WND Doubles Down On The Big Lie

An issue of WorldNetDaily's Whistleblower magazine dedicated to insisting that the election was stolen from Trump might have been considered somewhat credible if it wasn't so filled with easily debunked and discredited claims.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 10/6/2021

David Kupelian

Doubling down on editor Joseph Farah's embrace of Trump's Big Lie, the July-August issue of Whistleblower is titled, "Yes, the 2020 election was stolen." The introductory promo taken from David Kupelian's essay touted how great Donald Trump supposedly was and how terrible Joe Biden supposedly is, then asks: "In short, was the 2020 election truly fair? Or was it rigged?" Kupelian is then quoted:

"This Whistleblower issue," says bestselling author and Whistleblower Editor David Kupelian, "takes a 30,000-foot view and explores all of the components of what was in reality a rigged 2020 election – from actual conventional voter fraud, to Google’s turning an estimated 6 million 'undecided' voters to Biden, to social media and major news organizations and the 'deep state' all working together to suppress damning information about Joe Biden just before the election, to encouraging voter fraud under cover of COVID, to the Democrat-Media Complex's underlying message that voter fraud is morally permissible because 'Trump is another Hitler' – and lays out an overwhelmingly convincing case that the 2020 election was the most corrupt in generations."

(Have we mentioned that WND repeatedly likened President Obama to Hitler and other Nazis, thus effectively pushing the underlying message that spreading lies about him -- such as its years-long birther obsession -- was morally permissible? (Also, the Antichrist.) Kupelian apparently had no moral qualms about that. )

The problem here, as it was in the COVID issue, is that many of the articles selected for the magazine were discredited at the time they were originally published on the WND website. They include:

• “How we know Democrats rigged and stole the 2020 election: 10 questions Americans aren't allowed to ask, let alone answer” by Wayne Allyn Root

This first appeared as a May 10 column by Root that was turned into an anonymously written "news" article the same day. The article summarized Root this way:

He wonders why Michigan "had a dump of 149,772 votes at 6:31 AM on November 4th – with 96% of the vote going to Biden? How did Wisconsin find 143,379 votes at 3:42 AM on November 4th , just about all of them for Biden? How come you could only produce numbers like this for Biden with no GOP witnesses in the room?"

And why were Philadelphia Democrats so desperate to keep Republican witnesses out of the counting room?

"Why did you refuse entry of Republican witnesses even with a court order in hand? Why did you cover the windows with pizza boxes so no Republican could see in? In Detroit, there are videotapes of vans pulling up in the middle of the night with boxes of ballots. In Atlanta, there are videotapes of suitcases with thousands of fake ballots suddenly appearing after a fake water main break was used to force all GOP witnesses out of the counting room. Why can’t we discuss these videotapes?"

Here's what the anonymous WND writer didn't tell readers:

Suspicious ballot dump in Michigan? False.

Suspicious ballot dump in Wisconsin? False.

Republicans barred from ballot counting rooms in Philadelphia? False.

Ballot-counting rooms covered "so no Republican could see in"? False.

Vans with boxes of ballots late at night in Detroit? False.

Suitcases of ballots in Atlanta? False.

Fake water main break? False.

• “Audit team reports 74,000-ballot discrepancy in Arizona county’s mail-in votes"

This appears to be a repeat of a July 15 article by Bob Unruh. Fact-checkers have found that the claim from the folks running the highly dubious audit in Arizona is wrong because it "appears to have come from a lack of understanding of the data contained in early voting reports."

• “Shocker: Vote recount in 1 county had 60% error rate”

This is from a July 14 article by Unruh that cited the highly unreliable Gateway Pundit and the right-wing voter rights group in the state run by a conspiracy theorist. A fact-checker debunked the claim, pointing out that given how Georgia election ballots had been recounted three times, "there is no chance that a large number of ballots were double counted."

• “Texas probing hundreds of election fraud cases”

This comes from a June 28 article by Unruh. The claim is highly overblown; an actual news outlet reported that the Texas Attorney General's office did report 534 cases of voter fraud in which people were charged -- but they date back to 2004. By contrast, nearly 94 million votes were cast in Texas elections since 2004, making the 534 cases of voter fraud an infinitesimal issue. While there were also 510 cases being investigated at the time of the report, only one involved the 2020 election.

• “Google can turn an election without 'vote fraud'” by Art Moore, on top Google researcher Robert Epstein, a Democrat, who warns of Big Tech’s dire “threat to democracy”

This appears to be from a July 6 interview Art Moore did with Epstein. ConWebWatch has documented how his anti-Google research is dubious at best. As for his star claim, as repeated by Kupelian, that Google "turn[ed] an estimated 6 million 'undecided' voters to Biden," the Washington Post's Philip Bump noted: "Of course, the idea that people primarily base their decisions on what they learn from Googling candidates — particularly at the presidential level — is dismissible on its face. President Biden got a record level of support from Democrats even as Trump earned near-universal support from Republicans. Which of them was influenced by his or her search results?"

Farah promotes

He loves the Big Lie, and it may very well have been his idea (and his directive) to devote an issue of Whistleblower to perpetuating the lie, so it's no surprise that WND editor Joseph Farah has spent several recent columns promoting that issue. Farah gushed in his Aug. 12 column:

David Kupelian has outdone himself.

The longtime managing editor of WND and the Grand Swami of Whistleblower magazine has made it official – saying the words you are not permitted to say in America. He's not only saying that the 2020 election was stolen, he's put together a historic, unforgettable, special report PROVING it beyond any doubt.

I've never been prouder of my colleague of 35 years – yes, that's how long I've known him and been working with him.

[...]

But the reality that the election was stolen is not what Democratic operatives wanted to hear. It's not what Big Tech wanted to hear. It's not what China wanted to hear. So, the mainstream media caved in to the theory that no one cheated, couldn’t happen here in America. Claims that the election was “rigged” were all just one big racist right-wing Trumpian conspiracy theory!

But it did happen.

And that is the crime, the horrible truth, before us.

Nothing else makes any sense. They STOLE it – right before our eyes.

It was like no election before or since – and it must be like no election in the future. Or else we will continue to live in the kind of tyranny we've experienced since Jan. 6, 2021.

Actually, contrary to Farah's claim that Kupelian's report is "PROVING it beyond any doubt," ConWebWatch was able to easily prove that the issue contains numerous false and misleading claims about the election simply from the summary he provided. Kupelian may have "outdone himself," but not in a good way.

Farah began his Aug. 16 column with a heaping helping of self-aggrandizement:

There was a time when WND had a uniquely broad reach.

The last time we were one of the hottest sites on the internet was in 2016 – late 2016. It was a good run for us. I thought it was the precursor for more really good things.

WND played a distinctive role in the success of Donald J. Trump being elected president – the first time he was elected. Trump was the best president we ever had in the modern era, just the man we needed for the times we were living in.

Because Trump represented such an existential threat to the establishment, the Big Tech monopolies and their approved-media cabal would never forgive us for our full-throated and convincing endorsement of Trump and his pro-America agenda. We started seeing our Google search-engine rankings and Facebook rankings drop precipitously.

WND never had a "uniquely broad reach" -- it was always a right-wing website with a self-limiting readership. And the decline in WND's readership has much more to do with the fact that it publishes misinformation and conspiracy theories than its full-throated (and highly biased) support for Trump. Farah eventually begs his readers to buy as many copies as possible:

Here's one important thing you can do today: We need this issue of Whistleblower to be our biggest ever!

It's well worth it – whether you buy a subscription or a single issue, and whether you go print or digital. We're counting on you like never before.

This is a collector's item. It's also a convincing, stirring and powerfully compelling 48-page issue with lots of terrific contributors. You need this. You need to arm yourself with FACTS, TRUTH and REASON.

Buy as many copies as you can afford to hand out to your friends who are not quite convinced, or as a motivator to action in this critical moment.

We all have a lot of work to do. We've got to ensure that our next election is a fair one. If it's not, it's pretty much the end of the America we have known and loved all our lives.

As described above, FACTS, TRUTH and REASON are the last things you'll find in this magazine.

Farah then tried to push a conspiracy theory in his Sept. 1 column:

Remember what Joe Biden did on his first day in the White House?

Within moments of taking the oath of office, he signed an executive order abolishing the "President's Advisory 1776 Commission."

It was a great idea, by President Donald Trump – and a popular one. The stated purpose was to "enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union."

People need to understand the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the sacrifice it took to institute them.

Why did Joe kill the commission so quickly? What did it mean? And why were his fellow Democrats so thrilled about its demise?

Farah will never accept the fact that the commission deserved to die because it put out a report rife with factual errors and partisan politics. Instead, he peddled the evidence-free idea that Democrats are subverting elections, culminating in "the Big Steal of 2020. These people were serious about no longer having free elections." The column ended with a plug for the magazine.

Farah spent his Sept. 3 column arguing that the 2018 midterms were stolen by Democrats as well:

Here's the thing: When Republicans vote in America, Republicans actually win. That's not the case among Democrats.

You could get dead people to "vote."

You could get fake voters.

You could get illegal voters.

In fact, it would be wrong to speculate that these things couldn't happen; it's a fact that this kind of activity is part of any Democratic Party game plan.

[...]

When I heard that twice as many Americans likely were voting in November 2018 as voted in the presidential election year in 2016, I got worried.

Donald Trump worked very hard for those votes. That's what I saw over the previous several days. Maybe it was wrong of me to assume Dems wouldn't show up. But, where were they in 2014, 2016? Why did nearly every American – eligible and ineligible to vote – all come out to join the party on the same day?

Farah offered no actual evidence of this, of course -- he's just fearmongering to keep his dwindling readership afraid and engaged. And, of course, there was another plug for the magazine.

Weirdly, throughout all this, WND has made no effort to defend the false claims in the magazine that have been identified. Perhaps Farah and Kupelian know they're lying and running a scam, they can't prove us wrong, and they would prefer to pretend they've been busted.

Kupelian promotes

The fact that Whistleblower's claims have been discredited was not stopping WND managing editor David Kupelian from trying to promote it, something he rarely goes out to do. So we were graced with an Aug. 15 article pushing his dishonest PR:

At a time when even suggesting the November 2020 presidential election was unfair or rigged will get journalists censored, “fact-checked” and condemned – and perhaps fired – WND’s popular Whistleblower magazine apparently didn’t get the memo.

“Over at Whistleblower magazine,” announced TV host Dr. Gina Loudon on her popular “Dr. Gina Prime Time” show on America’s Real Voice network, “they devoted the entire issue this month to election fraud. The front cover says, ‘YES, THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN.’ That is putting it in no uncertain terms!”

Stop right there. WND offers no evidence that Loudon's show is "popular," and the article gets the name of the channel wrong -- it's Real America's Voice, not America’s Real Voice. Also, you might remember that Loudon is a former WND columnist who tried to armchair-diagnose President Obama as a psychopath and demonstrated some serious pathology of her own by spreading lies. You might also remember her for trying to make hay off her teenage daughter being in a relationship with a 57-year-old actor-- then later making sure WND deleted the column she wrote quasi-defending it.

So Loudon was the perfect "popular" host to regurgitate Kupelian's lies. The article continued:

“David,” she said to her guest, Whistleblower Editor David Kupelian, “We’re not crazy! The election really was stolen. And that’s a big statement. We’ve heard it from some, but most people have been very, very reserved on this. If you say this, you’re branded crazy or a conspiracy theorist, David, though it’s looking more like those are compliments than insults these days.”

Asking Kupelian to highlight some of the many ways the 2020 election was rigged, Loudon first prompted Kupelian to explain how Google, with or without voter fraud, can and does swing American elections.

“For this issue of Whistleblower, Gina, we interviewed Robert Epstein, who’s the preeminent Google researcher,” said Kupelian. “He used to be editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, a very sharp guy – and by the way, a Democrat … so there’s no political motivation here. But he’s an honest man and he wants us to have free and fair elections.” Epstein, who has developed very sophisticated and accurate methodologies for measuring how Google sways public opinion and therefore elections, determined that Google, “because of its tainted search algorithm, swung at least 6 million voters to Joe Biden!” said Kupelian.

“We’re told that the election hinged on 44,000 votes total in three states,” added Kupelian, out of “161,000,000 votes, a record number of votes cast. Forty-four thousand votes – that’s a close election! Well guess what? Six million is a lot more than 44,000 votes, it’s like 130 times 44,000 votes!”

Again: Epstein's anti-Google research is dubious at best. More from the article:

Citing another example from “YES, THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN,” Kupelian told how, after Twitter scandalously banned the New York Post’s devastating reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks prior to the election, “the Media Research Center polled Biden voters.” It turns out, Kupelian revealed, that “36% had never even heard about the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post, thanks to Twitter, and listen to this: 4.6% of Biden voters said that they would not have voted for Biden had they known what was in this story – the dirt, the total corruption not just of Hunter Biden, but of Joe Biden. So that right there would have been enough to have given Trump 289 electoral votes and he would have been elected to his second term.”

As ConWebWatch has documented, the MRC poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates -- the same pollster employed by Trump's campaign -- so the trust factor is quite low. Kupelian then hyporitically harped again on Trump-Hitler comparisons:

“Back in 2016, Gina, I did an article on five different Washington Post writers who explicitly compared Donald Trump to Hitler in the run-up to the election. And you ask yourself, why would they do that? It’s because, if you and I, Gina, were alive in Hitler’s Germany, would we cheat on an election in order to save six million Jews, to slay this dragon and stop a terrible war? Of course we would’ve cheated on the election! This was the left’s subliminal but undeniable message to America: It’s not only that it’s OK to cheat – it’s immoral NOT to cheat, if you’re getting rid of Hitler, the worst person to ever live, which is what they were saying about Trump.”

Is Kupelian saying that by doing so, it was immoral for WND NOT to lie about Obama's birth certificate and numerous other things regarding him during his presidency? It appears so, making him a raging hypocrite as well as a liar.

The article concluded:

Added Kupelian, who has been WND’s vice president and managing editor since 1999 and editor of Whistleblower the entire time, “I just want the gaslighting to stop. This was the most corrupt, dirty election, certainly in our lifetimes, and I believe anybody who reads this issue of Whistleblower – and I don’t care if they’re a Democrat or Republican – if they’re just decent, half-way fair-minded people, they will come away believing that this was a stinking, dirty election.”

Actually, the only person gaslighting here is Kupelian, and he has no intention whatsoever of stopping -- the grift is just too alluring.

WND published Kupelian's introductory essay on its website on Aug. 23, headlined "How the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump." Since it wasn't, Kupelian can't possibly prove otherwise. First of all, he's obviously so filled with hate and bile for Biden that he can't possibly be objective. He writes:

The numbing spectacle of America being humiliated and mocked by the rest of the world and ordered around by Afghan terrorists, and of the greatest nation on earth being led by a babbling, obviously senile, unprincipled, corrupt, mindless shell of a man – with a vice president arguably even worse – should compel every American to carefully consider how on earth we got here, and whether the presidential selection process so employed was truly legitimate.

[...]

A shuffling, peevish and often confused Joe Biden attracted no more than 100 to 200 people to his pre-election rallies where he stumbled through short scripted speeches. His vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, selected entirely for being a woman of color (Biden had committed publicly to choosing a woman VP and said he’d prefer one of color), turned out to be so jarringly repellant, even to Democrats, that she dropped out of the presidential race during the primaries, winning zero electoral votes.

Yet Biden and Harris won the 2020 election – supposedly.

Kupelian then ranted:

Most allegations that last November’s election was stolen from Donald Trump center on election fraud and abuse. Indeed, the number of documented “irregularities” is overwhelming: five crucial swing states bizarrely announcing on election eve they were going to stop counting votes for the night when Trump was ahead, only to report the next morning that Joe Biden was in the lead; the clearly unconstitutional last-minute changes in voting regulations in various states, all obviously intended to invite fraud and abuse; Philadelphia election workers refusing to allow Republican observers to witness the vote count and Detroit election personnel likewise plastering cardboard over windows in a vote-counting room to avoid being observed as required by law; the refusal of some states to check voters’ signatures on ballots; the hundreds of affidavits, sworn under penalty of perjury and imprisonment, all testifying to having witnessed overt election fraud; and so on ad infinitum.

Kupelian simply (and lazily) tossed out allegations that he makes no effort to substantiate -- perhaps because he knows they're bogus and discredited. Instead, most of this essay is devoted to re-litigating Trump's presidency, painting him as a wonderful man and his critics as nothing less than evil. Complaining yet again that Trump was likened to Hitler, he concluded:

From the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, to the two fake impeachments, to false claims Trump praised “very fine” Nazis in Charlottesville, to claims he instituted a “Muslim travel ban,” to claims he “locks children in cages” and “makes women and children drink from toilets,” to the continual comparisons with Hitler, the media and tech monopolies, along with Democrats and the “deep state,” had been interfering with Trump’s re-election bid for more than four years.

One more thing: If a nation’s leader truly is another Hitler, as top Democrats and media personalities insisted continually, not only should that leader obviously be defeated, but there is an absolute moral imperative to cheat in order to defeat him.

Except they never really believed Trump was another Hitler. They were just lying – because they love power more than truth, more than honor, more than what’s right. More than anything.

We would once again remind Kupelian that he and the rest of WND spent years likening President Obama to Hitler and other Nazis. By his own reasoning, if Kupelian believed that Obama was another Hitler, that meant not only that he believed Obama should be defeated but also that there is an absolute moral imperative to lie in order to defeat him. That explains WND's obsession with Obama's birth certificate. Portraying it as fraudulent was a lie and Kupelian likely knew it, but he and Joseph Farah also knew it could build a conspiracy theory around it that perpetuate itself throughout Obama's presidency and possibly beyond.

And, of course, Kupelian doesn't have the guts to venture outside of his far-right bubble to push his case -- again, because he likely knows he's lying and would get immediately shredded apart. That's why he's stuck doing things like appearing on the allegedly "popular" podcast of a former WND columnist to promote this bogus venture.

Kupelian's essay was capped off with a plea to buy the magazine, with Kupelian adding: "I urge you to get this issue. It is flying off the shelves, but we printed 10,000 extra copies to meet the demand." Kupelian offered no proof that such "demand" for the magazine exists -- heck, he won't even release Whistleblower's circulation numbers.

Kupelian, Farah and WND aren't into publishing facts -- they want to push a narrative, and they don't care that it has been repeatedly discredited. The fact that it's so willing and eager to publish lies -- not any "big tech" conspiracy against it -- is the reason WND remains at death's door.