Meet PatriotHole, the Onion's New Right-Wing-Skewering Mockery Machine

The best word to describe PatriotHole's launch probably won't ever apply to the site again: quiet. Sometime this morning, The Onion's spinoff brand ClickHole became PatriotHole, a new site promising to provide a "loud light in the darkness." True to claim, the site features a color—a shade of ’70s chain-restaurant orange Breitbart News readers might recognize—as loud as its voice and an attitude much like that angry uncle you ignore on Facebook. It was all so very, very Onion.

PatriotHole, according to a welcome post, presents "the internet’s last stand against the tyranny of Leftist Media" and offers an online haven for anyone with an InfoWars bumper sticker. "We felt that ClickHole wasn’t reaching its beautiful click potential because it was marginalizing these groups in this growing market of people who like to say things louder than normal people," says Editor in Chief Matt Powers. "Our audience was too quiet and we wanted to court the loud people. So ClickHole has boldly become PatriotHole in this climate where volume equals truth and truth equals clicks."

In a world where Stephen Colbert has shed his Republican hawk persona, this only seems right. News organizations struggle to keep up with the Trump Administration and its conspiracy-minded worldview, and mocking the president Onion-style has lost its luster. Meanwhile, the far-right media entered the mainstream with an assist from the White House. Enter the Onion: After years of taking on the news media, and then click-bait BuzzFeed economy as ClickHole, the parody purveyors launched PatriotHole to mock those who cry "fake news" using, well, fake news.

Not surprisingly, the site tunes its content to target your Facebook feed. Headlines on the site on launch day include "Attention, Patriots: Share This Video On Your Facebook Wall To Let The World Know That Your President Is In Charge Of You" and "Huge Relief: Russian Officials Can’t Figure Out Which Of The 50 Things President Trump Screamed At Them About ISIS And Airplanes Was Classified Information." They’re outlandish in all the ways good satire news should be, yet you can imagine someone thinking they’re real. And in that sense, they could be the magic thing that penetrates liberal and far-right filter bubbles—for better or worse.

The Trump Administration makes satire a tough business. It's not for lack of material, as Saturday Night Live proves with each episode, but because parodists must tread carefully to ensure their work is not mistaken for real news. After all, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tweeted Onion content as if it was news, and Trump occasionally spreads stories from unreliable sources (perhaps because his staff feeds them to him). Also, thanks to the contributions of one small town in Macedonia, the quantity of fake news on the internet nearly rivals the quantity of legitimate journalism produced by The New York Times. Information wanted to be free, but once it was released it put on a lot of different disguises, and now the legit sources are hard to tell from the jokers.

Which raises the question, would PatriotHole ever do actual news? *The Onion'*s other site, The A.V. Club, provides culture news, and other satire sites occasionally keep it real: Last year, women's-magazine parody Reductress devoted its site to talking about rape culture. Humor, yes, but there was nothing funny about the issues it raised.

Don't expect that from PatriotHole. “We’re not worried about what other sites are doing, we’re very much avoiding looking at what other sites are doing or looking at facts or any other kinds of research,” says Powers. "We just want to reflect our readers’ viewpoints back at them because we know they're accurate."

A few months ago, The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” PatriotHole strives to provide the light keeping it alive. Kinda. “I think what we’re hoping to accomplish is to get as many people clicking on our site as humanly possible, and we built a path to that that is through liberty, loving, bravery-thumping, red-blooded Americans who love church and who love clicking on content,” Powers says. “That’s our singular focus now. We don’t look back, we just look forward, like this great nation of ours.” The answer may not be honest, but if you're modeling yourself after Breitbart News, why start now?