The Trust Talk

Suppose I better file for unemployment early. Does the Virginia Department of Labor accept ante-UC applications?

I inquire because the last time a “The Talk” column was filed, the poor author’s glutes received the Buckley boot. Prudence seems to require this scribe toetap softly over identity landmines. Then again, Ta-Nehisi Coates prosified his version of “The Talk” and won a National Book Award, while implying white people stalk the earth as demons incarnate. The lernen lesson: When you’re a beloved black racialist, they let you do it.

On to my Talk, which is applicable exclusively to youngsters raised in the rightest mold. I haven’t advice for those misbegotten minors brought up by that most clueless of creatures: the lib ‘rent. If you’re too prog-poisoned to prescribe your progeny’s pronouns, you automatically flunk Parenting 101.

Now, my children aren’t yet in tween years. Thus, I’ll be theorizing with an air stripling, warning forth on the most pressing danger to their beings. Not gangsterish coppers, roving bands of excitiable urban youth, or a raving unshod man on the subway who smells like urinous sardines. Not even their overbearing guv-school teachers who hang rainbow flags above their desks and force the class to recite “Imagine” in place of the National Anthem.

No, what you must be wary of, my precious projected child, is the phantasms that lurk behind your iPhone’s silicate glass. You’ve, without heed nor hesitance, absorbed the mores of our digital era and are adept at wading in the fastest, widest, most turbulent river on the planet: the algo-stream. Consider this your life vest. Or balance pole. Or your sturdy pair of iron boots, the same Link wears in Ocarina of Time. Whatever the metaphor, take this smidge of counsel with both hands and hold tightly.

My “Talk” in five brief words: Assume everyone online is lying. That doesn’t just apply to the pronoun-in-bio left-posters who heart-swarm Zohran Mamdani’s jump-cut videos. But it’s an aeternitatis ethic even though the modern internet was birthed in the H. W. Bush Administration.

You have zero recollection of the Before Computer (BC) era. But, this may stretch your credulity, there was a time when communication wasn’t done behind avatared veil. You could simply yap openly, without fear, unguarded of immediate social death. The conversation wasn’t so triple-faceted, with hidden motives lurking in syllabled lines.

(Since the Talk has gone on for more than 90 seconds, now is requisite distraction-intercept time. Hey! Put your phone down. Off the TikTok! Your father is speaking to you!)

There’s an iron law of politics that runs down the millennia, stretching back to the wheat contracts of Babylonia. It consists of only two words—blessedly brief for your attention span!—but is of foreign tongue, so you may need ChatGPT to translate. This unbendable insight is as follows: cui bono? In the King’s English: who benefits?

Whenever you read an incisive screed on Facebook, watch a curiously choreographed Reel on your phone, or have your heart beset with a misty GoFundMe plea, it’s best to pose the perennial question to yourself: Why is this incensed commenter demanding the President cuff and confine so-and-so? What’s with the all-caps spleen splaying? Why is this viralist hailing a brand of unsalted caramel popcorn like it’s manna from heaven?

The answer is almost always green: a hyperactive cash grab from the unsuspecting. Consider Twitter, which once functioned as a seamless agora, where genuinely curious, erudite, and even blunt opinions were bandied about. It was so effective as an abstract public square that an orange Demosthenes used his typekey soapbox to ascend to the White House.

Now, it’s devolved into a pixelated stage where everyone fights for an apron spot by spitting magma-hot takes. Elon Musk, the second-rate William Randolph Hearst, shovels piles of dinero to accounts that best douse the swarm in delirium tonic. The result is a grifter jamboree. “I like interacting with a lot of you on this platform, but I’ve started to suspect that many of the characters on here are no longer meaningfully speaking for themselves or their affiliated institutions but instead renting themselves out to others,” observed National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty. Here, here! MAGA sycophants, DNC drones, Trump tongue-bathers, willful blue keyboarders, dutiful shitlibs, flannel-mouthed redders, conspiratorial cranks, antisemitic metal dealers, irony-poisoned nihilists, dissembling longfaces—all have polluted our politic with half-truths, aspic conjecture, and outright flesh-trade.

Peer networks are worse. Facebook is an AI slopscape; its photo-annex Instagram is filtered “sponsor” posts for various skin abrasives. Google, the once-king card catalog that made Zenodotus look like a chapbook peddler, put its neural bot in charge and reduced its limitless archive to a crummy souk. And is YouTube even capable of playing anything without first full-volume blaring three ads in succession?

(Hey again! I know it’s been another minute but you’ve got to hold your attention on me. I’m giving you a life lesson here. The 6-7 memes can wait!)

There’s an old marketing saw that goes “if you’re not paying, you’re the product.” Your youthful confidence in your incorruptibility is normal. But trust a man who once punched the teen card: you’re not nearly as armored as you think from the triggered temptations of the seemingly gratis online ambit. Freedom of thought and conscience is the keystone of our civic order. Liberty is best exercised with discipline. Otherwise you’ll doomscroll while eating Doritos in bed until you’re Medicare eligible. Keep your trust in the flesh, the tangible, the close, the corporeal, the immediately visible. Kick Dr. Johnson’s stone until your toe is sore. And for the love of all the Labubus stuffed in an anon Japanese warehouse, log off.