As former President Donald Trump and his acolytes busily build an alternate reality in which America’s elections are rife with conspiracies and fraud, it’s worth noting that here in the real world, spreading the biggest of MAGA’s Big Lies can still backfire on its purveyors.
We’re happy to report that the disinformation peddlers behind The Gateway Pundit, the national right-wing conspiracy site based (to our region’s shame) in the St. Louis area, are a step closer to facing well-deserved justice. A St. Louis judge last month finally set a in a defamation suit by two Georgia election workers whose lives were disrupted after the site repeatedly targeted them with debunked and slanderous allegations of ballot fraud in the 2020 election.
People are also reading…
In setting the March trial date for site founder Jim Hoft and others behind this putrid platform, the court has effectively ended their strategy of indefinitely delaying the case by pursuing bankruptcy. Should justice prevail, Hoft & Co. will soon find themselves joining Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, Fox News and other professional liars who have learned the expensive way that facts still matter.
After the 2020 election, Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye†Moss, Freeman’s daughter, became the focal point of a smear campaign by Trump and his supporters based on a video that falsely purported to show the women of producing “suitcases†full of illegal ballots and running them through vote-counting machines multiple times. Even after election officials debunked the claims, Trump himself and others continued spreading the lie about the women.
The Gateway Pundit was among the most aggressive promoters of that lie. The women sued Hoft and his site after its sustained campaign against them resulted in a deluge of harassment and death threats so onerous that, on the advice of the FBI, Freeman moved out of her home for two months.
Hoft sought bankruptcy protection for the site, claiming this and other litigation against it was threatening to drive it out of business. But a federal judge in July threw out the bankruptcy claim, ruling that it was a ““ action filed “purely as a litigation strategy†to stall the defamation suit.
Hoft’s lawyers had sought a stay in that suit while they appealed the dismissal of the bankruptcy case. But St. Louis Circuit Judge Elizabeth Hogan’s order on Aug. 26 setting a trial date for the defamation case effectively rejects that strategy. She ordered the jury trial to begin March 10.
The jury will have plenty evidence to consider. The website repeated its false allegations against the two women again and again, naming them, showing their pictures and declaring them “dirty Crooks,†all with the histrionics that are familiar to Gateway Pundit viewers — screaming uppercase copy, exclamation points everywhere and unsupported claims of criminality presented as established fact.
“Now we have evidence mother Ruby sent the same stack of votes through a tabulator ... three times,†falsely declared one of the numerous articles the site posted on the issue. “... (N)obody did more to steal the election for Joe Biden than this mother-daughter combo. The good people in Georgia need to stand up.â€
The kind of people who read The Gateway Pundit reacted like you’d expect.
“As a direct result of Defendants’ campaign of lies,†reads the , “Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss began receiving — almost immediately — an onslaught of extremely violent and graphic threats and dangerous harassment.â€
Among more than 400 emails and 75 text messages threatening Freeman was one that read, “We know where you live, we coming to get you.â€
The two women have already won a defamation suit against Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, for damages of almost $150 million, for spreading the same lies against them. In that case, Giuliani’s defense team tried to shift blame for the lies to The Gateway Pundit. As if all these toxic Trump sycophants weren’t rowing in the same direction.
Then there’s Fox News, which paid out an astronomical $787 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after allowing various Trump water-carriers on their shows to falsely accuse the company of helping throw the 2020 election. How anyone continues turning to a network for information after such an unprecedented admission of peddling fake news is beyond us.
It’s gratifying that these bad actors are getting the legal comeuppance they all deserve. Seeing The Gateway Pundit sued out of existence next year — a real possibility now — would be a win for decency and democracy.
But the more important takeaway voters should glean from these examples of lies coming home to roost is that Trump’s current attempts to cast doubt on the sanctity of the upcoming election are every bit as flimsy and false as are the ones already adjudicated. If Trump loses on Nov. 5, he will, virtually without a doubt, claim (again) that he was robbed. And it will be every bit as much of a lie as it was last time.
