Former Gateway Pundit White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich, once heralded as the Trump movement’s scourge of the mainstream media’s press corps, is now out at the popular right-wing blog.
While Gateway Pundit chief Jim Hoft claimed last week that Wintrich’s exit had been in the works for several weeks, the announcement came right after Wintrich went on a podcast hosted by a prominent white nationalist.
“I'd like to wish Lucian Wintrich the best of luck and blessings on his next endeavor after leaving Gateway Pundit several weeks ago,” Hoft tweeted.
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Wintrich’s abrupt exit from The Gateway Pundit marks an anticlimax from his position in early 2017, when his application for a White House press pass threatened to upend the daily press briefings and scored him a string of media profiles. The prospect of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing outrage blog that played loose with the facts, having a White House correspondent looked like the latest Trump-era insult to the press.
Hoft, delighted by the prospect of putting a man previously best known for organizing an event where Milo Yiannopoulos doused himself in pig’s blood in the White House press room, promised Wintrich a $10 bonus for every question he asked that included the phrase “fake news.”
Wintrich didn’t make much of an impact on the press briefings, but he did manage to play a role on The Gateway Pundit, including falling for a hoax about “antifa supersoldiers” plan to “behead all white parents.”
While Wintrich’s bylines on Gateway Pundit had dwindled recently, his exit from the site appears to have been sped up by his appearance on a podcast hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a white nationalist who marched in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Shortly after the appearance, Wintrich, who had been introduced on the show as Gateway Pundit’s New York bureau chief, dropped the site from his Twitter bio. For his part, Wintrich told The Daily Beast that he left Gateway Pundit to work on “two independent media projects” and emailed a YouTube link to the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Free Bird.” Hoft didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But Wintrich doesn’t seem entirely happy about his exit. In a Periscope livestream on Sunday night, Wintrich chatted with fans as he prepared to cook lobsters he had named after Alexander Soros, the son of liberal financier George Soros, and Jared Holt, the Right Wing Watch researcher who had noticed Wintrich’s appearance on Fuentes’s podcast.
Wintrich declared that the lobsters “low-energy soy boys.”
“They save all their pinching, all their snipping for social media,” Wintrich said.
Wintrich opted to cook the lobster named after Holt first.
“We’re going to introduce him to reality there, we’ll see how he takes it,” Wintrich said as he plopped the lobster in boiling water.
