Tucker Carlson wants to build the Panopticon — in our schools


Yeah, he is really arguing for complete surveillance of every teacher in America to catch them if they dare to teach seditious ideas, like Critical Race Theory, because he thinks that’s what grade school teachers are actually doing. It’s nonsense. You know I’m a big fat flamingly liberal college teacher, and I don’t teach CRT because it’s way out of my discipline and an inappropriate topic for a class on genetics or cell biology, right? So why does he fear a second grade teacher who’s teaching about the times table would sneak in a lesson on racial oppression?

But this teacher lists many good points. Bring it on! For the past year and a half we’ve all been teaching under the lenses of cameras (often purchased with our own money) as we struggle to teach in spite of the pandemic, so this is nothing new. Even before the pandemic, my classes have been pretty much open — I get requests for potential student recruits to sit in, and I always say yes, and I’ve had students bring a friend into the class, and it’s not as if I’d yell “get out!” because they haven’t paid tuition, and there are always a couple of students in the front row with recorders going through the whole lecture. Does Carlson think we’re afraid of people hearing what we teach?

And who is going to review all these classes?

To be honest, I’m fascinated by the logistics of your proposal. In a world where school districts are struggling to recruit and maintain teachers, who is going to man your “citizen review boards” (setting aside the fact that public school teachers already answer to publicly elected school boards)? For instance, in my school district I sense you would need well over 500 cameras going every day. Who watches those 500 screens 10 hours a day (I want you watching my 7 am jazz band and my after school lessons)? What qualifications would these “experts” need to know what they were watching for? What happens when they catch a teacher teaching…let me get this right…”civilization ending poison?” Who do they report that to? I’m also curious who will pay for all of this incredible technology. Maybe I missed it, but can you point me to a K-12 institution where Critical Race Theory is being taught? Hell, can you define Critical Race Theory for all of us? I’m sure you’ve got answers to all of these questions.

If you think spending that much money and time on surveillance is worthwhile, though, maybe you can kick in a few bucks to help those teachers get school supplies. Or give them raises. That would be nice.

For now, though, we can just have fun with the dumbass punching bag who says stupid shit for his stupid audience on television.

Frankly, I’ve never been able to figure out, instead of dreaming up Orwellian plans to have Big Brother in all of our classrooms, why you don’t round up an army of bright young conservatives to actually step up and teach? Is it because teachers work hard, aren’t paid as much as those with similar educational backgrounds, don’t have support from our elected officials, constantly serve as punching bags for those who don’t understand public education, or is it just because it’s easier to throw rocks at a house than to build one?

Here’s the real deal Tuck, I grew up with my mom making me eat your family’s Salisbury Steaks once every couple of weeks (his family makes Swanson TV dinners) for many years. I struggle to take advice on teaching and learning from a guy who makes a steak that, on its best day, tastes like shoe leather that has been left out in a goat pasture for a few weeks. I get that Critical Race Theory is your latest attempt to scare your elderly demographic, but let’s just admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

With all of that being said, count me on the cameras Tucky. Like many teachers, I’m in the early stages of understanding Critical Race Theory (most of us hadn’t heard about it until you and your people started crying about it), but if you find me teaching it, have one of the Tucker Youth watching your surveillance devices let me know. If Critical Race Theory involves talking honestly about American history, I’m probably doing that sometimes. I spent much of the last six years advocating for a way for teaching to become more transparent, and in the dumbest way possible, you are joining that crusade. Let’s make this happen TV Dinner Boy.

Man, TV Dinner Boy is an ass.

Comments

  1. James says

    How is it, that every idea that comes out of that fuckwit’s mouth is so bad?
    Also, how is it that every picture I see of TV Dinner Boy makes him look like a constipated and concussed cave man?

  2. gijoel says

    I’m also curious who will pay for all of this incredible technology

    Teachers of course.Not only do these prickbiscuits make beat yourself, but they’ll make you pay for the whip as well.

  3. gijoel says

    Also I’m not sure about if Tucker is a slang term in the States, but in the antipodes it’s slang for food.

  4. Reginald Selkirk says

    your latest attempt to scare your elderly demographic

    Got to keep them scared of something, because what else would they think about? The insurrection and the existential threat posed to democracy by the Republican Party? Can’t have that.

  5. Artor says

    “Does Carlson think we’re afraid of people hearing what we teach?”
    No. He is incapable of it.

  6. wzrd1 says

    I’m fascinated that he wishes to engage in surveillance of teachers, just after having a hissy fit over his vaporware “NSA surveillance” of himself.
    All for thee, none for me?
    Oh, I forgot, the GOP party line is to throw up a massive racial smokescreen to distract from their obstruction of pandemic mitigation measures being blocked, along with full scale, government wide obstruction.

  7. says

    The religious reich desperately wants to dismember the public school system. Tucky boy has picked up on this and ran with it. Does he want his kids to be homeschooled? Wait does Tucker even have kids? Please dear god tell me that man hasn’t reproduced.

  8. imback says

    #3 @gijoel, tucker has not been used as slang for food here in the US as far as I know, but many here have heard the slang term, and we assume that every Aussie still has a jumbuck in their tucker bag. ;-)

  9. imback says

    Also, how is it that every picture I see of TV Dinner Boy makes him look like a constipated and concussed cave man?

    Surely the constipation comes from all those Salisbury steaks?

  10. robro says

    I find it odd to associate Carlson with Swanson’s. He’s a step-son of an heir to the Swanson family fortune whom his father married when Tucker was 10 (1979) after his mother left the family to pursue art. The Swanson family sold the brand to Campbell Soup Company in 1955. He and his brother added “Swanson” to their name at some point for reasons only known to them. He’s such a suck up perhaps he thought it would put him in line for some of the mullah. According to the usual source, Carlson’s Trinity College yearbook describes him as a member of the “Dan White Society”…if that’s the “Dan White” I’m familiar with he is truly an ass.

  11. AstroLad says

    Tuckered out, or plumb tuckered out, means tired, weary. (It was a staple in western movies.) Very appropriate for his “ideas”.
    I put ideas in quotes because it implies thought, and as pointed out above, that’s beyond Tucky boy.

  12. raven says

    Where do the Thought Police fit in here?
    If you are going to watch the teachers and censor what they say, you have to have the Thought Police somewhere.
    The next step of course, are the show trials and then, the Gulags.

  13. says

    Carlson has 4 kids. I’m guessing the oldest is probably close to, or even possible past, college age given that he and his wife married in 1991.

    As for his video plan I understood it to be so the parents could watch, not a giant band of paid overseers. Either way someone elsewhere said this would be illegal under existing laws around student privacy.

  14. snarkrates says

    Ray Ceeya: “Now that I think about it, can we enact our gay master plan and have Carlson castrated?”
    Wow, nanosurgery.

  15. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 4

    <

    blockquote>Got to keep them scared of something, because what else would they think about? The insurrection and the existential threat posed to democracy by the Republican Party?

    <

    blockquote>

    Trust me, the old farts in question DIDN’T consider the insurrection to be any sort of threat. If anything, they’ve been waiting for something like Jan. 6 for decades and are hoping it happens again.

  16. Doc Bill says

    The big-mouthed authoritarian speaks. “Lock ’em up!” “Deport them all!” “Put them on an island!”
    It’s all just childish blather with no basis in reality. Sure, it sounds grand to say “monitor the teacher” and less grand when you look at my school district. Approximately 800 class-hours are taught PER DAY at the high school. The district has two middle schools and eight elementary schools. But, yeah, video those teachers and review the content. Simple! Easy peasy!

  17. raven says

    Carlson’s plan, as usual, isn’t well thought out.
    He is assuming that all grade school teachers are center to leftists.
    That isn’t true at all.
    Teachers in general reflect the society that they live in.

    A huge number of teachers are right wingnuts as well.
    They have no problem claiming jesus loves them and hates everyone else, that evolution is false and thought up by satan, the War of Northern Aggression was wrong because the South lost, Eisenhower was a commie, Trump is still the real president, and the whole package deal of right wingnuttery.

  18. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 14

    Where do the Thought Police fit in here? … The next step of course, are the show trials and then, the Gulags.

    Conservatives don’t have “Thought Police” and “Gulags,” only the Left wants those. No, they’ll have “Patriotic Education Commitees” or “Godless Commie Traitor Punishment Facilities,” or something like that.

  19. says

    <sarcasm>
    Of course, by having all of these hours and hours and hours of tape of every teacher (and what about the administrators and school counsellors? surely they’re involved in this too!) available for review, we’re also going to catch all other kinds of misconduct.

    The English teacher who tolerates teh gays, and teaches all those poems with extramarital relationships and lust (like, say, the Song of Solomon, but that’s for the now-mandatory Religion class, right?).

    The elementary-school music teacher who encourages a talented student to take up drums, and maybe actually play some of that American rock and roll. Or, worse yet — naturally, for the high-school students only — plays Brubeck’s “Take Five” and discusses what “5/4 time” really means.

    The pedophile math teacher hitting on the kids.

    The shop teacher (stereotypically!) providing no instruction at all to the female students, because “they can’t handle power tools” (even though it’s a required class).

    The PE teacher whose only method of “teaching” is humiliating kids, especially those with any kind of injury or disability.

    Yeah, this is going to turn out just fine for all of those financially-strapped, chronically underinsured rural school districts.
    </sarcasm>

  20. cynix says

    Talk about invasive big government. What next? Home surveillance to make sure parents are teaching their children the ‘right’ (no pun intended) ideas.

  21. birgerjohansson says

    Surveillance?
    Man, I recently learned his favv president said “Hitler did a lot of good things” to his chief of staff.
    Nazis gotta naz.

  22. kome says

    This rhetoric is very much like the “build the wall” rhetoric. It isn’t intended to be a project proposal that has any logistical chance of being accomplished (remember the cheers that Trump got when he responded to some critique about the logistics of his wall plan and Mexico paying for it with “the wall just got 10 feet higher”?). It’s the impossible task that can never be completed, and as long as it isn’t completed it gives the right-wing free culture war and identity politics talking points to gin up the electorate or to further engage in their strategy of stochastic terrorism that has worked so well for them.

    We need to stop responding to the right-wing as though they were arguing in good faith or that the people who listen to them can be reasoned out of listening to them. We’re not dealing with people for whom rational discourse and logic and evidence matter. We are dealing with fascists and terrorists. That’s how we need to approach the problems presented by the modern day right-wing in the United States.

  23. F.O. says

    It’s just another wall.

    Doesn’t have to be practical or doable or even effective, it just has to stoke fear and self righteousness in the audience.

  24. davidc1 says

    Over here in dear old GB ,tucker is slang for a lady part .

    It isn’t really ,but these things have got to start somewhere ,so we should all start calling stupid people Tuckers .It will soon catch on.

  25. lakitha tolbert says

    18 Doc Bill

    This right here! Do this man have any idea just how many schools there are in a large city? (Of course he doesn’t. That question was rhetorical!) In the greater Cleveland area alone there are over a 100 schools, that teach Pre-K, through High School, and that’s NOT including private and religious schools! And Cleveland isnt even that big. Its considered midsized!

  26. unclefrogy says

    he is clearly advocating something like the Stasi and from all the agitation lately coming from the right wing party they would not be be opposed to that either if they could control it. the “demonstrators ” from the 6 would be glad to do work for a “modest fee”.

  27. unclefrogy says

    @29 I think what you are noticing is the innumeracy of the conservative mind set generally it is a major flaw in much of their “thinking” about everthing.

  28. raven says

    @12

    …as a member of the “Dan White Society”…if that’s the “Dan White” I’m familiar with he is truly an ass.

    The name was familiar but I looked it up to be sure. It was a long time ago.

    Daniel James White was an American politician who assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, on Monday, November 27, 1978, at City Hall. Wikipedia

    Shortly after Dan White got out of prison, he committed suicide.
    Yeah, Carlson is good at one thing, being a horrible person.

  29. Akira MacKenzie says

    Back in the 90s, the clique of College Republicans at my university started a offshoot group called “The Tailgunner Society” after Joe McCarthy.

  30. wzrd1 says

    Typhoid Tucker finds himself thinking that he’s ever so superior to one and all, but forgets that his application to the CIA was turned down during a period of phenomenal recruitment efforts.
    So, he went into the ever so lucrative field of yellow journalism.

  31. jillianemergent says

    Why not just dispense with in-classroom teaching altogether? It’s never too early to learn to obey the loudspeaker in the ceiling.

  32. robro says

    Raven @ #33 — That’s the Dan White I’m familiar with, of course. Just allowing that there may be more than one. I’m confident that Tucker could be disgusting enough to worship the evil Twinkie killer.

  33. voidhawk says

    He’d be the first one to complain when the ACLU use his cameras to pick up the teachers teaching creationism or forcing school prayers

  34. Akira MacKenzie says

    voidhawk @ 38

    Oh, in Tucker’s world the ACLU no longer exists. In fact, it never existed. Who the hell are you talking about, you commie-feminazi-queermosexual-lib!

  35. rrutis1 says

    unclefroggy @30
    The authoritarians of course also expect us to rat on each other to supplement the new Stasi.