The onetime action star-turned-WorldNetDaily columnist spent 2022 endorsing dubious right-wing Republicans and embracing conspiracy theories about election fraud and COVID vaccines.
By Terry Krepel Posted 3/6/2023
Chuck Norris
When he's not using his WorldNetDaily column to shill for companies that pay him to do so, Chuck Norris is using his column to shill for right-wing candidates and conspiracy theories. Part of that was using his diminishing clout to hand out numerous election endorsements before the midterm elections. Norris started his Oct. 17 column this way:
When my wife, Gena, and I heard the political watershed news that Tulsi Gabbard, who served as the U.S. representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021, announced this past week that she was stepping away from the Democratic Party, we were thrilled and commend her courage. Actually, I made a very similar shift back in the 1960s.
Actually, Gabbard hasn't been a real Democrat for years -- meaning that courage was hardly a factor here -- and Norris conveniently omitted any mention of Gabbard's propagandizing for Russia. Norris then went on to proclaim his "Chuck Norris Approved" endorsement of right-wing candidates:
America is again at a huge tipping point, maybe the biggest one ever. If we don't stop liberal progressives now by electing more constitutionally conservative leaders, they will continue to lead most Americans (particularly younger generations) down the slippery slope to socialism and Marxism.
So, without further adieu, let me highlight a few of my top choices in the midterm elections about to take place in just three short weeks. Obviously, there are several critical races on the national stage as well as for most local regions, which is why I will also recommend a website that will help you choose the right candidates in your state, too.
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Please, share this column and especially those candidate choices above with everyone you know across the country. We are in the final stretch to what are clearly the most critical midterm elections in years.
Norris' list included right-wing extremists like Blake Masters and Kari Lake -- who still pushthe lie that there was election fraud in 2020 -- as well as carpetbagger Mehmet Oz and immoral abortion-lover Herschel Walker.
Norris went on to add: "Also, for additional election wisdom, please subscribe to WND's insightful Whistleblower magazine and especially its latest edition: "Stopping the Madness: A Midterm Election Guide for Voters who Love America." This issue of WND's sparsely read magazine is little more than a fearmongering anti-liberal screed designed to demonize anyone who's not as far right as WND managing editor David Kupelian and try to scare his fellow right-wingers into voting.
Norris ramped up his own fearmongering -- as WND columnists do -- in his Oct. 24 column, blaming an alleged increase in police officers killed on duty on how " liberals around the nation demanded that cities 'defund the police' and "pushed for a woke anti-police ideology." He repeated his list of endorsements, with a few additions, demanding that "we must elect constitutionally conservative candidates in these next midterm elections ... to rebolster our law enforcement agencies and stop the outrageous levels of violent crime."
Norris switched his fearmongering focus to the border for his Oct. 31 column, uncritically repeating right-wing talking points and unsurprisingly blaming "the completely-do-nothing-open-border policy of the Biden administration is that it is literally killing hundreds of migrants trying to get into the U.S." It weird to see Norris claiming to care about the lives of migrants since most right-wingers do, given how they're described with dehumanizing terms like "illegals." Norris then went on to "re-list my 'Chuck Norris-Approved candidates' who are strong advocates for securing U.S. borders."
In his final pre-election column before the election on Nov. 7, Norris equated himself with the Founding Fathers, baselessly insisting that they were as dogmatically right-wing as he is while also serving up eve more fearmongering (read: parroting right-wing talking points):
America as our founders created it is on life support and desperately needs our help.
Our broken borders have allowed into the U.S. record numbers of criminals and contraband. The last few years, overdoses from fentanyl that was smuggled from Mexico killed over 100,000 Americans (including teens). Cartels have capitalized on the Biden administration's open border policies, making billions of dollars more by increasing human smuggling and child trafficking.
Inside the U.S., violent crime and police killings have soared in every state. Inflation is at a 40-year high. Mortgage rates are at a 20-year high. The fed raised interest rates six times this year alone. The largest shipping mogul just reported that "dark economic clouds are on the horizon." Full-blown recession is imminent. And, most painful of all, as gas, grocery and house prices skyrocket, average middle-class Americans are struggling simply to pay for essentials like food and shelter.
As a result of all the above, the United States of America is more divided than ever. And it doesn't help that U.S. and Russian leaders have recently brought us again to the brink of Armageddon by their nuclear-war rhetoric and pride-filled warmonger actions.
The downfall of the American dream is why Americans are rightly disappointed with Democrat-led local, state and federal governments. The most recent Gallup poll shows that Mr. Biden's job approval has spiraled "back down to 40%." More than 75% of Democrats don't even like him!
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To be frank, the only way your quality of life is going to get better is by getting the liberal Democrats out of office across the country. It starts with these midterm elections and will run to the 2024 presidential campaign.
But rather than just me sharing how powerful your vote is, I want to remind you what America's founders said about it when they created our republic, including their advice about whom to vote for in these upcoming midterm elections.
This is what just eight prominent founders want you to remember as you go to the polls and draw the curtain on that voting booth. (A special thanks goes to historian David Barton from Wallbuilders for providing this information on his website: www.wallbuilders.com.)
The fact that Norris is invoking the notoriously wrong "historian" Barton tells you all you need to know about how seriously he and his endorsements should be taken. And, of course, he fails to consider that one reason "the United States of America is more divided than ever" is because right-wingers like himself insisting on spreading fear and misinformation about anyone who doesn't agree with them.
Norris again repeated his list of endorsements, adding: "Friends, this is a do-or-die midterm election. Please share this column ASAP on your social media and encourage everyone you know to get out to vote, by mail or in person."
Meanwhile, WND editor Joseph Farah attempted to hitch a ride on Norris' endorsement bandwagon, parroting Norris' parroting in his Nov. 2 column:
I love Chuck Norris' political endorsements!
And I'd like add my own because we think so much alike. How do I know?
He told me so. Yes, I have had the pleasure of meeting Chuck, his wife, Gena – even their kids. I've been invited to his house and met him a few times. There are very few people who share my ideas quite so closely.
Farah repeated Norris' endorsements, then added a bunch of his own favorite far-right folks, many of whom are election deniers like Farah.
Note that Farah said "there are very few people who share my ideas quite so closely" as Norris. Farah seems to think that's a good thing, but given that Farah's "ideas" include election denial and spreading COVID lies, it really isn't.
Doubling down on Herschel Walker
One of the candidates Norris (and Farah) endorsed was Herschel Walker, whom he declared "has proven his patriotic grit and love for the stars and stripes to be the 'Chuck Norris Approved' U.S. Senate candidate for Georgia." Walker did not win his general election but did win enough votes to make it into a runoff for that seat, which compelled Norris to write a Nov. 28 column dedicated solely to explaining why he was still endorsing Walker:
Liberal mainstream media have used every underhanded dirty trick and tactic to try and stop Herschel Walker from winning the Georgia U.S. Senate election. But the fact is, Walker is still in the ring fighting. He deserves to win. Let me tell you why.
First, if you didn't know, Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker is set to face off against incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock in a runoff election on Tuesday, Dec. 6, after both candidates failed to get at least 50% of the vote in the midterm race earlier this month.
Let me share with you seven reasons why my wife, Gena, and I passionately believe every American should rally immediately behind Herschel Walker. I'm going to tell you what mainstream media won't tell you about him.
What followed read like it was copy-and-pasted from Walker's campaign website, boilerplate text praising Walker's success in football and business. The top reason, meanwhile, was this:
Walker is a man of faith who has lived most of his life as a committed Christian. No man is perfect, including me. George Washington was absolutely right when he said, "Perfection falls not to the lot of humanity." But imperfections haven't stopped Walker or me from trying to be the best Christian examples we can be, including showing that we need forgiveness like anyone else.
That was the closest Norris got to admitting certain unpleasant truths about Walker -- which is presumably was Norris was referring in his bashing of the "liberal mainstream media" for employing "every underhanded dirty trick and tactic." That, of course, are the credible accusations of domestic violence made against him by former girlfriends and the abortions he paid for (not to mention the secret children that came out of the woodwork) -- so damaging that even Walker's own son turned against him.
Nevertheless, Norris played the endorsement game and even begged for money on his behalf:
It's going to take every one of us to get out and help Walker win. So, please, fight to help Herschel win Georgia's Senate seat!
If you're a Georgian or know someone who is (especially in the 18-49 age range), please vote for or encourage them to vote for Hershel Walker for U.S. Senate. Please share this column with them and encourage everyone you know to financially support Walker via his website, Team Herschel.
The future of America and Americans are depending upon it.
As we all know, Norris' second endorsement didn't work any better than the first, and he lost the runoff. It's unclear whether this record of failure will dissuade Norris from continuing to endorse right-wing candidates.
Supporting discredited '2000 Mules'
here's never a good time to embrace a bogus conspiracy theory, but Norris sure picked an especially bad time to do so. He spent his Aug. 15 column gushing over admitted criminal Dinesh D'Souza and his "2000 Mules" film, which WND has heavily promoted even as it became increasingly discredited. Indeed, Norris himself tried to handwave the errors and gaps in the film:
Filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, born in India, has produced a string of amazing documentaries. They include:
"America: Imagine the World Without Her" (2014)
"Hillary's America" (the top-grossing documentary of 2016)
"Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?" (2018)
His latest achievement is called "2000 Mules," which was released back in May.
Critiques like the New York Times accuse "2000 Mules" of simply "repackaging … Trump's election lies." But that is an unfair oversimplification and accusation. Dinesh is a much greater intellectual than to produce a documentary in such regurgitating terms.
What Dinesh did in "2000 Mules" was to examine the evidence for voter fraud in the 2020 election by tracking digital device location data of "mules," or individuals who stuffed voter drop boxes with stacks of completed ballots, especially in swing states.
Before you criticize the premise as impossible, or believe someone else's conclusions (even mine), you should watch the documentary (available online) and examine the evidence for yourself. It contains digital, telecommunication and video evidence of ballot box stuffing occurring by the same individual in multiples areas. As I'll share in a moment, this all makes a huge difference because modern elections are now determined by drop-box and mailed ballots.
Again, though Dinesh's liberal critics have accused him of having "too many gaps" in his evidence, I would say to them that his evidence between the alleged "gaps" is sufficient to make a case for examination. Any fraud is too much fraud, whether it was enough to sway the election or not.
While Norris was promoting this discredited film, the people whose so-called research are at the center of "2000 Mules," Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote, were at a heavily hyped gathering (in far-right circles, anyway) where they promised to "pull the ripcord" and share their evidence. But as the Washington Post reported:
Finally, it was time for Phillips and his colleague Catherine Engelbrecht to prove the doubters wrong. The result? The announcement of a website Open.ink, at which they promised to dump the drop-box surveillance video they obtained from states and documents from various election lawsuits.
“The ‘pulling of the ripcord’ is Open.ink,” Phillips said. There was no announcement that Open.ink would also include the cellphone geolocation data that Phillips claimed showed the existence of all of the mules in the first place. It’s hard to see what is there, since if you visit at this point, you’re quickly redirected to a sign-up sheet that asks you to create an account that must be approved before you can move forward.
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After revealing the site, the True the Vote team put a coda on that boring-old 2020 stuff.
“And that really I think is ...” Engelbrecht said, looking at Phillips — her demeanor indicating uncertainty about taking the next step.
“ ... the end of ‘mules,’ we’re done!” Phillips replied with affected enthusiasm.
“The end of ‘mules!’ ” Engelbrecht added. “End scene. We’re done.”
No doubt realizing that this is not what the audience expected — RSBN’s lower-third read “The Pit reveals ‘devastating news on 2020’ ” at multiple points in the program — she tried to contextualize the development.
“Honestly, guys,” she said, “ ... it’s time to move on. Not to move on to what happened in 2020, because we still have to understand what happened. That is critical. We have to understand that. But we are 90 some days out from midterms” — and so on.
On top of that, Phillips got himself banned from the conference's afterparty at a nearby hotel when he tried to bring a gun with him in violation of hotel policy.
While Norris was blissfully ignorant of the principals behind "2000 Mules" abandoning their own conspiracy theory even as he was promoting it, he still insisted on spouting more bogus election fraud conspiracies:
You can believe or disbelieve in 2020 election fraud; that is your American right. However, the question is: Is it possible that it really occurred in some way, shape, or form? Whether fraud contributed to the win or loss of your favorite candidate's election is secondary compared to whether or not any form of corruption occurred in the national election.
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Election investigation is warranted right now based simply on the fact that Joe Biden received 13 million more votes in 2020 than mega-popular Barack Obama did in 2008, when Obama set a record of votes for any presidential election before and despite Biden is the most unpopular presidential candidate and leader since the founding of our republic.
Is it plausible that the least-popular candidate in history (Biden) could beat one of the most-popular incumbent presidents (Trump) by a record-breaking 7 million votes: Biden with 81,282,916 votes compared to Trump with 74,223,369? Is it also plausible during a global pandemic that there would suddenly be an overall 7% increase in voter turnout across the country in 2020 compared to 2016?
What's also suspect about those 7 million additional 2020 votes for Biden is the fact that the majority were received by mail. Is it a mere coincidence (or "just because of COVID") that, for the first time in 30 years, voting by mail soared across the country while voting in person dropped off the grid? What a convenient, perfectly-timed political pandemic!
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Bottom line: Is the extensive suspicion of election fraud (held by more than 40% of Americans) really far-fetched? Are sheriffs across the country wrong for investigating voter fraud now? Absolutely not.
Gena and I thank, congratulate and commend Dinesh D'Souza in being willing to stand up for the truth, especially in the face of his own personal sacrifices and risks.
You can like or dislike Dinesh or his documentaries, or even call him jaded and a demon, but you can't deny the core of his facts, and the right that Americans have to know the truth.
But they will not get that truth from conspiracy-mongers like Norris who put discredited narratives ahead of the facts because he refuses to accept that Trump lost re-election fair and square.
Endorsing conspiracy theories
Instead, Norris shifted from endorsing candidates to endorsing right-wing conspiracy theories. Norris began his Dec. 5 column by touting:
Candace Owens is an amazing and insightful African American commentator on culture and politics. In 2020, she won Salem Media Group's prestigious national "Culture Warrior of the Year" Award.
In her recent documentary, "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of the BLM," she begins by quoting Malcolm X: "The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent."
That's the truth. But it's only the initial descent down the rabbit hole of how Americans are being cheated, hoodwinked and controlled to believe what influential liberal powers in mainstream media and among the social elite want them to believe.
"The Greatest Lie Ever Sold" is about 80 minutes long and was released on Oct. 12. It has been hailed by many as "the best documentary of 2022." I highly recommend everyone watch it and make up your own mind about the evidence Candace and firsthand eyewitnesses reported. Watch just this official trailer and you'll wonder, "Was I duped, too?"
Meanwhile, actual film reviewers have a less generous view of Owen's screed:
Coming in at around 1 hour and 20 minutes, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold spends 40 of those minutes with Candace Owens attacking George Floyd’s character and repeating Conservative talking points about the man dying of Fentanyl poisoning and not Chauvin’s knee cutting off his air supply.
She then goes out of her way to paint Chauvin as this “good decent man who loved his mommy” and implies (heavily) that he’s an innocent man being sacrificed on the cross by “the system.” She talks to his mother, his co-workers, and friends, and literally does everything aside from showing him walking old ladies across the street and praying over homeless people. Meanwhile, she details Floyd’s life like he was a monster who needed to be put down.
Like most political propaganda, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold builds its case through lies by omission. Conspiracy theories that are able to take hold rest on small kernels of truth; facts that are exploited and decontextualized.
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What seems to eat at Owens the most is that so many people across the country had compassion. She genuinely can’t believe that so many took to the streets on behalf of a flawed human being, a stranger. This solidarity—fighting for someone you don’t know—seems foreign to her. It can only be explained by manipulation.
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In the end, Candace Owens is doing exactly what she thinks she’s exposing: lying to profit off a Black man’s untimely death.
In other words, hardly a fair and balanced portrayal. Yet Norris' levels of gush over the film got embarrassingly high: "When my wife, Gena, and I viewed the documentary film, our jaws dropped, our heads spun, and our hearts were inspired to tell others about this insightful exposé." Needless to say, there was no mention of Owen's palling around with anti-Semite Kanye West or her attempt to unload failing right-wing social media site Parler (run by her husband, George Farmer) onto Ye, which was abandoned after he went full anti-Semite.
If Norris proved himself to be a right-wing mark for gushing over Owen's film, he proved to be absolutely gullible in his praise for another film:
The second documentary film I encourage everyone to watch and investigate for themselves is "Died Suddenly," which was released on Nov. 21 and is produced by the Stew Peters Network, the same award-winning team that brought us "Watch The Water" and "These Little Ones."
Stew Peters is a former bounty hunter turned American media personality. His radio show is simply called the "Stew Peters Show," which airs weekdays.
The core of "Died Suddenly," a one-hour engaging documentary, is this: 68.5% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 13.01 billion doses have been administered globally, and 2.37 million are now administered each day. At least 262,908,216 Americans, or 79% of the U.S. population, have received at least one dose, according to USA Facts.
The crazy thing is this, and it's a global phenomenon: Healthy adults are dropping dead everywhere. There has been a rise in "sudden deaths" around the world, both in younger and older people, and vaccines might be largely to blame.
Actually, that's not happening. "Died Suddenly," meanwhile, is a discredited rehash of anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, featuring footage of people who didn't die but merely fainted and footage of people taken before the COVID pandemic started, and Stew Peters is a guy who loves to spew conspiracy theories.
Before vouching for the film, though, Norris attempted a disclaimer of sorts:
Please don't misunderstand. I know there are a lot of polarities regarding vaccines, and I respect those on each side of the debate. But I truly believe this information I share here is critical for those on both the right and the left in making medical decisions for themselves and their loved ones. Please hear out what I say and Stew Peter's film conveys before making a judgment.
But Norris simply recited claims from the film and censored any of the criticism of bogus footage and bogus claims. Rather than tell his readers the truth, Norris concluded with more gushing:
One could rightfully say, if Candace Owen's documentary is about "The Greatest Lie Ever Told," Stew Peter's film might just be about "The Second Greatest Lie Ever Told."
The fact is, especially when it comes to the bias teamwork of mainstream media and government officials, we need to do what the Bible says: "Test all things and hold fast to that which is good."
Don't believe something just because one so-called "government expert" said it. Don't let politicians or pundits sway your opinion. Do your own homework, and don't rely on biased algorithms to yield your searches. Weigh the pros vs. the cons. Don't be medically forced to make decisions by peer or social pressure. Most of all, don't check your will and brain in at the door, especially when so many people are mysteriously dying around the world.
Listen also to the firsthand testimonies and experts from many fields in the film, "Died Suddenly"; then make up your mind about yours and your loved ones' health.
No rational human being would subject themselves to such dishonesty. But Norris chose to go down that conspiracy rabbit hole -- and now he demands that you do as well. No wonder he's stuck writing columns for WND.
