WND Has Been Infiltrated By Pagans!!

posted on 8/30/2013 by the Salt City Sinner

 ...well, WND has been infiltrated by ONE pagan, anyway.

Now, when it comes to religion, I am not one to throw stones – both as a matter of principle and because my house is made of the very thinnest glass. After all, according to Jesper Aagard Petersen's 2009 book on contemporary looney-tunes belief systems*, people like myself are “often seen by other occultists as dangerous or worrisome revolutionaries.” In short, I would never criticize someone for letting their religious freak flag fly.

I am, however, perpetually delighted by the pratfalls and hypocrisy of “pure” religious believers (usually these falls from “grace” involve sexual proclivities of a nature that they have spoken out against pretty heatedly – see Ted Haggard et. al. -- but not in this case). This brings us to WND.

Big Joe Farah's perpetual conspiracy engine has been a source of much mirth  here  at Salt City Sinner and  elsewhere . WND (formerly WorldNetDaily) is not an explicitly Cbristian organization. Their mission statement emphasizes their fierce independence, which I suppose is a claim that they can make, being the organ that broke the  story  of Barack Obama's secret life as a gay – or “gay,” as WND would be careful to frame in scare quotes.

WND's David Lane

Although they don't front-load the Jesus, a quick perusal of WND stories for the last few months reveals a tabloid potpourri of weird Messianic Judaism, end times prophecy, Catholic church / Great Satan book of John the Revelator hermeneutics, and, inexplicably, astrology, and establishes that WND is a very Christian, very evangelical, very Biblical-literalist media entity. This makes the presence of one Kevin DeAnna very curious, indeed.

Most of WND's luminaries – from founder Big Joe Farah to Jason “Molotov” Mitchell (a former member of the quasi-defunct, quasi-militant Christian Zealot movement) to Aaron Klein – are hard-core Christians, right wing Jews, or at least fans of that crazy old tough guy YHWH, the god of Abraham. WND's take on the god of Abraham, of course, excludes Muslims, who are personae extremely non grata in this worldview.

Thor's Hammer, symbol of Asatru

DeAnna is a convert to Asatru, which theologically speaking puts him much, much closer to my neck of the woods than the neck occupied by, say, Aaron Klein, who  thinks  without a shred of evidence that Satanism caused Sandy Hook, and who has  called  for a “Satanist watch list.”

Asatru, for those of you who do not spend your time cavorting naked through moonlit wooded glens, is a neopaganist revival religion that worships the Norse pantheon (Thor, Odin, you know – stars of Marvel comics, most of Neil Gaiman's body of work, and recent blockbuster movies alike). For someone who who is not just the wrong type of YHWH fan-boy but an outright polytheist to be welcomed at WND is curious – until you learn a little bit more about DeAnna's back story and about some of the fringier elements of Asatru and what some adherents believe.

Kevin DeAnna

Kevin DeAnna got his  start  at a charming little organization called “Youth For Western Civilization.” YWC was formed as a more overtly... shall we say, racially zesty... version of the College Republicans, and is opposed not just to illegal immigration, but immigration in general. YWC also reposted, approvingly, an essay from the white nationalist website VDARE, which read, in part,

[People claim], despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that the Great Wave of European (Italian, Irish, Jewish, et. al.) immigration of 100 years ago was assimilated without any real hiccups, and without changing the character of the country. 

But anyone who has watched machine politics in action in cities like B. Hussein Obama’s Chicago, or knows anything about the Mafia, or is at all familiar with how largely Jewish intellectual elites have utterly transformed American social and political discourse, knows that is nonsense. 

For someone who believes strongly in genetic heritage (which is a charitable way of saying that DeAnna sounds like a believer in racial “purity”), some aspects of Asatru, especially the “folkish” variety, would hold a natural appeal.

Asatru places a very big emphasis on being an old religion, and some flavors place a very big emphasis on being on old religion practiced/inherited by white Europeans. In and of itself there's not anything wrong with interest in one's ancestry or worshiping one's ancestral religion – see, for example, Native American communities – but it is kind of creepy that some Asatru organizations (including  Asatru.org ) emphasize that Christianity and Judaism are “Middle Eastern religions” as opposed to the “more European” practice of Asatru.

DeAnna's  career  at WND has been relatively low-profile, characterized by pieces supporting Russian nationalism, hating on Occupy, the usual hit singles. I would loosely summarize his apparent politics as “authoritarian” – and apparently, Big Joe Farah's super-Christy media imprint is fine with idolatrous heathens as long as they hate the right people and/or are useful to the cause.

Oh, WND, for this you forsake the lean, mean Nazarene?

* - 'Contemporary religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology," Ashgate Publishing 2009