Theuspatriot.com is the self-proclaimed, “best Conservative news on the internet.” In fact, the site does boast some of the best news for conservatives, but it achieves this goal by making most of it up.
For example, it gained a little attention a few months ago for an article claiming that there was a “Report Circulating That Justice John Roberts Signed Off On Obama’s Arrest For Treason.” Even if you ignore fact that a sitting President can’t be arrested and that the Supreme Court cannot issue arrest warrants, the first line of article states that, “There is some serious speculation that Chief Justice John Roberts has signed off on Interpol.”
I’m not sure what the US Patriot thinks that Interpol is, but it’s an independent, international police agency, and it’s not something that can be “signed off on.” That line would make just as much sense if the author had said “There is some serious speculation that Chief Justice John Roberts has tickled on flapjacks.” In fact, that sentence makes more sense, because John Roberts could (at least hypothetically) tickle someone while standing on a stack of pancakes.
Visual approximation.
Now, some people have speculated that the US Patriot is actually a satirical website, or some kind of parody, which is tempting to believe, especially given that the site appears to have debuted on April 1rst, 2014. However, if that were the case, they wouldn’t report real news in a straight-faced manner, which the Patriot does from time to time. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at how they report real news.
The US Patriot covered the recent lawsuit brought against the President by Republican members of Congress. In it, they quoted the Wall Street Journal. Have a look:
This is cheap writing even by my standards, and look how many pictures I use.
In a 303 word article, 241 belong to the Wall Street Journal. While this is lazy and most like some form of copyright infringement, it’s also proof that the Patriot’s goal is not satire. If it were, it wouldn’t put its insane fabrications along with real content.
It also wouldn’t be blatantly racist. Really, this site is quite racist.
For example, every article about a Hispanic and Latino person is about illegal immigration.
Have you noticed all the articles are written by “The Patriot?” It’s like the economist for dumb people.
Seriously, I flipped through this entire site, and I only found one article about a Latino or Hispanic person that didn’t have the words “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” in the title (and it was belittling a Mexican woman’s claim that Americans had a racist view of her culture).
It also does the same thing to Muslims, though the approach is a bit different. There’s specific two tiered method to it, which is to-
a) show the worst examples of Islamic extremism abroad and-
b) make it seem like it is something that is coming to America.
This pattern is pretty consistent across the site; show Muslim extremists in the Middle East doing something awful (like this and this), then find any small story about Muslims in America and give it an “it could happen here” spin (like this and this). It’s a very specific combination designed to elicited fear.
And of course there are racist articles about Black people. For example, the author(s?) throw the word “Thug” out in lieu of racial slurs.
Seriously, is “Thug” a completely racist word now? Should I stop saying “Thug?”
And it even manages to be racist without using words. For example, check out these articles on welfare and see if you notice what the accompanying pictures have in common.
I…don’t have anything clever for this. This is just shitty.
It does the same thing for prison as well.
I’d like to point out that this article is supportive of forced sterilization. To put that in perspective, the last people to support forced sterilization were the Nazis.
Now, it would’ve been easy to just pick the Patriot apart for its blatant lies (like their claim that the president gave himself a pay raise), or go after their birther claims, or their undying support of Cliven Bundy. But after digging around on the site longer than any rational person should, I was actually disturbed by how…familiar everything was. There are a lot of sites that use the same tactics to convey racist messages without being explicitly racist (looking at you, Fox News ). There are a lot of online news sources that will take large quantities of content from respected news outlets and mix it in with their own click-bait content (the Huffington Post does this pretty liberally (no pun intended(triple parenthetical))).
And that’s really what’s so disturbing about the US Patriot. At its core, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it comes together in a way specifically designed to misinform. It has blatant false assertions like the kind you’d find in an outlandish tabloid, but then it mixes them with real stories to blur the lines between real and fake, and throws in some racist overtones for good measure. And while most of us are smart enough to see through this, there will always be a handful of people that read this stuff and then think that the President is a Kenyan born Muslim who somehow evaded arrest at the hands of John Roberts to plot the destruction of Cliven Bundy’s ranch.
So think of the U.S. Patriot the next time you see something like this:
Also, pretty sure that’s the Dad from the Wonder Years. Just saying.
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