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The right wing-PayPal connection

October 29, 2009 2:35 pm ET by Terry Krepel

A few weeks back, we noted that James O'Keefe -- who has gained right-wing fame for his clandestine ACORN videos -- received thousands of dollars for a previous stunt from Peter Thiel, a co-founder of the online payment site PayPal with major conservative cred.

Interestingly, Thiel is not the only PayPal alum with a toehold in right-wing activism.

Eric Jackson is the former marketing director for PayPal, and Norman Book is its former financial systems manager. After leaving the company following its acquisition by eBay, the pair in 2004 founded World Ahead Publishing, with the goal to publish conservative-oriented books (among them: "Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!").

In 2006, WorldNetDaily selected World Ahead to be the latest partner in its WND Books imprint; in 2008, WND purchased World Ahead outright. As part of the deal, Jackson was named executive vice president of strategy of WND (he has since left that position; he currently "advises startups and non-profits on their business and product strategies"), while Book was named (and remains) executive vice president of operations.

What does this mean? Not much, beyond the fact that not every dot-com start-up is run by a flaming liberal. And that some are far enough right to hang out with WorldNetDaily.

Tags: WorldNetDaily, James O'Keefe

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    • Author by oscar the grouch (October 29, 2009 2:47 pm ET)
        1
      Well, at least MMFA summed it all up correctly in the last paragraph. And I sure that if not all dot com start is run by a "flaming" liberal, a good portion of them are run by "smoldering" liberal.
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      • Author by MickD (October 29, 2009 3:58 pm ET)
        1  
        Dude, money is to be made. That is the country for conservatives, the Land of Green. Flag wrapping is just a front for all that.
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        • Author by seaniccus (October 29, 2009 11:09 pm ET)
             
          Yeah, these guys who disagree with you can't POSSIBLY actually love their country and yet still have different ideas of how America should work! It's all just a front for EVIL CAPITALISM. Or perhaps racism. It depends on how you are feeling at the time, right?
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    • Author by macko (October 29, 2009 4:49 pm ET)
         
      everybody needs to eat and food aint free. It has nothing to do with flag wrapping. Believing you should pay your own way isn't a strictly conservative idea either.

      Now tricking those acorn nuts to say what they did was an obvious conservative trick.
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    • Author by smarshall1432997 (October 29, 2009 6:15 pm ET)
      1  
      We knew something was too good to be true with why these two young people were able to travel around America on their own dimes to bring light to ACORN based on their editied videos was just some under-handed, right-winged Republican master piece of controversy. When Republicans like FoxNews jumped up and down with glee, something just wasn't right with this, LOL. Thanks Media Matters for doing the research.

      Btw, let's see if Jake Tapper at ABC and Campbell Brown at CNN report on this connection? Uh, oh. LOL.
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