Tucker Carlson accused the NSA (sort of) of tapping his wires to try to get his show taken off the air because it is part of the deep state far left socialist agenda. It had an effect.
Because the second rule of the web is, “Do not feed the trolls,” this is not about Tucker Carlson. This is about the Age of Narcissus. That lovely boy fell in love with a boy just as lovely as himself, but it was his reflection in a pool of water. When he leaned down to kiss the boy he loved, the water’s surface was disturbed, and so he was damned to just stare and his beloved in unfulfilled longing until he died of starvation. He was turned into a white flower that bends over water.
Tucker Carlson had a weird, weird accusation that the National Security Agency was “monitoring” him and wanted to destroy his show. This was trolling. Back on June 21, David Frum had written an article in The Atlantic entitled, “Remember Who Tucker Carlson Is.” Frum was upset at journalists using Carlson as a source for backstage gossip about Fox News, and so he reminded readers that Tucker Carlson lies to make himself important.
In 2018, Carlson persuaded the Washington Post to run a story about protestors (unknown cause, never apprehended) attacking his house, damaging his front door, and howling with blood in their eyes to slaughter Tucker’s helpless family. Within a week, the debunking was underway. Nope. No damage to the front door. Yes, people had chanted for a bit outside his house the way progressive protestors do, and they had walked on.
Frum reminds us that Tucker Carlson likes to endanger other people when making himself a big, important victim of faceless enemies: In 2018, he got away with playing the press to increase his importance, and
Almost two years later, Carlson again tried to score points by claiming that he was being endangered in his own home. The New York Times, he said on television, was planning to report his home address—with the deliberate intention of exposing his family to harm. . . .Then he named the supposed reporter of the supposed story on air, showing a photograph of that reporter, and also named a New York Times photographer and editor as accomplices to the paper’s hurtful plans.
And now he has done it again. He is the victim of the NSA, which proves he’s important — perhaps the most important person in America, given the power of the Anonymous Them out to silence him.
It’s trolling as a form of selfie. It’s persecution for Narcissus.
On July 2, April Falcon Doss wrote “The Tucker Carlson Disinformation Show” at Just Security. She is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law and Policy. From 2017-2018, she served as Senior Minority Counsel for the Russia Investigation in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (i.e. for the Democrats). Her topic is entirely the NSA fiasco and why it worked on Carlson’s audience, or why it fits into an overall type of propaganda called misinformation. (She calls it disinformation, but I believe it may not be that, quite.)
Tucker Carlson is striving to climb at Fox News. Of that there is no doubt. First, in September 2019, Carlson had Joe di Genova on to say that the phone call with Zelenskyy was perfect and without any violations of law, and Shep Smith had Judge Neapolitano on to say that the phone call broke the law, and Smith had to apologize. With the reshuffle of programs after the departure of O’Reilly and the expansion of “opinion” to 7:00 PM, Carlson became top rated, and he has been shoving at everyone else. Fox News has been shoving in the same direction. Laura Ingraham has been pushing her “North Korean defector (who) says American university wokeness is like Kim Jeong Un,” but the promoted features have been “Chinese whistle blower reveals real origin of coronavirus.”
Fox News is promoting the Ingraham and Carlson guests exclusively. Not news, but opinion.
What did Tucker say?
Petite-fascist Carlson said that NSA was trying to get his TV show stopped, NSA fed the troll in a foolhardy way by saying that Carlson was not a “target” and “the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.” However, Kevin “I got you a jar of Starburst Candies, Mr. Trump, sir” McCarthy, demanded that the House Intelligence Committee investigate!
We need to read Carlson’s monologue.
It’s different without his whining voice and constipation-curious face. The non sequiturs and red herrings really stand out. My source is April Falcon Doss. The highlighting will be mine:
According to Carlson’s monologue,
It’s not just political protesters the government is spying on. Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower in the US government that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air. Now that’s a shocking claim and ordinarily we’d be skeptical of them. It’s illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. The whistleblower, who is in a position to know, repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could only have come directly from my texts and emails. There’s no other possible source for that information, period. The NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons. The Biden administration is spying on us, we have confirmed that. … Only Congress can force transparency on the intelligence agencies and they should do that immediately. Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. If they’re doing it to us, and again they are definitely doing it us, they are almost certainly doing it to others. This is scary, and we need to stop it right away.
As with the 2018 “I was attacked by mad dog protesters” story, this one has worked. It seems a political appointee shoved into NSA got fired last week. That’s odd. Now Tucker Carlson is getting offers of help from Kim Dotcom, the slightly indicted Internet pirate.
Why did it work?
Ms. Falcon Doss explains that Carlson can only exist, and this misinformation can only be effective, when there are certain conditions for disinformation:
1. It has a kernel of truth, whether that’s historical or personal or analogy.
2. The claim must come from an non-disprovable source. It has to come from “everybody knows” (“in Washington, this is considered fine”) or “a source” or “a whistleblower,” and it must be validated with negatives (“who else could have known this?”) (“the denials don’t make any sense”).
3. “Third, the nature of the claim fits squarely within the disinformation adage that “If it enrages, it engages.”’
4. When confronted with point-blank denials or specific factual rebuttals, move the goal posts.
- In the first instance, the NSA is an overripe melon. People like me have been preaching it for years due to Cheney’s “The Program” and what was revealed as STELLAR WIND. Mass collection of records does occur. It shouldn’t. That’s why Snowden was a “white knight” whistle blower (one of the few). The right takes our evidence and says, “And NSA is the deep state fighting Donald Trump the paladin” — in spite of Trump political appointees high up in NSA, and Michael Ellis.
- However, even people like me acknowledge that collecting everything in a massive facility in Utah is not actually “spying.” To get to that, someone has to select a record, and the NSA does not select Americans. If Americans appear on an overseas target’s signals, then NSA goes through minimization procedures. But the kernel of truth, or the rumor of one, and spectacularly bad communications from NSA’s representatives allow for Carlson’s audience to believe something absurd. Of course, they also have years of Trump claiming to have had his “wires tapped.”
- Carlson is also tapping into his audience’s awareness of “Justice Department spying on journalists.” That was the Barr Justice Department, under Trump, and it was the Justice Department, not the NSA, but. . . the kernel of truth.
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For #2, Carlson loves — with a burning passion that will never be quenched — Somebody and A Person and A Source. He loves Protesters and Leftists and Scientists and various other collective nouns that refer to audience prejudices or cultural stereotypes. He is also quite fond of A Person Who Came Forward and A Dissident whose credentials cannot be tested. (The love match between Fox News and A General, A SEAL, and An Army Ranger is another topic.)
In the case of his narcissistic trolling, he has a person not from NSA. You only notice this when you read his screed. He claimed that he had a source from “the US government.” He then said that it was a “whistle blower,” but not from NSA.
- For criterion #3, Carlson is working off of a longer script. Fox News started right after January 6th in its opinion shows claiming that “they” were going to put “all Trump voters” on the no-fly list, that Congress wants to “investigate every Trump supporter.” The old demagogue’s trick of saying that his luxurious apartment in the midst of famine was really for the people and that those who would take away even one pet tiger of his were really attacking the poorest of the poor in the land has been wielded usually to get the Foxed viewer with Trump, but Carlson — like Alex Jones — uses it to make his viewers care about him.
- And, for criterion #4, we have to see what happened after NSA denied Carlson’s claims.
Moving the goal posts, conspiracy theorizing, and misinformation’s epistemic closure
The National Security Agency should not have fed the troll. However, the Tucker Carlson show is like Herman Hesse’s “Theater for Madmen Only” in Steppenwolf: people go there to see their wishes enacted, their psychic differentials displayed. April Falcon Doss says,
When someone with Carlson’s platform claims to have been targeted by NSA, that’s a big deal – and one that the U.S. Intelligence Community and the U.S. government are likely to take seriously, even if his lawyers have argued before that you can’t believe what he says on air.
The reason that they should not have taken this seriously, even though Carlson made an explicit, whinging cry for “Congress” to “must act,” is that the monologue we all read, above, was not interested in the viewer’s rights, but in Tucker Carlson’s.
After the denial, Carlson, like any good troll, had fuel for a reply. Again, my source for the transcript is Just Security, and it’s important to see the words rather than hear them:
This person had details from my emails that no one else could have known. … the NSA is chartered to spy on foreigners, not on Americans, that’s illegal. Yet the NSA routinely spies on Americans – millions of Americans, and sometimes it does it for political reasons, and everyone knows this, everyone, including sitting members of the intel committees. In Washington this is just considered fine. But it’s not fine, it is dangerous and its wrong. Some faceless hack in a powerful government spy agency decides he doesn’t like what you think so he’s going to hurt you and there’s nothing you can do about it? That could happen to you.
See the moving of the goal posts? Carlson’s original source was someone from the US Government who was linguistically linked to “NSA,” but only by syntax. Now, the person still isn’t stated as an NSA source, but the verification (after a denial) is that “no one else could know” his e-mails.
If we weren’t on a train, we’d stop and think. We’d realize that there are dozens of ways for a person’s e-mails to be known that don’t involve the NSA. Then he lies before he goes to the viewer’s prejudices about the “deep state” and the “swamp.” Finally, the enemy he’s facing is not NSA but “some faceless hack,” and the person is not going to leak Carlson’s e-mails but “hurt” him. The threat became more nebulous, the informant more vague, and “everybody knows.”
Because Carlson is telling his audience that what it already fears is fearful, he drops the need to prove anything, and he hurtles over the points of verification. Conspiracy theories are self-healing. If there is no evidence, it means that They are so powerful that They hid it all. If your sources are invalid, it’s because They spent untold millions to discredit the truth. If you suffer ridicule for your beliefs, it only proves how right you are, because They don’t want people to know, and you’re being persecuted.
The Fox News night time audience has been drinking conspiracy theory thought for a while now. They were told about an unseeable plot by Democrats to take their guns. They have been told about the invisible plot to invoke Shariah law in American towns. They have been taught that there is an undetectable invasion of “Mexicans” who are literally bankrupting America’s states. They know for a fact that there is an actual war on Christmas.
These conspiracies were trivial compared to the grander plots to steal the elections by fraudulent voters and votes. The fact that no audit (except metaphysical ones) can catch the fraud only proves how powerful the forces arrayed against them really are.
Misinformation is the practice of delivering information structures that contain within them falsehoods. It is using the methods of information, narrative, and education to purposefully confuse an audience. It is not disinformation, which seeks to break information channels altogether and, lately, invalidate the concept of truth.
“Spying”
April Falcon Doss’s four conditions apply to message environments, but one of the classic techniques of misinformation and disinformation — one which works without any audience environment — is destabilizing the signification of words.
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” talked about the way that political forces had unconsciously corrupted language and the ways that emotional connotations had so polluted words that political questions had become impossible. It is not an essay about misinformation/disinformation. That took place in the novel 1984, where Orwell demonstrated Newspeak and MiniTru — the control of thought by the denial of the means of expression, which is a linguistic analog to the laborer’s crisis in capitalism/fascism, where a non-productive/hostile/hegemonic force controls the means of production.
Orwell worried about power limiting ambiguity as an expression of individuality and critical thought and identity. Today’s right, and especially figures surrounding Donald Trump, have sought to employ instability masquerading as irony (the Pepe memes of 4-chan and 8-chan, the “ironic” genocide references sported by Boogaloo Bois) as a means of evacuating meaning and thereby opening a lacuna for power to be asserted. (I apologize for being theoretical, here, but I trust you guys.)
Let’s look at two examples:
- “Fake news” referred to news stories with fabricated, sensational, opinion-affirming content that became popular in 2015-2016 in the U.S. general election. It was produced either as state-sponsored propaganda (Sputnik and Epoch Times) or to take advantage of Google’s AdSense program’s $0.001/click revenue stream. As soon as Donald Trump was in office, he began to use “fake news” for any news story that was corroborated and accurate but which displeased him. Journalists wondered if this was a conscious joke or not, but he repeated it over and over again. Eventually, the term lost its signification, and the real phenomenon of propaganda injected into journalism online had no signifier.
- “The Big Lie” comes from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It referred to the idea that Germany lost World War I, and he said that “the Jews” had told it. Joseph Goebbels said, later, that the people will sooner believe a big lie than a small one, and, as minister of propaganda, he employed the staggeringly obvious lie with assaultive force. Since then, “the big lie” has meant “a propaganda technique for tricking the public with a shockingly clear falsehood.” Political commentators noted that Trump said that, if he lost the Republican primaries in 2015 and 2016, it would only be because they were “rigged.” When he declared that he would lose to Hillary Clinton because the election was “rigged,” he was accused of the big lie. When he said, again, that he would lose to Biden because the election was “stolen,” again he was accused of using the “big lie.” Donald Trump now uses the phrase “Big Lie” to refer to the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Trump did the same thing with “spying.” He suggested, in 2017, that the FBI had “tapped” his “wires” in Trump Tower. William P. Barr confirmed that he thought that Trump’s campaign was “I don’t know if spying is the right word” but “spied on.”
Donald Trump’s campaign was under investigation.
Michael Flynn was lobbying illegally for Turkey, and he was very friendly with Vladimir Putin after being fired from a top intelligence position. He spoke to Russian officials while they were in Russia. On Fox News, this has been portrayed, quite often, as “spying” on Flynn.
The Steele dossier? “Spying.”
Legitimate law enforcement investigations have been turned into espionage on Fox News, and it has been a trip hammer performing a tattoo on the viewers’ brains. All investigations into the January 6 insurrectionists? Spying.
Now, Tucker Carlson says that he is being spied upon.
Why Carlson should be stripped naked
As David Frum pointed out, Tucker Carlson is not above Munchausen syndrome tactics. When Sarah Huckabee’s deluxe chicken restaurant martyrdom happened in June of 2018, Tucker must have felt left out. When Ted Cruz and Stephen Miller got chased around by a total of two people viciously frowning at them near airplanes, Tucker knew he could do them better. Hence the protesters damaging his front door and “attacking” his family by, um, standing on the curb and chanting for about ten minutes.
I recently said that Rudy Giuliani was the John the Baptist for Donald Trump’s Anti-Christ — a man who yelled at reporters, gloried in low brow values, and elevated the tacky to cultural capital. If so, then Tucker Carlson is the Avatar for the Age of Narcissus.
He is important because of his audience, but his audience only assembles because he is not concerned for his their rights, but for his own, and the charges he made against NSA were designed to make him the World’s Most Dangerous Man, and thus the flower of all political truth. When he talks about NSA, he isn’t giving a public interest story. Not a word about metadata, Stellar Wind, Prism, or warrantless wiretaps. No, he’s telling a story about himself — one that will make him a danger to the “far left regime” of Joe Biden.
His audience is there to admire him and to have him tell it that, as goes Tucker so go they.
The NSA, since Snowden, has continued its bulk collection, but it doesn’t “spy.” Imagine a tape recorder that never gets played. That’s what they’re doing. They don’t consciously record American metadata, but an American who e-mails or chats or talks to a foreigner will get collected. However, that’s still not “spying.” Someone has to hit the “play” button. That means someone has to call up a particular record (selector). If that includes an American, then the NSA has to “minimize” the American. (This is the “masking” thing.)
All that caution and precision is irrelevant for the far right. They chant, “Michael Flynn” the way they used to chant “Ruby Ridge.” Flynn, for them, is “proof” that NSA spies on Americans, if only they could find it.
“Spying!” And now Tucker Carlson joins the ranks of Michael Flynn, Donald Trump, and Sergei Kislyak as great patriots of the Fox News right, thanks to the arts of misinformation, a preconditioned audience, and an intelligence service afraid that Kevin McCarthy will become Speaker of the House.
Do not feed the narcissistic trolls.
UPDATE: This just appeared: Marcy Wheeler at Empty Wheel blog has, “Tucker Carlson Burns FBI or NSA Intercepts Regarding His 30-Month Pursuit of Face-Time with Vladimir Putin” I have not had time to read and digest it, but Tucker’s lies blew up, and his attention was fading. “Jonathan Swan — who’s a political reporter, not a surveillance reporter — described that sources claimed authorities had obtained communications from Tucker Carlson’s efforts to get an interview with Vladimir Putin. Swan describes that Tucker had two intermediaries with Russia, but they live in the US. (I had hypothesized these might be Ukrainian sources, but Swan suggests they’re Russians.)”