Lucian Baxter Wintrich IV is an American writer, speaker, and the former White House correspondent for the far-right news and opinion site The Gateway Pundit. He was among the first members of the White House Press Corps to be openly gay and one of the youngest.
Wintrich gained public notice from his pro-Donald Trump presidential candidacy series "Twinks4Trump", photographs of mostly shirtless gay twinks sporting "Make America Great Again" baseball caps. According to David Freedlander of The Daily Beast, Wintrich was also organizer of a "performance art show" which Wintrich billed as "the first pro-Trump art show in the nation's history". Wintrich has collaborated with Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart News. Although he was initially considered to be aligned with the alt-right movement, he later disavowed it, saying that Richard Spencer ruined the term. The day before Donald Trump's inauguration, Wintrich was named as the inaugural White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, which was newly granted White House briefing credentials by the incoming administration.
Controversies
On February 15, 2017, Wintrich was scheduled to speak to the College Republicans at New York University, but the talk was postponed over security concerns. On March 23, 2017, he eventually spoke to the NYU College Republicans. On March 10, 2017, Wintrich was confronted by a fellow White House correspondent, Jon Decker of Fox News in the White House Briefing Room, who loudly accused Wintrich of being a white supremacist. After the briefing, Wintrich was approached by April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, who filmed him answering questions about whether or not he was a racist. Ben Jacobs of The Guardian described Wintrich engaging with Ryan as him "holding his own briefing because nothing matters." On November 28, 2017, Wintrich was arrested after an altercation in which he grabbed a woman who had snatched his papers from the speaker's lectern he was using during a talk at the University of Connecticut entitled "It's OK to Be White". He was charged with breach of peace. In December 2017, the charges against Wintrich were dropped and the woman who took the papers was charged with attempted sixth-degree larceny and disorderly conduct. She stated through her attorney that she took Wintrich's speech as a form of protest. The charges against her were later dropped after she agreed to a one year campus ban and a $500 donation to the university. In February 2018, Wintrich tweeted the conspiracy theory that some survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, who had spoken to the media about gun control in the wake of the tragedy, were "trained actors who were recruited by Soros-linked organizations as spokespeople after a crisis." The tweet was liked by Donald Trump Jr. but was much criticized by others, including the shooting survivor David Hogg, whom Wintrich had accused of being "heavily coached" for interviews. On August 10, 2018, Right Wing Watch published an account of Wintrich's appearance on a podcast hosted by Nick Fuentes who has frequently been described as a White Nationalist. According RWW During the podcast, Wintrich and Fuentes discussed among other topics, immigration, anti-white racism, and the alleged intellectual inferiority of certain ethnic groups. Coincidentally same day, The Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft announced via Twitter that Wintrich had left the organization several weeks earlier. Later Wintrich appeared in a Periscope livestream where he conversed with admirers as he prepared to boil two lobsters; one of which he named for the Right Wing Watch reporter, Jared Holt, who had described his appearance on Fuentes's program. In March 2020, during the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic, Wintrich held a "coronavirus potluck," where the point was to spread the virus and build immunity. Wintrich himself said that the potluck was inspired by chickenpox parties. Around twenty people attended the potluck in his New York city apartment.
