Violent Rhetoric Against Public Officials Seen in Comments on Hyperpartisan News Site Ahead of 2026 Midterms

Readers of a hyperpartisan news blog have shared violent and threatening comments about public officials in the United States ahead of 2026 midterm elections, a new analysis from Open Measures has found.

Public officials in the US have faced unprecedented amounts of threats, hate, and harassment in recent years, raising safety concerns and driving high turnover in some sectors of public service. Attacks have targeted both elected officials and nonpartisan government employees at the federal, state, and local level – imposing additional strains on democratic processes, like voting.

Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Open Measures reviewed an often-overlooked threat surface where threats against public officials routinely appear: comment sections on hyperpartisan news blogs. For our analysis, we looked at our collections for Disqus, a third-party platform used by many of the internet’s highest-trafficked publications to allow users to post comments on their sites’ content.

Our Approach

Open Measures created two search queries to identify comments containing violent and threatening rhetoric targeting public officials on Disqus-enabled sites over the last month, between Aug. 22 and Sept. 22, 2026. The first included keywords related to titles of government positions, including terms like “senator”, “council,” and their variations. The second included terms related to violence, like “execute” and “kill,” among others. After separately reviewing the results of these queries, we combined them into a third query that would identify posts that contained at least one term from each.

While keyword-based search methods are useful for identifying and monitoring violent rhetoric, even the most carefully designed queries are likely to surface irrelevant posts and omit others that could be of interest. This limitation is relevant to the analysis of contemporary political discourse, as hyperbolic and aggressive online rhetoric about political figures is relatively widespread online and does not always reflecting immediate or specific threats to their safety. As such, a thorough manual review of results and the contexts they appear in is necessary to confidently arrive at broader conclusions.

Open Measures’ platform includes tools to streamline the manual review necessary to arrive at confident qualitative analysis; Discover enables researchers to filter and review individual posts identified by their search queries, while Research Assistant generates reports and insights from large volumes of data, and can be configured to flag posts that contain threatening language for closer inspection. We used both tools to help us assess the results surfaced by our queries, and to identify individual posts and threads for closer review.

As such, the analysis that follows should be understood as a partial snapshot of a larger threat environment targeting public officials, not a conclusive assessment of all concerning material that has appeared in the comment sections of Disqus-enabled sites.

High Volumes of Concerning Comments Identified on Hyperpartisan 'Junk News' Site

When reviewing the results of our queries, we observed a particularly high density of violent and threatening rhetoric among Disqus comments shared on The Gateway Pundit, so we narrowed the scope of our analysis to more closely examine activity associated with the site.

The Gateway Pundit is a political news blog that fact-checking organizations have repeatedly highlighted as a promoter of “junk news” and conspiracy theories. The site is known for its unabashed political bias toward President Donald Trump, routinely publishing flattering articles about him and other figures in or aligned with his administration and sharply criticizing others deemed to be political opponents. The outlet also presents stories in ways known to reinforce an audience’s prejudices against perceived out-groups, including racial and religious minorities, mainstream news media figures, left-wing activists, and public officials.

The outlet wields significant influence in the broader pro-Trump digital media ecosystem and has established itself as a vital platform for right-wing election denialist movements. Our prior research has found that Gateway Pundit articles are consistently among the most shared links on platforms dominated by pro-Trump userbases, like Truth Social and Gab, and that content published by the site often drives hostile narratives as they develop in those communities.

Of all Disqus-enabled sites in Open Measures’ platform, The Gateway Pundit is among those that see the highest number of comments on its content. Using a wildcard search -- a broad search not filtered by any specific keyword -- to assess all Disqus comments in our platform that were posted during our analysis period, we saw The Gateway Pundit hosted the 11th most-active Disqus comments section between Aug. 22 and Sept. 22. During that month-long period, articles on the site saw more than 620,000 comments.

Caption: An Activity chart shows the 15 Disqus-enabled sites that saw the highest number of comments between Aug. 22 and Sept. 22, 2026. The Gateway Pundit ranked 11th in comment activity during this period, with its readership sharing nearly 620,000 posts.

Gateway Pundit Articles Criticizing Public Officials Frequently Elicit Comments Containing Violent Rhetoric

The Gateway Pundit’s coverage regularly takes aim at public officials, posting articles with headlines and images intended to emphasize their subjects’ alleged corruption. Stories on the site have previously directed readers' anger toward both high-profile figures, like members of Congress, and otherwise obscure local officials, like county clerks, school board members, sheriffs, and judges, among others.

We found that these stories reliably elicited outrage from the site’s commenters, forming a call-and-response dynamic evident across dozens of Gateway Pundit articles we reviewed. Gateway Pundit commenters regularly used hyperbolic and hostile language when talking about public officials, and some openly fantasized about seeing those individuals physically harmed.

For example, Gateway Pundit ran a story on Sept. 18 that aggregated credulous claims about a federal judge who ruled against the Trump Administration in court, alleging he was linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Alongside hundreds of reader comments disparaging the judge, including many that likened him to a Nazi, some Gateway Pundit commenters fantasized about the judge’s death and called for his execution.

“Impeach convict and hang as an enemy agent,” one commenter wrote.

Another posted: “Why is [the judge] still breathing?”

“I could watch him dance at the end of a rope every day for a year and still not get tired of watching him kick,” another commenter wrote.

One commenter posted an animated image depicting a noose swinging in the wind, captioned: “Citizen Vigilantes time to act. it is the only way!”

Caption: A Disqus comment on a Sept. 18 article published by The Gateway Pundit that boosted claims that a federal judge was linked to the Chinese Communist Party includes an animated image of a noose and remarks that citizen vigilantism “is the only way.”

As we reviewed similar comments that appeared on Gateway Pundit articles over the last month, we saw commenters shared similarly violent fantasies about other public officials featured in the site’s articles: a county sheriff in South Carolina, city government leaders in Seattle, congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, a labor union representing employees at a federal agency, and several judges across the country.

Open Measures did not observe any comments during our analysis where a user expressed specific plans to physically harm a subject of Gateway Pundit’s coverage, but we did encounter comments from users who expressed their hopes that others would do so. For example, one comment on a Sept. 10 article about federal judges who blocked the Trump Administration’s attempts to reinstate new rules around mail-in voting read:

These judges are the tyrants and despots that founding fathers warned us about. They’re the reason why we have a second amendment. At some point the American people, including the cowards in this comment section, are going to have to grow a collective set of nuts and rise up and overthrow this freezing is federal judiciary in tyrannical United States government by any means necessary.

Other comments in this vein fantasized about an eventual “revolution” and anticipated the arrival of a second US Civil War.

Our Take

Our research found that Gateway Pundit articles negatively depicting public officials regularly drew strong responses from the site’s readers, including comments that fantasized about and called for violence against the individuals featured on the site.

The violent rhetoric we observed Gateway Pundit readers using toward public officials provides a clear view of the sorts of harassment and intimidation threats that public officials are facing around 2026 US midterm elections. While we did not identify comments during our analysis that conveyed immediate and actionable threats to the physical safety of the individuals that they were directed toward, extreme political rhetoric has contributed to countless acts of real-world violence.

Comment sections on inflammatory political news sites like The Gateway Pundit are often overlooked as places where serious threats can appear online, and our findings underscore the importance of adding them to the sources researchers and security professionals already monitor. Open Measures will continue to track threats surrounding this year’s midterm elections.