ADDRESSING MY (ALLEGED!) INVOLVEMENT IN THE CEO KILLING

Also, I have procured a copy of the killer's real manifesto, and I'm ready to share

Jan 02, 2025

Happy new year everyone. As usual, I’m a few weeks behind the news cycle, so you’ll have to forgive me. But this time, the delay was for good reason: it came at the behest of my legal team, who’d advised me to lay low for a little until the dust settled after the whole healthcare CEO-killed-by-vigilante thing. Luckily, “a little while” is subjective; my sense is that they defined this as “for the foreseeable future”, but I’m too impatient for all that. (And please excuse the thumbnail gif, I clicked on the wrong file and now it won’t let me change it.)

Anyway, we had been smack-bang in the middle of a post-mortem for the 2024 US election. We’d been trying to figure out why, exactly, the Dems had made so many seemingly inexplicably poor decisions in the preceding months. The best we could come up with was the theory that they don’t actually care that much about winning, preferring instead to be the noble/sanctimonious losers (while helping to maintain the status quo). For the fun of it, I threw my “political consultant” hat into the ring, and gave them a blueprint on how they might go about securing an election victory for themselves, if someone was holding a [3D-printed?] gun to their head.

The gist of my pitch to them was that they were out of touch, and would need to undergo a full-scale re-brand. Their fetishization of “due process” and “respectful debate” and “bipartisan cooperation” and all those other serious-sounding buzzwords has proven to be manifestly useless. I mean, their (supposed) opposition, the GOP, have made it clear that they don’t give a shit about any of that stuff. So, our high-minded notions of what Politics™ should be/look like have gotta go. We’ve got to appeal to the gen pop’s most base desires: sex, fear, blood-thirst, etc.

If we want to compete, we’ve gotta get with the times. To drive home the point (for my clients), the stylistic comparison I drew was between Trump and Vince McMahon (and the latter’s billion-dollar brand, the WWE). These guys have mastered the formula: pantomime villains, incorrigible womanizers, cutthroat businessmen, psychopathic wills-to-power, etc. Crucially, they know how to work a crowd—specifically a poor/working class one—into a frenzy. In the same vein, they know that bad press is better than no press.

So, you may not think highly of ‘em, but this electorate is the hand you’ve been dealt (by yourself, but that’s not the point right now), and it’s your job to make the best out of it. Scolding people isn’t going to win them over. Folks are telling you what they want: WWE storylines. Big, brash, violent, explicit. So give them what they want: soundbyte-able, quotable, meme-able stuff. (Trump almost getting JFK’ed back in July was gold dust, for instance.)

As far as our prospective candidate goes, then, this means playing the hits: he’s gonna need to be a straight, white male. You’ve got to beat these “alpha males” at their own game.

The logical extension, then—as far as I could see—was that our guy would need to possess the one trump card that the smooth-brained masses could not deny. . .

Indeed, we mustn’t forget that there’s a not-particularly-well-disguised homoerotic subtext over in the MAGA/MAGA-adjacent tent. Lots of repressed desires. For example, the leaked texts from Vince “The Cuckold” McMahon salivating over the idea of his mistress getting taken to pound-town by his buddies.

. . . or Trump bragging about his buddy Arnold Palmer’s penis.

. . . or the leaked audio of Jerry Jones (owner of the NFL Cowboys) doing the same thing about his players’.

. . . or Joe Rogan’s subconscious desperately trying to come out on his behalf.

I’ll quit beating around the bush: our candidate’s schlong is gonna have to be bigger than Trump’s.

I promise that this will sway more people than you realize. Way more than the 50,000 or whatever that swung the 2016 election. Way, way more. Several million at least.

Call this crass, unethical, undignified/unbecoming/socially corrosive or whatever else if you like. But remember, that’s just your old training talking. We’re ditching that line of thinking; it doesn’t work. I’m the captain now. You and I both know, deep down, that what I’m saying is true. There’s tons of precedent for the court of public opinion being swayed by all sorts of irrelevant factors: millions of people believed that OJ had to be innocent solely because he’d been such a talented football player, for god’s sake. And, lest we forget, there’s people who develop parasocial relationships with serial killers like Ted Bundy, writing them love letters on death row. (People still get crushes on these charismatic killers today, as they binge watch true crime shows.)

This is good news for us. Really good news. Our candidate doesn’t have to be someone with a particularly coherent ideology, let alone a “qualified” politician (in fact, this would likely hurt our case). General sex appeal will be more than enough. Basically, it just can’t be another robotic, unlikeable careerist put forth by the DNC focus-group machine. We can’t discount the value of celebrity here (I mentioned that Kamala would have done better with the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as her running mate). People have voted Arnold Schwarzenegger into office. And Reagan. And there’s still an appetite for this, as proven by Trump, obviously, but it’s not just a partisan thing: loads of people have been calling for Jon Stewart to run for office. And, over the last few weeks, that clip of an impassioned/informed Matt Damon has made the rounds and won more than a few people over. (“Now that’s a guy I would vote for!”)

I suggested that we could astroturf someone if need be, like how Kim K broke onto the scene with her “leaked” sex tape. We want someone who isn’t afraid to be controversial; to put themselves out there. Just give us this platform, and we can work from there. . . . But who would it be?

This was all very tentative; hypothetical. These blueprints were (very) rough drafts. The election had only happened a couple of weeks earlier, after all. Before I could even send out the next chunk of the proposal, though, one of our subscribers1 took it upon himself to go out there (into the real world!) and get the ball rolling himself. . .

Get this: a wealthy (check) white (check) dude (check) under 45 (check) with a six-pack (check) who at least presented as straight (check) decided to go out and make himself famous (check) by killing someone whose demise the vast majority of Americans could revel in.

(Funnily enough, we’ve just finished talking about schadenfreude, and how it was only going to get more common among the increasing poor/working class, what with political division increasing and material conditions worsening. The first of those posts is linked ⬇️here⬇️.)

The Headless Bikeman

Jack Rathmell

August 2, 2024

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I mean, talk about “taking initiative”! That’s the American spirit right there. This kid’s going places, I’m telling you. You just can’t teach those intangibles.

So, I don’t see the murder charge being a hurdle. We’ve learned, after all, that having a criminal record means nothing. You can confess/be convicted of whatever you want, and people will forgive—and even defend—you if they like you enough. There are loopholes for everything; it’s just a matter of creating/taking advantage of them. Besides, he’s still too young to run for president as things stand, so he had a few years to burn anyway.

Remember when we talked about how we were going to have to figure out how to build a big tent? How we were maybe going to have to cooperate with people with whom we may disagree on certain particulars? How about when I said (only semi-jokingly) that it’s private interest groups like the NRA/KKK/Taliban who we should be keeping an eye on? How those were the real “swing states”? Well, look: Mr. Luigi’s already got the 2nd amendment crowd on board, just like that. Bang. (So to speak.) That’s a lot of donor money behind him. (Look how Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero for these people.) As a self-styled tech bro, Luigi will also appeal to the enlightened-centrist/Musk-fanboy/crypto-bro crowd. Sure enough, an e-coin in his name has already been “minted” (?) and has a market cap of several million. It seems like he’s also going to do well with the black/latino bloc. The ones in his cell block, at least: he got a fresh new haircut from one of them while in prison, which is apparently a good sign.

Look, I’m not an expert on any of this. (Clearly.) I’m just a kook/disseminator of misinformation. These posts are purely satirical, half-baked ramblings that have no bearing on reality. Me predicting the rise of (or setting the stage for?) someone like Luigi was just a case of the blind squirrel finding a nut. (That said, I’ll still post the remaining chunk of the “blueprint” next time, if only because I’d already drafted it and don’t want it to go to waste.) All I’m saying is, this kid already has more political capital—and public goodwill—in his pinkie than a dozen Kamalas/Hillarys combined (whether you condone what he did or not). Who knows what he’ll do with it?

For the record, I can’t prove that Luigi was a subscriber of this publication. But we know he used substack, and there are already a few other bloggers out there wondering whether they are to blame, and I want to feel important too. Plus, I managed to get my hands on his actual manifesto, and learned that it was actually two pages; of which the lame-stream media released only the first. (As it’s an ongoing investigation, I ran the picture through a filter to disguise his handwriting. For some reason, it scrambled a couple of letters around. Ignore that. I also had to redact a couple of details to protect his privacy.) In this never-before-seen second section, he makes a couple of references that I don’t think can be a coincidence. But I’ll let you be the judge.