Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well, especially considering that we are currently living in very dark, dystopian, and anxiety-inducing times.

If you've been online in the past few weeks, most likely you've seen some pretty horrifying stuff, things that are becoming so frequent and increasingly terrible, I'm not even sure where to start. But what I do want to highlight is how fundamentally unprepared the current-day media landscape is to deal with these conversations and these stories that are currently going viral and instilling a lot of polarization.

There are many instances of this, but the latest of all of them that inspired me to do this video is this recent music video from none other than DaBaby. Yes, that DaBaby, who hasn't made a hit song or had a relevant feature in years at this point, He's somehow back in the discourse yet again off of this new music video he has dropped on social media, which featured a dramatization of the recent and very tragic and violent killing of Iryna Zartuska, a Ukrainian who was living in America and was recently seen being killed on security cam footage on public transit. If you haven't seen it, don't go look for it. It's horrifying. It is stomach-churning.

When digging further into the background of the suspect in this killing, Decarlos Brown, the guy clearly had a history of very serious mental health issues, and at one time even called the police to investigate manmade materials inside his body. I don't know. I feel like anybody who is engaging in that behavior shouldn't necessarily be arrested and locked away with the key thrown away, but they should, at the very least, be put into some system or program or something that is going to hopefully, mentally, put that person on the right track so that they're not slipping through the cracks and presenting as a danger to society because they have no help, no support, no nothing.

That is the discourse that we would be having in a sane society. But instead, what is happening as a result of the proliferation of this video are these intensified, bigoted narratives around race in America. The discourse around all of this is so scattershot and so insane.

Personally, from an outside perspective, it just feels like it's something that cannot be untangled right now, as I feel like most people are not so much seeing the situation as much as they are seeing and hearing about the way it's being exploited to push political narratives, increase the sense of paranoia and fear that your average everyday person feels when just walking down the street and are maybe disengaging from it out of fear that they would be adding fuel to those flames.

When you do have somebody step up to the plate in the way DaBaby did here with this song and music video, it is a completely cringe misfire, not only in terms of the content of the song itself, seemingly having very little to do with what the music video is dramatizing in a literal sense. But of course, DaBaby paints himself in the video as this heroic bystander who just happened to grab the hand of the perpetrator in the video just as he was going to stab and just prevented the whole thing from happening. Just needed DaBaby to stop them, and then we can just get off the train and everybody's cool.

It's a clear attempt at communicating and saying something deep. I mean, even the hashtag DaBaby attaches to the video on Twitter insinuates that there's some message here that we can't miss. #DontMissTheMessage, we've got to catch on to this message. I have to wonder, on some level, with this piece of media being as exploitative as it is, it's clearly taking advantage of a very terrible moment. Does DaBaby, in some twisted way, think he's doing the right thing here?

Did he just happen to see this video and see it getting shared over and over and over, and maybe he didn't really understand the greater social context in which it's being shared and pushed, and the fact that black communities across America are being scapegoated as having some responsibility for this, as opposed to it once again being the doings of one mentally ill man who was clearly not helped by the system. No, DaBaby's post here doesn't really seem to understand or grasp that element of this at all.

There truly is very little to be gleaned from this music video DaBaby has put up. Outside of murder is bad, and if you catch somebody who's about to commit a heinous act, such as this one, in the right exact perfect moment and reason with him immediately as if you had a premonition of what was going to happen in the first place, then temperatures can cool down and everything will be fine after.

At the end of the day, this just feels like DaBaby making this very serious, very horrible situation about him, which leads me to move on to the high-profile political assassination of conservative social media influencer and TPUSA founder, the late Charlie Kirk, who was recently, as I'm sure you know at this point, gunned down on the campus of a Utah University while doing what he did quite famously, debate college students about various political issues and positions from a conservative standpoint.

Now, I guess I should probably say off the bat, just for anyone who's confused and is curious and needs to be assured of this, I completely do not endorse the killing of this man. And very much like the Zartuska, killing, but times 10, the discourse around this has been even more confusing because obviously there's even more incentive for this to be politically exploited, with numerous influencers and massive brands across conservative social media calling for civil war in the wake of this.

And on top of that, untold numbers of people looking for any way they can to spin this so that it has something to do with trans people. First, trolls, internet users, and various posters online were infatuated with the idea of the killer themselves being trans. Then, once it became clear that was not the case, we were then thinking about how there were trans things on the bullet casings. Now that we've seen more info around what was etched into those bullet casings—believe me, even that is confusing and coded and was released by the FBI in a way to where there was very little context around it, which only created more polarizing takes on what any of these etchings mean.

All I'm saying is the official narrative and investigation around it in terms of the information that has been divulged thus far, has not been helpful at all in terms of quelling confusion around these messages. And yes, now that we have learned more about what was actually on those bullet casings, now we're all talking about how the shooter's roommate or partner might be trans. And if that doesn't end up being the case, I'm sure we're going to learn the shooter had a trans bus driver at some point. We'll see.

I also want to say, far and away, the vast majority of mass shootings and incidents like this are not committed by trans people, are not committed by leftists. I don't feel like that should require saying because that's just an obvious fact. But apparently it does require saying because there are some stupid people who believe that. Either way, the lack of a coherent discussion and narrative around something as devastating and as nasty and as honestly fear-inducing as this has only created a vacuum where basically anybody who is willing to reduce this down to the simplest and most aggressive terms they can is going to come out on top in some way because you're, by virtue of that, giving confused internet users seeking answers, some narrative to latch onto, just to make this whole very scary thing easier to grasp.

Enter Tom McDonald, who somehow came out with a Charlie Kirk song before we even had video of this man in an open casket with his wife giving a statement. Now, of course, the song itself is highly emotionally manipulative, complete trash. Sounds like flow for flow, a complete ripoff of at least several Macklemore songs because Tom McDonald only exists to steal flows and ideas from basically every relevant white rapper there ever was just to chew them up and spit them out with a bunch of right-wing talking points, which this tribute track is obviously chock-full of.

Even though as of right now, with as much material and information as we have, the shooter and his family background doesn't seem like super woke or anything like that. But who the hell knows what woke means to your average conservative at this point? Because online, we're all just playing this endless game of moron telephone, where every single time a word or a term or a phrase or a meme is repeated, it just loses more and more and more of its meaning.

Yeah, in his rush to post this song, Tom seemingly also doesn't fully understand Charlie Kirk's age. The guy was not barely 31, he was about to turn 32, which might not seem like a big deal, but this compiled with Basically, every generic, average perception of him that maybe casual Internet users that came across one or two YouTube videos of him debating online. Whatever that average Charlie Kirk content consumer thought of Charlie, Tom is basically packed into this song. And knowingly so, because Tom wants to ride this wave right to the end so that he can maximize the amount of attention he's going to get out of it.

And that's really the discussion here, because not only is Tom McDonald essentially whitewashing Charlie Kirk's legacy and ignoring basically anything he ever said or did that was the least bit controversial. But this man with this song and this music video is just exploiting Charlie Kirk's death in the same exact way he's trying to or was trying to up until this point, exploit the fact that Gavin Newsom is really going at Trump right now and will likely run for President very soon.

And believe me, personally, I'm no fan of Gavin Newsom. But the fact that Tom was desperately trying to cling to this man's coattails for at least a little bit of attention, why he's doing it is obvious. It's not out of some seriously and deeply held political imperative or philosophical worldview. The guy is a self-interested social media opportunist who's actually fucking Canadian. So if anything he says or does actually has any social or future downsides to it, I'm sure that guy can just go fuck off back over there. He does not have skin in the game like your average person who actually might have to live here long term.

Now, another interesting thing I'll say about this new song of Tom's is that he's posted to the internet that sales from it, streams from it, whatever profits are generated from this track, will be going together into a donation. But he's waiting to do it because he wants to give the biggest donation possible.

Now, Charlie's family, and my heart goes out to them because obviously, the death of a father, regardless of who that father is, is a pretty major and pretty awful thing for a family to have to sustain. Most likely, they have a lot going on, and they're probably not following the exploits of one Tom McDonald here very closely and might not be keeping tabs on or keeping a lookout for that donation when it comes. So what I would like is for all of you watching this video and any Tom fans also watching this video is to continue following Tom McDonald's @hangovergang Instagram page closely and just make sure he follows through with that donation.

Maybe even potentially send to the family further donations because it's not as if a song, once you give a donation, just stops generating profits. Maybe my read of Tom here is incorrect. Maybe he's more well-intentioned than I think he is. Either way, seeing that donation, proof of that donation would be fantastic, especially after witnessing such a horrible tragedy.

Ending off this video, I apologize. I'm a little at a loss for words. I don't really have many reflections to pass your way, other than just things seem so insanely scary and fragmented right now. But I guess some recommendations that I could give you and some observations that I am having is that it seems a lot of this extremity and a lot of this mass psychosis, frankly, is being inflamed by just an overuse and an overindulgence in the internet and social media, especially on platforms whose algorithms tend to skew toward extreme political ideologies.

So I'm not coming on here and saying that you should be avoiding the internet entirely or anything like that. But when you are online, you should limit your exposure to those sorts of platforms. You should instead embrace places and spaces where you know you're actually interacting with real people and not bots.

And in addition to all of that, I recommend even more that all of you do your best to spend some time with some real people face to face for the love of God. And don't just simply allow everything that you see on the Internet to paint the entirety of your worldview. I can already hear the keyboard strokes, "Anthony, isn't that what you do?" That's your terminally online brain talking. Shut the fuck up and turn that off and get the fuck off the computer, you idiot. I'm going to type that same comment anyway. No.

Let me know what you guys think about all of this down in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, forever.