuteman Project's "border operations director" was Shawna Forde, best known for her role in the 2009 killings of a 9-year-old girl and her father, for which she was found guilty of first-degree murder.

These are WND's fellow travelers -- some of whom were also on the WND payroll. WND's publishing of hate-filled white nationalists like Nehlen, Shoebat and Greer doesn't seem so far-fetched now, does it?