At the center of every conspiratorial enterprise, you’re almost certain to find someone using it to make money. We’ve seen that with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense organization, Alex Jones and his Infowars organization and Rudy Giuliani’s … entire political career.
This week, it was far-right blogger Jim Hoft’s turn to flaunt the lifestyles of the rich and truly shameless at a bankruptcy hearing for his website, The Gateway Pundit.
This week, it was far-right blogger Jim Hoft’s turn to flaunt the lifestyles of the rich and truly shameless at a bankruptcy hearing for his website, The Gateway Pundit.
The site has been one of the most relentless platforms pushing Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread election fraud led to his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. Doing so has spurred multiple defamation lawsuits against the outlet, including one filed by former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Hoft has tried, and failed, to have the suits dismissed. And now he’s seeking bankruptcy protection.
That’s how we arrived at Tuesday’s bankruptcy hearing, at which Hoft revealed the lavish lifestyle he’s been able to afford on The Gateway Pundit’s dime.
According to Business Insider:
Tuesday’s bankruptcy hearing shed some light on how Jim Hoft managed the company’s finances. He used the company to give himself an $800,000 loan to purchase a condo in 2021 in Jensen Beach, Florida, he said. To date, none of the loan has been repaid, according to a recent filing, which also lists the condo as the company headquarters.
The company also owns a 2021 Porsche Cayenne worth about $54,000, according to a recent filing. Hoft said he has used it as a “company car” when he’s in St. Louis, where he is originally from and still spends a portion of the year.
That is all on top of a salary of $17,000 a month that Hoft pays himself, he said at the hearing.
The lavish expenses are certainly under federal scrutiny. Business Insider reported that at the end of the hearing, a lawyer for the U.S. Trustee Program, which oversees bankruptcy cases, “warned that his office may seek to have the bankruptcy dismissed — exposing the Gateway Pundit to the defamation lawsuits it was trying to avoid — or put someone else in charge of the company.”
The lavish expenses are certainly under federal scrutiny.
True to form, Hoft responded with a conspiratorial screed on his website, headlined “The Department of Justice Is Targeting The Gateway Pundit in Their Hopes to Ruin Us — Secretly Injected Itself in Chapter 11 Case – Why?” The blog post, which doubled down on false claims about Freeman and Moss, ended with a plea for donations.
Hoft’s bankruptcy gambit doesn’t seem to be working. It has, however, given us a window into the luxurious lives that today’s right-wing conspiracy theorists are able to afford on the backs of their shameless lies.