The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something out of the ordinary. It took a break from its coverage of the 2024 presidential election (sample headlines: “KAMALA IS KOLLAPSING,” “KAMALA FUNDS NAZIS”) to post a three-sentence note from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft, offering some factual information about the previous presidential election.

In his brief statement, presented without any particular fanfare, Hoft writes that election officials in Georgia concluded that no widespread voter fraud took place at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020. He notes specifically that they concluded that two election workers processing votes that night, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, had not engaged “in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.” And he explains that “a legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”  

Indeed, the blog post appeared just days after the Gateway Pundit settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, who sued the outlet for promoting false claims that they had participated in mass voter fraud. (These claims, quickly debunked, were focused on video footage of the mother-daughter pair storing ballots in their appropriate carriers—conspiracy theorists had claimed that they were instead packing them into suitcases for some wicked purpose.) The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after it was announced, almost 70 articles previously published on the Gateway Pundit, and cited in the lawsuit, were no longer available, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

Even so, the site—which has promoted numerous lies and conspiracy theories in the past, and which still faces a lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, for pushing false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election—shows no signs of retreat. (The Gateway Pundit has fought this lawsuit, including by filing a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge tossed it out, concluding that the filing was in “bad faith.”) The site has continued to post with impunity, promoting on a number of occasions the conspiracy that Democrats are “openly stealing” the 2024 election with fraudulent overseas votes. A political-science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular claim has been one of the “dominant narratives” this year, as Donald Trump’s supporters seek ways to undermine faith in the democratic process.  

This is to be expected: The Gateway Pundit has been around since 2004, and it has always been a destination for those disaffected by the “establishment media.” Comment sections—on any website, let alone those that explicitly cater to the far-right fringe—have never had a reputation for sobriety and thoughtfulness. And the Gateway Pundit’s is particularly vivid. One recent commenter described a desire to see Democratic officials “stripped naked and sprayed down with a firehose like Rambo in First Blood.” Even so, data recently shared with me by the Center for Countering Digital Hate—a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online abuse, and which reports on companies that it believes allow such content to spread—show just how nasty these communities can get. Despite the fracturing of online ecosystems in recent years—namely, the rise and fall of various social platforms and the restructuring of Google Search, both of which have resulted in an overall downturn in traffic to news sites—the Gateway Pundit has remained strikingly relevant on social media, according to the CCDH. And its user base, as seen in the comments, has regularly endorsed political violence in the past few months, despite the site’s own policies forbidding such posts.

Researchers from the CCDH recently examined the comment sections beneath 120 Gateway Pundit articles about alleged election fraud published between May and September. They found that 75 percent of those sections contained “threats or calls for violence.” One comment cited in the report reads: “Beat the hell out of any Democrat you come across today just for the hell of it.”

Another: “They could show/televise the hangings or lined up and executed by firing squad and have that be a reminder not to try to overthrow our constitution.” Overall, the researchers found more than 200 comments with violent content hosted on the Gateway Pundit.

Sites like the Gateway Pundit often attempt to justify the vitriol they host on their platforms by arguing in free-speech terms. But even free-speech absolutists can understand legitimate concerns about incitements to violence. Local election officials in Georgia and Arizona have blamed the site and its comment section for election-violence threats in the past. A 2021 Reuters report found links between the site and more than 80 “menacing” messages sent to election workers. According to Reuters, after the Gateway Pundit published a fake report about ballot fraud in Wisconsin, one election official found herself identified in the comment section, along with calls for her to be killed. “She found one post especially unnerving,” the Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Szep write. “It recommended a specific bullet for killing her—a 7.62 millimeter round for an AK-47 assault rifle.”

The CCDH researchers used data from a social-media monitoring tool called Newswhip to measure social-media engagement with election-related content from Gateway Pundit and similar sites. Although Gateway Pundit was second to Breitbart as a source for election misinformation on social media overall, the researchers found that the Gateway Pundit was actually the most popular on X, where its content was shared more than 800,000 times from the start of the year through October 2.  

In response to a request for comment, John Burns, a lawyer representing Hoft and the Gateway Pundit, told me that the site relies on users reporting “offending” comments, including those expressing violence or threats. “If a few slipped through the cracks, we’ll look into it,” Burns said. He did not comment on the specifics of the CCDH report, nor the recent lawsuits against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus, which has taken a hands-off approach to policing far-right, racist content in the past. Disqus offers clients AI-powered, customizable moderation tools that allow them to filter out toxic or inappropriate comments from their site, or ban users. The CCDH report points out that violent comments are against Disqus’s own terms of service. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community rules,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Only if a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team do we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we aim to review within 24 hours and determine whether or not action is required based on our rules and terms of service.”

The Gateway Pundit is just one of a constellation of right-wing sites that offer readers an alternate reality. Emily Bell, the founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites pushed the range of what’s considered acceptable speech “quite a long way to the right,” and in some cases, away from traditional, “fact-based” media. They started to grow more popular with the rise of the social web, in which algorithmic recommendation systems and conservative influencers pushed their articles to legions of users.

The real power of these sites may come not in their broad reach, but in how they shape the opinions of a relatively small, radical subset of people. According to a paper published in Nature this summer, false and inflammatory content tends to reach “a narrow fringe” of highly motivated users. Sites like the Gateway Pundit are “influential in a very small niche,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the paper, told me over email. As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

I asked Pasha Dashtgard, the director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, what exactly the relationship is between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “That is such a million-dollar question,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” By that, he means that it’s hard for researchers and law enforcement to know when online threats will translate into armed vigilantes descending on government buildings. Social-media platforms have only gotten less transparent with their data since the previous cycle, making it more difficult for researchers to suss out what’s happening on them.

“The pathway to radicalization is not linear,” Dashtgard explained. “Certainly I would want to disabuse anyone of the idea that it’s like, you go on this website and that makes you want to kill people.” People could have other risk factors that make them more likely to commit violence, such as feeling alienated or depressed, he said. These sites just represent another potential push mechanism.

And they don’t seem to be slowing down. Three hours after Hoft posted his blog post correcting the record in the case of Freeman and Moss, he posted another statement. This one was addressed to readers. “Many of you may be aware that The Gateway Pundit was in the news this week. We settled an ongoing lawsuit against us,” the post reads in part. “Despite their best efforts, we are still standing.”

Strange things can happen in the desert. On Wednesday morning in San Tan Valley, Arizona, I watched Kari Lake, the Republican Senate candidate, come within a few feet of violating a fundamental election law.

Lake’s campaign bus had just rolled up to an early-voting site roughly an hour southeast of Phoenix. Along the path leading to the precinct’s entrance was a yellow sign that read 75 FOOT LIMIT. The post warned that electioneering beyond that threshold would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor. Lake, as is her proclivity, waltzed right up to the line with a knowing smile.

I stood nearby, watching Lake glad-hand and pose for selfies with voters, who seemed surprised to see her. I heard her ask a man if he’d voted for Donald Trump. Amid the campaigning, she found time to attack the media. When I told her I was reporting for The Atlantic, she replied, “Oh, is that that really, really, really biased outlet?” (Three reallys.) Lake appeared to be performing for the cameras, but at that stop, there were none, save for those of her own campaign. It was just me and three other journalists with notebooks. No matter: This was, after all, Kari Lake. Bombast is her brand.

Lake may be the most MAGA-fied downballot candidate in the country. (The phrase MAKE ARIZONA GRAND AGAIN is splayed across the side of her bus next to a giant image of her head.) A former local-TV news anchor, Lake first gained national attention by promoting Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about Arizona’s 2020 election results. When she ran for Arizona governor in 2022, she refused to accept her defeat. Most candidates make their name on a particular issue; election denialism, more than anything, has come to define Lake.

Once seen as Trump’s potential 2024 running mate, Lake is now battling the Democrat Ruben Gallego for the Arizona Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. The RealClearPolitics polling average suggests that she could be on the verge of another loss. Trump, meanwhile, appears poised to retake the state at the top of the ticket. Although no outcome is guaranteed, on Tuesday, in a border state plagued by division and extremism, both a Democrat and a Republican might emerge victorious.

Such a result would come as a shock to many. It might particularly rankle conspiracists and those who have spent years casting doubt on the validity of America’s electoral systems. People, in other words, such as Kari Lake.

[Read: In Kari Lake, Trumpism has found its leading lady]

That morning, she took questions from the three other reporters, but looked at me and said, “I’m not talking to your outlet.” So I instead approached one of her surrogates, Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and later as the acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, too, had antagonized The Atlantic alongside Lake just minutes before. (Just as Trump did in a recent rally, Grenell claimed without evidence that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had “made up a lot of stuff.”) But now, in a quieter setting off to the side of the scene, he was willing to speak with me.

I informed Grenell that I had planned to ask Lake a straightforward question: Would she commit to accepting next week’s election results? He scoffed at the premise.

“It’s a dumb question to be like, ‘Do you accept the results of an election?’” Grenell told me. He said that “of course” she would accept the outcome if it were a free and fair election. “Let me ask you this question,” he said. “Do you think there’s no fraud in the election? Zero fraud?”

Lake saw me speaking with Grenell, and as she was heading back to her bus, she and I made eye contact. The crowd was smaller now, and Lake was chatting in a slightly dialed-down register. Professional wrestlers have a term to describe the performative antagonization of an opponent: kayfabe. Based on what I had seen of Lake prior to that moment, though, I didn’t think she ever snapped out of her combative persona when dealing with the media. As we briefly spoke one-on-one, Lake wasn’t exactly friendly, but she was at least willing to let me finish a sentence. I asked her if she’d accept the election results.

“A legally run election? Yes, absolutely,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

But how do you define that?

Suddenly her switch flipped. With a bright smile and sarcasm in her voice, Lake said, “I will accept the results of the election, absolutely!” Then she swiftly got back on the bus.

[George Packer: What will become of American civilization?]

Later that afternoon, I drove to a strip mall in Maryvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in metro Phoenix, to meet Gallego, Lake’s challenger. Between a barber shop and a check-cashing place, Arizona Democrats had set up a bustling field office. Inside the room, papel picado banners hung from the drop ceiling, the walls were plastered with posters—Latinos Con Harriz Walz, Democratas Protegen El Aborto—and, on the far side of the room, someone had handwritten a slew of motivational quotes (“If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” — Roberto Clemente). When I turned around, I spotted Gallego chatting with that day’s volunteers. He was dressed casually in a short-sleeve button-down and jeans, and he wasn’t surrounded by a large entourage, as Lake had been. He and I found a quiet corner, and I asked him the same question I had asked Lake: Would he commit to accepting the election results? He didn’t hesitate.

“I trust the Arizona election system. I trust the Republicans and Democrats that have been running the state, and I will trust the results of the election, win or lose,” Gallego said.

Right now, the 44-year-old is in a rare position: He knows he stands a chance of winning over Lake-wary Republicans. He’s a Democrat, but, as a former Marine who has spoken out on culture-war issues, such as against the use of Latinx, he may appeal to some centrists and independents as well. Above all, he’s positioned to woo some of the most sought-after persuadable voters in the region: Latinos. He sometimes tells a story about how he grew up sleeping on the floor and didn’t have a bed until he got to college. On the stump, he often delivers remarks in both Spanish and English.

What Gallego is not doing is running a straight Democratic-party-line campaign. When I asked him how he felt about Joe Biden’s comments that Trump supporters are “garbage,” he didn’t rush to unequivocally defend the president. “No matter what, we shouldn’t be castigating people for how they vote,” he said. I also asked him if he anticipated civil unrest next week, given the chaos that had unfolded in Arizona in previous elections. “I really have faith in the voters of Arizona—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—that they’re going to go vote, and they’re going to keep it civil,” Gallego said. “I hope that the politicians would actually keep it civil and not try to bring election denialism into it, like Kari Lake has. That’s where the danger has happened.”

Gallego had stopped by that office to rev up volunteers for a canvassing operation. Joining him was Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords. That afternoon, I asked Kelly what sort of challenges he and his fellow Arizona Democrats were anticipating after Election Day, and whether he believed that Lake (and Trump, for that matter) would accept the election’s outcome. “They should,” Kelly said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t expect their behavior to be much different than it was in the 2020 and 2022 election, though. I mean, I have no reason to expect that. But you know, you can always dream that maybe they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Kari Lake certainly should have learned her lesson.”

Former president's comments about Liz Cheney described as 'deeply troubling'.

Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised around violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

[David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message]

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.