[35] Founded in 2004 by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit expanded from a one-person enterprise into a multi-employee operation, supported primarily by advertising revenue.

[43] The Gateway Pundit was founded prior to the 2004 United States presidential election,[44] according to its founder, Jim Hoft, to "speak the truth" and to "expose the wickedness of the left".

[49][50] A study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that The Gateway Pundit earned up to $1.1 million in Google Ad revenue between November 2020 and July 2021.

[56] In February 2017, Hoft and The Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich, a 28-year-old writer and artist, were granted White House press credentials by the Trump administration.

[57] On August 14, 2020, after President Trump called on invited Gateway Pundit reporter Alicia Powe for a question at his televised White House press briefing, the White House Correspondents' Association president told the Washington Examiner that including Powe as a guest was an "outrageous" violation of the group's social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[63] In August 2019, journalism professors Erik P. Bucy and John E. Newhagen observed that "the most aggressive fake news sites and associated YouTube channels, such as InfoWars, The Gateway Pundit, and The Daily Stormer, are routinely sued by victims of these published reports for libel and defamation.

[64] In November 2019, the Wikipedia community deprecated The Gateway Pundit as an untrustworthy source of information,[65][66] due to it "publishing hoax articles and reporting conspiracy theories as fact".

"[68][70] Regarding voter fraud, The Gateway Pundit published an unsubstantiated report during the 2016 presidential election from the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, claiming that Republicans had accused Broward County, Florida officials of tampering with mail-in ballots.

[72] Shortly after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in which a person drove a vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one, The Gateway Pundit falsely identified a young man from Michigan as the driver.

[79][80] Later that month, The Gateway Pundit was one of a number of far-right websites that pushed the claim that at least one of the teenage survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was a deep state pawn,[81] alleging that David Hogg's gun control activism was being coached by his retired FBI agent father.

[82] In July 2018, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that a man arrested with bomb-making equipment and illegal weapons had been a "leftist antifa terrorist".

"[85][86][87] In December 2020, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's brother "Ron" worked for a Chinese tech firm.

[90] Analysis conducted in 2022 by researchers with the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group found The Gateway Pundit was the second-most prolific purveyor of election misinformation on Twitter during the late months of 2020.

"[95] In December 2021, two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea' ArShaye Moss, sued The Gateway Pundit for defamation, alleging that the site and its owners had knowingly published false stories about them that "instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety".

[34][96] In response, the website doubled down on its false claims with an article titled "Ruby Freeman and Daughter Sue Gateway Pundit for Posting Video of Her Shoving Ballots Through Voting Machines Numerous Times – PLEASE HELP US Fight This Latest Lawsuit".

[102] In October 2024, the parties reached a settlement; the terms were not disclosed, but the Associated Press reported that nearly 70 articles were no longer available on the Gateway Pundit website after they had been included in the lawsuit as being defamatory.

In October 2024, the following "Note from the Editor: Legal Update" was posted to the site:Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020.

The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea 'Shaye' Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.

[10] In February 2021, a Gateway Pundit article claimed without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had "illegally inflated the COVID fatality number by at least 1,600 percent".

[105] In August 2021, the British anti-disinformation organization Logically found that 30% of referral traffic to OpenVAERS, a website which promotes misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, came from The Gateway Pundit.

[34][107] In December 2017, The Gateway Pundit published a Reddit post as evidence that Democratic activists were committing voter fraud in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election.

[109] In April 2018, The Gateway Pundit falsely claimed in a headline that two prominent African-American conservative video bloggers – Diamond and Silk – had been censored by Facebook.

[111] The article was cited by radio host Larry Elder and others in June 2019 after Harris confronted then-presidential candidate Joe Biden over his opposition to busing during the first Democratic presidential debate.

[112] In September 2018, after psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford alleged that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when they were teenagers, The Gateway Pundit published an article erroneously claiming that Kavanaugh's mother, a district court judge in Maryland, had once ruled in a foreclosure case against Dr. Ford's parents, creating what The Gateway Pundit called "bad blood" between the two families.

[123] Notable writers for The Gateway Pundit, past and present, include Michael Strickland (2015–2016), Lucian Wintrich (2017–2018), Cassandra Fairbanks (2017–present), and Jacob Wohl (2018).