We’ve detailed how WorldNetDaily has heavily promoted Paul Nehlen’s campaign to run against Paul Ryan in the 2018 Republican primary in Wisconsin — so enthusiastically, in fact, that it just might violate campaign law. After all, WND did publish Nehlen’s anti-“globalist” book “Wage the Battle” in July and is selling his anti-Muslim film “Hijrah” in its online store.
But WND hasn’t done a lot of promotion of Nehlen lately. Near as we can tell, the last time Nehlen got an article to himself on WND was Sept. 14, in which Paul Bremmer touted Nehlen’s declaration that “America demands a wall. You cannot effectively deport a criminal without a wall.”
As much as we’d like to think that it suddenly expressed concern about election law after our first piece was published, the truth may be a little more inconvenient: Nehlen has been descending into white nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Nehlen has been caught unironically using triple parentheses around a Jewish name — a trope that white nationalists use to harass Jews on Twitter — and he has strongly suggested his critics are being paid by Jews to attack him. He has also embraced other white nationalist memes. It’s so bad that Breitbart, which has been an even more enthusiastic booster of Nehlen than WND, has reportedly dropped its support of him (or maybe not).
Meanwhile, it’s been crickets from WND. While it hasn’t promoted him since mid-September, it also hasn’t said a peep about the controversies surrounding him. You’d think that as the publisher of Nehlen’s book and seller of his Muslim-bashing film, it would have something to say.
Then again, WND is weirdly proud that it can keep its racism relatively covert, at least to the point that Google doesn’t threaten to pull its advertising over race-baiting.
This is the second WND-linked writer in trouble for racially charged rhetoric in recent months. We’ve already noted how WND-promoted contrarian investor Marc Faber got caught saying that he thanked God that “white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the U.S. would look like Zimbabwe.”
UPDATE: It appears Breitbart now has definitively cut ties with Nehlen after he tweeted about he was enjoying an anti-Semitic book. We’ve contacted WND Books for a statement about its relationship with Nehlen; we’ll let you know if we hear back.