WND's Trump Propaganda Operation
From hyping a false affidavit to Elizabeth Farah's podcast screeds to a magazine-length smear job against Kamala Harris, WorldNetDaily was completely in Donald Trump's thrall.
For the 2024 election, WorldNetDaily was such a reliable and aggressive shill for Donald Trump that it may as well have been on the Trump campaign payroll — and may well have been for all we know. That aggressive propaganda operaeion manifested itself in several ways during the campaign. Let’s take a look at a few of those.
Fake debate affidavit
WND’s coverage of the Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate was largely focused on lazily parroting right-wing attacks on ABC’s debate moderators for purported bias, particularly in daring to fact-check Trump’s numerous lies:
‘Serial lies and distortions’: Network stung for letting Kamala Harris get away with lying
‘Linsey Davis is a liar’: Social media deliver abortion truth bomb to presidential debate moderator
‘It was not a debate, but a campaign contribution’: New push for ABC to be prosecuted
ABC goes silent when asked whether debate time was donation to Harris campaign
What WND didn’t do, however, is report the fact that Trump performed poorly at the debate — a fact acknowledged by conservatives such as Andy McCarthy, Frank Luntz, Karl Rove and even Robert Kennedy Jr., as well as a Fox News voter panel.
Meanwhile, the attacks on ABC continued. A Sept. 13 article by Bob Unruh tried to make a big deal out of moderator Linsey Davis being prepared to respond to false claims by — shock! — preparing beforehand to respond when Trump predictably made those false claims again.
Then, Joe Kovacs spent a Sept. 15 article latching onto a “bombshell” claim about ABC and the debate:
Claims of a purposeful scheme to skew the Sept. 10 ABC News presidential debate in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump are now intensified with the Sunday release of a sworn statement by a network whistleblower specifying the allegations.
The affidavit under penalty of perjury released by @DocNetyoutube indicates ABC coordinated with the Harris campaign to give her sample questions, along with assurances Trump would be fact-checked while Kamala would not, and favorable accommodations for the Democrat’s appearance on screen.
The document, dated Sept. 9, one day prior to the debate and redacted in portions to conceal the whistleblower’s identity, is from a Manhattan, New York, resident who has worked at ABC News for more than 10 years in “various technical and administrative positions.”
“For the record, I do not endorse Donald Trump in his capacity as candidate for the president of the United States,” the whistleblower says.
“The intent of this affidavit is to address concerns about perceived biases within news reporting within my employer’s debate that will be hosted on September 10, 2024.”
The ABC employee says Harris received “particular accommodations including, but not limited to, the providing of a podium significantly smaller than that used by Donald Trump, and assurances regarding split-screen television views that would favorably impact Kamala Harris’s appearance relative to Donald Trump.”
[…]
The statement also indicates: “The Harris campaign was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions, covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.”
Just one problem: it wasn’t real. That purported affidavit was completely unsubstantiated and riddled with typos, something a legitimate affidavit wouldn’t have, and it was created the day before the debate. As Mediaite pointed out: “Any basic computer and printer from the past thirty years could have been used to type up this exact document, print it out, scrawl some signatures on it, and then black out sections. Posting a scan of it online proves nothing except that someone owned a computer and printer and had a little free time.”
Nevertheless, Kovacs pushed the fake affidavit again in a Sept. 17 article:
ABC News is apparently pressing the panic button in the wake of fierce criticism of its Sept. 10 presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
A sworn statement by an ABC News whistleblower exposing network bias favoring Harris continues to be in focus regarding “assurances” to the Democrat’s campaign days before the event.
Now David Muir, anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” and co-moderator of the debate, is defending his performance during the matchup, as ratings for his evening news broadcast have plunged some 12% in the aftermath.
Kovacs also uncritically quoted the Twitter/X account claiming that “Everything the whistleblower has submitted has been proven except for sample questions. There will be another tweet later today announcing action to be taken against ABC and the affiliates of ABC,” but no evidence to prove that claim was ever provided.
Since then, even the “sworn” affidavit’s promoters now admit it’s fake, and the source of the claim has deleted his Twitter/X account. It has since been revealed that despite the account bearing the name “Black Insurrectionist,” it was operated by a white guy who is known for defrauding investors and owing millions of dollars in back taxes. (Newsmax columnist Michael Dorstewitz also bought into this fake story.)
Kovacs, meanwhile, has never told his readers the truth about this fake story, let alone apologize or correct the record (which, granted, is something WND rarely does).
Elizabeth Farah’s podcast tirades
In the runup to the 2020 election, Elizabeth Farah — whose husband Joseph founded WND — posted a series of videos invoking Christianity in an effort to re-elect Donald Trump, hyperbolically declaring at one point that electing Biden would bring “wickedness, tyranny, destruction that is unimaginable, at least to me.” After Trump lost, Farah ran an 8-hour-long livestream rantfest wailing that Trump lost and anyone who didn’t vote for him was evil.
With Joseph Farah remaining largely incapacitated due to his health issues, Elizabeth Farah has stepped up again to serve as WorldNetDaily’s pro-Trump propagandist. Over the past month or so, Elizabeth Farah has put out a series of “Farah on Fire” videos — titled “Kamala’s America: The Nightmare Scenarios Revealed” — in which she worked with fellow right-wing propagandists to fearmonger about a Harris presidency. Typical was a rant by her first guest, right-wing writer Eric Metaxas:
What would happen if you lose? Well, I’ll tell you what will happen. They’ll take away your guns, they’ll take away your money, they’ll take away your voice — you’re done. It’s over. You don’t get to fight back. So in the past, if somebody wins and terrible things happen, it’s not an existential crisis, you get another bite at the apple. This time, like, they’re gonna take your teeth away. You will never get another bite at the apple.
Meanwhile, Farah — who mispronounced Harris’ first name throughout the Metaxas video — gushed over Metaxas as “a national gem, in my humble opinion, and that is a fact.” She didn’t ask Metaxas about his falsely attributing a quote to Dietrich Bonhoeffer for partisan reasons, which has reached the point where Bonhoeffer’s relatives have demanded that Metaxas stop exploiting him. Later, Metaxas falsely framed the Capitol riot as people “wandering around the Capitol taking selfies.”
Other extremists Farah interviewed include:
Dennis Prager, pseudo-educator
Robert Spencer, professional Islamophobe
Roberrt Malone, anti-vaxxer and medical misinformer
Robert Epstein, shoddy anti-Google activist
Jack Posobiec, white nationalist and plagiarist
Auron MacIntyre, who thinks there should be statues of Richard Nixon and Kyle Rittenhouse
Rep. Tim Burchett, right-wing congressman
Walid Phares, Islamophobe
Farah unsurprisingly portrays anyone who’s not as far-right as she is as not just wrong but evil. Farah’s right-wing extremism was summarized this way:
Farah sums up her view of America’s current historic crisis this way: “The Marxist globalists have been building the Deep State year by year for decades, during every presidential administration, regardless of which party occupies the White House. They thought this process would continue without challenge until America had been irrevocably transformed. To accomplish this, they needed a weaponized Department of Justice and intelligence agencies, effective control over elections, a massive flood of uneducated illegal alien voters who can’t understand our language and come from cultures often incompatible with ours, and a permanent bureaucratic state staffed by leftists. They’ve accomplished all that.
“The only components missing from irretrievably hardening the Democrat socialist state are: 1) the subjection of the U.S. Supreme Court by packing it and imposing term-limits, and 2) adding two more states and, thereby, four more Democrat senators to our union. With that, the ‘Making America Great Again’ reformation would be dead.”
However, adds Farah:
Enter, now, Donald J. Trump who promises to drain the swamp and destroy the Deep State. But this time he is fully informed, has learned from his mistakes and has chosen J.D. Vance, a brilliant, powerful and like-minded running mate, who is ready to go day one.
Adding to the Trump threat is the “American Enlightenment.” How the elites hate that. More Americans, white, black and brown, rich and poor, young and old have been awakened – not “woke.”
And yet, if Harris and Walz somehow pull off a win, either because Christians, conservatives, gun-owners and other normal, sane citizens are too lazy or indifferent to vote, or because of Democrats’ malevolent election-fraud program, Harris and Walz, directed by Obama and supported by the weaponized Deep State, will have to finish the job quickly in a few years to prevent any other dangerous opposition rising again. This means the Harris-Walz regime will rapidly dismantle the constitutional protections that have long been the only thing standing between liberty and totalitarianism in America.
Unsurprisingly, Farah has blocked any alternative view from interfering with her far-right fearmongering — it’s as if she’s actually afraid to defend what she says. Then again, ConWebWatch caught her spreading Russian propaganda last summer by posting a fake receipt claiming that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife bought a wildly expensive car, so she’s very much in sync with the WND fake-news agenda.
‘Whistleblower’ propaganda pamphlet
In addition to Elizabeth Farah’s fearmongering videos designed to smear Kamala Harris (and anyone who would vote for her) as not just wrong but evil, WorldNetDaily is making another in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign by giving away digital copies of the latest edition of its sparsely read Whistleblower magazine. Like Farah’s videos, this Whistleblower issue is called “Kamala’s America” and is filled with the same hyperbolic level of fearmongering, much of it repurposed from WND itself as well as from other right-wing writers. As usual, managing editor David Kupelian set the paranoid tone with his opening essay, kicking off with his full-throated embrace of Trump’s strongman authoritarianism:
Imagine this. You’re blessed to live in the freest, most powerful nation on earth, where citizens actually get to choose their leaders and their nation’s future direction.
A uniquely historic election is just weeks away, and your two choices for leader – and your nation’s future – couldn’t possibly be more different.
One leader candidate promises to halt the ongoing, full-scale foreign invasion of your country, which the current leaders have not only allowed, but invited and enabled. Incredibly, over 10 million illegal aliens from all over the world have walked unimpeded into your homeland, including countless terrorists, drug-dealers, sex traffickers of women and children, violent gangs, mental patients and criminals, powerfully fueling your nation’s current twin epidemics of violent crime and drug-overdose deaths. Recent official government statistics reveal the “undocumented migrants” invading your country include over 13,000 convicted murderers.
Promising to definitively end the current ruling regime’s suicidal immigration policies, this leader candidate commits to finally securing the border with both a physical wall and maximum law-enforcement presence – while implementing the largest mass deportation of illegal aliens in the nation’s history.
This same candidate also promises – based on decades of executive-level negotiating experience, personal strength and sound policies – to regain the lost respect of world leaders, both friend and foe, thereby serving as a powerful force not just for preserving your nation’s peace and security, but world peace as well. This candidate likewise promises to restore your nation’s ailing economy and reverse the most devastating inflation in 40 years, which is rapidly impoverishing tens of millions of citizens.
Remarkably, there’s very little doubt this particular candidate can make good on all of these life-saving promises, having actually accomplished virtually all of them while serving as the nation’s president just a few years ago.
By contrast, Kupelian labeled Harris as an “opposing presidential hopeful” and misleadingly described her purported beliefs. He then huffed:
And yet, a strange blindness pervades the nation.
For although your uniquely free country was founded on the traditional cultural, economic and constitutional values espoused by the first candidate, something like half of the voting population is mysteriously inclined to choose the other. Yet many respected analysts and historians claim that, if elevated from vice president to president, this latter candidate would destroy the country, perhaps permanently. They fear this person’s irrational, self-destructive policies, coupled with radical-left political beliefs and excruciating weakness and unseriousness on a highly volatile world stage dominated by dictators and psychopaths, could well bring about a nuclear World War III.
The question then is why? Why is there any doubt as to who is the more worthy candidate?
Kupelian then pushed more absurdly biased comparisons:
Donald Trump – despite continual attacks and daily media defamation, two failed impeachment attempts and never-ending hoaxes (remember “Russian collusion!”) – led the country well. He protected the border, revitalized the nation’s military, kept the U.S. out of any new wars, made America energy-independent, cut taxes, got the economy roaring with a super-low 1.4% inflation rate and gasoline under $2 per gallon. Groceries, housing and other core necessities were within the reach of most Americans. Real wages were rising, and Trump ushered in the lowest unemployment rates in decades, including the lowest black unemployment rate ever recorded. He nominated, and saw confirmed, three Supreme Court justices who honor the U.S. Constitution, as well as 234 similarly right-thinking federal judges. He maintained peace in the Middle East, both via the Abraham Accords and by withholding funds from the Mideast’s prime terrorism sponsor, Iran. Indeed, Trump restrained not only Iran, but China and Russia from attacking neighboring countries.
In stark contrast, Kamala Harris, as vice president of the United States, working in the west wing of the White House, has been formulating and implementing her and President Joe Biden’s policies full-bore since January 2021. In every area of life and policy, with virtually no exceptions, she has made America a worse, poorer, angrier, more violent, more conflicted and much more dangerous and unhappy place to live, work and raise a family.
She and Biden did this largely by pursuing policies opposite to Trump’s: Whereas Trump built hundreds of miles of border wall, Biden and Harris threw the border wide open, allowing the shocking invasion that is now devastating America. Whereas Trump denied money to Iran, Biden-Harris released a total of $16 billion to the radical Islamic theocracy, which promptly funded Hamas’ appalling terror war on Israel starting on Oct. 7, 2023. Whereas Trump made America a net exporter of oil for the first time in 75 years, Biden-Harris shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on their very first day in office. It’s the same in almost every other area of domestic and foreign policy.
All of this is a matter of objective fact and not really debatable by honest and informed people. It’s self-evident … like 2+2=4.
Unfortunately, the purveyors of America’s “2+2=5” gospel – that is, the major news media, who daily violate their sacred responsibility to report truthfully on crucial issues and events – have been extolling and covering up for Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, while simultaneously lying about and attacking Trump and his VP pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, at every turn.
Hew then laughably huffed: “But even a complicit news establishment cannot hide truth forever.”
Of course, Kupelian is complicit with the Trump campaign, and through his wildly biased and inflammatory commentary, he’s hiding the truth from his readers. He went on to prove his extremism with vicious name-calling:
The real and ultimate issue with Harris, and with Walz – beyond even their neo-Marxist political ideology, their lust for power and today’s totally corrupt Democratic Party politics – is whether they and their agendas are serving good or evil, freedom or slavery, life or death, God or Satan. Stay with me here.
Why would anyone stay with Kupelian when he’s literally likening Harris to Satan? He further displayed his mendacious hypocrisy by once again complaining that some have compared Trump to Hitler:
They’ve simultaneously been convinced by the most shamefully dishonest and corrupt news establishment in American history that Donald Trump is another Adolf Hitler – or at the very least, a racist-fascist-insurrectionist-dictator who insists there are “very fine” Nazis, and that he is, as Joe Biden calls Trump, “the greatest threat to our democracy.” No wonder he is the target of repeated assassination attempts.
Now here’s a news flash for you: Just as most establishment media entities have become nothing more than professional propagandists and politically motivated liars who exist to defame and destroy Donald Trump, so are they likewise disingenuous about Kamala Harris. That’s right: The entire media love affair with Kamala Harris is pretend. They know she’s awful.
How does that justify smearing Harris as Satan, especially after he has insisted that likening Trump to Hitler encourages violence against him? Does Kupelian’s Harris-Satan comparison means he’s encouraging violence against Harris (just like he and WND did when the repeatedly pushed the narrative that Barack Obama was Hitler)? He won’t say — perhaps because he knows it’s true. Instead, he huffed:
Now here’s a news flash for you: Just as most establishment media entities have become nothing more than professional propagandists and politically motivated liars who exist to defame and destroy Donald Trump, so are they likewise disingenuous about Kamala Harris. That’s right: The entire media love affair with Kamala Harris is pretend. They know she’s awful.
Isn’t Kupelian working as a professional propagandist and politically motivated liar who exists to defame and destroy Harris? Yes, he is — and, again, he will never state that truth publicly.
Kupelian closed with another strongman appeal:
The truth is, almost nobody in the Washington, D.C. government-media complex actually likesKamala Harris or believes she possesses the character, competency or gravitas to be president of the United States. But they loathe – or to put it much more precisely, they FEAR – Donald J. Trump because of the mortal threat he represents to the entrenched, corrupt and hopelessly power-addicted permanent governing class in Washington, D.C.
At such a critical time, tens of millions of decent, clear-thinking Americans are praying, voting (or planning on voting), volunteering for and donating to election-integrity efforts, and talking to others about what they consider to be hands-down the most important election in American history.
Actually, Kupelian’s the one who’s acting out of fear — he needs Trump to be president so he and WND can feel relevant again after years of destroying itself through publishing fake news and hate. Trump, after all, cares even less about the truth than Kupelian does, and when WND has a better chance of surviving in an atmosphere where the truth doesn’t matter.
In short, this is all an attempt to preserve WND. And Kupelian doesn’t have the guts to leave his right-wing bubble to talk about it.
Trump-promoting ‘news’
WorldNetDaily has always been a shill for various right-wing interests, but during the presidential election, it was the PR operation for Donald Trump’s campaign in all but name — ironic given how it has long accused non-right-wing media of working for Democrats. On top of efforts like Elizabeth Farah’s videos trotting out various right-wingers to bash Kamala Harris and the propaganda edition of its sparsely read Whistleblower magazine, WND’s “news” content featured numerous articles that may as well have been written by Trump’s campaign comms staff, even though they carried the bylines of WND’s alleged reporters like Bob Unruh and Joe Kovacs. Here are some of those highly biased articles designed to promote Trump in the final few months of the campaign:
‘Disgraceful’: Listen to crowd gasp as Trump scolds reporter for ‘hostile’ attack
‘Commie-la Harris’: Trump unveils his vision of Democratic National Convention
‘Willing to serve’: Trump floats Musk as member of his cabinet, and Elon has instant response
‘I can’t stop laughing’: New Trump ad plays Obama’s own words from DNC stage
‘Nastiest and most unfair newscaster’: Trump scorches ‘ABC Fake News’ as he agrees to debate Kamala
‘Unscrupulous behavior’: Trump makes serious vow for 2024 election cheaters
‘She can’t hide’: WATCH New Trump ad destroying Kamala’s promises for Day One
Trump deals devastating blow to Harris, rejects her demand for another debate
Trump blames Dems’ ‘Communist left rhetoric’ for flying ‘bullets’
Onetime Trump impeachment witness now promises to vote for Republican for president
WATCH: Bill Clinton now is appearing in a pro-Donald Trump ad, blasting the border catastrophe
At Al Smith dinner, Trump slays crowd with humor, thanks God for saving him from assassination
Trump pledges to boost homeschoolers with $10,000 PER CHILD tax writeoff
Note how many of those simply recap a Trump campaign ad. Campaign ads are rarely newsworthy on their own, which means WND is engaging in the laziest form of journalism and propaganda here.