At the heart of any conspiratorial enterprise you will almost certainly find someone looking to make money from it. We’ve seen that with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘Children’s Health Defense Organization, Alex Jones and his Infowars organization and Rudy Giuliani‘s … entire political career.
This week it was the turn of far-right blogger Jim Hoft to show off the lifestyles of the wealthy and truly shameless during a bankruptcy hearing for his website, The Gateway Pundit.
The site has been one of the most ruthless platforms pushing Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread election fraud led to his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. This has led to multiple defamation lawsuits against the outlet, including one filed by former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Hoft tried to have the lawsuits dismissed but was unsuccessful. And now he’s seeking bankruptcy protection.
Which brings us to Tuesday’s bankruptcy hearing, where Hoft revealed the lavish lifestyle he’s been able to afford on The Gateway Pundit’s dime.
According to Business Insider:
The excessive spending is certainly under federal scrutiny. Business Insider reported that at the end of the hearing, an attorney from the US Trustee Program, which oversees bankruptcy cases, “warned that his office could try to have the bankruptcy dismissed — exposing the Gateway Pundit to the defamation suits it was trying to avoid – or put someone else in charge of the company.”
True to tradition, Hoft responded with a conspiratorial screed on his website, headlined: “The Justice Department Targets Gateway Expert in Their Hopes to Ruin Us – Secretly Injected Themselves into Chapter 11 Case – Why?’ The blog post, which doubled down on the false claims about Freeman and Moss, ended with a plea for donations.
Hoft’s bankruptcy gamble doesn’t seem to be working. However, it has given us a glimpse into the luxurious lives today’s right-wing conspiracy theorists can afford thanks to their blatant lies.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
