Who Do You Trust?

We are being manipulated by trusted voices who do not have our best interests at heart.

I’m sort of obsessed with a new technology that allows television programmers to see real-time audience reaction. Until now, ratings were delivered either overnight, in the case of the networks who paid Neilsen a bundle to get audience measurements as soon as possible. Everyone else, cable, radio, local TV, etc., had to wait for the “book” to be published. First it was quarterly, then monthly.

The new tech is a game-changer. Ratings services put a handheld dial that is connected to the internet into a statistically valid number of sample homes screened by Zip Code and demographics including household income, age, and gender.

Tucker Carlson‘s nightly show on the Fox News Channel is the most vocal proponent of the dial technology. Fox programmers say that his show changed the moment they had access to dial technology, and the ratings bear them out: He’s through the roof. It began with Carlson trying out phrases to see what moved the dial. If you’ve noticed a decidedly harder edge to his show, it’s not your imagination, and it’s not pretty. Using this new technology, the show has become an expression of our country’s id.

They’ve discovered that when he plays to his audience’s—on average, about 3 million primarily White men aged 55+—deepest fears, they ratchet the dial up. The stuff that really moves the dial is the highly polarizing use of “us versus them,” where it is understood that “us” is White Christian nationalists, and “them” is everybody else.

The journalists at Fox hate the notion that the audience is programming the station instead of trained, objective and thorough investigators. The audience, they say, is untrained and easily moved by emotional, volatile statements about race, gender, and power.

Another Carlson theme that pays off is the “Great Replacement Theory” that holds that White Christian men are being strategically replaced by Democrats who are shipping immigrants into the country with the goal of winning elections. I’d like to meet these Democrats who have such discipline in organization, planning, and execution.

Part of his mastery of the medium is Carlson’s ability to deftly use replacement theory to justify some downright un-American views, and then preempt any pushback by disparaging anyone who might disagree: “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," he recently said on his show. "But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true." It’s an interesting form of persuasion that only works when there’s no one on set to refute it, and as you may have noticed, he no longer books guests who might disagree with anything he says. Therefore, if he says it’s true, it’s true.

The New York Times did an exhaustive study (and let’s face it, having to watch five years of Tucker Carlson shows in a row would in fact be exhausting) that revealed, “400 instances where he talked about Democratic politicians and others seeking to force demographic change through immigration."

The truth, as any demographer will tell you, is that based on birthrate and aging, Whites will lose majority status here over the next decades without any help from a political party. They call it “demographic destiny,” and it has more to do with math than politics.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote: “The danger with replacement theory in its current form isn’t that a handful of its followers are crazy but that too many of them are sane.”

According to an AP/University of Chicago survey, “belief in replacement theory is much higher among OANN/Newsmax viewers (45 percent) and Fox News viewers (31 percent) than it is among CNN (13 percent) or MSNBC viewers (11 percent).”

“Invasion” is a word Carlson also uses frequently. Here’s a disturbing fact: the word “invasion” appears in the Buffalo grocery store shooter’s racist manifesto, and was uttered by the racist mass murderer who targeted Hispanics at that El Paso Walmart.

The cynical search for ratings has been wed to the desire to cast over half of our fellow Americans as supporters of “dirty invaders” in a naked effort to undo majority rules, and open, fair elections—cornerstones of our republic—to the degree that we’re not even sure that we like democracy anymore. That’s the power of propaganda. That’s the power of the dial.

We clearly don’t trust each other anymore, and that’s a loss. Australians trust each other. Trust is the deciding factor in their successful fight against both mass shootings and Covid.

It’s time to think about who deserves our trust.

©2022 Jon Sinton