‘All news is fake news’

Mr. Wintrich, whose previous job was with a New York advertising firm, has yet to ask a question in a White House briefing. But he’s already scored another kind of journalistic coup: being confronted by another journalist.

“They hate blacks, Jews, Hispanics,” Fox News Radio’s Jon Decker reportedly called out to other correspondents when Mr. Wintrich first entered the press room in March.

Mr. Decker later characterized the encounter as a “straightforward and direct” conversation, but Mr. Wintrich wrote that Mr. Decker “grabbed my arm” and began “screaming [that] Gateway Pundit is a white supremacist publication.”

The clash reflected a broader conflict involving the White House, traditional media and upstart right-wing publications like Breitbart News and the Daily Caller. When Mr. Wintrich gained White House credentials in February, The New York Times reported “concerns that the Trump administration, which has called the news media ‘the opposition party,’ is favoring outlets more sympathetic to its views.”

For his part, Mr. Wintrich told the Times “We will be doing a little trolling of the media,” referring to the online practice of goading opponents into lashing out and making fools of themselves.

He wears his allegiance on his sleeve, penning stories like “Trump Administration: One of the Most Transparent in US History, Open to Media,” which countered media grumbling with reminders of secretive practices by President Barack Obama.

“People can trust what I write … understanding there’s a bias behind it,” he said. That, he said, was “far more truthful than what the left does, where they say, ‘We’re completely unbiased.’ ”

“All news is fake news, but there are facts buried in it,” he said. “I’m giving facts, and the facts will be surrounded by color, the same as The New York Times or CNN.”

St. Louis-based Gateway Pundit is a particularly colorful publication, one that often amplifies social-media rumors and brings them to the attention of a wider audience.

Mr. Hoft said the site drew 1 million daily pageviews at the 2016 campaign’s peak. But Gateway has been condemned for reporting baseless rumors, including stories questioning Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s health, and amplifying a Twitter claim that liberal billionaire George Soros had paid to bus protesters to Austin, Texas. More recently, the site wrongly identified an Asian-American journalist it accused of photographing Secretary of State Rex Tilleron’s notes: she was soon deluged with angry messages.

Mr. Hoft ascribed errors to the speed with which the site reported news. “I’d stack up our record to that of the Washington Post,” he said.

Mr. Wintrich has largely avoided such controversies. But few of his roughly 100 Gateway Pundit posts since January have drawn on his White House access: Policy issues, like a recent post on internet policy, “get minimal engagement,” he said.

Many posts rely on material reported elsewhere. And often, Mr. Wintrich himself is the story.

“I consider some of what I’m doing to be performance art,” he said, adding that “quote-unquote serious journalists are doing performance art themselves, but they don’t understand that.”

Angelo Carusone, president of liberal media-criticism outlet Media Matters for America, said Mr. Wintrich “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.”

‘There’s no stopping Lucian’

The son of an artist and a designfirm owner, Mr. Wintrich grew up in Squirrel Hill, though in media profiles he sometimes identifies himself as hailing from “the inner city of Pittsburgh.” (“Some friends in Pittsburgh called me out on that,” he said.)

“His creativity was pretty boundless,” recalled his mother, Rebecca Einhorn. Lucian began making art at age 2, and launched a crowdsourced student news site in fifth grade. In high school he cohosted a podcast called “Acorns and Merlot,” which a 2007 Post-Gazette story described as “sometimes irreverent or crude [but] often hilarious.”

Mr. Wintrich later interned with Charlie Humphrey, then the head of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The two produced a short film celebrating Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary: In it, Mr. Wintrich sings and dances comedically, often with children he recruited on location in Oakland and Downtown.

“That playful quality is very much how he is,” said Mr. Humphrey. “He’s a bit of a prankster.”

By age 18, Mr. Wintrich also was creating a public persona, legally changing his name from Lucian Einhorn to Lucian Baxter Wintrich IV. He said he hoped the new name would shield relatives from controversies while “show[ing] up higher on Google search results.”

(While Wintrich is a family name, there is no Lucian Baxter Wintrich III. “Lucian Wintrich” is “humorously pretentious-sounding,” he said, so he added a middle name and suffix to “make it all the funnier.”)

“It was a little puzzling,” said his mother of the name change. “But there’s no stopping Lucian. He wasn’t a kid who just fell in place.”

Conflicts with authority meant “Lucian probably attended 10 different schools in Pittsburgh before he went off to Bard” College, a prestigious liberal-arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. “I drove home thinking, ‘I bet I’ll have to go back and pick him up in two weeks.’ ”

Mr. Wintrich did graduate, composing a senior project that helped foreshadow his career: “Electronic Democracy and Electronic Propaganda: The New Media as a Political Tool.” But he bridled against a campus where he felt political correctness short-circuited debate.

“I think that regressive, leftist way of thinking is bad for the arts and bad for culture,” he said. He responded in part by launching an online journal that exercised no editorial control on submissions.

Even in grade school, his mother said, “He would not edit out someone else’s comments. He didn’t think those controls should be there.”

“I got in a bunch of trouble for that,” Mr. Wintrich said.

Some “Acorns and Merlot” episodes also were pulled “because of

Mr. Wintrich’s “Twinks for Trump” photo essay marked the end of one career, and the beginning of another.

He exhibited the photos during Cleveland’s Republican National Convention and in a New York exhibit he curated. The latter show also featured Milo Yiannopoulos, a friend and fellow gay pro-Trump provocateur who bathed in pig’s blood — a gesture apparently intended to decry terrorism by Islamic extremists.

The photos combined “stereotypes about young gay men [and] conservatives,” Mr. Wintrich told NBC News, in hopes of “getting people to laugh [and] think about things a little differently.”

Mr. Wintrich is “bringing some charm and spunk to everything,” said Cassandra Fairbanks, another activist turned pro-Trump online journalist. “We have a severe lack of right-wing artists,” and he and Mr. Yiannopoulos were “voices that aren’t the typical stuffy Republicans.”

“I don’t think these men do us any favors,” countered Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund head Aisha C. Moodie-Mills, whose organization backs LGBT candidates. Mr. Trump’s administration, she said, had rolled back efforts to protect transgender students in school, “which puts those students at risk.” It also hadn’t declared June as national LGBT Pride month.

Mr. Wintrich called such declarations “empty gestures” and said he opposed the transgender policy as an infringement on state’s rights. And he said Mr. Trump, who sounded a more tolerant note than other 2016 Republican contenders, “went to Elton John’s wedding. That’s more than most conservatives would do.”

But Mr. Wintrich said supporting Mr. Trump cost him friends and his job with New York advertising firm Anomaly. The company denies his politics played a role, but Breitbart News, for one, publicized news of Mr. Wintrich’s firing and ascribed it to “being the ‘wrong kind of gay.’ ”

“There are some things he writes that I don’t appreciate,” Mr. Wintrich’s mother said. But “I'm proud of him because he has the courage to voice his opinion … even if it means losing your job.”

Still, Mr. Wintrich met his future boss, Mr. Hoft, at the Cleveland show, which raised his profile on the right.

Conservative online media can be “a mini star system … that promotes personalities” whose confrontations with the left go viral, said Will Sommer, whose newsletter Right Richter tracks conservative media.

“There’s a stunt aspect” to gaining notoriety, Mr. Sommer said. “And Lucian seems like someone who is really into feuds.”

A case in point: Heat Street. Weeks after its podcast mocked Mr. Wintrich, owner Dow Jones announced the site was closing after failing to find a buyer. The company also deleted the podcast, which a spokesperson said “fell far short of our standards.”

Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose life seems a testament to a belief in no-holds-barred online expression, Mr. Wintrich voiced little sympathy.

“You can’t survive on the internet if you take offense at everything you see,” he said. But Heat Street had tried to use trolling tactics to get him fired. “And if I’m at war, I’ll use anything on the table.”