There is growing concern that mis/disinformation is used in social media campaigns to alter public opinion on important topics with broad societal implications. In this article, we explore the use of patriotic themes, defined in an American context, in social media for four recent politically charged events: the 2016 United States (U.S.) presidential election – which was subject to an influence campaign from foreign (Russian) sources, the 2020 U.S. presential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 U.S. mid-term elections. We demonstrate a clear negative bias through simple keyword analysis in the Russian influence operation and 2022 mid-term elections. The bigram analysis on the 2020 elections and COVID data did not show a similar bias in either a positive or negative direction. Thus, we use narrative extraction to perform a deeper dive into these corpora and identify the narratives that are prevalent. We conclude that keyword analysis is not sufficient in all circumstances, and that narrative analysis can fill the gaps. We further conclude that replies in social media can substantially reinforce negative discourse, but do not show a bias effect when the discourse is generally neutral.