Lucian Wintrich

Wintrich was born Lucian Baxter Einhorn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood.[10] His mother is a painter and experimental filmmaker, and his father owns a design firm.[11] Wintrich attended the experimental prep school Fanny Edel Falk Laboratory School and then Taylor Allderdice High School.[12] Wintrich received a bachelor of arts from Bard College, where he majored in political science.[13] His graduate thesis at Bard was titled "Electronic Democracy and Electronic Propaganda: The New Media as a Political Tool."[10]

At the age of 18, Wintrich legally changed his name to Lucian Baxter Wintrich IV. This change included both the reversion to a historic family surname and the addition of a fictitious suffix, which Wintrich told a reporter he selected to "make it all the funnier".[10]

The day before Donald Trump's inauguration, Wintrich was named the inaugural White House correspondent for St. Louis-based publication Gateway Pundit.[14][15][16][17][18] Despite having no formal journalism experience, Wintrich was granted White House briefing credentials by the incoming administration.[14][15][16][17][18]

Wintrich described his role as twofold: "writing about dry policy stuff" and "trolling the media."[19] He also referred to it as "performance art".[11]

Much of Wintrich's time as a White House correspondent was spent deriding the media itself rather than reporting on the administration. He spawned the "#FireColbert" movement, wherein he characterized the night show host's joke involving Trump and Vladimir Putin in a gay relationship as a "disgusting 12-minute homophobic rant."[20][21]

In Washington, Wintrich served as the Gateway Pundit’s public face. The president of Media Matters remarked that "he is not really doing what a White House correspondent does, but he wasn't supposed to. They're looking for that moment when they get a viral response."[22] Although initially considered to be aligned with the alt-right movement, he later disavowed it, saying that white supremacist Richard Spencer had ruined the term.[23][24][25]

On August 10, 2018, Right Wing Watch published an account of Wintrich's appearance on a podcast hosted by Nick Fuentes, who has been described as a white nationalist.[2][26][27] On the same day, The Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft announced via Twitter that Wintrich had left the organization several weeks earlier.[28]

On March 10, 2017, Wintrich was confronted by a fellow White House correspondent, Jon Decker of Fox News in the White House Briefing Room,[29][30] who described Wintrich as white supremacist. Wintrich in turn called Decker a "Nazi homophobe".[31] After the briefing, April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks approached Wintrich with a live camera and asked if he was a racist. Ben Jacobs of The Guardian described Wintrich engaging with Ryan as him "holding his own briefing because nothing matters."[32]

On November 28, 2017, Wintrich was arrested after an altercation involving a heckler at a speech he gave at the University of Connecticut titled "It's OK to Be White".[33][34] He was initially charged with breach of peace.[35][36] The charges against Wintrich were later dropped.[37][38]

In February 2018, Wintrich tweeted the false conspiracy theory that survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were "trained actors who were recruited by [George] Soros-linked organizations as spokespeople after a crisis."[39]