In a story headlined “Minnesota dad who ranted against Trump election gunned down wife, ex-girlfriend and his 2 kids in murder-suicide,” the New York Post does not say why 46 year-old Duluth, Minnesota lib Anthony Nephew murdered his ex-girlfriend and their 15 year-old son, then his wife and their 7 year-old son before turning the gun on himself in a Friday rampage, they just imply he snapped because the convicted felon former president is on his way back to the White House.
“Implying” is doing a lot of work here. “Before his rampage, Anthony Nephew had been sharing left-wing and anti-Trump posts on his Facebook account. ‘My mental health and the world can no longer peacefully coexist, and a lot of the reason is religion,’ Anthony Nephew wrote in July,” says the Post in their article, seemingly trying to will into existence a direct connection between the asshole’s politics and that he murdered his current and former partners and both of his sons.
“Nephew shared other political posts, including an image of former president Barack Obama, Trump, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The word ‘hate’ sits under Trump’s face, while the words ‘hope,’ ‘heal’ and ‘grow’ correspond with the Democratic politicians,” the Post continues, making it obvious they don’t have anything else to make politics relevant to the tragedy.
Which is okay. The way the headline and story are written are fucking weasely but that’s really our only quibble here. This is the New York Post’s job: Turn this horrible act of murder into “LMAO! This libtard’s TDS was so bad he killed his ex, his wife, two sons, and then himself because he couldn’t bear to live in a country ruled by an America First patriot!” which is like a little victory lap for them after four years of taking everything bad that happens and trying to fit it into just a small piece of societal decay accelerating under a feckless, decadent, and morally vacant “Biden regime.”
Would I have written the same thing in the alternate timeline where Kamala Harris is the president-elect and the guy was a Trump fan? No, I would have just connected the dots myself and made it sound like it was a direct consequence of Trump losing simply by the timing alone.
Or maybe the connection would be on someone else, like it was in one similar-ish example we have.
Anyway, as you’ll have noticed, the post-2024 election National Zero is not as remotely as busy as the pre-2024 election. Part of that’s just my own personal disappointment over the outcome, exhaustion, outside commitments, etc, but there’s also a lot of reflecting on the information environment and what the MAGA propaganda-industrial complex did right when they were in a position to complain about the incumbent administration rather than defend their guy.
If you remember 2017 through 2021 they quite often really fucking sucked at it.
Yet they were undeterred by his defeat and they spent the next four years turning every single article into some sort of argument for why we need Trump back, no matter how fucking scurrilous, stupid, and ultimately irrelevant. You knew RIGHT AWAY what they were getting at when Breitbart tweeted this (even as they stupidly left out a link to their actual article about it).
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 27, 2024
Part of it is going to be natural. In my not-so-humble opinion National Zero is in style and substance if not politics the most right wing-ish of the sites on our tier. We can be pretty fucking shameless and gutter-level bad faith in ways that make this Post article seem circumspect and modest.
But while being able to do that in one article and then savage the freaking incompetence and dipshittery of morons like James Comer and Jim Jordan in the next – and thus confidently “defend” Joe and Hunter Biden by default – is what puts our current audience’s asses in the seats we need to be going after far more asses. And not just center-left asses. All asses. Especially the asses who are open to the persuasion from right wing propaganda. If National Zero is to make a serious push on expanding our reach and delivering content to low-info, apolitical non-voters to get them on our team the same way that little shit Ben Shapiro would get them boys on Team MAGA we need to be studying and analyzing their product even closer than we were before.
Morally this isn’t any new horizon for me either. Some of what you’re going to read on this site six months from now is going to have a lot of overlap with blackpilled, far-left accelerationism being propagated by the burn-it-all-down far lefties. Personally I think they can go fuck themselves (Nice job helping to save the West Bank from Netanyahu you did last week, you stupid cunts) and as such I’m going to be devoting time and space into rip into them as well – both as a guardrail to stay away from the acceleration Kool-Aid AND to draw in the low-infos who were suckered into thinking that all Democratic voters are the kinds of assholes who would burn an American flag in public.
This is a zero-sum game being played in a space where there’s a steadily growing recognition that the “structural disadvantage in the information ecosystem” is more than literally anything else the reason why the New York Post is unsubtly mocking a tragic mass murder than crying in their Fruity Pebbles about how their Orange Messiah is going to die in prison and – importantly and painfully fucking obvious for a while now – that the mainstream media are no longer a reliable partner in combatting the lies and bullshit constantly being fed to those who aren’t plugged-in.
What this is ultimately going to look like and how successful I’ll be at actually tapping into a flood of investment that may or may not actually materialize for such ventures there’s one more thing to be said: Jack and I didn’t want this. We’d rather be mocking the impotent rage of “Stop the Steal 2.0” and celebrating the first woman’s ascent to the presidency than plotting openly to our readers about what the road ahead looks like for our brand with such nihilistic and naked propagandism.
When life gives you oranges though…