As many readers are aware, for most of National Zero’s first year and a half after launch we (mostly Spartan though) copied and pasted from other news sites to rapidly deliver content in a half-assed attempt to duplicate the “wire” or “topic-based community” model seen elsewhere until we ditched it in late 2021, with some limited exceptions. Among those carveouts are government agency press releases like Thursday’s announcement from the Justice Department on the arrest of Texas MAGA terrorist Timothy Muller, who had texted an FBI agent involved with the original investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, sending the threats just hours after Hunter was found guilty Tuesday.

The cursory skimming and copypasta of the release was a mistake, as a closer read of it and, more importantly, Muller’s arrest affidavit reveal where this demented fucking freak and his obviously very steady diet of right wing media, almost certainly centered on Fox News, really shine.

Three of the texts, the word “maggot” standing in for a word it rhymes with and starts with “f”:

We had assumed that (not maggot) was actually “fucker” on Thursday, so silly us for editing the press release without considering the homophobia endemic to the far right. And having missed just how badly these nebulous, meaningless bullshit sound bytes inspired by the “Twitter files” circlejerk from Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity and the rest of the MAGA Cinematic Universe have been internalized in the fanbase with that insane “disenfranchise 75 million Americans” line.

It’s actually pretty jarring to see that kind of language in a MAGA death threat. Like we knew such rage was out there, as last year NBC News printed a story about how the Justice Department had stood up a full-time task force dedicated specifically to investigating threats to personnel connected to anything and everything Hunter Biden-related – no doubt it was that task force specifically who cuffed this Muller asshole. But while that article quite excellently drew a straight line from those two IRS “whistleblower” shitbags and their false accusations of “interference” by Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf to threats against her, there was nothing quoting from the actual threats themselves to Wolf or any of the other DOJ personnel involved in the Hunter cases (Naturally the threats also coincided with Fox News turning Wolf into their monster of the week).

Compare it with the “Great Replacement”: There’s the version in the mass shooters’ manifestos, on 4chan, and on all sorts of other white nationalist media. Then there’s the at least partially sanitized version of it you see on Fox News and from Mike Johnson where they dog whistle out the violent and anti-semitic elements to try to present it as a “longer game” to dilute a white Christian conservative electorate with mass immigration (although Johnson has more recently ditched that to publicly pretend to buy into the Orange Felon’s stupid claims that migrants are voting in 2024).

Or “Stop the Steal,” in which the batshit Italian satellites and Chinese thermostat-level conspiracy theories of the aftermath of the 2020 election were “mainstream”-washed into intentionally vague garbage like “unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security” found in Elise Stefanik’s January 4, 2021 statement (she fucking deleted it) on why she was voting against certifying her Lord and Savior’s defeat two days later. Both the “Steal” and the “Great Replacement” are perfect examples of dregs of the right wing infotainment sphere’s extremist fury trickling up to and being laundered by the top of the GOP and conservative media.

Of course the outrages flow in the other direction all the time too. Read any five randomly selected arrest affidavits from January 6th rioters and almost certainly all five of them will contain statements or texts or something making it clear they were directly inspired by Trump’s rhetoric in the aftermath of his humiliating defeat. This “disenfranchise 75 million Americans” is a rarer vintage as it’s much more of a Fox News/GOP line than a Trump one. Donald’s own lawyer said it nearly verbatim during the second impeachment trial, calling it “a chance by a group of partisan politicians seeking to eliminate Donald Trump from the American political scene and seeking to disenfranchise 74 million-plus American voters.” Weeks earlier, prior to the insurrection he encouraged and then ran from, Josh Hawley said “74 million Americans are not going to be told their voices don’t matter.”

“They better not put my president in prison. He represents 74 million Americans,” Jesse Watters whined ahead of Trump’s first indictment last year, incorrectly so as all Americans are represented by the actual current President of the United States Joseph R Biden. “If he’s the nominee, you’re putting 74 million votes in prison. And that’s how I see it.” So the line’s been everywhere since the 2020 election (Muller of course rounds up 74,216,154 to 75 million as many MAGA clowns often did).

You just don’t see it much in Trump fanboys’ death threats to federal law enforcement. What makes it even more interesting is that it’s not like this agent was known to be investigating Trump himself but Hunter’s laptop and that apparently the act of not immediately arresting Joe and Hunter Biden in October of 2020 was itself the “disenfranchisement.” That’s the kind of quantum pretzel logic horseshit only someone watching Fox News day after day after day for years can develop in their brain like a tumor. Kind of like the time Trump screamed that the cocaine found in that White House coat check not being blamed on Hunter was “election interference.” And the time that he declared the US Constitution null and void, demanding to be reinstated to the presidency immediately because the FBI told Twitter and Facebook that the laptop was probably Russian disinformation.

It’s that cuntish sense of entitlement and grievance he shares with his fans like Timmy Muller, a dude who obviously had problems way before he got himself almost certainly sent to federal prison just using his words. The fusion of violent Proud Boys-level shit-talk with DC GOP “rapid response” talking points mills was too fascinating to let sit, even if we can’t really wrap this up with a neat conclusion after 1,100+ of our own words. Maybe it’s our own angst that this isn’t going to get the same kind of attention that the through-line between Tucker Carlson’s “Replacement” hard-on and white nationalist mass shooters did – for obvious and justifiable reasons. But we suspect that if there isn’t a lot more of this out there already then there will be as our fragile political system continues with Round Three against the Orange God Emperor and his “disenfranchised” cult members.