Just to have a bit of fun, I sent that link to ChatGPT to see what their take would be. After the requisite throat-clearing absolving itself while agreeing it’s an inappropriate use case, I got down to brass tacks:
Following election news is admittedly a pain in the ass, especially in an environment where empirical facts now often take a back seat the the letter after a candidate’s name, and shouting nonsense is often the core of a campaign. Take the Texas Senate race as an example: If you only watch Fox News, James Talarico is a radical godless communist whose main goal is to turn all kids trans before they even make it to high school, and the campaign ads in between will confirm the narrative, when the reality is Talarico is a Presbyterian seminary student who may know a bit more about Christianity than most voters who claim to be staunch Christians. Evangelicals hate when you point out the basis of the faith is loving each other.
And this, I shit you not, was the beginning of the response:
Following an election properly is a research problem with a continuously changing corpus. You have to keep updating the set of facts you’re working from, distinguish primary evidence from somebody’s characterization of it, and notice when something that seemed peripheral becomes important.
And the Talarico example is almost comically good for demonstrating why “relevance” isn’t a neutral filtering operation.
There is a real, documented religious story here. Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a Presbyterian minister; the Texas Tribune has reported extensively on how his theology informs his politics. His central theological argument really does involve the Christian obligation to love one’s neighbour and the idea that political action is, in part, about how we treat other people.
At the same time, he has said things such as “God is nonbinary” in a legislative speech, and Republican opponents have seized on that as evidence of his supposedly radical theology. The underlying statement exists; what it means theologically is a separate question.
Well, that’s an unexpected response, not least of which because I’ve been following the race pretty closely, and I’ve not seen this quote before, which I point out.
Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has explicitly made Christianity central to his political identity; he completed a master’s degree in theological studies and has described his politics through Jesus’ commandments to love God and one’s neighbor.
And “God is nonbinary” is absolutely a real Talarico quotation. But it came from a 2021 Texas House speech about a bill concerning transgender athletes, where he was making a theological argument about biblical descriptions of God. He has subsequently explained that he was deliberately being provocative and meant that God cannot be confined to human categories.
So, I ask why the hell a quote from an unrelated situation from five years ago would come in response to a question about a candidate in 2026, and it admits there’s a fair amount of sources in current conservative circles presenting it as both current and relevant, so that’s what it went with.
Great when you already know enough to question; propaganda otherwise.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I would be more worried about the intentional bias. The temptation to use that leverage is far too great to be ignored. Only a fool wouldn’t take that opportunity.