Michele Bachmann R-Minn. Tom Tancredo R-Colo. Sproul Jr. As WND's publisher and editor-in-chief, Joseph Farah writes a daily column and stirs this toxic stew. After a checkered newspaper career, culminating in his ill-advised attempt as executive editor to turn the Sacramento Union into a fundamentalist Christian, anti-gay mouthpiece, Farah founded the Western Center for Journalism WCJ in Until June , he was a board member of the Chalcedon Foundation, a Christian Reconstructionist outfit and anti-gay hate group.
Clark, a board member since , was difficult to track down. According to his LinkedIn profile, he served as ABA liaison to the American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC , a controversial and highly secretive group of far-right state legislators and business lobbyists that writes and pushes model bills and is funded by the far-right Koch brothers. Least noteworthy is Botkin, a Sacramento-area financial advisor and former Marine who has been on the board since and is an occasional contributor to conservative candidates.
According to ConWebWatch, he worked with Farah in during a short-lived effort to revive the Sacramento Union as a magazine. Subscribers from all sides of the issues have valued and trusted our timely and objective reporting for more than two decades. Learn more about us. Our customer relationships are the most important part of why we do what we do. You can trust us to bring you the most important information, accurately, the first time.
Learn more. Featured Stories. Climatewire U. His flagrant disregard for this truth, his contempt for the intelligence of his own audiences, his shameless grifting, his conspiratorial thinking and his, shall we say, inventive approach to grammar and spelling all grew from the right-wing swamplands that WND helped create, and has far exceeded it.
This trend line is most obvious when we consider birtherism, which was a huge cash cow for WND during Barack Obama's presidency. During the first years of Obama's tenure, WND was the go-to home for people who desperately wanted to believe that the first black president was illegitimate and fundamentally un-American. But then the conspiracy theory went mainstream, propelled by — well by You Know Who, the guy who built himself up as a political figure, starting in , by using his celebrity to push claims that Obama had faked his birth certificate into the mainstream news cycle.
Trump's obsession with the birther conspiracy theory seems to have emerged from WND, and Trump had regular phone conversations with Farah during the weeks leading up to Trump's efforts to turn this nonsense into actual news. In retrospect, Trump's mainstreaming of the birther movement was only one aspect part of a larger mainstreaming of the WND style during the Obama years.
This rise of right-wing conspiracism in the media was mirrored by Republicans in Congress, who spent much of the Obama years "investigating" the WND-style conspiracy theories about the attack on the U. Nowadays, there's no visible light between the raving crazies of the far right and the mainstream Republican Party, and that's not all due to Trump surrounding himself with his fellow charlatans and grifters.
Just this year, for instance, the supposedly reasonable Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. Even a decade ago, "mainstream" Republicans, even if they staunchly opposed abortion, avoided claiming that women and doctors conspired to commit infanticide. No doubt Republican politicians and pundits have always known that such ridiculous ideas are widely popular among their voters.
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