The Conspiracies Continue For Jack Cashill

The WorldNetDaily columnist has spent much of the year chasing random conspiracy theories and defending the dubious -- and he also co-wrote a novel with a plot and title that sound suspiciously familiar.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 9/24/2020

Jack Cashill

ConWebWatch has already noted Cashill's dismissal of wearing masks to help prevent the spread of coronavirus as nothing but "virtue signaling" conducted by "passive clowns." (Doesn't he count on passive clowns to be a significant part of his readership?) But Cashill has spent his 2020 chasing various random conspiracies and making dubious defenses.

That started the very first day, devoting most of his Jan. 1 column to attacking a member of the District of Columbia Bar Board of Professional Responsibility, which "made a recommendation that Judicial Watch founder and terrible lawyer Larry Klayman be suspended, a recommendation now under appeal, from the practice of law in the District for 33 months." None of it, of course, is relevant to the reasons that Klayman was facing discipline before the D.C Bar, which Cashill only briefly mentions: "The case itself has little to do with politics. It involves Klayman's pro-bono defense of a female Persian broadcaster at Voice of America. When she did not get the result she wanted, she turned on Klayman."

And as brief as that reference is, it manages to get the facts wrong. As the Washington Post more accurately summarized the story regarding his representation of a former VOA employee named Elham Sataki:

According to charges initiated by the bar’s disciplinary counsel in July 2017, Sataki alleged that Klayman induced her to move to Los Angeles, abandon her job in Washington and rely on him for housing and living expenses.

When she refused to enter a romantic relationship, he allegedly increased his compensation demands and exploited her “precarious financial position and his position as her attorney,” the report stated.

Despite her desire to pursue her case “simply and quietly,” Klayman, allegedly for his own political agenda, named unnecessary and high-profile defendants including former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and attacked the judge hearing Sataki’s case as politically biased, the report stated.

Klayman allegedly refused to withdraw from her case after Sataki fired him, then published several articles about it without her knowledge or consent in WorldNetDaily, a right-wing news aggregator site.

The report cited excerpts of communications from Klayman to his client after she rejected him, such as a text from April 23, 2010, in which he stated, “When someone u deeply care for tells u stuff like, ‘you’ll never be my Boyfriend . . . how would u feel?’ ”

In a letter later that year to a third party, Klayman wrote, “I do truly love Ellie. . . . But I do not want to hurt her and my own emotions have rendered me non-functional even as a lawyer,” according to the report.

Sataki told investigators, in a statement quoted in the report, “It was a vicious cycle and never ending and it felt like I was in an abusive relationship instead of a client/attorney relationship."

Klayman even wrote to Sataki's therapist proclaiming his love for her and other stalker-ish behavior.

Cashill is not going to tell you any of this, of course, because the truth gets in the way of his victim-creating and conspiracy-mongering. Just like he won't tell you that Joel Gilbert is a liar and a charlatan while he's promoting Gilbert's latest cinematic atrocity.

Defending a fraudulent filmmaker

Back in 2014, Cashill defended filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who deceived actors appearing in his badly made film "The Innocence of Muslims" by hiding the fact that it was an anti-Muslim screed, which did indeed spark protests in more than 20 countries even if it turned out not to be the main spark behind the Benghazi attack. Cashill once again whitewashed Nakoula's criminal history and sleazy deceptions over his film in his Jan. 22 column.

Cashill complained that President Obama referred to Nakoula as "sort of a shadowy character," despite the fact that he was; even Cashill had to concede that Nakoula was "on parole for his involvement in a check-kiting scheme." Cashill even justified Nakoula's making the film because "when Nakoula was making his film, there were at least 10 Muslim attacks on his fellow Coptic Christians in Egypt" and that "anti-Muslim sentiments" are "as understandable for Copts as anti-Nazi sentiments were for Jews in pre-war Germany."

Cashill got even more contradictory, claiming that federal officials held Nakoula "in secret without charge or without access to an attorney," then later admitted that uploading the film to YouTube violated his probation -- then suggested, but offered no evidence to back it up, that Nakoula didn't actually upload the video.

Cashill concluded by whining: "That an American citizen was about to spend a year in federal custody for producing a perfectly legal satire inspired not a single major media journalist to cry foul. But then again, they had a president to reelect. With their swooning support, that president was and would remain famously 'scandal free.'"

The fact that Nakoula maliciously deceived his actors -- putting their lives in danger -- and lived a life of deception appears not to bother Cashill one bit.

Seth Rich conspiracy theory

It was fitting that this column by Cashill was posted at WND on April 1, since it's a cruel joke of a piece that endeavors to perpetuate discredited Seth Rich conspiracy theories.

Cashill began by citing the notoriously unreliable Gateway Pundit, who was quoting Ty Clevenger, who as ConWebWatch has pointed out is a gadfly Clinton-hater; one reason right-wing conspiracy-mongers have latched onto the Seth Rich story is because of their pathological hatred of all things Clinton. Hew then referenced "veteran news analyst Ellen Ratner," who reportedly forwarded the idea that Rich leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, insisting she "had no reason to make this up." But as we noted, the only evidence linked to this is a video fellow conspirator Ed Butowsky tweeted out of Ratner in which she said nothing about Rich.

Nevertheless, Cashill wrote, "'Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron, were responsible for releasing the DNC emails to WikiLeaks,' [WikiLeaks leader Julian] Assange reportedly told Ratner, and she in turn told Butowsky. Butowsky made this claim in a complex, multi-party defamation lawsuit filed in July 2019." Cashill didn't mention that there's a separate lawsuit in which Aaron Rich is suing Butowsky and others for falsely claiming that he was involved in the theft of the DNC files, which has already resulted in the retraction of a Washington Times column making that claim and an apology from conspiracy-monger and former WND writer Jerome Corsi -- who, as ConWebWatch has reported, knew that the core conspiracy theory he and WND were promoting about Rich giving the DNC emails to WikiLeaks was false at the time he and WND were promoting it.

Cashill then defended the alleged honor of the "well-intentioned" Butowsky:

In fact, Butowsky was not a reporter but an occasional Fox News contributor on economic issues. He was not "concocting a story about Seth Rich's death" but attempting to solve a genuine mystery.

He had information that the major media did not, including Ratner's testimony and unfiltered conversations with Rich's parents.

NPR reporter David Folkenflik had less interest in solving Rich's murder than he did in slandering Butowsky. He dug into the educational background of this amateur investigator more aggressively than NPR had ever dug into Barack Obama's.

Other alternative journalists, most notably the irrepressible Matt Couch, faced similar legal and media harassment.

Eventually, Fox News was sued into silence. This widespread suppression would have had some justification if major media journalists knew anything about Rich's murder, but they did not.

Cashill didn't mention that Fox News has plenty of legal firepower and could have stood by its bogus Seth Rich story had it chose to; instead, it was retracted. He also didn't mention that the Mueller Report showed that the DNC emails were hacked by Russians and that Julian Assange was lying when he perpetuated the story of Seth Rich's purported involvement.

Cashill had similarly touted Couch in a Dec. 18 column in which he uncritically repeated Couch's false claim that discovery had been sealed in the lawsuit Aaron Rich filed against him. In fact, Couch is less "irrepressible" and more a fellow empathy-devoid conspiracy-monger.

As with his fellow conspiracy-mongers like Butowsky, Clevenger and Couch, the conspiracy is always -- always -- more important than the facts for Cashill. And he doesn't care who gets hurt in the process as long as the conspiracy is perpetuated.

Racial attacks

You knew Cashill's Feb. 26 WND column -- headlined "Will someone speak honestly about race and crime?" -- wasn't going to go well when he started by attacking a Democratic presidential debate as pandering to black people and adding, "Every Democratic Party convention since 1964 could be described as a festival of pandering to black voter[s]."

Cashill then lamented that Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg apologized for the stop-and-frisk policy while New York City mayor, claiming that he was "apologizing for saving more black lives during his 12 years as mayor of New York City than even the doctors in the city's hospitals." He invoked race-obsessed conservative Heather Mac Donald to push the inherently criminal nature of black people:

Whites and Hispanics are rarely the ones responsible for black murders. "That black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate," wrote Mac Donald. "The national rate of homicides committed by blacks is eight times that of whites and Hispanics combined."

Eight times higher? Were the Democratic candidates unaware of that information or were they suppressing it? Someone should have explained those numbers to the frighteningly pious Mayor Pete.

"None of us," said the pronoun-challenged Buttigieg, "have the experience, the lived experience, of, for example, of walking down the street or in a mall and feeling eyes on us regarding us as dangerous without knowing the first thing about us, just 'cause of the color of their skin."

As Mac Donald pointed out, "Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined."

People walking down the street would be imprudent not to look at black teens suspiciously. Black people look at young black men suspiciously.

Ah, but Cashill wasn't done:

To those on stage, "racism" explains the fact that blacks are disproportionally represented in all phases of the criminal justice system.

But there is nothing arbitrary about murder. All homicides are investigated. The truth is, though, that homicides of black victims are solved less frequently than those of white victims.

There are many reasons why this is true. For instance, you are not likely to see "Snitches get stitches" spray painted on a wall in a white neighborhood.

Democrats see the low clearance rate for black victims as further proof of racism in the system. They fail to acknowledge the flip side of the argument, namely that the perpetrator, who is almost always black, is less likely to be apprehended than a non-black for murder, for any crime for that matter.

Remember that Cashill engaged in racial fearmongering before, devoting an entire book to smearing Trayvon Martin as an aspiring thug and lionizing his killer, George Zimmerman, as a civil-rights martyr. He also got mad at us for pointing out that he may have inspired mass killer Dylann Roof with such thinking.

Failed image rehab

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King lost his re-election bid in a Republican primary, his constituents having grown weary of his history of racist remarks. Not even Cashill's desperate attempt at image rehab couldn't stop it.

Taking aim at a Republican Jewish Coalition attack on King he insisted was "shockingly mendacious and spectacularly self-destructive," Cashill took issue with the RJC's claim that King supports "an ideology that says Jews, and other minority groups are inferior," insisting that "King has long been a champion of Israel and has argued publicly in favor of assimilation and interracial marriage."

Cashill then got the RJC's name wrong about midway through his column, calling the the "Republican Jewish Committee." He then complained about a New York Times interview with King and attacked reporter Trip Gabriel, all while framing King's casual racism as no big deal:

Gabriel's language was predictably loaded. Trump "demonized immigrants," he wrote, conflating "demonized" with "described."

The president made "demeaning" remarks, inspired "fear" and used "misleading" statistics.

King's behavior was even worse. He used "racist language" in the past, "promoted neo-Nazis" on Twitter and was denounced by one anonymous "Republican leader" as a "white supremacist."

Gabriel's link about racist language led to a Salon article detailing comments King made using the common metaphor "pick of the litter" to describe how America should choose the most productive immigrants seeking to come here regardless of race.

The leftist Salon editors subverted his obviously positive intent and headlined the article, "Rep. Steve King: Immigrants are like dogs." This was all standard media stuff.

Gabriel, a former Styles section editor, made King's life hell with one sentence allegedly said by King but unrecorded by either King or Gabriel.

Gabriel set up the quote with a fairly accurate observation that King supported "immigrants who enter the country legally and fully assimilate because what matters more than race is 'the culture of America' based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe."

Gabriel quoted King on the phrase, "the culture of America," but not on the phrase, "whites from Europe." King never talked in terms of race when he talked about culture. Gabriel slipped the "whites" reference in on his own.

The next sentence attributed to King proved to be the killer: "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization – how did that language become offensive."

Cashill gave King's language-parsing defense a pass -- "If he had meant to lump all three of those phrases together he would have said 'those words' not 'that language'" -- then huffed, "Besides, no one has ever sat in a class talking about the merits of white nationalism or white supremacism. Gabriel knew what King meant."

A strangely familiar book

Cashill is a bit full of himself -- so committed to the idea that he's right about everything that he can't be bothered to admit that a large number of his pet conspiracy theories have, shall we say, not held up, let alone apologize to his readers for getting things so wrong.

Cashill put out a book earlier this year, which he's portraying as a book for young men. He began his March 4 WND column with a rant about what he thinks is the current state of YA literature:

The betrayal begins with the books teachers assign in high school and college. These books are routinely effete, feminist, anti-Christian, socialistic and often gay.

Collectively, they do better a job of teaching a young male to be a metrosexual than to be an a man.

I do not exaggerate the problem facing young men in school. To see what educators would like our young people to read, I chose an article titled "20 Contemporary Books for Your High School Reading List" from a random Google search.

Here are some samples. In "Bless Me, Ultima," described as "a classic piece of Chicano literature," the protagonist learns a new kind of spirituality from a faith healer.

"The Hate U Give" tackles "themes of racism, police brutality, and societal injustice."

[...]

The one worthy book, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," may be the single bleakest book I have ever read. Even by post-apocalyptic standards, it is a total downer. The movie version makes "The Walking Dead" look like "Hello, Dolly."

Given the books young people are assigned, It should not surprise that girls are an incredible 10 times more likely than boys to pick up a book and read it on their own.

By contrast, Cashill asserted that in preparing to write his new book, "I harkened back to the books I was assigned to read in high school. I still remember them: 'Call of the Wild,' 'Red Badge of Courage,' 'Annapurna,' 'Kon-Tiki,' 'Mutiny on the Bounty,' 'Men Against the Sea,' 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Lord of the Flies.' These books not only captured our attention and held it, but they also helped us boys envision our lives as men. We saw how courage, perseverance and self-reliance worked in the real world and why they remain essential virtues."

Cashill found a co-writer and claimed they wrote "an action adventure novel that young men – men of any age – would actually want to read":

The result is "The Hunt." In the book we tell the story of a recently widowed Army veteran who takes his adolescent sons on a character-building elk hunt to Colorado only to discover they are the ones being hunted.

The hunters are leftist anarchists in league with Muslim terrorists hell-bent on shooting the president's plane out of the sky. The incorrectness of the bad guys assures that no public high school anywhere will put the book on its reading list.

"Leftist anarchists in league with Muslim terrorists" as the villain? Sounds exactly like the kind of book Cashill would write. But wait ... that premise -- and that title -- sound familiar. Is Cashill trying to confuse people by suggesting his book inspired a certain controversial, recently released film with the same basic plot? Wouldn't put it past him.

Cashill didn't remark on this amazing coincidence, of course -- that would be too obvious (not to mention making the inevitable copyright infringement lawsuit happen a bit sooner than he's planning). Instead, he cited a couple anonymous glowing reviews, then exhorts his reader to "talk to your school board" about adding it to their school curriculum.

We suspect that no school board would want any book with such a blatant partisan agenda -- almost assuredly filled with stiffly drawn heroes and cardboard villains -- to be inflicted on their students, written by a man who's best known for dubiously presenting fiction as fact.