Sarah Palin And The Fanficification Of Internet News

Sarah Palin, half-hearted former Alaskan governor, conservative media darling, and not-at-all sore loser who was very nearly a tentative heartbeat away from the position of free world leadership, has opened her flaptrap again — this time to opine that President Obama should be impeached because brown people.

An editorial by Sarah Palin published on paragon of internet political creepypastas, Breitbart, was published yesterday. In it, Palin works from the assumption a crackpot conspiracy theory accusing President Obama of deliberately “importing” immigrants is true — which of course, literate Americans can easily dismiss as bizarre, baseless, and formerly the stuff of instantly deleted AOL forwards from your grandparents.

Except in certain media circles, where the dog whistle has been permanently discarded for a megaphone. Believe it or not, inside the conservative bubble, the belief that President Obama himself (on direct orders of Saul Alinsky) is driving the recent influx of immigrants at the border — because socialism, duh.

Palin crafts a spectacular word salad as she alleges:

“Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate.”

No evidence is presented to back up this conspiracy of untold magnitude, but she soldiers on with nary a footnote to support this huge accusation:

“This is his fundamental transformation of America. It’s the only promise he has kept. Discrediting the price paid for America’s exceptionalism over our history, he’s given false hope and taxpayer’s change to millions of foreign nationals who want to sneak into our country illegally.”

Citation? Nope:

“Because of Obama’s purposeful dereliction of duty an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in, competing against Americans for our jobs and limited public services.”

Pssst, Sarah — if you’d had a job in recent years, you might recall that in order to get one, you must first prove your citizenship. Unless we are talking about competing for jobs picking strawberries for three dollars an hour, or cleaning people’s houses for minimum wage or less.

Does it matter that the claims of Palin and others inside this caucus are not only provably false but also are nonsensical? Of course it doesn’t, because reasons.

She paints a terrifying and wholly imaginary picture of a leader gone mad with desire to allow non-Americans to come take our jobs and our women, adding:

“There is no end in sight as our president prioritizes parties over doing the job he was hired by voters to do. Securing our borders is obviously fundamental here; it goes without saying that it is his job.”

It isn’t just this issue currently swirling in a reality-phobic vortex of spittle-laced, red-faced pearl clutching. It’s only Tuesday, and in addition to a tinfoil-hatlike idea Obama is recruiting random foreign nationals deeply under the radar, we also have a widespread belief that Costco has “banned” Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book.

Spoiler alert, the book wasn’t actually selling since most of its audience lacks the ability to read. But don’t let that get in the way of a good scaremongering… no, Costco too must be headed up by the reanimated corpse of Saul Alinsky, as why else would they choose to carry a book and then choose to no longer restock it once the monthly sales figures came in? It has to be socialism, and Saul Alinsky.

Of course, Costco continually stocks books from a bevy of authors on the conservative side of the spectrum, including Ann Coulter, whose ideas are far more radical and polarizing. And of course, D’Souza’s book sales inside Costco were abysmal. But it COULD be censorship that doesn’t even make sense, and by the new way of interpreting news, that means it IS.

So it gets reported as news. And Palin’s feverish speculation with zero basis in reality, also reported as news. Because if it could happen, it as good as did happen, and just share it on Facebook because it supports your worldview. Right?

Yes, Sarah Palin is thankfully relegated to an increasingly narrow and side-eyed portion of the American political spectrum, but this proliferation of fanfiction as news has to end. It used to be that if not accurately, most news agencies at least posted with honest intent — at this point, if people will believe it, someone will run it.