Steve Helber/Associated Press
A racist photograph on the 1984 yearbook page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia.
An accusation of sexual assault against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.
Both reports — the first triggering an earthquake in Virginia politics last week, the second setting off an aftershock on Monday — were originally published by an obscure right-wing news site, Big League Politics, which has promoted conspiracy theories and written favorably about white nationalist candidates.
But as mainstream news outlets scrambled to confirm the photograph on Mr. Northam’s medical school yearbook page on Friday, it became clear that Big League Politics — and its mission of promoting the Trump agenda and nationalist causes — had assumed outsized influence in an increasingly Democratic state.
The website has dealt a severe blow to Mr. Northam, who first admitted to posing for the photograph, then reversed himself and has refused to resign despite enormous pressure from fellow Democrats in Virginia and around the nation, throwing his state’s politics into a crisis.
A cloud also now hangs over the head of Mr. Fairfax, who would succeed Mr. Northam if he resigns, after Big League Politics published unsubstantiated accusations that he sexually assaulted a woman he met at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Big League Politics is a relatively new entry to the constellation of right-wing media outlets that sprung up during Donald Trump’s rise, and until the bombshell yearbook report, its readership had remained small.
Patrick Howley, the editor in chief, said he received the photograph showing a pair of figures in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes from a “concerned citizen,” declining to add more details.
But one of Big League Politics’s owners, Noel Fritsch, described the source of the photograph as “some people who were classmates of Northam,” who brought it to light out of anger at the governor’s remarks early last week defending late-term abortions.
In its mission statement, Big League Politics purports to be “not conservative” and “not liberal,” but it has trafficked in conspiracy theories favored by the far right, like the case of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staff member whose murder in Washington was falsely seized on by conservative commentators as linked to WikiLeaks.
And Mr. Fritsch, a North Carolina-based political consultant, has worked for Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semitic Wisconsin congressional candidate who challenged former House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, and Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct with teenagers. Last…
