I have to admit that W.N.D. is one of those sites I began reading when I was first involved in political blogging, then slowly began distancing myself from as they tend to make that perfect circle the “old right” makes when they lean so far to what they perceive as the right that the end up on the far left. Their support for conspiracy theories of various stripes didn’t help their credibility with me.

Conspiracy theories are almost always scams. The North American Union, 9/11 “Truth” and now Obama’s citizenship are all carny style schemes designed to get you to buy books and frequent websites or forums which run ad programs where companies bid to get their ads on your site based on traffic. The rise of the Satanic Ritual Abuse movement, what we now refer to as the Satanic Panic, was one such scheme largely pushed (even to this day) by people like Ted Gunderson who make a living spreading nonsense around. The W.N.D. version of Ted Gunderson is Jerome Corsi, a 9/11 truther who is at the center of the Birther movement. He also has gone on record claiming President Bush allowed 9/11 to happen to set the stage for the formation of the North American Union and that oil comes not from decomposing organic matter but from abiotic processing, which is a fancy way of saying oil just appears out of the earth.

Unsurprisingly, Corsi has written several books which sell very well among the fringe. The Late Great U.S.A. and America for Sale are both lurid accounts of the conspiracy against America by “them” and Black Gold Strangle Hold makes the case that the oil companies, every world government, and the scientific community all are hiding the fact that oil is not at all scarce. Vapid irrationality to be sure, but lucrative in the extreme for Corsi. And those who sell his books.

The problem, of course, isn’t whether Corsi is making a little cash, as I don’t begrudge any American their right to run a snake oil shop, but it’s in how Corsi’s conspiracy mongering is allowed to reflect on the right by supposedly serious people taking him seriously. Aside from the obvious, I dislike conspiracy theories for two reasons. The first is as we have seen during the Satanic Panic, these theories can have very real consequences for innocent people caught up in the fantasy world of the conspiracist. The second, however, is that it distracts from real conspiracies. The progressive agenda is a conspiracy, not one plotted in shadows by secret societies but simply an alliance of leftists all working to steer this country into a European cultural and political model. We know this because we can go to sites like Media Matters and see it for ourselves.

While people waste time trying to find the secret N.A.U. treaty written by the Illuminati, the Obama administration openly cedes our interest to the United Nations. While people buy Corsi’s book on how oil is really as plentiful as the air we breath, China is drilling for the last remaining oil off our coasts while progressive groups block us from adding that precious resource to our own reserves. While idiots seek “the truth” about 9/11, a Jihadist movement is sweeping the globe and overrunning Europe with its eye on America next. There are real enemies to face, real conspiracies to unravel. Corsi and his ilk waste our time in an old right version of the live action Vampire: The Masquerade game.

Which brings me to World Net Daily, a website scorned by what they thought was their soul mate. World Net Daily, long associated with Corsi and the worst sorts of conspiracy mongering, has discovered Glenn Beck cheating on them with common sense. Hurt and angered, they launched into an attack on Beck loaded with justifications for their idiocy and pleas for Beck to come back to them:

“Birthers,” however, reflect a far greater diversity of opinion than is assumed by Beck’s characterization. For example, while the term has been applied to anyone questioning Obama’s eligibility to serve as president under the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” clause, many “birthers” don’t doubt Obama’s Hawaiian birth, but instead take issue with his father’s foreign citizenship.

While other top radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Lou Dobbs, have all said unequivocally and publicly that the Obama eligibility issue is legitimate and worthy, a few – including Beck and fellow Fox TV host Bill O’Reilly – have taken the position that the issue is, in O’Reilly’s words, “bogus.” Both Beck and O’Reilly cite the contemporaneous appearance of birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers as prima facie evidence Obama was born in Hawaii and “birthers” are conspiracy nuts.

However, what neither talk host realizes is that newspaper birth announcements are not placed by parents phoning their local paper with the good news that they had a child. Rather, as WND has reported based on interviews with the two Hawaii papers involved, the Obama newspaper birth announcements stemmed from information automatically sent to the papers by Hawaii’s Department of Health upon the state’s issuance of a “Certification of Live Birth,” which, as WND has also reported, is considered insufficient on its own to positively document the president’s birthplace.

Many people remain unaware that a child does not even have to be born in Hawaii to receive a “Certification of Live Birth – that’s the “short form” that provides no hospital name, delivering physician or any of the other information that traditionally appears on a legitimate birth certificate. And yet the “short form” COLB is the one and only piece of evidence the White House has cited in defending its assertion Obama was born in Hawaii.

Hawaiian law specifically allows “an adult or the legal parents of a minor child” to apply to the health department and, upon unspecified proof, be given the birth document.

The only requirement for proof cited in the law doesn’t address the birth of the child either, just “that the legal parents of such individual while living without Territory or State of Hawaii had declared the Territory or State of Hawaii as their legal residence for at least one year immediately preceding the birth or adoption of such child.”

Demand the truth by joining the petition campaign to make President Obama reveal his long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate!

And since Obama’s long-form birth certificate remains locked away from public view and sealed by privacy laws, no brainwashing device – such as Beck alluded to in his program – would be necessary to keep Hillary Clinton from discovering the contents of Obama’s original birth certificate.

That excerpt sets the tone. A desperate plea by desperate people who fear not only losing their credibility as they are attacked by a well known pundit, but their meal ticket as his huge audience abandons the snipe hunt for proof that Obama can’t be President. It should be obvious to all that W.N.D. does not exist on page views only. They have a bookstore which admittedly has some very good books for sale, such as Ray Comfort’s thought provoking (if flawed) Nothing Created Everything and Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate. But the W.N.D. book catalog also relies heavily on the sale of conspiratorial works which relies in turn on the persistence of a conspiratorial mindset among the right.

World Net Daily has a donation page where the top cause you can donate to is a fund to buy billboards that promote Birtherism. Surely no one believes that the majority of that money would not be used in “administrative” costs? They also sell DVDs, clothing and other items, something they have in common with Alex Jones’ websites.

In other words, W.N.D. is financially invested in people being hooked on their conspiracy theories. The site, like Alex Jones’ Prison Planet, is in itself a conspiracy designed to prey on suckers who need to feel as if there are secret forces at work against them for a variety of reasons.

The real conspiracy is the conspiracy to separate the gullible from their cash, and the “Birthers” are a part of that conspiracy. Beck is right to dismiss them and we’d all be better off dismissing anyone who makes a living peddling their asinine fever dreams.