Posted 12:11 PM by Scoobie Davis

Christian Publishing House Uncovered as Apologist for Racists and Conspiracy Nuts
Over a year ago, I uncovered how the respected Christian publishing House, Thomas Nelson Publishing, had prostituted its integrity by joining forces with conspiracy nut and hatemonger Joseph Farah and his organization WorldNetDaily. I pointed out that what made this particularly egregious was that one of the first books published by this unholy alliance was Michael Savage’s scurrilous (and barely coherent) book, The Savage Nation (Thomas Nelson and WND recently published Savage’s latest book, The Enemy Within). Unbelievable as it may seem, Thomas Nelson Publishing has outdone itself yet again with its announcement of the publication of Richard Poe’s Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists which is due out next month (Poe is a former editor of David Horowitz’s FrontPageMagazine). I have only read the forward and description of the book, but based on this limited information, I can conclude that this book is an apologia for smearmongers and racists of the worst kind and one that whitewashes their nefarious activities. Of course, since I haven’t read the book yet, I could be wrong, but I am willing to bet my life that I am giving an accurate description of the book (as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “You don’t have to eat the whole egg to know that it’s rotten").

Here is part of the book’s description on Amazon.com:

From her own “war room” in the White House, Hillary Clinton commanded a secret police operation dedicated to silencing dissent, muzzling media critics, intimidating political foes, whitewashing Clinton scandals, and obstructing justice. Hillary's operatives infiltrated every level of the news media, federal law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the federal court system. . .They looked upon the “unregulated” datastream of cyberspace as a threat to their power, potentially devastating in its ability to bypass the controlled, corporate media. For that reason, Hillary's secret police persecuted Internet dissidents with special ferocity. . .Mainstream news media spiked the story of Hillary’s secret war—and of the scandals she sought to conceal. But the courageous new journalists of the Internet underground defied the odds and exposed the shocking truth about history’s most corrupt presidency. This is their story.

Whose story is it? According to the Jim Robinson’s forward (see addendum), it is the story of the “courageous new journalists” Christopher Ruddy, Joseph Farah, Matt Drudge, Judge Jim Johnson, David Horowitz, and Robinson himself. For those of you familiar with this web site, what I’m about to write is old news, but it’s important to go over these matters.

Let’s first discuss Farah, Ruddy, and Horowitz. I wrote a recent post about this trio that comprises the Scaife Internet Network. Please read this post thoroughly and check out the links. To sum up the post, Ruddy and Farah were part of a Scaife-funded incestuous media echo chamber that attempted to give mainstream credibility to Scaife’s paranoid delusions that Bill and Hillary Clinton were responsible not only for the death of Vince Foster, but were responsible for the deaths of dozens of people who were supposedly in the way of the Clintons’ quest for power. It’s a completely loony and vicious urban legend known as the Clinton Body Count.

Next is Judge Jim Johnson. Johnson, a longtime foe of the Clintons, is a deranged and virulent racist who courted the KKK during his gubernatorial campaign. His writings have included comparisons of African-Americans to apes. Johnson was one of the interviewees in the discredited Clinton Chronicles video (more on this later). Conason and Lyons have a good profile of Johnson in their book The Hunting of the President.

Matt Drudge is Matt Drudge. I had the pleasure of personally questioning Drudge about journalistic ethics and truth telling. Click here and here.

Jim Robinson runs the Free Republic web site. The Free Republic is a major repository for these bizarre conspiracy theories--especially the Clinton Body Count. A case in point is Robinson’s absurd forward. Just one example, in the forward, Robinson writes of “journalists getting knocked upside the head in hotels” supposedly by Hillary’s “secret police operation.” Robinson is referring to TNR’s reporter L.J. Davis who was covering Whitewater. The only problem is that it didn’t happen. Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page also spread this canard before it was debunked (no retractions or apologies from either party). Where’s the fucking editor from Thomas Nelson?

This isn’t the first time that Christianity has been evoked to give credence to anti-Clinton smears. Investigative reporter Murray Waas caught the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Patrick Matrisciana using deceptive techniques to bilk Falwell’s flock of their hard-earned money. Thomas Nelson can’t have it both ways: It can’t whitewash these lunatics and scumbags and also claim to be Christian. Click here and contact the people at Thomas Nelson and tell them what they are doing is wrong. It’s important.

Addendum: I have reprinted the entire Jim Robinson forward from Poe’s website, despite Poe’s warning that “[t]his excerpt may not be reproduced or published, on or offline, except by permission of the publisher.” So sue me, Poe. Here are Robinson’s deranged words in their entirety:

HILLARY'S SECRET WAR by Richard Poe is the first book I’ve read that really pulls together the story of the Internet underground during the Clinton years. I was thrilled to read it. This story has never been told before, and I’m proud to say that I was part of it, in my own small way.

We poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into building FreeRepublic.com and organizing a cyber-community of tens of thousands of Freeper activists all over the United States. We didn’t do that job to win medals or accolades. We did it because it had to be done, just like we went to Vietnam – those of us who went -- because that job had to be done too.
To tell the truth, I was ready to go to my grave knowing that everything we accomplished at Free Republic might be forgotten. That was OK with me. What mattered was doing the job, not getting credit for it. Still, when I read Richard’s book for the first time, it kind of choked me up a little bit, because I saw that somebody had been paying attention; somebody recognized what we were doing. Somebody knew that the Freepers were fighting for liberty on the Internet, just as we veterans fought for freedom in Vietnam. That made me feel pretty good.

For me, it was fascinating to read about the lives and struggles of others involved in this movement that Richard calls the New Underground—people like Chris Ruddy, Joe Farah, Matt Drudge, David Horowitz, J. J. Johnson, and all the rest. Believe it or not, I don’t really know any of those people. I met Drudge once and J. J. Johnson once. But as for Ruddy and Farah, it’s been an e-mail here, a phone call there. And I don’t think I ever communicated with David Horowitz at all.

Hillary says that we’re a vast right-wing conspiracy, but if there’s a conspiracy going on, they sure never let me in on it. I hear Richard Mellon Scaife has given money to a lot of fine causes and organizations, and good for him, but he sure hasn’t thrown any my way.

When it comes to networking and conspiring, I’m not much good at it. It’s hard enough just trying to get Freepers to work together. How do you get tens of thousands of individualists to cooperate on something, each with his or her own opinion and agenda? Trying to keep the Freepers pulling in the same direction is like trying to herd cats.

I love all the details in Richard’s book about the other Web sites and their owners. Reading their stories was eye opening for me. I was so busy fighting my own skirmishes, I didn’t have much time to survey the battlefield as a whole. Hillary’s Secret War showed me that the persecution we endured at Free Republic was part of a bigger picture.

Of course, I knew about Hillary and her secret police. We all knew that. Way back in the early ’90s on the Prodigy message board, we were already talking about how it seemed that Hillary was pulling all the strings. But her war on media dissidents, both on and off the Internet, really was a secret war, just as Richard says. Most people in America had no idea it was going on.

They didn’t know what kinds of pressures and harassment people faced when they tried to speak out and tell the truth about Clinton corruption. Even many of us who were directly involved in the dissident media didn’t always have the perspective to fit the pieces together—the threats and intimidation, the IRS audits, burglaries, lawsuits, surveillance, infiltration, the smear campaigns, false arrests, journalists getting knocked upside the head in hotels, even a lot of folks mysteriously ending up dead.

Now, I want to make one thing clear. I’m not really big on conspiracy theory. If I’m going to believe something, there’s got to be some meat and potatoes to it. I sincerely doubt that Hillary ever personally ordered anyone killed. I just don’t want to believe that Hillary is that rotten. And I don’t think Richard Poe jumps to that conclusion either.

But there were definitely forces at work in America that killed to protect the Clintons and their secrets. Richard doesn’t pull any punches in writing about that. Whether those forces were Chinese intelligence or Dixie Mafia, or whatever they were, I can only guess. But they were out there. And if Hillary ever said to her subordinates, "Gee, I wish such-and-such person would just go away and disappear," I don’t doubt there were people in the kind of circles she moved in who might take a statement like that seriously and do something about it.

Hillary is the godmother of the Clinton crime family. There is no question about it. That’s why she said we need gatekeepers and editors on the Internet. Hillary has a lot to hide and she knows she can’t control the Internet the way she controls Dan Rather. The invention of the printing press freed the masses from the gatekeepers of old. Now anyone with a computer and Internet connection wields the equivalent of his own printing press, along with a worldwide distribution network.

Web sites such as The DrudgeReport, WorldNetDaily, NewsMax, FrontPageMagazine, Lucianne, FreeRepublic, and countless others have given voice to millions of liberty-minded individuals. Underground pamphleteers ignited the flames of revolution in 1776. Now the Internet is fanning those flames all over again. And that’s bad news for Hillary.
She knows she can’t get back in the White House unless she shuts us down first. The secret war Richard writes about is still going on. It died down a little bit when Bush took office, but it’s just the lull before the storm. We know the storm is coming, and we’re getting ready for it.

Note: I found out about the book from an article in ConWebWatch. UPDATE: ConWebWatch's Terry Krepel has an interesting back-and-forth with Poe.