If you’re an also-ran Republican candidate for president, what do you between elections? Okay, but then what do you do between releasing books and promotional DVDs?

Former candidate and U.S. senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum has decided to become a columnist for the World Net Daily. For those who have argued that the Republican Party needs to move back into the center with a more welcoming tone, Santorum’s move is a step in the opposite direction. The site often traffics in wild, unsubstantiated, religious-themed conspiracy of the kind Santorum has only dabbled in.

For WND, hiring Santorum actually represents a dramatic shift to the center.

The ex-senator may be the nation’s pre-eminent homophobe and spokesman for fundamentalist values, but he did operate in Washington D.C. for more than a decade with the occasional demonstration of pragmatism. His first rant takes on a safe target for the right wing — the U.N., which he accuses of wanting to pave the way for euthanizing his disabled child. It’s a wild swing at a nearly irrelevant issue. But for World Net Daily, it’s tame.

Here are 5 WND stories more extreme than most anything you can expect from Rick Santorum.

Grover Norquist gets a lot of press for being the enforcer of the pledge nearly all congressional leaders have taken to never raise taxes–not in a box, not with a fox, etc. But to WND columnist Pamela Geller, Norquist is despised for a whole other reason. “Grover Norquist is toxic and should be persona non grata in the Republican Party. He is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” she writes. Like Michele Bachmann’s favorite sage Frank Gaffney, Geller believes that Grover is connected to the Brotherhood through his Palestinian wife. That would make his pledge a Muslim Brotherhood plot, right?


How did Donald Trump get his start in the business of accusing the president of the United States of fraud and treason? Maybe it was World Net Daily, the Internet’s most popular birther site. When the reality star, business developer and bane of the Macy’s brand started spouting birther nonsense, the site made sure the world knew.

Rick Santorum hates evolution, no doubt. He thinks it’s a tool to lead people to atheism, which he also despises. But he hasn’t compared people to accept the theory to Hitler — yet. He leaves that Bradlee Dean, Michele Bachmann’s rock’n’roll preacher friend, who in a post for WND wrote, “When people fall in line with the theory of evolution, and with those like Adolf Hitler who kill millions and millions of people because they weren’t quite as evolved, it’s not only terrible, but also very dangerous.” As the Führer of People for the Ethical Use of Nazi References (PEUNR), I give this 4 out of a possible 5 heils on the offensiveness meter.


If you think climate change is bad, don’t mess with Israel. World Net Daily‘s founder Joseph Farah connected the tornado in Joplin, Missouri with President Obama saying that negotiations between Israel and Palestine should begin based on the Jewish state’s 1967 borders. And God’s rage is bipartisan. Katrina, he says, could be connected to George W. Bush’s “forced” withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip. No word if Farah thinks Superstorm Sandy was President Obama’s reward for the Iron Dome missile system.

The greatest World Net Daily post of all time was written by the dean of right-wing conspiracists, Jerome R. Corsi. The author of The Obama Nation claims that the president is homosexual on the “down low.” The only reason — we assume — this bombshell didn’t rock the election is that it came out on the same day as the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. If only President Obama had to answer this explosive accusation instead of the right wing getting distracted by a tragedy they could politicize. Maybe in 2016, Santorum can give his new colleague Corsi the national attention this story obviously deserves.