WND: Racist, Ignorant, Far-Right Lunatics

posted 7/26/2012 by the Salt City Sinner

For somewhere between five and ten years now, I have been fascinated by WND, formerly World Net Daily.

I've posted more than a few entries about Big Joe Farah and his online mental health clinic, and with good reason .WND is the progenitor and primary past and present promoter of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, promotes the idea of an American Christian theocracy, routinely cranks out hate speech about Arabs, Muslims, gay people, and pretty much anyone else who doesn't fit their target demographic of old, white, ultra-far-right cranks.

Of particular note lately is WND's decision to hire Colin Flaherty as their new Black People Are Scary Correspondent. Flaherty has been cranking out a series of "black mobs attack white people" stories for the last month and a half. WND and Flaherty are also pimping his recent rant, "White Girl Bleed A Lot," which is basically a book-length "black mobs" rant.

As I noted before, Flaherty's perspective on these matters is not what you would call well-informed. His primary source material for his articles is - and this is him saying this, not me - YouTube videos and tweets from random black people.

In a recent post about Flaherty and his little white-guy crusade, I wrote:

How would Big Joe come off if we scraped the bottom of Twitter's barrel and judged him and his "news" organization by what we found?

I meant that as a criticism of Flaherty's sources, which are dubious at best. However, upon reading his post two days ago (  "Black Mobs Now Have Soundtrack For Violence"* ) I realized that  while looking for a representative sample of Flaherty's fans on Twitter might yield horrifying but unfair results, a sample of the comments left on his article by registered (and frequent) readers/commenters on WND might prove illuminating. Let's have a peek, shall we?

[Editor's Note: the following screencaps of comments on WND contain vile, racist hate speech. Obscenity has been carefully edited out, as WND finds nasty language objectionable. It's worth noting that while they edit posts for s-bombs or f-bombs, they do not, apparently, edit for anything else. You have been warned.]

We'll start out with some of the more level-headed and innocuous reactions to Archduke Flaherty's latest column.

"Spoiled and coddled" and "no consequences," yes sirree. That would explain the staggering rate of incarceration among black adults and youth and widespread incidents of police brutality.

jesus christ

It's nice that wi163175/OLD ONE 75 calls the modern Klan evil, but "protect our white women?"

"C'mon, guys, what's the big deal about slavery?!"

You know, the LDS Church here in Salt City has an internationally renowned and well-equipped genealogy facility. Just sayin'.

Now this is where we get into the tall weeds, so to speak:

These are just two examples of the old "back to Africa" chestnut on WND. There are literally pages of this sentiment on every post that features Obama or just black people in general. One particularly offensive example suggested that Obama pack his family up and move everyone back to Africa - but no, the Birther thing and WND's hatred of Obama aren't racially motivated at all, these are just patriots expressing their honest regard for Our Founding Fathers.

Then there are the predictable if depressing death threats...

...and the REALLY nasty stuff.

Nice.

WND is not just bordering on Stormfront territory any more: I think it's pretty clear that one of the U.S.' most popular and widely read right-wing news sites is openly white supremacist at this point.

What does it take, given the above sentiments, to get shut down by moderators? Oh, the word $h!t. We can't have that on our nice, clean Christian website:

To emphasize that again: dropping the s-bomb will get you edited by the moderators at WND, while "ooga booga booga" and other openly racist, Klansman-style, deep southern fried white hate is totally okay (file under Free Expression, I guess).

Since WND is extra-Christy, let's get biblical on them:

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
            - Matthew 7:16

WND is an extremist, far-right wing, racist organization, and their avid followers are a pack of ignorant bigots.

*: It's worth noting that Flaherty's "breaking news" for this article consists of scary lyrics from rap songs, a few of which are over ten years old and the most recent of which is a year old. STAY TUNED FOR UP TO THE MINUTE COVERAGE, GUYS!!