The first episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show Who Is America? hit Showtime over the weekend, and it makes for 30 minutes of brutally uncomfortable viewing. It opens with Cohen, disguised as Dr. Billy W. Ruddick, publisher of Truthbrary.org, interviewing Bernie Sanders about Obamacare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I really don’t,” Sanders finally says after listening to Cohen tell him that if the 99 percent of Americans not in the richest 1 percent would just move over into the 199 percent, they’d be fine. By the end of the episode, Cohen easily convinces sitting senators to record a PSA in favor of arming three-year-olds in school with guns.

Cohen plays four different characters on the new show: the mobility-scooter-riding Ruddick who can’t do math, an Israeli counterterrorism expert who thinks exceptional 16-month-olds can handle guns, a Seattle liberal who forces his daughter to menstruate on American flags, and a British ex-con looking to start a career as an artist (his media of choice are feces and ejaculate). That all sounds like over-the-top parody, but the dry-eyed brutality of Who Is America? is how, aside from Cohen’s prosthetics, so much of the show is rooted in reality. It’s just that reality in 2018 is pretty absurd.

The existence of Truthbrary.org makes this clear. In the episode, Cohen's alter ego Ruddick directs people to visit his website , which turns out to be home to an insane mix of conspiracy theories. (Now that Who Is America? has aired, it also features Ruddick's claims of being duped by Cohen.) “REJECT THE MAINSTREME MEDIA + THE LIEbrary OF FALSE INFOMATION THEY TRY TO PUSH INTO THE PUBLICS MIND'S. THE TRUTHBRARY WILL SET YOU FREE. THIS IS A LIBERTY WEBSITE FOR TRUE AMERICA AND TRUTH LOVING AMERICANS,” it reads.

Along the left-hand side, the site presents an index of articles. Three are about 9/11, naturally. The other 25 cover topics like chemtrails, Hillary Clinton being a satanist, and why Pearl Harbor was faked. The articles are long and rabid, written in the breathless style that characterizes online conspiracy sites. A visitor to Truthbrary who is in on the joke might read them and think that Cohen and his team did a great job of mimicry. In reality, they didn’t have to. As others have noted, it appears they just took text from all over the web and put it on the site.

This website is post-parody. Parody that’s literally reality, copied and pasted. And that’s the scariest part.

WIRED reached out to Showtime to see if Cohen and the show had permission to reprint these articles. Representatives for Showtime said Cohen’s team at Sunshine Sachs, a PR firm, controls the Truthbrary site, and referred questions to them. WIRED reached out and will update this story when we hear back. We’re particularly interested to hear how they picked which articles to include on the site, whose URL was registered in October 2017. Because many of these sources are the very definition of misinformation, WIRED is not linking to them.

'While a single person did not write these articles, it is absolutely possible that a single person read them all, and has a worldview informed by them.'

A quick Google search for snippets of text in the Truthbrary articles reveals all but the first article show up in largely the same form elsewhere, published under different bylines and dated in some cases to years before Who Is America? aired. The first article appears to be a list of headlines, though WIRED was unable to find its provenance. The rest seem to be sourced from a variety of online sources, ranging from mainstream news sources like the conservative website Newsmax (in the case of the Trump Immigration article, which matches an article headlined “16 Reasons Donald Trump Is Not Wrong on Immigration,” published in 2015) to fringe conspiracy websites to viral misinformation farms. One article matches a post on libertarian website Taki Mag, published by infamous writer Taki Theodoracopulos. The most commonly sourced site, with three articles that match posts on Truthbrary.org, is something called Sonarz, which based on its editor’s Medium bio and Facebook page appears to be published out of Thailand and peddles cat trees along with conspiracy theories about 9/11.