It started happening almost immediately after the announcements began to pour out on social media about her death.

Dolly Parton, one of the few universally beloved entertainers remaining on the planet, was dead at age 80.

And within a few minutes, both sides of the lunatic fringe were tarring and feathering her.

Now, I’m willing to concede that this instantaneous response could very well be the work of bots. The dead internet theory is more than a theory, with more than half of the traffic on the web now estimated to be AI trash and roving bots, looking to engage the dwindling number of actual human beings on the platforms.

How do they usually look to engage them?

Rage bait.

Getting people worked up.

Getting people pissed off.

Getting them to have an emotional response, to start fighting, even if they’re fighting with an AI programmed to respond with whatever it thinks is going to trigger the person to engage for a longer amount of time, to get them to stay online, to keep flogging that dead horse to try to justify its existence for the shareholders and people who are still spending money to advertise on social media, only to get dwindling results because most of the audience isn’t human or isn’t really engaged.

That’s why it seems like the web is such a cesspool. Well, yes, because it is, but because it’s engineered to be that way. It’s engineered to trigger emotion to keep people online and engaged to justify its existence.

Its latest rage triggering was in creating a bunch of bullshit about Dolly Parton.

Her body wasn’t even in the ground when the lies started. The fake quotes. The attribution of her to one political side or the other in the most extreme ways. Putting words in the mouth of a woman whose own words were enough to assure anyone paying attention that she wasn’t about politics, she was just about being a good human being.

And she was. Dolly Parton was just a wonderful human being and one of the few people left on this planet who was just a decent person without having to be performative or political about it. And she deserves to be remembered and respected as such.

So, anyone seeing anything online about her saying she was to the extreme of this side or that needs to consider the very strong possibility that you’re being lied to by an AI bot, and the purpose of that is just to get you worked up and engaged.

Don’t.

Ignore it.

Go about your day.

You’ll be just fine, and the world will be better off.

Let Dolly Parton rest in peace. The same peace she afforded to people with her good deeds and persona while she was alive.

Also, while I’m always one for a good conspiracy theory, I do not think she was murdered or a member of the Illuminati or asked for Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s firstborn, or a clone, or a witch, or an MK Ultra agent.

Like many celebrities in the ’90s and ’00s, I interviewed Dolly Parton a couple of times, and she was always an incredibly sweet human being, whose public persona matched up with the one I encountered. By all reports she was incredibly generous, kind, and considerate.