Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  With Bush out of office, some wondered how Olbermann would fare without nightly opposition. They shouldn’t have worried. After Obama backed an extension of the Bush administration policy on warrantless wiretapping, Olbermann declared: “Welcome to change you cannot believe in.”49 As a series of pragmatic compromises on health care began to enrage the party’s left wing, the Olbermann of the Bush years came boiling back to the surface. With the public option effectively out of the picture, Olbermann started making demands of the president. “It is, above all else, immoral and a betrayal of the people who elected you, Sir. You must now announce that you will veto any bill lacking an option or buy-in, but containing a mandate.”50 He named centrist Democrat Senator Ben Nelson “the worst person in the world” for comparing him to Limbaugh and Beck, while suggesting that Independent-Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman drive off a bridge.51 And he went after conservative commentator Michelle Malkin by saying that without her “total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred” she “would just be a big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”52

  The certainty and moral outrage have not yet faded. It reminds me of something a wise man once said: “The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack.”

  Wingnuts on the Web

  Harry Truman used to say that “the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Harry Truman never met the Internet.

  The Internet is a force multiplier for Wingnuts, empowering them to reach far broader audiences faster than ever before. It is the best breeding ground for every imaginable conspiracy theory. It provides a national megaphone for what would in earlier years have been just a whisper campaign. It enables like-minded individuals to ignore geography and their isolation and come together as an opinion army.

  While the right was dominating talk radio, the left rallied its partisans through the Internet. Within a few years groups like MoveOn.org and blogs like Daily Kos went from being outside agitators to inside players. Their fund-raising powers and ability to fire up activists were too impressive for the Democratic establishment not to forgive and forget their outbursts of radicalism: MoveOn’s infamous “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?”53 and the comments of Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas after the killing of four military contractors in Iraq. (“I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. . . . They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”54)

  The GOP was slower to adapt from the AM dial. There were popular and influential conservative news aggregators like the Drudge Report that filtered the news though a subjective lens but very little in terms of effective online activist organizing. During the 2008 campaign, I’d been told by a conservative strategist that “our voters don’t use the Internet”—while he was surfing the Web. The McCain-Palin campaign seemed to take that advice to heart (no doubt under the influence of the direct-mail mandarins who’d made their fortunes while building the conservative movement). Republicans even sent out a fund-raising letter designed to look like an emergency telegram—the instant message of the horse-and-buggy era—two years after the last real telegram was sent by Western Union. They were the Party of the Telegraph.

  The technology gap could be seen in the GOP’s 2008 online outreach. Obama had 3.1 million Facebook supporters, compared to 600,000 for McCain. Obama had 113 million YouTube views compared to twenty-five million for McCain. And when it came to Meetup.com—a site famously used by Howard Dean supporters in 2004—McCain got outhustled not only by Obama but also Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. McCain ran a twentieth-century GOTV (Get Out the Vote) campaign in which phone calls and mailings to supporters were the key metric. The McCain campaign spent $18 million in postage and shipping costs, and $3 million on the Internet, according to opensecrets.org. By comparison, Obama spent $15 million in postage and shipping costs and $14 million on the Internet.

  But after the election, grassroots conservatives woke up to social media and the Internet. They were energized by being in the opposition—supplementing their talk radio diet with Twitter, the social networking service that pushes text messages of 140 characters or less. Ironically, McCain—whose campaign hadn’t collected cell phone numbers for text messaging during the campaign—created his own Twitter account three days after the election and ten months later had a million followers. 55 By mid-2009 there were twice as many conservative congressmen on Twitter as Democrats, and Sarah Palin was using her Facebook page as her primary means of communicating with supporters. The Tea Parties and town hall protests were organized online, and with an assist from Fox News’ pre-game promotion, they started to feel like populist uprisings.

  This conservative netroots revolution is an evolutionary leap—a higher degree of specialization—beyond the niche partisan network approach innovated by Roger Ailes at Fox News. Now what conservatives dismiss as “mainstream media”—because it does not reflect movement politics—can be completely bypassed. You can have news tailored to fit your beliefs and chat with like-minded activists. The logical conclusion is already upon us: conservatives trying to create their own online encyclopedia, an alternative to Wikipedia known as Conservapedia. 56 It’s the actual expression of what Stephen Colbert only joked about when he denounced reference books as “elitist—constantly telling us what is or isn’t true or what did or didn’t happen.”57

  In the isolation of the echo chamber, the influence of fringe news sites is increased, and the tallest midget in that corner of the Wingnut world is WorldNetDaily. It was the brainchild of Joseph Farah, a mustachioed longtime newspaperman from Paterson, New Jersey, turned outer-limits conservative activist. Farah was a generation older than most Internet entrepreneurs, but as editor of the Sacramento Union in California he’d gotten to know the Silicon Valley crowd and saw the news potential of the evolving medium. Farah convinced his friend Rush Limbaugh to pen front-page columns for the Sacramento Union. It was too late for the Union; circulation continued to decline and the paper soon shut its doors, but subsequently Farah embarked on a career as a Clinton critic from the perch of the Western Journalism Center, funded by Richard Mellon Scaife (and including the then-conservative Arianna Huffington on its board of advisors).

  At the time, right-wing opposition to Bill Clinton was still essentially an analog event, pumped out over radio, magazines, direct mail and videotapes that purported to offer evidence of rape, murder and drug deals perpetrated by the forty-second president. While repeatedly “investigating” a conspiracy theory that longtime Clinton aide Vince Foster had not committed suicide but had been murdered with the White House’s knowledge—a theory determined to be false by three official reports—Farah began aggregating anti-Clinton articles on a site called eTruth.com. He upped the ante in 1997 with the launch of WorldNetDaily with his wife and quickly claimed to have 10,000 visitors a day.

  Twelve years and two presidents later, WorldNetDaily has established itself as a clearing house of right Wingnut information and paraphernalia with twenty-five employees. Visitors have spiked since Obama’s election. 58 Farah claims an impressive six to eight million unique visitors a month, and $400 million in annual sales from its superstore, peddling books like Muslim Mafia and $80 jars of earth from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount while offering special departments for Tea Party paraphernalia. There are gimmicks to trade on voter anger, like a “pink slip” you can send to every member of Congress for the discounted price of $29.95, and a lawn sign with the motto “America was founded by Right-Wing Extremists.”

  The gear may be profitable but it’s the stories that keep people coming. With its blurring of news and opinion, WorldNetDaily draws a devoted audience, claiming credit for breaking the Obama-Bill Ayers connection,59 Hamas’s alleged endorsement of Obama60 and investigations into Obama’s Chicago church.61 Some of its stories are picked up by other conservative outlets quietly and not a little shamefacedly because of the sub-tabloid reputation of the outfit. (“Glenn Beck was reading WorldNetDaily copy
without attribution and that’s how he ended up claiming the scalp of Van Jones,” Farah told me.)

  But aspirations to credibility are diminished with stories about H1N1 microchip implants62 and FEMA concentration camps,63 leading to nicknames like WorldNut Daily. And for all the biblical beliefs professed on the site (such as creationist-inspired stories that try to debunk ideas that fossil fuels came from fossils) and strict stands against pornography, there is preoccupation with proving Democratic opponents are secretly gay. The site repeatedly published a thoroughly discredited drifter’s claim that “he took cocaine in 1999 with the then-Illinois legislator [Obama] and participated in homosexual acts” with him64 and regurgitated bilge about Hillary Clinton’s “well-known bisexuality and her lesbian affair with her beautiful assistant.”65 All in all, it offers a relentlessly grim prognosis for America short of the second coming (predicted in 2015 ),66 full of plans for Obama to bring back “inquisitions”67 and “destroy capitalism.” 68 No wonder its primary advertiser appears to be “survival seeds” for your very own “crisis garden” and a “crisis cooker” to “prepare hot meals when the power is off.”69 They are profiting off the paranoia they intentionally inflame in their readers.

  But the real growth industry for WorldNetDaily in 2009 was their enthusiastic advocacy of Birther claims that Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president. Farah rented twenty roadside billboards saying “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” at a cost of $300,000 and collected online donations to help fund the effort. A WND-produced DVD “A Question of Eligibility” documents the claims of Birther proponents including Alan Keyes and Orly Taitz, but darkly states that credits for the movie are being withheld by the filmmakers because “they fear reprisals from their government.”

  Farah sees himself as an old-school newspaper editor rather than a partisan advocate. He claims to take a disinterested view of the op-eds on his homepage. “You ought to see some of the wacky stuff that they write. Doesn’t mean I agree with it,” he told me. “I don’t even look at the columns before they get published in WorldNetDaily. We have a commentary editor who does that. . . . I don’t even read most of the commentary in WorldNetDaily after it’s published ’ cause I’m not a commentary kind of a guy, to be honest with you.”

  His own commentaries, however, are a different matter, and they do not pretend to be the work of a journalist aiming for objectivity. Instead, the political and the religious are often entwined with a relentlessly hostile view of Democrats in general and President Obama in particular. On Inauguration Day, for example, Farah offered readers a specially written prayer for the president’s failure: “I do not hesitate today in calling on godly Americans to pray that Barack Hussein Obama fail in his efforts to change our country from one anchored on self-governance and constitutional republicanism to one based on the raw and unlimited power of the central state. It would be folly to pray for his success in such an evil campaign. I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God’s. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God’s straightforward Commandments.” 70

  At the end of Obama’s first year, did Farah agree with the calls to impeach Obama that are advertised on his site? “Oh, hell yeah, I think there are grounds for impeaching Obama. I think there were grounds for impeaching Bush. I think there were grounds for impeaching Clinton . . . There’s nothing in the Constitution that would even remotely justify a national takeover of health care. [Before the election] I predicted that Americans would wake up from this slumber that they’ve been [in] for so long and start marching in the streets again to reclaim their liberties and that’s exactly what I see happening today. Obama could end up being, [in the] long term, a blessing in disguise.”

  I ask whether he worries whether WND’s stories could provoke an ugly response from an unstable reader. “I think the media establishment should ask themselves that question. When they see hundreds of thousands of Americans rallying in Washington and call it tens of thousands and ignore grassroots protest movements around the country, they are doing a disservice to a vibrant debate in a free republic. They are promoting other methods for grievances to be addressed. There are only a few other possibilities—peaceful civil disobedience is one, and violent force is another. I believe reporting events accurately is the best protection of a vibrant debate in a free republic. Covering up events and silencing voices is much more irresponsible and dangerous.”

  Farah doesn’t deny that WND’s stories add to the heat on the Wingnut street, but says, “I don’t think anger is necessarily an all bad thing. We should be angry at Hitler. We should be angry at Charles Manson.” But what about when people start comparing President Obama to Hitler? I ask. “Well, if the analogy fits, it would be irresponsible not to make it,” he replies. “Obviously, you can’t compare him to Hitler’s genocidal holocaust policies, right? He hasn’t done anything remotely resembling that. But I think it’s fair to point out that Hitler nationalized health care and that Stalin did that and Hugo Chávez did that and Fidel Castro did that.”

  For WorldNetDaily and others on the Wingnut Web, extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.

  Escaping the Echo Chamber

  The pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow said, “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”71

  Truth, or course, doesn’t come tailor-made for any one ideology or political party.

  But hyper-partisanship has become an industry unto itself, and it is thriving at a time when the old news industry, aspiring to objectivity dominated by print reporting and the network evening news, seems to be fading. The fragmentation and self-segregation we are experiencing with television, radio and the Internet exacerbates our political differences while they decrease the confidence we had in the honesty and integrity of journalism altogether.

  Today, with newspapers fighting for survival, faith in the accuracy and fairness of the press is at twenty-five-year lows.72 You can’t blame people for being cynical. The clearest path to profit seems to come from abandoning the ideal of objectivity and nakedly playing to the base. But even at a time when pundits sound like paid shills for political parties, it was shocking to learn that black conservative columnist Armstrong Williams had accepted a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars from the Bush administration to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy in print and on air.73

  Ironically, Williams had previously complained about the partisan straightjacket he felt imposed upon him by the split-scream formatting of cable news, telling Tina Brown on CNBC, “One of the things that I struggle with when I go on television like, let’s say, a Crossfire, [or] Wolf Blitzer, I’m expected to take a certain side. I’m expected to defend the president [Bush]. Now there are some areas I don’t want to defend the president in because I don’t necessarily believe that, but you’re put in that position. And I think sometimes you’re in a predicament that the public is not really getting what you think is their best interests served. So I think sometimes we get caught up in these labels and these stereotypes . . . [and] we do the public a disservice.”74

  The spin cycle is baked into the booking of guests where predictable partisanship is encouraged. Conflict sells and balanced analysis is considered bad for ratings—it takes too long to get to the truth.

  Politicians have an interest in encouraging an increasingly partisan media. By drumming home the message of media bias, they try to diminish the credibility of their critics while developing contacts more likely to present their side of the story. This self-serving mission requires loss of perspective. Texas Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, for instance, told students in the summer of ’09 what he believed to be the “the greatest threat to America.” It was not necessarily a recession, he said, or even another terrorist attack. “The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias.”75

  Washington is the only city in the nation where the most important thi
ng about you is what political party you belong to. Partisan media reinforces the rampant “team-ism.” If you walk into a congressman’s office and see Fox News on the TV and a Washington Times on the table, you’ll immediately know what party he or she belongs to, just as you would if MSNBC was blaring or the Washington Post was the paper of choice. It’s no surprise that Republicans and Democrats are so divided. They are consuming different versions of the truth, interpreting the same events in fundamentally different ways.

  Likewise, the echo chamber isolates and intensifies grassroots politics, breeding groupthink in tiny platoons that can have disproportionate influence on political debates. When it extends to a national level, it can create a Tower of Babel, condemning us to mutual incomprehensibility. It’s easier to demonize people who disagree with you if you don’t know them. In the constant partisan spin cycle everyone has lost sight of the fact that only 15 percent of Americans call themselves conservative Republicans and only 11 percent describe themselves as liberal Democrats.76 Slicing and dicing that demographic is going to produce diminishing returns, while leaving the other 74 percent of Americans in the center available and unaccounted for.