A key part of Joseph Farah’s money begs to keep his flailing WorldNetDaily alive is portraying himself and WND as victims of Google and “big tech” while refusing to concede that the real cause of WND’s impending demise is Farah himself for his editorial agenda of fake news and conspiracy theories. Frah cheered in his March 25 column that the Heritage Foundation declared that “Big Tech is an enemy of the American people” then ramped up his own victimhood:
I’ve been screaming from the rafters since 2017 about it. It caused me so much anxiety that it gave me five strokes – the last one being a major one.
It cost me so much lost revenue in that period that, from 2016 through 2022, I can conservatively estimate it at $100 million.
That’s how much this news site, WND.com, been devalued, demonetized and dehumanized in the last several years.
That’s what countless other conservative, Christian news sites have experienced.
But I coexisted with Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest through most of the history of the internet – almost 20 years. Perhaps I’m a slow learner. We at WND were doing all right. We were growing. We were making a real difference. We weren’t being compromised. We weren’t being blackballed. We weren’t being canceled.
All of that ended in 2016.
Why?
Because we took a strong stand for one presidential candidate – perhaps stronger than any stand we had ever taken: Donald J. Trump. In America, we had that right, and everyone knew it – but Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest began denying that right. It’s just that simple.
They didn’t care what I said about them, like when I called Google “evil” years before. Amazon didn’t smear or not order the books I published or the videos I made before 2016. Facebook didn’t restrict the reach to readers we’d developed through our use of the social site before 2016.
That’s because in 2016 we were playing for all the marbles – the presidency of the United States. And we won.
Farah “won” in 2016 because he didn’t care about the truth. It spread bogus stories about Hillary Clinton’s health, and then-WND reporter Jerome Corsi aligned himself with the phenomenally sleazy right-wing political operative Roger Stone to smear Clinton, and published other fake-news stories during and after the campaign.
In his April 1 column, Farah asserted that Google “hasn’t faced any government investigations into its monopolistic trailblazing efforts” because “just pays off the government ‘watchdogs'” — a claim for which he provided no evidence. He then regurgitated his victimization narrative again:
Google controls it all.
And this is the world WND lives in and has to navigate through. We can’t use Google’s search engine. We’re prevented from using the one and only major ad platform, Google Ad Manager. And most of the rest of the media operate in a state of constant intimidation and fear – of this TYRANT.
WND is now DEMONETIZED PERMANENTLY! That’s official. You simply can’t do what we do – tell the truth about the 2020 election, tell the truth about the pandemic, tell the truth about the southern border, tell the truth about the transgender agenda and so on – while Google is running the media!
WND wasn’t “demonetized” by Google — as we explained, Google made the sensible business decision to no longer associate its ad service with the unreliable, conspiratorial content of WND. As if to prove Google’s decision to decouple from WND was indeed a sensible one, Farah continued spewing claims he doesn’t support:
Google and Big Tech are a BEAST. It may be the No. 1 existential threat to the USA. I know it is to WND and what little is left of America’s truly free press.
Google uses all of its tricks to slant the news to the left and in support of the official Joe Biden positions. It’s not even funny. It’s more than a 20-1 ratio in their news feed, and the more “fake” the news, the more play it gets on Google.
This column, like the other, ends in a money beg.
Such nonsensical ranting from Farah and his deputy, David Kupelian, only serve to reinforce the decision of normal business not to have anything to do with WND, and his counterfactual insistence on blaming everyone but himself for WND’s current situation and absolute refusal to seek repentance for his self-inflicted wounds seems to indicate that WND does not deserve to live.