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Tucker Carlson creates vivid pictures of mutilation in viewers' minds, radicalizing them [1]

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Date: 2022-09-21

A denaturer of audiences.

You may have heard by now about Tucker Carlson’s recent incitement to violence. Here at DKos Lady Courtney wrote about it yesterday, as did DailyKos’ own Walter Einenkel.

Tucker is intent on ginning up heat and hostility with his lambasting of teachers. It falls upon them to instruct elementary school-aged children about the biological changes that may be happening to them due to puberty. Instead of fighting this policy on its own grounds, a fight that has already been fought and lost, Tucker instructs his audience to assault the teachers, in a misguided act of protection.

Doctors, too! Rough them up. Beat them! That’s Tucker Carlson’s advice—demand—of his viewing audience, mostly made up of young and middle-aged men. A plurality, if not a flat majority, of his viewership are probably White and conservative, demographically speaking—the ones who a call to uphold the status quo of pale male leadership. Those doctors are butchers! They are mutilating children.

Jesse Dollemore had the clip.

(cue to 3:42)

These are sex crimes. And the people committing them should be punished. Now, try and say that out loud anywhere but on Fox News. You can't. Why can't you? Because it's true, that's why. You can't say the truth things. You can claim that the Earth is flat and no one gets exercised. But when you start saying things like "All lives matter," or "Sexualizing my children is a crime and if you keep it up, I'm going to hurt you because I am the dad”—say that? Oh, you're done.

Discussing body changes is not sexualizing children. But pointing that out would disturb Tucker’s flow.

Libs of TikTock is being banned from the internet. Why? Because it showed documentary evidence of what was happening.

The whole Internet? Damn! That’s quite a feat.

Some people describe what was happening as grooming. We’re not exactly sure what that means, but if it’s sexually abusing children, yeah, that is what’s happening.

How can someone purport to be a news anchor or head and report that they don't know what they’re reporting about? In most countries, someone who did that would be hounded out of their profession and would slink home in shame.

But this is a common tactic Carlson uses. He plays dumb so that he doesn’t have to shatter the preconceived ideas of his audience. To them, that’s what grooming must mean, because that’s all the innuendo they’ve been hearing for the last year or so. They’ve been trained to think “trans” when they hear “grooming”. Fox has been very instrumental in getting their audience to associate those two things. Pavlov’s bursting with pride in the over yonder, I’m sure.

But the term “groomer” is now hate speech, says NBC News.

This might be the one glimmer of actual news in Tucker’s report, but he’s sandwiched in so that NBC News looks like censors, when in reality they’re upholding standards.

The English language is wide and broad enough that if one particular word becomes verboten in some context, another similar word can be substituted.

But when your goal is to train a listener to salivate at the sound of a bell to get their adrenaline levels spiking, such substitutions become problematic. The audience isn’t synced to that cue. So either Fox invests more time linking certain words together so as to bring about this push-button hate, or they just tell the rest of the journalistic world to flick off. It’s clear what Fox has chosen.

Yeah, they’re being mean to doctors who castrate children, who cut the breasts off girls. Yeah.

This is the meat of his message (which is why I’ve highlighted it), and I’ll return to it in just a bit. All of the other portions of the segment were efforts to be jovial, to bring the audience over to his side. This, though, is where the radicalization starts.

This is not only happening. It is being celebrated and aggressively defended by virtually everyone with power.

What does this even mean? Is he trying to make his audience feel powerless? The implicit comparison is right there.

Take three steps back. We used to say, “Oh, our society doesn’t care about children.” That’s not what this is. What you’re seeing is a society that hates children. You would have to hate children in order to sexualize them.

First off, this is not the steel-trap argument that he thinks it is, though I’m sure Tucker feels that it’s good enough to hoodwink his viewership. It’s not even an argument; it’s just what Carlson is asserting after all of that fallacious “reasoning” that came before.

(Also, is he saying that in order to sexualize anyone that a prerequisite is hate? That would explain his misogyny! But that’s neither here nor there at this time, I suppose.)

Because sexualizing children screws them up for life.

Again, Carlson inserts a nugget of truth here with which no one can argue. Yes, engaging in sexual behaviors with children traumatizes them, in many cases for their entire lifespan. This is absolutely true. The harm comes from the adult in the situation introducing a relational “style” or interaction that is developmentally beyond where that child is, so the child cannot put the behaviors in proper context. They don't have any context. Such contact has great potential to disturb the bedrock of a person’s developing self-concept.

But even then, behavior is not the same thing as a fantasy. Fantasies do not harm others if they are kept in the realm of the mind. It is grossly unfair to group mental imagery with actions that affect another person bodily. No one is touching anyone in that situation. They are not equivalent. But Tucker is intent on conflating the two. Conflation is a familiar weapon in Carlson’s arsenal.

No one should put up with this. No parent should put up with this for one second, no matter what the law says.

He sneaks in that last bit almost under his breath and so gives the phrase a semblance of reasonableness. Don’t listen to the law! Pshaw. That pesky rule of law.

Your duty, your moral duty, is to defend your children. This is an attack on your children, and you should fight back.

Carlson says without saying it that the viewers’ inner arbiter tops secular rules. This is a direct mirroring of Christian phraseology of being faithful to one’s conscience (or, in other cases, “God’s law”) instead of “the way of the world.” It’s a moral duty to defy criminal law in this instance, Tucker implies.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/21/2124295/-Tucker-Carlson-creates-vivid-pictures-of-mutilation-in-viewers-minds-radicalizing-them

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