Netflix's "Zero Day" is elite propaganda (spoilers)

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We also really, really love telling elaborate stories about high-level conspiracies. The latest one is Zero Day, Netflix’s new political “thriller.” The hero, Joe Biden—sorry, I mean “George Mullen”—is an elderly, one-term, moderate, dead-son-having, possibly dementia-addled former president played by Robert De Niro. After America experiences a mysterious cyber attack that leads to the deaths of more than 3,000 people, he is asked to lead a commission investigating its causes. He is given enormous powers, including the suspension of habeas corpus.

In his pursuit of the truth—which is presented as noble—Mullen relentlessly abuses his power. For instance, he abducts a character obviously based on Tucker Carlson in the middle of the night, without a warrant, throwing a hood over his head and then torturing him for information. He also convinces the current president—played by Angela Bassett—to shut down the entire banking system, and threatens to place a veteran’s child into foster care, among other things. Again, Mullen is the hero here, and all of these acts are portrayed as necessary evils undertaken for the greater good.

After following a series of false leads, Mullen uncovers the truth. It wasn’t the CIA, who are portrayed as heroes for saving Mullen from an angry mob. Instead, they were people with faces and names: a bipartisan group of legislators and oligarchs, sick of political gridlock, who decided to undercut the extremists on both the left and right. And so they worked with a ring of sketchy billionaires to manufacture a crisis that would bring the country together. (Although they didn’t expect anyone to die in the process.)

The takeaway for the viewer is there is no systemic problem, no insidious deep state, no immovable force of power shaping the country against its will. In Zero Day, the masses are bad, overly polarized, and too shortsighted to see how necessary it is for Mullen to wipe his arse with the Constitution in pursuit of finding truth and restoring normalcy. All America really needs is a principled moderate to tell hard truths and give a good speech—which Mullen does, in true West Wing fashion, at several points throughout the series.

Basically, this show might be the most obvious example of regime propaganda I’ve ever come across. I was shocked at how swampy its politics were—until I realized it was co-created by a former head of NBC and a former national security reporter for The New York Times. This perhaps accounts for its establishment politics and its overly libidinal Tucker Carlson torture scenes. Ratings jealousy manifests in all sorts of ways. Who knows, maybe next season they’ll have De Niro waterboarding a stand-in for Elon Musk.

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