There’s a little boy in Texas who just turned 6 last week. He was at the mall with his 3 year-old brother and parents on Saturday. Maybe they planned to buy him a new bike or a video game console for a gift, have a dinner at a family-friendly restaurant and then some ice cream afterwards. The usual stuff for an innocent child who’s supposed to grow up with their love and support, completely unburdened by the savagery of right wing nationalism and gun culture. He’s never going to have his parents break up a fight with his little brother over their Pokemon toys or the affections of a girl they both like when they’re teenagers. He’s never going to talk to them again.

The GoFundMe page for 6 year-old William Cho is gut-wrenching nausea only tempered by all the good souls out there have having kicked in more than 14 times the original $50,000 goal and counting only six hours since launch. We can only hope the families of the other victims are seeing similar numbers. It need not be said that GoFundMe drives shouldn’t even be necessary in the first place given that sick fuck shouldn’t have been allowed to own an AR-15. What else are we going to write here that hasn’t already been written about Texas being a place where human life is cheap?

Look at that page and then ask yourself if this petty fucking bullshit truly matters:

This gets weirder by the moment

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 8, 2023

Should we feel some measure of satisfaction that these worms are trying to call it a “psyop” now that the shooter’s Neo-Nazi and Libs of TikTok fandom has been exposed? In the sense that it’s necessary to counter their disinformation and their intense desire to link the massacre to the “border crisis” the same way they thanked Jesus Christ almighty that the sick asshole who murdered three children and three adults in Nashville was “trans,” yes. It does help. It isn’t a “win” though.

This isn’t the MAGA Bomber. Nobody got hurt and it was legitimately funny to see the fanboys melt down when their “false flag” narrative imploded. Same story with that MAGA dipshit that torched his own RV and got caught trying to blame it on Antifa. Paul Pelosi is recovering from the near deadly attack by QAnon-pilled freak David DePape who the fanboys wanted oh-so-badly to be a gay hooker, so don’t feel too bad for laughing at them for squirming over it.

The grim sarcasm with which we at National Zero often treat these horrific stories of mass murder is a coping mechanism. We’re human and we’re going to act like it sometimes, especially when the names and faces are unknown to us and all we have are abstract numbers of the victims. We also more often than not sarcastically report on the confirmation of our initial suspicions when this or that perpetrator is unambiguously revealed to be a right wing MAGA terrorist.

But to see the once-smiling faces of the collateral damage of this endless Red vs Blue pissing contest and know that a little boy will grow up an orphan while we bicker with the MAGA trolls over the scumbag’s Nazi tattoos… Like what the fuck are we even doing here? Does it really matter that some loser who impotently calls everything a “psyop” got “owned” again when that attention pretty plainly comes at the expense of attention to the human wreckage left behind by the rampage? Fuck.