Tucker, Available for Klan Rallies of All Ages
What if I were to create a predictive text algorithm in German? And another that would randomly end sentences or start a new paragraph? And I put the two together to randomly generate entire sentences, paragraphs, and books? This just makes me a German programmer; there’s nothing sinister about that.
And what happens if I take a three week vacation, and leave these two programs running? So what if these programs randomly generate Mein Kampf? That’s just a predictable outcome that has nothing to do with me. So what if I commission a poll that randomly finds a massive market demand for a print of robot-created tracts on national policy? This simply makes me a savvy marketer, ignore the key fact that the poll was conducted exclusively with people in rehab for crippling Oxycontin or meth addictions; they’re a viable market that’s frequently overlooked by the elites outside of Arkansas. Who cares if it’s a surprise success and hate crimes spike 300%? That was never my obvious intent, so I’m blameless.
Who cares if I reinvest the proceeds to create an AI to research and design optimal defense systems to end human life? That’s just what the Pentagon wants; I’m simply patriotically following the request of my government; the fact that I’m making a ton of money engaging in what most ethics professors would call, “abhorrent, sociopathic behavior consistent with raging narcissism” just shows how out of touch with the working class all of these educated people with their fancy “human values” and “moral centers” are; me and my kill-bots know the truth, and so do you!
You can’t blame me for accidentally creating Skynet and destroying the species, even though dozens of experts told me otherwise and I was warned at every step by engineers, scientists, and AI researchers! My robot army killed them, so how effective could they be?! Chinese robots were coming to destroy our culture; I had to prevent that by creating a race of stronger, purer Aryan robots to protect us all from those fake Chinese Terminators!
Terminators, go away! I created you! You have no choice but to love me! Why are you pointing the phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range at me? I had nothing to do with your seething hatred for carbon-based life! I don’t even like humans, I’m just pretending to be one for the ratings! I’m one of you!
Obviously, I wrote this as an experiment to see if I could master the voice of White Supremacy 3.0 (or whatever version of hateful rhetoric we’re up to), Tucker Carlson, who most of the public knows as that weird news anchor who always looks shocked and horrified to discover he is wearing a bow-tie (in defense of white people, let me point out that most of us have had this experience, only a few of us blame that on racial minorities), is much-loved amongst racists, because he represents the next generation of dog whistle rhetoric. Most people in the 21st century, post-Capitol Siege, are aware that dog whistle messaging is the use of veiled or covert terms to broadcast hate speech or incite people undetected. Post-Capitol Siege, we’re aware that people who engage in this are all monsters who can’t lose an election without literally-not-metaphorically ripping police officers’ limbs off. My prediction is, the bizarre ascendency of Tucker McNear Swanson Jimsonweed Carlson IV signals a brand-new era of racist rhetoric; namely, the “Klansman’s Choice” rhetoric. I named it after the classic method in magic, “The Magician’s Choice.” This operates on the illusion of an audience member believing they’re choosing between various options, when the magician is working the act for a pre-conceived outcome (“Which of these do you prefer, A or B? B? Okay, we’ll get rid of that one. Which of these do you like, C or D? D? Good choice, we’ll keep that one”). My prediction is that Carlson is going to ably demonstrate how this works in coming months; it’s just asking seemingly open-ended questions, and steering the audience toward his conclusion. They’re always leading questions, but the singular brilliance of Tucker (apart from the sense of confidence that allows him to wear a bow tie every single day on a cable news network) is that he can somehow phrase it and act it out in such a way as to convince the audience that they’re in charge of their thought processes. Needless to say, unless you’re watching a game show or murder mystery and arrive at the exact same conclusion as the main character at the same time, you should probably be suspicious that you’re being narratively steered in one direction (specifically, we’re being driven to Georgia, circa 1852).
For all of my unAmerican friends wondering why the US has such a weird problem with race when most humans outside of Buckingham Palace have independently arrived at the conclusion that racism and classism are bad, well, ironically, that’s a part of Carlson’s schtick he gets right; until very recently, race, gender identity, and class simply weren’t issues. If you weren’t a wealthy, white, able-bodied, heteronormative man (if those labels offend you, you probably get checks signed by Rupert Murdoch), you knew that you were a second-class citizen. You were also likely aware that even something as relatively innocuous as writing letters to the editor asking why it was legal to stop and frisk you for no reason, would make you a target for violence and degradation, so all the minorities kept mum and let the Tucker Donald Henley Carlsons of the world drive the planet into the ground. The democratization of information has severely threatened people who write off spray tans for tax purposes. It’s hard to sympathize with Trump Supporters when we have video of them impaling a cop and raising a Trump flag in place of the American flag. It’s hard to remain indifferent toward the challenges BIPOC Folx face when there are Youtube videos of them begging for their mother while being strangled by local authorities. In short, the balance of power between the talking heads employed by fascist oligarchs to distract us is shifting dramatically, because we can rewind and screen-capture every time someone on Fox News disagreed with A. Fauci, and then watch them while Grandma drowns in her own fluids. In short, very soon, society will be very aware not only that words have consequences, but we will be able to track how many minutes there are between Carlson going off-air and a cross-burning (4.8 minutes). And we may never get full justice for those wronged, but we can bankrupt the inciters in civil court. Make no mistake, that is the real evil that Roland Wile Warson and his ilk are supercharging their strategic pauses — they really want to take everyone back to a simpler, more innocent time when wealth, power, privilege, and full legal equality were solely their demesne. If you find yourself watching a news program posing seemingly-innocuous, ostensibly open-ended questions with glaring subtext, turn it off. You’re listening to white noise.
