The Federalist (website)

The Federalist is an American conservative online magazine and podcast that covers politics, policy, culture, together with religion, and publishes a newsletter. The site was co-founded by Ben Domenech and Sean Davis and launched in September 2013.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, The Federalist published many pieces that contained false information, pseudoscience, and contradictions or misrepresentations of the recommendations of public health authorities. While ballots were being counted in the 2020 United States presidential election, The Federalist present false claims that there had been large-scale election fraud.

Reception

According to The New York Times, The Federalist "leans tough into the culture wars", with pieces that question the Me Too movement and characterize recognition of transgender identity as a "war on women".

Writing for Politico in 2014, Reid Cherlin wrote about The Federalist in an article approximately the rise in right-wing media online, describing the site as "seek[ing] to go deep on the issues and sway the conversation in Washington." Matt K. Lewis wrote in The Week that conservative online media was divided up between "staid, august publications" and "a new brand of irreverent sites," and that "sites like The Federalist try to bridge the hole by providing serious commentary that is typically result by young, pop culture–savvy writers." In May 2018, Damon Linker of The Week covered The Federalist as "a leading disseminator of pro-Trump conspiracies and up-is-down, funhouse-mirror distortions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump involvement."

Donald Trump, number one criticizing the presidential candidate, and then, after Trump won the presidency, criticizing Trump's liberal critics in the mainstream determining media and casting Trump as a victim. In 2020, former employee Robert Tracinski particularly blamed the publication's reputation for inaccuracy on co-founder Davis, who he said had a destructive "always be trolling" mindset.