What's Been Going on With Patriots.Win, aka "The_Donald Without Reddit"

 For those that follow Reddit (and why the Hell are you wasting your time doing that?) a couple of years ago they banned a wad of forums ("subreddits") that Reddit (and I know it's stylized "reddit", but screw Steve Huffman) found objection for a number of reasons, and this was a site that hosted r/nazi, r/coontown, and r/picsofdeadkids (all real and banned subreddits). The Chapo Trap House subreddit (which was not loved by the hosts of the podcast it was an alleged fansite of) vanished the same day as r/The_Donald, except the the Trumpist website had already fled to TheDonald.win, a freestanding subreddit built off the "top level domain" .win, which is for gambling websites and off-track betting. Because of the January 6th Capitol riot, they changed URLs to Patriots.win and they are operating there still. TheDonald.win became America.win, and it has the following message:

The author of that  was Jody Williams, an ex-US Army guy with a buzzcut who has been called a "traitor" by The_Donald faithful. He was co-ordinating with the redditors as far back as 2019; they knew they had been on thin ice since 2017, and they were looking for an escape route. Patriots.win is that escape.

Above: What the front page looked like on the morning of 11-27-21. Notice that the "top stories" are all designed to rile the intended audience.

Below: Trump "snark dancing" photo, screenshot taken March 5, 2022.

There are now sub-sites to the Patriots.Win main page. Here is their alleged comedy page (03-09-22):

There is a question as to how many of the old moderators of The_Donald are still involved with this "new" website. Below is a list of the moderator of Patriots.win from March 5, 2022.

And here is a copypaste of a list from 2018 made by the writer of The_Donald's moderators. All of the names in bold match the above list:

Mods as of 10-23-18:

shadowman3001 (523828) 1 year ago full permissions

US2A (336062) 1 year ago full permissions

sublimeinslime (312268) 1 year ago full permissions

zettapede (43723) 1 year ago access, config, flair, mail, posts, wiki

thunderbert80 (1883442) 1 year ago access, config, flair, mail, posts, wiki

Ivaginaryfriend (1655523) 1 year ago full permissions

mivvan (416777) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

Katfish29 (106304) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

lalicat (86252) 1 year ago access, config, flair, mail, posts, wiki

SportzStar (22529) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

D4rkd3str0yer (125461) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

Sanotsuto (7356) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

bh506407 (47785) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

pm_me_yo_doggos (63683) 1 year ago access, config, flair, mail, posts, wiki

CovfefeBucks (37436) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

DrWeeGee (1755095) 1 year ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

DanWofSoc (438616) 1 year ago access, config, flair, mail, posts, wiki

BotForceOne (1) 1 year ago access, flair, posts, wiki

AutoModerator (1778) 1 year ago posts, wiki

joshhawley2018 (56243) 7 months ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

-F-B-I- (29664) 7 months ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

nimblecalifornian (18239) 7 months ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

pray_for_kekistan (129334) 7 months ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

Foss_is_Boss (155674) 4 months ago access, flair, mail, posts, wiki

That's four out of twenty-four that are a direct match from four years ago. Doggos and pm_me_yo_doggos are probably the same person, and I'm sure that a lot of the others are there as well. Two of the people on our 2018 list (joshhawley2018 and shadowman3001) were mentioned in a 2019 DailyDot article trying to replace the banned The_Donald subreddit with a formerly-private subreddit called Mr_Trump which had gone dormant. That subreddit was later banned, which meant that the users in question just joined TheDonald.win team if they weren't running it already.

Why should we care?

Well, a part of social media website became the public interface for a political campaign, and then the administration that followed it, a portion that because a hangout for the most radicalized members of a political party. The media claims that this portion of the social media website became the target for a Russian troll farm ahead of the election in 2016. Mother Jones ran an article in 2020 how the moderators of that portion gamed Reddit's rules and were able to stave off being banned for years. The story of The_Donald and Patriots.Win shows the power of the Internet, at least the propaganda/disinformation uses of it, which are frankly terrifying.