Last week I semi-jokingly reported there was a “factual inaccuracy” in a campaign attack ad for Pennsylvania Dem Attorney General Josh Shapiro in his contest against QAnon freak Republican Doug Mastriano and a small handful of readers didn’t respond so positively in the comments to my pointing out how COVID vaccines tuning people gay isn’t a canonical belief in the Quniverse.
That they didn’t get it because my half-assed joke sucked or if they weren’t in the mood is neither here nor there. The unfortunate fact is that Dems aren’t doing so great in a number of contests in crucial states and that’s been weighing on the vibe here. All caveats about encouraging news on the early turnout front and a possible overweighting of Republican support in polling – among other variables and uncertainties – aside, November 8th could end up being a very bad night for Dems.
Except in Pennsylvania (well Michigan too), where the GOP just basically fucking handed the governor’s office to Shapiro by nominating a dipshit QAnon huckster who has no idea how to win a statewide campaign. You see that ad and all it says is that Shapiro is just having fun right now, burning off fuck around money, shoving Mastriano’s bald head in the toilet just because he can.
But after laughing heartily about it, this ad actually made me feel a little hollow and dead inside all the same. It speaks to a whole universe of missed opportunity for Dems in this campaign season, to finally match the Republican propaganda machine on their ground, playing a little loose with the truth about the most insane excesses of the other guys. If Shapiro could meet “The Left supports castrating children” with “QAnon fans think the COVID vaccine turns you gay,” then why couldn’t some info operation funded by the Democrats go more into tying the entire Republican Party to QAnon? Like what the fuck, it’s not even that much of a stretch considering their fucking leader now simply just openly endorses the Q cult’s idolization of him.
Imagine a world where “Republicans think drinking piss cures COVID” was hammered on the airwaves and on social media through the same kind of astroturfed infrastructure the right wing have deployed so effectively against Democrats stuck arguing how effective their policies have been at reducing problems X, Y, and Z. It would be awesome. So who the hell decided we can’t have it both ways? Why can’t we let every American know Marjorie Taylor Greene fucked a tantric sex guru while married to her husband who’s currently divorcing her WHILE the Ron Klains and Pete Buttigieges and Elizabeth Warrens of the world get into the weeds with their wonky shit?
Turn the heat up enough on these sorts of things and campaigns will be forced to address them. What’s the good of needling JD Vance’s comms director to say “JD doesn’t believe horse paste cures COVID but continues to support choice in blah blah blah”? Three things: You’ve wasted their time, forced them on the defensive, and almost certainly turned off ivermectin fanboys. That last one is a cynical as it is effective. If you will never flip the other guys’ voters then you can get them mad at their candidate and want to stay home on election day. Addition by subtraction.
Now I’m not saying go that far, as I did pictured above. Mostly because it wouldn’t work. Nor am I saying I’m the guy who’s going to mastermind building a complex $500 million information operation from scratch. Mostly because I don’t have $500 million. But like I’ve written before, my well-deserved reputation as an abrasive asshole “Blue Revenge” troll was the foundation this site was built upon. When operating at its full capacity creatively (which these days I am not, unfortunately), National Zero is absolutely a political outrage and entertainment machine, almost a perfect mirror image of the most invective-filled right wing media sites out there in the MAGAverse.
We’ve got two years of embarrassing material and dumb shit from the right wing on this site. Whole swathes of it could theoretically be exploited to the same effect that the MAGA media exploits the fears and revulsion among voters adjacent to their rage-fueled hardcore GOP base. How many people know articles that Trump regularly links to on his Truth Social profile are written by a guy who married a teenage male prostitute he picked up in the Philippines? Probably very few, if any. Yet he literally just did it less than two hours ago. Like libs always say “Can you imagine if Obama or Hillary or Biden did this or that like Trump did?” But seriously think about what impact that would have if it were thrown in people’s faces when they opened up Facebook, especially the ones susceptible to “messaging” about “groomers.” Sure, that’ll make some Dems uncomfortable, but it’s past time to start thinking about how to fight like the other guys do.
They’re pretty comfortable doing it.