I Watched "Zero Day" So You Don't Have To

2/5 Don't Waste Your Time

Contains spoilers

My wife heard from a turbonormie friend of ours at the gym that Zero Day was "good." This from a political centrist TeeVee Watcher, literally the undecided meme, a nice guy and career government type with great taste in bourbon.

Every once in a while I subject myself to the normie political propaganda dramas to see what they're putting into the heads of the masses. Netflix series always end up on the free sites, so it's a small matter to check them out. Now, I would never recommend such material to a TeeVee Watcher, particularly a Fox News boomer, nor would I acknowledge having subjected myself to this outside of our circles. I only do it for you, the people.

Told from the POV of former American president George Mullen (Robert DeNiro), a cyberattack disables America's infrastructure for a mere 60 seconds, causing several thousand fatalities due to vehicular accidents, dropped hospital life support systems, etc.​ A mysterious message is transmitted across all domestic cell phones (and possibly other systems) when service is restored -

⚠ THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN

The Congress encourages the creation of a commission with extra-constitutional powers to investigate the attack, which used what they refer to as a cyberweapon exploiting a Zero Day vulnerability. Former President George Mullen, a single-term president known for his bipartisanship, is invited to head the commission. His Ashkenazi Sweathog daughter Alex, a sort of AOC stand-in, is a junior congresscritter and totally mad at her dad. Mullen is the perfect fit for this role, you see, not only because of his bipartisan "let's put the country first" approach to politics, but also due to his intelligence background in Vietnam as well as experience as a prosecutor. Amusingly, ​if I understand the timeline correctly, in this alternate universe Obama was never president. Indeed, The First Black Pres-dent currently serving during the story is the unbearable girlboss Angela Bassett. Stuff happens, there are twists and turns, and the Russians aren't the enemy.

Visually, it's pleasant to watch, and the editing only gets a little choppy in the last two of eight episodes, when the pace accelerates beyond the slow, steady build experienced at the beginning. There is a slightly disjointed feel to some aspects of the show, which hints at rushed reshoots more than a complex story. My wife tapped out pretty quickly because it bored her, but I happily clicked "next" every time I wasn't too sleepy to continue.

I write this review not because I think anyone here cares about a piece of Netflix pap, but because it's a glimpse into the memetic zeitgeist being put out for mainstream consumption. The execrable but memetically interesting "Leave the World Behind" was directly in line with the 2022 ZOG memescape, so "Zero Day" was worth a shot, and I think it delivered.

DeNiro, despite being in his dotage, is ​still seen as a big-ticket actor, though clearly on a severe downward slide. Normie Republicans absolutely hate him for his political stances, and while the "Zero Day" producers may or may not understand that, or care, he now limits the audience. Do Fox News boomers watch Netflix? No, the audience is solidly GenX / Millennial, trending normie/default liberal. Why am I speculating about the audience? If you see it, it's for you. Gone are the days of the made for TeeVee movie or miniseries, where a solid third of American households would dutifully tune in to be entertained via a memetic firmware update. Theatrical releases had to be entertaining above all, so any messaging in that format had to be more subtle or incidental.

So, what memetic firmware update is being communicated via "Zero Day?" "Leave the World Behind" was a solidly Team A operation, blessed by the Obamas - the story details a false flag operation by Republicans and other retrograde Whites in the Pentagon to scapegoat foreign browns to enable a coup, told from the POV of entitled White Liberals who dissaspect magical blacks.

My position is that "Zero Day" is a Team B production, as it feels as if it were an update to The West Wing​ cinematic universe, but pushes a very centrist, Let's All Be Reasonable, Cease The Infighting, And Come Together As Americans message. The villains are (spoilers) leftist conspiracy theorists (!!), militant Occupy Wall Street types (!!), a leftist fusion of Alex Jones and Rachel Maddow with the surname Green (!!), a hedge fund manager (ho hum), an autistic tech billionaire (ho hum) who is both female and obviously jewish (!!), and bipartisan members of Congress who explicitly state that they want to chop off the "radicals" in both their parties so that they can get back to business as usual (!!). Our gerontocratic system is a huge theme, but wasn't the world of our delusional olds better?

While there is some slight lip service by an implicitly Republican House leader about one third of the country being deeply committed to disinformation and conspiracy theories, one third denying an election, and one third calling for the teardown of our historic American banking and governmental systems, the overall theme is that suppressing alternate opinions is what will destroy America. Given the direction by all involved, including black girlboss prez-dent, to ​"do the right thing for the country" (and her next election) and let the conspirators quietly step down, telling the truth is the correct move. There is a huge wink wink about the 2020 elections and COVID regime here, though carefully worded.

"Zero Day" was written in 2021 or 2022, DeNiro attached in 2022, greenlit in early 2023, some initial filming done in 2023, but most in 2024. The writers' strike of 2023 is blamed for a hold on production in late 2023 until December, but I suspect that October 7 had an awful lot to do with a rewrite/reframe which led to the disjointed messaging. There is a scene between DeNiro and Matthew Modine, the undesignated (but strongly implied Republican) Speaker of the House, which feels as if it were filmed and edited after the Trump election to reframe some element of the story that wasn't sufficiently centrist, but I can't know for sure. It may have just been sloppily edited, unlike the rest of the series.

In sum, I hold that "Zero Day" is a Team B memetic bullet fired directly at the heart of the adult White normie, leveraging themes from the past few decades to ask them, "warts and all, wasn't 90s and 00s centrist liberalism a better way?" Will it strike home? Per the reviews from ZOGspace, I'm not sure, but people love watching their slop, don't they?​

(But not me - ever! Right?)

KD