The new Drudge
Since the site’s inception in May, Trump and some of his supporters have pointed to Revolver News as an alternative to The Drudge Report, the conservative news aggregation giant whose tone toward the president has shifted to negative and antagonistic since 2019.
Revolver articles flattering to Trump have been shared directly by allies of the White House, and even the president, for months. In September, Trump tweeted an endorsement of Revolver.
“Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 14. “They like REVOLVER and others!”
Revolver News does not disclose on its website who is behind its operations or any corporate affiliations, but Darren Beattie, a former speechwriter for Trump who was fired in 2018 for speaking at an event alongside white nationalists, has claimed authorship of some of the posts on the website. Most articles do not have bylines, and the few names that are on articles appear to be aliases of people that do not appear elsewhere on the internet and could not be identified with public records searches.
In 2019, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a loyal Trump ally, hired Beattie as a speechwriter. Gaetz’s chief of staff, Jillian Lane Wyant, told NBC News on Wednesday that Beattie was no longer with Gaetz’s office. Campaign finance reports show Beattie was on the payroll of Gaetz’s re-election campaign and was paid $10,000 in June.
Beattie declined to comment on his role at Revolver News or the site’s ownership.
Attempts to identify Revolver’s ownership were unsuccessful, but the website shares an internet protocol address (a numerical label given to any computer connected to the internet) with only nine other websites, according to website details that are publicly available. Those websites make up “The Mix,” which describes itself as a “unified publishing network” mostly covering pro wrestling and mixed martial arts.
The Mix is owned by Intermarkets, a digital media and advertising company. Until 2019, Intermarkets was the exclusive advertising representative for The Drudge Report, one of the most visited news sites on the internet.
Revolver, created in May, is now the only politics aggregator hosted on The Mix’s IP address.
Revolver and The Mix sites share a Texas-based web service provider, Precision Creations. Joshua Wychopen, president of Precision Creations, declined to comment on the site’s owner, citing client privacy concerns. Intermarkets denied any relationship with Revolver. Shauna Schatz, Intermarkets’ vice president of media, said that she was unaware of who owned Revolver.
The online news watchdog Newsguard said in a report that Revolver “severely violates basic journalistic standards” and publishes conspiracy theories and misinformation about Covid-19.
On Oct. 15, Revolver published an article that suggested some of the unfounded allegations about Hunter Biden under the byline of Moxie Russo, a name that did not appear elsewhere on the internet based on various web searches and could not be identified in public records. While Beattie declined to comment on whether he had written the Oct. 15 article or subsequent ones from Revolver News detailing the baseless child abuse accusations, but he has promoted the articles from his personal Twitter account.
Into the mainstream
Shortly thereafter, some conservative media figures and politicians seized on the baseless claims.
Chanel Rion, a correspondent for the conservative cable media outlet One America News Network, claimed in a tweet that she had seen content from the hard drive. In the days following, Lauren Witzke, a QAnon-supporting Senate candidate in Delaware, tweeted the child abuse allegations. InfoWars host Alex Jones amplified similar unfounded claims about Hunter Biden, one version of which has been viewed over 3 million times on InfoWars’ video hosting site.
By the weekend, more mainstream conservative media personalities had seized on the child abuse rumors. On Saturday, Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo suggested in an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., that the FBI may be investigating the claims. Bartiromo did not directly refer to Revolver News but discussed details unique to the Revolver News article. Johnson also echoed the suggestion. On Sunday, Wayne Allen Root, a national radio host, echoed some of the claims, receiving more than 25,000 retweets in two hours.
On Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. repeated the accusations during a Fox News appearance.
The claims have also spread far and wide on Facebook, especially on public pages and groups dedicated to the QAnon-linked SaveTheChildren conspiracy theory movement, according to posts viewed by NBC News, using a list maintained by Junkipedia, an organization that monitors misinformation.
Giuliani, who said he has been in possession of the laptop for months, made no similar claims until last week. On Oct. 14, Giuliani said he would start revealing evidence of child abuse over “the next five days” related to the claims but he has yet to do so.
Subsequent appearances by Giuliani on the conservative cable channel Newsmax, including one on Tuesday in which he claimed to have handed over Hunter Biden’s hard drive to the Delaware State Police, have garnered millions of views across online platforms.
Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the absence of evidence, lurid descriptions of Hunter Biden’s allegedly criminal activity were pushed without proof by anonymous users on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan.
While the claims have not been repeated by any mainstream media outlets, that does not mean that they have not had their intended effect. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the goal of the rumors isn’t necessarily to make people believe the claims, but to confuse and disillusion voters into distrusting any piece of information and, in turn, keep them from wanting to vote at all.
“All ‘flooding the zone with s–t’ does is just make reasonable people not want to engage,” said Phillips. “So then the screamers and the people on the far, far, far-right take over the discourse, and then that means no one can have a discourse.”
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