The WorldNetDaily editor is clinging so fiercely to bogus election fraud conspiracies that he has even thrown his own daughter -- who worked in the Trump administration -- under the bus.
By Terry Krepel Posted 5/17/2021
Joseph Farah
WorldNetDaily's obsession with pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud in the 2020 presidential election is so deep, editor Joseph Farah felt he was sufficiently recovered from a series of strokes nearly two years earlier to weigh in.
In his Nov. 30 column, Farah served up "6 reasons I'm not giving up on Trump," the first of which was a Trump talking point: "Trump won a landslide of votes legally cast by the end of "Election Day." Then came the yet-undetermined number of mail-in votes that were not authorized by state legislatures were arguably postmarked after Election Day and may not have been signed by certified voters.
By reasons 3 and 4, however, Farah is mostly copying-and-pasting unproven claims by Trump and whining that the Justice Department won't investigate, while also declaring that "There are paths to absolutely secure, free and fair elections in America – including, just to cite one example, blockchain technology." His final reason is simply a Trump ad: "It may be our only chance to preserve the nation from a massive mistake – changing horses in midstream, after an amazing first term, a mistake that could be irrevocable."
Remember that before his 2019 stroke, Farah was embarrassing himself by acting like a ridiculous Trump fanboy.
Farah spent his Dec. 9 column cheering the Texas lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court that would "invalidate 62 Electoral College votes of four battleground states and have them awarded to Trump because of fraud." It's mostly another copy-and-paste, this time from the legal filing and statements by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Farah concluded by declaring: "This could well be our last chance to root out the obvious stench that has been left behind in the 2020 election."
Of course, that Texas lawsuit was swiftly rejected by the Supreme Court, showing that once again Farah was betting on the wrong horse.
Nevertheless, in his Dec. 29 column, he declared that a Gallup poll showing Trump being rated higher than Joe Biden on a list of most admired Americans is evidence that Trump "won in a landslide": "Donald J. Trump is the most admired man in America. We saw in the campaign that he had become the most LOVED man in America. Then how could he have lost an honest election?"
Dissing his daughter
Following the right-wing, pro-Trump riot in the Capitol on Jan. 6, former White House communications director Alyssa Farah -- Joseph Farah's daughter -- took to Twitter to send a message to the Trump supporters that instigated and encouraged the violence:
Dear MAGA- I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.
There were cases of fraud that should be investigated. But the legitimate margins of victory for Biden are far too wide to change the outcome. You need to know that. I’m proud of many policy accomplishments the Trump Admin had. But we must accept these results.
Which is all well and good -- admitting that the election is not stolen is a big step for a former Trump White House official to take publicly. But there's another issue involved here: Farah's father, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, is still spouting those election conspiracy theories her daughter has renounced.
On Jan. 8, two days after the Capitol riots, Farah admitted he was at the rally that preceded the riot -- and he also took a minor shot at his daughter for rejecting his conspiracy theories:
My wife, Elizabeth, and I traveled to Washington Wednesday for President Trump's "Save America Rally" – because we sincerely believed we needed to show our support for the president, since the will of the majority of the electorate had been overthrown.
There were, by my estimates, at least half a million gathered at the mall – dressing in red, white and blue and many sporting American flags. It was a sight to behold. At daybreak, they began showing up from every nook and cranny in the city.
We were proud to be there. There was no place we'd rather have been than showing our support for the greatest president of our lifetimes – perhaps the greatest ever!
[...]
I guess it's no surprise that we did not attend with my 31-year-old daughter, Alyssa, who resigned as director of communications for the White House in November, because she strongly disagreed with our president and with us. Alyssa is a grown adult, and despite the disappointment of the disagreement, we are not here to pick a public fight with her. We love ALL our kids – all five of our daughters!
But we want to go on the record as to why we agree with Trump that our nation has been the victim of a fraud of epic proportions and that Joe Biden is the first American pretender about to be elevated to the "throne" in 240 years!
Why do I say this?
The evidence is so overwhelming as to make me wonder where to begin. The particulars vary depending on the state. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada certified election results despite the illegal, unconstitutional or fraudulent actions taken to produce the results we were given.
[...]
The items I have listed above are only a taste, but will suffice to make the point: Any election exhibiting half these characteristics would have received a thorough investigation in the weeks between Nov. 3 and Dec. 16 – that is, any election that did not have Donald J. Trump as the aggrieved candidate.
So, yeah, there's a bit of a family feud going on there. Alyssa Farah has been trying to downplay her link to her father and his discredited website; as ConWebWatch has documented, her name was scrubbed from WND's archive on the articles she wrote for it while a college student (though they seem to have forgotten that the internet is forever).
Farah pere's refusal to accept reality seems to have caused a rift between him and his daughter. It's also something that -- despite belated attempts to boost revenue and credibility -- it may also cost Farah his business.
More conspiracies
Even after the Capitol riot -- and despite the utter lack of credible evidence that the election was "stolen" from Trump -- Farah still insisted on riding the Trump conspiracy train. Farah huffed in his Jan. 21 column:
How does a president of the United States lose an election when he has a majority of likely voters behind him?
That's the disturbing mystery still surrounding November's election.
It also provides a trifle more evidence Donald Trump is right about the steal – the theft, the swindle, the biggest hijacking in the history of the U.S.
In Rasmussen's final presidential tracking poll for President Trump, 51% of likely voters approved of his job performance.
If translated into votes, this have been enough to deliver to Trump the kind of massive victory over Joe Biden that he expected.
When you watch returns coming in on election night with Trump way ahead, did you figure there was a reason counting STOPPED? Was that the first time it occurred to you this was going to be an election unlike any other?
When you watched the record crowds attending rallies during a pandemic and Joe Biden unable to draw flies by comparison, was that the best evidence of all?
When you heard the horror stories of voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, did you think Americans would ever get to hear about the most important defrauding in election history?
When you saw that Georgia once again was denied a free and fair election in the same way, had you lost all faith?
When you saw the way the networks and Big Tech managed to squelch any reporting on the fraud charges, did you think America would ever descend lower?
In his Jan. 26 column, Farah wrote that he "underscore some of the facts surrounding the election that was "stolen" from President Donald J. Trump," but he just rehashed the same old conspiracies:
Most Republicans and some Democrats know that Trump was on the way to a mandate-style victory with a likely tally of more than 400 in the Electoral College. Just remember where you were election night, when the vote was going all one direction … and then it stalled. As Trump explains it, he was getting calls for most of the night congratulating him. And then they stopped counting votes – in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. In Georgia, they blamed an outage at a water main – but that turned out to be a lie. By the next day, it was no mystery what had happened.
[...]
Now here's something others have not considered: The role played by Chinese Communists. You say there's no evidence? It was their pandemic, launched upon the world, knowingly – a world quite unprepared for such an eventuality. Would that not be, shall we say, newsworthy? It would also be logical. Now, how much fake news was fed to us regarding the utter fantasies about supposed "Russian Collusion"? It was used pretty much as a four-year media crusade against Trump. I don't know if the pandemic was a planned operation entirely. But it was used by the Chinese to do something evil. For instance, they sent thousands of people contaminated with the virus to the U.S. and elsewhere, but prevented infected people from traveling within China.
The manipulation of the presidential election was good for the Democrats, the fake news, Big Tech and the Chinese. They all got what they wanted from the "Steal." They're all banking heavily that it works. They all have a lot at stake. There's just one thing that could upset their apple cart – just one man.
Donald J. Trump.
How will he do it?
I'm not sure.
But payback will be sweet.
Oh, how I can taste it now.
Farah offered more of the same in his Feb. 3 column:
Some, like me for instance, think it would be appropriate to bring back the asterisk for Joe Biden's presidency. There's no doubt that Joe is sitting in the White House. He's called the president by CNN and even Fox News. But I know there at least 75 million reasons that he shouldn't be sitting in that residence and not being called by that title.
It seems an asterisk is the best way to denote the electoral steal most Americans know about (no matter how bad George Stephanopoulos feels).
Let's face facts. According to the actual vote, Donald J. Trump should still be president. I think the least we can do is to put an asterisk next to Biden's name as the 46th president. If we lived in a time of free and fair elections and freedom of the press, it wouldn't take us very long to prove the fraud to the right authorities. But we live in a time in which you cannot speak of the fraud, not write of it, not broadcast about it without seeing those ever-present warning labels, like this one that appeared shortly after Nov. 3: "The AP has called the Presidential race for Joe Biden." Those labels appeared even though it is unconstitutional, not to mention patently absurd, that any news organization should have a roles in "calling" or "deciding" the winner.
Big Tech is playing mind control.
[...]
I believe Trump got considerably more than 75 million votes, by the way. If we ever find out what the totals were for the winner, Trump, and the loser, Biden, we'll see how lopsided it truly was, a virtual landslide.
You know how you can tell?
The Democrats are so mad about any passing mention of election fraud. They use the television waves to tell us how mad they are – at the Republicans! They are all steamed in their appearances on the fake news networks. It's the dead giveaway. They stole the election, and they're planning to steal the next one – but they get angry at any Republican who won't agree that Biden won fairly! That's why they won't give up until we forget about the last election.
I don't want to forget.
I won't.
I want to stay as mad about this with every executive order that Biden signs.
Of course, staying mad is a good way to induce another stroke, which Farah has spent the past two years recovering from.
Farah has had a messy history with Brett Kavanaugh. He has been vocal in the past in attacking Kavanaugh's purported role in botching the investigation of the death of Vince Foster while working for Ken Starr (by not charging anyone with murder in Foster's suicide, apparently) -- but when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, Farah went silent, only to rage about him again once he was safely on the court.
So when Kavanaugh was on the majority side in deciding not to hear a complaint of fraud in Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election, Farah -- who's been spinning bogus conspiracy theories about the election, eternally unable to accept that Trump lost fair and square -- ranted again in his Feb. 24 column:
The Supreme Court sold out once again Monday morning in a failure to hear a review of a Pennsylvania case in Election 2020.
Perhaps the Supreme Court had something more important to do than hear the case. Perhaps a majority of the court was just too sensitive about how it would be viewed as a politicization of the judiciary. Perhaps there were some members too eager to get along with their colleagues.
There is one justice on the court I was quite sure would never have the guts to do the right thing.
[...]
No, the one person I KNEW would disappoint me was one I had understood so well for years – Brett Kavanaugh. Back in 2018, I begged that he not be the one selected for the high court. However, I sat through his anguishing confirmation process and actually gained sympathy for him while he was repeatedly beaten up without so much as any evidence over an alleged sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford 38 years earlier. He won the hearts of conservatives because of the insanity of the opposition. That was just the Democrats doing their thing – much like they would do in the 2020 election!
There are six Republican justices – of a total of nine!
Only Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch sought to hear the case. Shocking! There are three Democrats that always vote as Democrats. It's in their blood. It's in their DNA. It's in their genes.
[...]
How are Americans to believe in the sanctity of elections when Supreme Court justices don't! This election had all the makings of a fraud without most people paying attention to the details.
OK, how did I know? What gave me a bad feeling about Kavanaugh – worse than a bad feeling?
I was sure he would disappoint us just as surely as all the other Republican squishes had done so – Earl Warren, Warren Burger, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor.
How did I know that Kavanaugh would betray Trump?
Simple deduction: His former mentor did the same thing to Ronald Reagan – namely Kenneth Starr.
Farah then once again rehashed his bill of goods against Kavanaugh. The problem, of course, is that there was no real case to begin with -- election law experts have said everything went down legally in Pennsylvania.
It should be no surprise that Farah doesn't care about the facts, since not caring about the facts has been WND's calling card for much of its existence.
Arizona recount
Farah has long embraced bogus election conspiracy theories, so it's no surprise that he's all in favor of the Republican-driven recount in Maricopa County, Ariz., as expressed in his April 23 column:
They're busy counting votes in Arizona, again.
You might recall this was the state that was called early on election night by the Fox News team – but took days to reveal a "victory" by Joe Biden by 10,000 votes of 3.2 million supposedly cast. Why were they so sure?
Oh, and for the record, there were no illegal alien votes disqualified. None! They were not searched for. Neither were the voter rolls cleaned. And don't forget about the people who went to the polls and were told, "You've already voted. You're not eligible."
If you believe that, you probably voted for Joe Biden because he was the most articulate, most prescient, most lucid, most visionary, most capable presidential candidate in American history.
It's just that some voters in Arizona are stubborn. They can't believe that Biden got some 81 million votes nationwide in the election, more than Donald J. Trump's 74 million and Barack Obama's 69 million. He did this without campaigning! He got just enough votes to outpoll the most popular president and beloved leader ever.
Farah offered no evidence that anyone in Arizona went to the polls and was told they already voted.
He went on to assert that "Republicans have chosen an independent firm called Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company" to run the audit -- but Cyber Ninjas is not "independent" at all, given that its CEO has been spreading the same kind of election conspiracy theories Farah has.
Farah also claimed, "And just so no one will be disappointed by the results, the audit will be livestreamed for public viewing, and officials say there will be 24-7 private security inside and outside of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix throughout the process." In fact, the audit has been far from transparent; it took a court order to force Cyber Ninjas to make its policies and procedures public, violations on pen color usage were found, it wasn't until days after the audit started that journalists were granted full access to it, and reporters are being barred from observing the audit for specious accusations like a tweet deemed to be objectionable. Still, Farah ranted:
Why would we want to know the truth? How could we not insist on knowing the truth?
Was Joe Biden's win legitimate, or was Donald Trump robbed? We must know!
[...]
This may be the beginning ... of getting to the truth.
This may be the beginning ... of getting our country back!
In his April 28 column, Farah defended the audit from critics such as Rachel Maddow:
So what is Rachel Maddow afraid of? Is she afraid that we're going to overturn the whole national election? Or is she afraid we might learn how they perpetrated the biggest election fraud ever? And what are the hosts and guests on CNN and other networks afraid of? Why are they resorting to hysteria, rage, insanity?
And why is Fox News not even paying attention to the Arizona audit? Why are they pretending nothing is happening here?
Something's happening here, all right.
Ordinary Americans are holding their leaders accountable. Nay, they are being leaders, and they are going to continuing being leaders. They realize we don't have any choice in our system of government. This is the state of our nation we've been left with.
As criticism mounted of the audit -- to the point that even the Justice Department has expressed concerns about it -- Farah used his May 7 column to, um, conterintuitively claim that all the criticism means the audit is being run perfectly, or something:
It seems the Justice Department wants to be sure no one uncovers proof of shenanigans in the election of 2020. Why?
Because Cyber Ninja may engage in rooting it out by personally canvassing voters – looking for actual fraud. For instance, the suspicion is that illegal votes were cast by voters registered to certain addresses. The Justice Department does not want Cyber Ninja to ask them about the addresses, because this supposedly would be construed as "voter intimidation."
The Justice Department did not want to conduct the investigation – and they sure don't want anyone else conducting one.
Hmmm.
Who else opposes the audit?
How about every Democrat you can think of.
What do they have in common? They all know that the fraud will be uncovered and ultimately send Joe Biden packin'.
That's not the case in the short term. The hand count will not change the results because officials in the states have already certified them. Sen. Fann insisted that the audit is meant to restore trust in the system and influence changes to the law.
But President Donald Trump has celebrated the audit, insisting it will show Arizona was a "scam election" state. And this is what bugs the Democrats. He'll likely be running for the president in 2024, and if cheating occurred, it won't be Republicans to blame.
This is the kind of thing that only makes sense in Farah's conspiracy-addled brain.
