Just who is Michael Baxter of Real Raw News?

In response to: Site author “Michael Baxter” portrays himself as a reporter with access to privileged information. He cites unnamed sources who he claims are in day-to-day contact with Trump, and others who he claims are at Guantanamo Bay. He promises to check back with them regularly. He attributes direct quotes to named people. He issues corrections when he makes spelling errors or gets someone’s title wrong. A disclaimer added to its “About Us” page in April says the website contains “humor, parody and satire,” yet Baxter has defended the accuracy of his writings dozens of times in the comments sections on various articles.

“We don’t publish fake news,” he wrote in one such comment.

“The headlines can read like pretty straight news reporting, if you’re at all kind of susceptible to believing that this is really happening,” said John Gregory, a senior analyst at NewsGuard, a service that reviews and rates websites according to various journalistic criteria. “It doesn’t have some of the telltale signs of hoaxes or misinformation that we might see on other sites.”

In the alternative universe of Real Raw News, former Vice President Mike Pence has been on the run for months in an escape that saw him seek asylum in Qatar and take a bullet to the chest. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, hasn’t gotten his COVID-19 vaccine. The military has arrested dozens of public figures — including Hunter Biden, former Attorney General William Barr, and billionaire Bill Gates — and several of them have been hanged, sent to the guillotine, shot by a firing squad or otherwise executed.

Of course, none of that is true. But these headlines haven’t stopped the site from building a following. Though the website has been publishing for less than 10 months, mentions of Real Raw News, realrawnews.com and related hashtags have more than doubled across social media, broadcast and traditional media, and online sites within the last two months, according to an analysis from Zignal Labs Inc., a media intelligence firm. Several stories from that time frame got thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.

“We have this assumption that most people can spot that this is a fake news site, and therefore it’s not impactful,” said Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. “But I just don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

After debunking more than a dozen claims in 2021 that originated on Real Raw News, PolitiFact decided to investigate the website and who was behind it.

We found that the “Michael Baxter” behind Real Raw News previously ran at least three other websites and associated YouTube channels that, while now mostly purged from the internet, also promoted far-fetched conspiracy theories — about everything from the mythical planet “Nibiru” to alien visitations.

Public records and other publicly available information show the author’s real name is Michael Tuffin, 53, who lived in Texas as recently as July and has also lived in New York.