Normally, the St. Louis-based website The Gateway Pundit can and should be laughed off as right-wing, fake-news nonsense. But as Reuters recently reported, the site’s false allegations of election fraud in jurisdictions around the country have stoked harassment and death threats against two dozen election officials. The reason toxic platforms like this exist is because there is a market for them. Only when the news-consuming public learns to be more discerning in where it looks for information will those platforms loosen their damaging grip on political discourse.
The Gateway Pundit is a popular blog among America’s far-right political fringes, trafficking in the kind of half-truths and whole-cloth lies that fuel so much of that end of the political spectrum these days. After a right-wing fanatic killed a counterprotester with a car during the white nationalist demonstration in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, The Gateway Pundit falsely attributed the attack to an “Anti-Trump protester.” After the Las Vegas mass shooting that year, it wrongly accused “a Democrat who liked Rachel Maddow.”
The site was a prominent purveyor of the racist lie that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. And, more recently, it advanced the Trumpian big lie that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud.
