By Joe Broadmeadow
I’ve spent over two decades in law enforcement. I’ve interviewed con artists, processed fraud cases, and sat across the table from people who were absolutely certain they were right when the evidence said otherwise. So, when a viral internet post lands in my inbox for the fifteenth time—attributed this round to someone named “Robert Cottrell”—my instincts kick in the same way they did on the job. Something here doesn’t add up.
Let me be fair before I’m blunt: some of what drives these posts is genuine. The frustration of watching a country change faster than feels comfortable. The pride people feel in their families who came here and worked hard and became Americans without complaint. The worry that something valuable is being lost. I understand all of that, and I won’t dismiss it. Patriotism—real patriotism—is worth protecting, which is precisely why it deserves better than what this post is selling.
The complete post is here for your entertainment:
So let’s work through it, piece by piece.
The Phantom Government Statement
The most alarming line in this post is presented as news: “Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of AMERICA, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks.”
No such announcement was ever made. No Wednesday. No press conference. No government directive. This sentence has been circulating—in nearly identical form—since at least 2001, according to fact-checkers at Lead Stories and Reuters. It’s been attributed, at various times, to Donald Trump, Barack Obama, two different Australian prime ministers, and now someone called Robert Cottrell. It fits none of them because it was said by none of them. The original text was lifted—largely intact—from an opinion piece written shortly after 9/11 by a U.S. Air Force veteran named Barry Loudermilk, according to Snopes, who has been debunking this particular zombie post for over twenty years.
What you are reading is not a statement of American government policy. It is a chain letter wearing a news article’s clothing.
The Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796 and unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1797, states plainly in Article 11: “…the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
“We Were Founded on Christian Principles”
I was raised Catholic. I have no animus toward Christianity. But a claim is either true or it isn’t, and this one requires some precision.
The Founders were a complicated lot—deists, skeptics, and nominal Christians among them. Thomas Jefferson cut the miracles out of his Bible with a razor. Benjamin Franklin suggested that prayer open the Constitutional Convention and was essentially laughed out of the room. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, was adamant that government had no business in religion’s house, or vice versa.
More to the point: there is an actual ratified document that speaks to this directly. The Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796 and unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1797, states plainly in Article 11: “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” This wasn’t a throwaway line — it was a formal declaration of American foreign policy, ratified without a single dissenting vote under President John Adams, as documented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The First Amendment itself prohibits Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. These are not liberal talking points. They are primary sources.
“We Speak English”
The post thunders that immigrants must learn English because “we speak ENGLISH”—the capitalization doing the work that the facts cannot. Here is the problem: the United States has no official language at the federal level. Not now. Not ever in its history, per official USAGov documentation. A 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to use English, but that is an administrative preference, not a legal establishment—and it most certainly does not erase the fact that for 250 years this country operated without declaring an official tongue. The Founders printed government documents in German and French. The Southwest was acquired in a war with a Spanish-speaking nation. Louisiana conducts legal proceedings in French to this day.
Telling immigrants they must speak English is a personal preference dressed up as a national law. They aren’t the same thing.
The “My people were here before the Anglos” line.
“I add that my ancestors were here, LONG before the Anglos!! My ancestors, learned the language and worked and never once did I hear any of them trash America.”
You might want to take a look at the history of Indian schools where native children, forcibly taken from their parents, were beaten, sometimes to death, for speaking their native tongues. Or how the “good fathers” of the church systematically eradicated the native religions in favor of Chrisitanity.
If you didn’t hear them complain, it was either because you weren’t listening or they were too terrified to speak out. Here’s a reality check on the “benefit” of the arrival of European settlers and their Christian piety: 85 to 95% of the indigenous population died out after the arrival of Europeans through disease, starvation, or wars with white settlers taking their land.
The Tolerance Paradox
Perhaps the most intellectually interesting moment in this post is the sentence: “We will accept your beliefs and will not question why.” This is followed, three paragraphs later, by “If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world.”
Read those twice. The post simultaneously promises to accept your beliefs and tells you to leave if your beliefs differ from ours. That is not tolerance. That is tolerance as a performance, immediately revoked upon contact with disagreement. It is also a peculiar reading of American freedom — the idea that the greatest liberty this country offers is the freedom to leave if you don’t comply. In law enforcement, we had a word for that kind of offer.
“Circulate This Among Ourselves”
The last line is the tell. “IF we circulate this among ourselves, WE will find the courage to start speaking and voicing the same truths.”
This is the anatomy of a misinformation campaign. Real truths don’t need chain-letter distribution to survive. Real government announcements don’t require viral Facebook posts to achieve legitimacy. The call to circulate is the mechanism by which fabricated quotes and invented news stories outlive every fact-check written against them. When a post tells you that circulating it is a form of courage, your first move should be to slow down, not speed up.
I have dealt with people who spread misinformation about crimes, about criminals, about court cases. The damage it does is real. It poisons the ability to have honest conversations about genuine problems. And there are genuine problems worth discussing here — immigration policy is complicated, integration is hard, and reasonable people disagree sharply about the right approaches. That conversation deserves facts, not fabricated government proclamations and misattributed editorials bouncing around the internet since the Bush administration.
What Real Patriotism Looks Like
My family came to this country from somewhere else. So did yours, unless you’re Indigenous, in which case it is everyone else who arrived uninvited and proceeded to explain how things work here.
I am proud of what this country built. I’m proud of the First Amendment—which protects religious freedom, including for Muslims. I’m proud of the Treaty of Tripoli—because a young nation had the intellectual honesty to put in writing that it was not a theocracy. I’m proud of the fact that we never got around to declaring an official language, because we never quite managed to agree that one culture had the definitive claim on this place.
Real patriotism does not require demonizing your neighbors or spreading fabricated quotes about government directives that never happened. It requires something harder: engaging with the actual complexity of a country that has always been, from its first contested moments, an argument about who belongs and what we owe each other.
That argument is worth having. This post is not the way to have it.
Joseph Broadmeadow is a retired police captain from East Providence, RI, and the author of multiple books including the “Josh Williams” series and several non-fiction books on organized crime. He writes at joebroadmeadowblog.com.
A very well written and reasoned piece, Joe. Congratulations.