John Oliver had a great segment a while back on vaccine hesitancy, in which he shows Tucker Carlson asking absurdly loaded questions about the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccines. You can see the clip here, the Tucker Carlson bit is around 6:15 to 7:45. I bring this up not to praise Oliver or dump on Carlson, but to point out that Carlson’s disingenuous schtick has a name – “just asking questions”, or JAQing off: Just asking questions (also known as JAQing off) is a way of attempting to make wild accusations acceptable (and hopefully not legally actionable) by framing them as questions rather than statements. It shifts the burden of proof to one’s opponent; rather than laboriously having to prove that all politicians are reptoid scum, one
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John Oliver had a great segment a while back on vaccine hesitancy, in which he shows Tucker Carlson asking absurdly loaded questions about the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccines. You can see the clip here, the Tucker Carlson bit is around 6:15 to 7:45.
I bring this up not to praise Oliver or dump on Carlson, but to point out that Carlson’s disingenuous schtick has a name – “just asking questions”, or JAQing off:
Just asking questions (also known as JAQing off) is a way of attempting to make wild accusations acceptable (and hopefully not legally actionable) by framing them as questions rather than statements. It shifts the burden of proof to one’s opponent; rather than laboriously having to prove that all politicians are reptoid scum, one can pull out one single odd piece of evidence and force the opponent to explain why the evidence is wrong.