Killing for Content

If you’re online enough (or know someone who is), you’ve probably heard the phrase “everything is content.” What is content you might ask? Well, let's take a look at urban dictionary.

We can work with this.

Content is meant to be seen. Content involves spectacle. You watch it, you riff off of it with your friends, and if you don’t tune in, you’re missing out. Content is also something that goes away and you forget about when you put your phone away.

The second Trump administration is almost entirely staffed by content creators who want to make content and they are expending your taxpayer dollars as well as the international reputation of the United States of America to do it.

I get that this all sounds absurd, that’s par for the course with the Trump administration, but go take a look at who some of these cabinet heads are and what their professional backgrounds are. 

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was the host of Fox & Friends Weekend from 2017 to 2024. Worthy of note is that Hegseth’s tenure as a daytime TV host involved aggressive lobbying on behalf of war criminals such as Eddie Gallagher and Clint Lorance, which is very likely to have influenced Trump’s decisions to reverse the demotion of the former and pardon the latter.

Former Deputy Director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, spent the better part of the last decade as a podcaster. He has been a guest host of various Fox News shows and hosted the Dan Bongino Show from 2021 until 2025 when he assumed his position as Deputy Director.

A recent New York Times article that interviewed forty five current and former FBI employees notes how Bongino demanded the implementation of new fitness tests with no scientific or medical basis that would disproportionately disqualify women. According to an anonymous senior executive, Bongino justified the implementation of these tests despite pushback by stating:

You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera she’s out of shape or overweight, that’s going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they’d look good on a doorbell camera.

This is not a professional administrator, this is a casting director.

Some of these people aren’t content creators by profession but it doesn’t stop them from acting like it. Kash Patel, Director of the FBI, is notably not a content creator. The majority of his career was spent as a federal prosecutor and cabinet aide. However his recent behavior is more akin to a celebrity trying to flex their status for favors than an administrator.  Some of Kash Patel’s blatant corruption is detailed in the New York Times article and this is merely the tip of the iceberg. The previously-mentioned New York Times article noted how in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Patel arrived and demanded a raid jacket before he attended a press conference and upon realizing the jacket did not have the patches he liked, called over the SWAT team and began pulling their patches off to put on the jacket before making a public appearance. Please direct yourself to "Cool Boys with Cool Toys: The Cult of the Operator and the “Crisis” of Masculinity" if you would like further discussion of tactical gear as gender affirming care for men.

Another FBI employee recalled attending a conference call with the executives of nearly every field branch, a common occurrence following critical incidents, and watching as Patel and Bongino began discussing their Twitter strategy, down to which field office or government official would post and in what order they would do it. These are not the actions of a professional, nonpartisan law enforcement organization. These are youtubers scheming about how they’re gonna win a Twitter beef.

Gregory Bovino, former “Commander-at-large” of Customs and Border Patrol, has been a career member of Border Patrol since 1996 and has spent his entire career within the agency. This has not stopped Bovino from making constant appearances in public with a dramatic long coat reminiscent of that of a Gestapo officer and frequently being spotted “in the field” assisting his subordinates in yelling at protestors or tossing less than lethal munitions at them. His X account consists of hundreds of images of mugshots or Bovino himself mocking people who are outraged at his conduct.

Minnesota anti-ICE observer Will Stancil even noted that his actions were clearly an attempt to farm content. In response to a DHS post alleging CBP officers were part of a targeted harassment campaign when attempting to use gas station restrooms, Stancil noted that he had seen Bovino and his subordinates visit three different gas stations in succession and stand around posing for cameras while protestors yelled at them.

Worthy of note is that Bovino’s social media conduct was so egregious, even by the standards of this administration, that upon his removal from Minnesota following the murder of Alex Pretti, DHS suspended access to Bovino’s X account. Bovino’s X account, which also appears to be a personal account, has not been active since January 26, the day he was removed. He was quite literally told to hand in his badge, gun, and twitter password.

This phenomenon is not unique to cabinet heads trying to build their own personal “brand.” There is evidence that institutional policy has been put in place to orient government outreach to prioritize spectacle rather than information.

A recent Washington Post article gave an inside look at ICE’s social media machine using thousands of internal ICE messages provided to the Post. Six current or former officials at the Department of Homeland Security told the Post that their video efforts had broken with the careful and methodical work of past administrations. ICE’s public affairs arm has transformed from a routine government communication outlet, mostly ignored by Americans, into an influencer-esque media machine churning out videos of men clad in tactical gear carrying out immigration raids.

"[ICE’s public affairs team] began working like a professional influencer operation, creating a “social media checklist” of caught-on-camera arrests, sharing metrics with senior officials, using paid social media tracking tools, and cataloguing all of their Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, and X posts, ranked by impressions and engagement rate.”

Go ahead and check for yourself. Go to the Department of Homeland Security’s X account and look at the media tab. The overwhelming majority of the content here is mugshots or clips from Fox News, more akin to a Twitch streamer or youtuber promoting their own content and showing off what partnerships they’ve just acquired.

If you really think about it, social media metrics such as likes, reposts, and views are a form of immediate performance review.

Another “innovation” of Trump’s second term is “Rapid Response 47,” an X account intended to “hold fake news accountable for their lies.” The account seems to exist primarily to “debunk” criticism of the President posted by the media, such as questions about his increasingly corpse-like appearance, and to act as a reply guy. Several departments have followed suit with the Department of Defense and Department of Heath and Human Services having their own “rapid response” accounts which function in a largely identical fashion.

This isn’t the White House. It’s the Fox News content creator house. Their social media presence has nothing to do with communicating policy and everything to do with posting ragebait.

For those unaware of the term, “ragebait” is content deliberately meant to provoke anger or frustration which provokes an emotional response out of the user who proceeds to respond to it, usually negatively, on the platform in question. “Owning the libs” is a form of ragebait. I have chosen to use the more generic term to make it easier for readers to apply this framework to other administrations or countries because much of this is not unique to the Trump administration or American politics.

This is meaningfully distinct from “some red meat for the base” because social media algorithms are heavily influenced by interactions such as likes, reposts, and views, but especially comments or quote posts. They want people to interact both positively and negatively because it benefits their metrics, which as previously noted in the Washington Post’s reporting, is something that is tracked by these Trump administration social media teams.

Given this context, “Operation Southern Spear,” the ongoing campaign of strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the United States Southern Command area of responsibility should be conceptualized as content. If you look at the media tab for Pete Hegseth’s “Secretary of War” account on X from around October of last year you can find a dozen videos he has posted of these strikes. He includes several paragraphs of justifications and the basis for the strike and aerial reconnaissance video, typically taken with thermal imaging camera, of these boats at sea before being struck.

At a quick glance, these may appear to be dry and clinical descriptions of military actions carried out in the name of national security. They are not. This is Hegseth’s “professional” persona. When he swaps to his personal X account, he posts like a mukbang streamer talking about how he just ate another bowl of the spiciest ramen in the world.

United States Southern Command has followed suit and posted their own videos of boat strikes as well as tanker interdictions conducted by helicopter-borne units.

The posting of military actions, many of which involve people dying, is not exactly a new phenomenon but the prototype for this type of content is early ISIS propaganda. At its height, one of the hallmarks of ISIS propaganda was incredibly graphic execution videos or images, often of beheadings. These videos or images would be distributed through social media by ISIS members and sympathizers with the intent being to reach the largest number of people possible to intimidate them.

The boat strike campaign and the manner with which the administration is publicizing it, has nearly identical goals and methods.

Hegseth ends every single post of a boat strike with an explicit threat that the US government will hunt down and kill you if you are a “narco-terrorist.” If this isn’t chilling enough, remember that the administration has yet to provide any proof whatsoever that any of these victims were drug traffickers. Even should they be, that does not permit them to be killed via airstrike. Despite that (or maybe because of it), these videos are then shared amongst Trump supporters and followers across social media and the wider internet, all while they are cheering it on and celebrating the violent deaths of innocent people at sea.

Let me be very clear. These strikes are incredibly illegal. They are war crimes. At least 114 people have been killed in this campaign so far, and for many of them, their final moments are posted on the internet for Trump’s supporters to share like a Call of Duty montage.

This is abhorrent and this is what the administration is doing in your name with your tax dollars.

This culminated in the January 3, 2026 snatch and grab of Nicholas Maduro codenamed “Operation Absolute Resolve.” A discussion of the legality, ethics, or strategic thinking behind this blatant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty is well beyond the scope of this essay but the manner in which the Trump administration chose to disclose information about the operation to the public is not.

Following the successful raid, the Trump administration was quick to publish photographs of President Trump and many of his aides or secretaries monitoring the unfolding event on live feeds from a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago. These images are very clearly meant to mimic the aesthetics of the famous photo of President Barack Obama and his advisors watching Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Astute observers were quick to notice that the Mar-a-Lago situation room had X feeds projected onto wall screens. One of these (there are several) can be seen below.

If you look very closely, you can just make out the word “Venezuela” typed into X’s search bar. Trump later mentioned in a phone interview with Fox News that they had access to the live feed of the operation and “I mean, I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show. And if you would’ve seen the speed, the violence…it’s just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did.”

It is more than likely that President Trump, as well as his cabinet officials, were watching the live feed of Delta Force eliminating Maduro’s personal guard while also monitoring the reactions of users on X, who were only receiving fragmentary pieces of news and offering rampant speculation.

One of such users is the account “OSINTdefender,” an account with 1.8 million followers whose X feed can be seen on the right of the image below.  OSINTdefender is a known vector for mis/disinformation or erroneous reporting on current events, even by the standards of random OSINT accounts on social media who typically race to be the first poster on your timeline. This account also rarely credits the sources from which they are acquiring their footage.

If you utilize X’s advanced search feature and filter for posts made by OSINTdefender on January 3, 2026 you can see the exact posts this account made to X while the operation was ongoing, such as video of helicopters above Caracas and smoke plumes across the region from American airstrikes.

Operation Absolute Resolve was monitored in the same manner as a livestreamer who watches their stream’s chat for reactions. If you are unfamiliar with livestreaming culture, most livestreamers have a text chatroom accompanying their livestream. Streamers will often address these viewers collectively as “chat” and ask for their collective opinions or reactions to what is happening in the video feed.

If you really think about it, what is the “trending” or “what’s hot” feed on social media if not chat but for real life?

Following the completion of the raid, Trump went on Truth Social and posted a photo of Nicolas Maduro in custody aboard the USS Iwo Jima.

It is worth noting that Donald Trump has not made frequent use of X on either the “POTUS” or “realDonaldTrump” accounts since he was banned in January 2021 for his role in inciting the January 6th Insurrection. Even following his reinstatement after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X, he has made sporadic use of the platform, instead preferring to use Truth Social.

This image was posted only to Truth Social, and most other social media platforms received it via screenshot or another user downloading it and reposting it. This is not the behavior of an administrator, let alone the President of the United States of America, trying to communicate policy results to their constituents. This is a content creator telling you that there’s exclusive content on Patreon.

If you’re still reading at this point, I’ve probably convinced you.

The problem is the phenomenon I am describing is ridiculous and incongruent with our expectations of how government officials and agencies should act. To explain it to someone without all of the resources here makes you look like the crazy one. It is not helped by the fact that a universal language amongst the contemporary young right who make up the majority of these staffers and interns consists of Da Vinci Code-esque hidden messages full of dogwhistles.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy “coincidentally” manages to use the word “Trump” exactly 47 times. Likewise, government accounts frequently make seemingly innocuous posts such as this.

There are exactly 14 words in that post with the letter H inexplicably capitalized twice. “The Fourteen Words” (We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children) are a common white nationalist slogan and two capitalized letter Hs are reference to “Heil Hitler.” This often appears as “1488” amongst white nationalists.

There are several essays that could be written on the highly esoteric and increasingly niche aesthetics or tropes, most of which originated online and in far-right or outright neo-nazi communities, that are now ubiquitous amongst US government releases. Explaining this to someone who is not this online makes you sound like you’re Giorgio A. Tsoukalos on Ancient Aliens.

This is a larger symptom of the Trump era and how many people as well as many newsrooms have chosen to react to it. The mad king and his viziers posting categorically insane things on the internet, any one of which would be a scandal in any other administration, as ragebait is understood as entertainment first and politics or policy a distant second.

Trump’s insanity is interpreted as antics and content, not unlike what you’d see in a Mr. Beast video that you watch during your lunch break, rather than the actual policy or rhetoric it is. And much like the videos you watch during your lunch break, they go away when you put your phone down.

Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. His cabinet secretaries are the heads of some of the largest and most powerful bureaucracies on the planet. They cannot ever “do a little trolling.” This is real life. They (as well as many observers) may treat it like it’s a game but it is real. Their actions and their words have consequences.

The danger of allowing the mindset of “Everything is Content” to become normalized is that it contributes to the “unreality” of real life. If everything is content, then everything is a meme, and if everything is a meme then you don’t have to take anything seriously because it's all kayfabe and it goes away when you put the phone down.

This also creates very perverse incentives for content creators (or those aspiring to be them) in misrepresenting or outright manufacturing information on current events to their own financial and social benefit. It is worth remembering that a reason (but not the only reason) for the ongoing Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota that has resulted in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was content creator Nick Shirley’s viral video “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal.” The video mostly consists of Shirley arriving unannounced at child care centers in Minnesota while demanding to see children and being told to leave.

This video quickly gathered millions of views and caught the attention of federal officials, to the point that it was specifically mentioned in a White House press release, resulted in a freeze of federal funding to the state of Minnesota, and was a justification for the massive surge of DHS, CBP, and ICE agents deployed to Minnesota.

I would also caution anyone against believing that this is a uniquely Trumpian or American phenomenon. The idea that the world is your oyster with which to do things that will garner you attention on the internet is universal. It can happen anywhere and with anyone who has a smartphone and an internet connection.

Sometimes this is innocent and good hearted, like vibing to Fleetwood Mac while you sip cranberry juice and cruise around town on a longboard, or having your parrot open a beer and then chugging it on camera.

Sometimes it’s malicious and evil. Abu Lulu, a brigadier general in the Rapid Support Forces involved in the Sudanese Civil War, films himself executing civilians or prisoners and does Tiktok live segments where he boasts about how he has killed so many people that he has lost count.

When you start to believe that everything is content you forget that you are experiencing the real world. You forget that some of the horrible things that happen in the world are happening to real people because you’re preoccupied with how to riff off of it for internet clout.

Reality may not need to be realistic but that does not make it fiction.

Featured image is "Lethal Kinetic Strike, Sept 2, 2025," 2025.