WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is still trying to distract from the fact that WND has been a major purveyor of fake news over the years. Now he’s tossing out actual fake news in order to do it.
Farah whines in a Dec. 3 article:
This was the headline in a Politico story Friday: “Trump inherits Obama boom.”
Written by Ben White, the publication’s chief economic reporter, not I must point out, Barack Obama’s chief speech writer, the fake news story was apparently designed to persuade Americans that we are living in what he characterizes as “a fairly robust economy with the lowest jobless rate in nearly a decade, record home and stock prices and a healthy growth rate.”
For this reason, White states: “Trump instead will take office with an economy at near full employment and wages and spending rising. The economy is in such strong shape that the Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates again later this month to try and cool things off.”
In other words, Trump simply fooled Americans into believing their economy was underperforming and that the government wasn’t insolvent to the tune of $20 trillion – more than the annual gross domestic product.
It’s a shockingly one-sided piece of trashy propaganda that ignores one stunning FACT after another – for instance, that there are nearly 100 million adult Americans NOT WORKING out of a total of civilian adult, non-institutional population of 253 million. When Obama took office, the number of adults not working was 80 million, meaning the number has jumped by 25 percent! Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been growing at the shockingly low annual rate of between 1 and 2 percent throughout the Obama presidency.
As we’ve pointed out when CNSNews.com obsesses over the labor force participation rate, a significant percentage of those “nearly 100 million adult Americans NOT WORKING” (it’s actually 95 million, but who’s counting?) are students and retirees, and the main reason that number is increasing is that baby boomers are retiring. Also, as even CNS concedes (when it’s not trying to obscure the good news), there have never been more Americans employed than right now.
Farah also rants that the unemployment numbers are “cooked” and “literally only count those collecting unemployment checks.” Farah is lying: The unemployment numbers are computed the way they always have been, and “those collecting unemployment checks” is not the only employment-related data the government issues.
Farah also complained about a New York Times article noting that white nationalists see Russia’s Vladimir Putin as an example: “And who are these extremists the New York Times quotes prominently? A collection of racists, Klansmen and know-nothing wannabees, neo-Nazis and other deplorables – the kind of people you might not expect the ‘mainstream media’ to provide with a serious platform.” Among those Farah complains the Times quoted in its article is Jared Taylor of the white nationalist group American Renaissance.
You know who else has given Taylor credibility on this issue: WND. In October, WND columnist Jesse Lee Peterson spoke admirably of Taylor’s work: “If you don’t already know about rampant black-on-white crime (rape, robbery, murder and atrocious assaults), check the research of Colin Flaherty, Heather Mac Donald and Jared Taylor.”
(Flaherty, of course, is a race-baiter to whom Farah’s WND has given a prominent platform.)
Farah goes on to complain that “The Times also buys into the unfounded, groundless conspiracy-mongering of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.” Farah doesn’t back up his claim that Russian involvement in the election is unfounded and groundless — unsurprising, given that there’s plenty of evidence showing otherwise.
While Farah complained that Richard Spencer was also among the white nationalists quoted by the Times, he immediately defends Spencer later in his article:
It all started with a segment on CNN’s The Lead which quoted prominent white nationalist figure Richard Spencer as wondering if Jews were actually people. CNN host Jim Sciutto said, “of Jews Spencer said, ‘one wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem.’”
“That is an alt-right leader, Richard Spencer, talking about Jews,” Sciutto added. CNN then had a panel with RealClearPolitics’ Rebecca Berg and The Boston Globe’s Matt Viser with the chyron “ALT-RIGHT FOUNDER QUESTIONS IF JEWS ARE PEOPLE.”
Except, Spencer did not make those remarks about Jews. He made them about political consultants on television.
Farah is actually mostly correct here (Snopes says Spencer was “questioning the humanity and intelligence of members of the ‘mainstream media,’ not specifically that of Jews” in the specific remark CNN cited, but noted that in the same speech Spencer also referred to “Lügenpresse,” a term “commonly used in Nazi-era German propaganda to describe non-party-friendly (e.g., Jewish, Communist, and foreign) news sources”), but he omits the fact that Sciutto and CNN host Jake Tapper, on whose show the segment took place, both denounced and apologized for the chyron after they learned about it.
If only Farah and WND would have, say, offered Clark Jones such a quick apology for publishing fake news about him rather than fighting him in court for six years before abruptly settling his defamation suit against WND.
Yep, Farah complaining about fake news is pure chutzpah.