E85: Discourse and Manipulation

re:verb

Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email

34:01

I think you could probably go back and track the stages of grief, probably that is what I went through. But I think if you do it right, you end up at acceptance. And that's where I ended up. And that's not to say that I've fully accepted the idea that the golden toad is extinct. Personally, I do still hold out hope that it could still be out there in those forests." - Trevor Ritland This conversation is with Trevor Ritland, who—along with his twin brother Kyle—authored The Golden Toad . The book chronicles their remarkable journey into Costa Rica’s cloud forest, once home to hundreds of brilliant golden toads that would emerge for just a few weeks each year—until, one day, they vanished without a trace. What began as a search for a lost species soon became something much more profound: a confrontation with ecological grief, a meditation on hope, and a powerful call to protect the natural world while we still can. Links: SpeciesUnite.com Kyle and Trevor: https://kyleandtrevor.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adventureterm/ Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222249677-the-golden-toad Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Toad-Ecological-Mystery-Species/dp/163576996…

2 years ago 1:22:35

MP3•Episode home

The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.

To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents.

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]

van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent@gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.

100 episodes

#Society #Philosophy #Higher Education #Alex Helberg #Calvin Pollak #News #Podcasting Education #Verbs

E85: Discourse and Manipulation

re:verb

published 2 years ago

MP3•Episode home

Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

100 episodes

#Society #Philosophy #Higher Education #Alex Helberg #Calvin Pollak #News #Podcasting Education #Verbs

All episodes

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E104: “Shoveling cultural snow,” or: Season’s greetings from AI Slop Summer 1:14:53

10 days ago1:14:53

1:14:53

On today's show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on “AI” and public discourse, focusing this time on the increasing proliferation of AI applications in government writing, policy, and social media. We characterize the second Trump administration as the "first totally post-AI presidency," which has adopted the "dumbest, most unreflective, most uncritical approach" to AI's use in communication, research, and analysis. Throughout the show, we emphasize how AI technologies are themselves rhetorical artifacts at the same time as they so often produce “bad” rhetoric, reflecting the intentions, values, and presuppositions of their creators, as well as the inherent biases of their training data and text generation models. This often results in an entry-level, overly dense writing style - often referred to as "slop" - which is almost written not to be read, but rather to fill space. We explore several concerning examples of AI's uncritical adoption by the secondTrump administration and their acolytes in the tech world. Early executive orders exhibited AI-generated formatting errors and formulaic, generic language, demonstrating a context-blind style that could lead to legal problems and erode public trust. Furthermore, the "MAHA Report" from the Office of Health and Human Services was found to fabricate studies and misrepresent findings, reflecting how large language models are "sycophantic," and can reinforce existing (often false) beliefs. Our discussion also covers Palantir's "Foundry" product, which aims to combine diverse government datasets, raising significant privacy and political concerns, especially given the political leanings of Palantir’s founders. Finally, we examine xAI’s Grok chatbot (run by Elon Musk), which illustrates how tech elites can exert incredible political power through direct interventions in AI tools’ system prompts - which in recent months has led Grok to parrot conspiracy theories and make explicit antisemitic remarks on the public feeds of X/Twitter. Ultimately, our analyses emphasizes - once again - that these so-called “AI” technologies are not neutral; they are, in the words of Matteo Pasquinelli, "crystallization[s] of a productive social process" that "reinforce the power structure that underlies [them]," perpetuating existing inequalities. Understanding these mechanisms and engaging in what Pasquinelli terms "de-connectionism" - undoing the social and economic fabric constituting these systems - is essential for critiquing the structural factors and power dynamics that AI reproduces in public discourse. Have any questions or concerns about this episode? Reach out to our new custom-tuned chatbot, @Bakh_reverb on X/Twitter! Examples Analyzed in this Episode: Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-admin-accused-using-ai-191117579.html Eryk Salvaggio - “Musk, AI, and the Weaponization of ‘Administrative Error’” https://www.techpolicy.press/musk-ai-and-the-weaponization-of-administrative-error/ Emily Kennard & Margaret Manto (NOTUS) - “The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist” - https://archive.ph/WVIrT Sheera Frenkel & Aaron Krolik (NYT) - “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html David Klepper - “Gabbard says AI is speeding up intel work, including the release of the JFK assassination files” https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-ai-amazon-intelligence-beca4c4e25581e52de5343244e995e78 Miles Klee - “Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Goes Full Nazi, Calls Itself ‘MechaHitler’” - https://archive.ph/SdoJn Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode: Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). The dialogic imagination: Four essays . University of Texas Press. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code (1st ed.). Polity. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623). Our previous episode with Dr. Bender about her work Burke, K. (1984). Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose . Univ of California Press. Burke, K. (1965). Terministic screens. In Proceedings of the American Catholic philosophical association (Vol. 39, pp. 87-102). DeLuca, L. S., Reinhart, A., Weinberg, G., Laudenbach, M., Miller, S., & Brown, D. W. (2025). Developing Students’ Statistical Expertise Through Writing in the Age of AI. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education , 1-13. Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2017). The surveillant assemblage. Surveillance, crime and social control , 61-78. Hill, K. (2025, 13 June). “They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.” The New York Times. Markey, B., Brown, D. W., Laudenbach, M., & Kohler, A. (2024). Dense and disconnected: Analyzing the sedimented style of ChatGPT-generated text at scale. Written Communication , 41 (4), 571-600. Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly journal of speech , 70(2), 151-167. Murakami, H. (1994). Dance dance dance : a novel (1st ed.). Kodansha International. Pasquinelli, M. (2023). The eye of the master: A social history of artificial intelligence . Verso Books. Reinhart, A., Markey, B., Laudenbach, M., Pantusen, K., Yurko, R., Weinberg, G., & Brown, D. W. (2025). Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 122(8), e2422455122. An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)…

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E103: No (More) War with Iran! 1:18:35

29 days ago1:18:35

1:18:35

In this episode – recorded prior to Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel – Calvin and Alex unpack the alarming reality of US strikes on Iran, recently announced by President Trump on June 21, and the ensuing escalation of tensions between the US, Israel, and Iran. We situate these recent events within decades of neoconservative influence and prior escalations, including the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani by US Forces (which we covered back in Episode 31 ), as well as Israel’s “pre-emptive” strikes against Iran in 2024 and earlier in June 2025. We historicize the current conflict by highlighting the success of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) in preventing escalation, contrasting it with Trump's abandonment and the Democrats' failure to defend it, and debunk media narratives about Iran's nuclear ambitions, confirming Iran's compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). We then dissect the propagandistic pro-war rhetoric that has been employed most recently, such as Trump's bizarre Truth Social posts announcing the "very successful attack," and exposing the dangerous slippages between US and Israeli foreign policy, evidenced by Senator Ted Cruz's admissions on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson’s show. Finally, drawing on rhetorical scholars such as Jeffrey Tulis and Gordon Mitchell, we explore the libidinal urges driving contemporary presidential rhetoric and US war policy, and how intelligence is manipulated through "Team B intelligence coups," raising concerns about reliance on foreign intelligence like the Mossad. We conclude with a resolute call (echoing our earlier episode) for "No war with Iran," urging public dissent against these increasingly reckless and dangerous decisions. Works and concepts cited in this episode: Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self . London, UK: BBC Four. Daly, C. (2017). How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism . Smithsonian Magazine . Esfandiari, S. (2020, 6 Jan.). Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing because America has only fictional heroes like SpongeBob SquarePants, a prominent cleric said . Business Insider . Flanagan, J. C. (2004). Woodrow Wilson's" Rhetorical Restructuring": The Transformation of the American Self and the Construction of the German Enemy. Rhetoric & Public Affairs , 7(2), 115-148. Haar, R. (2010). Explaining George W. Bush's adoption of the Neoconservative agenda after 9/11. Politics & Policy , 38(5), 965-990. IAEA Director General. (2024, 19 Nov.). Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015) . [IAEA report raising concerns about Iran’s stockpile of “60% enriched” uranium] Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 92 (2), 144-173. Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour news cycle: A day in the rhetorical life of Colin Powell's UN address . Michigan State University Press. Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation . Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press. Porter, G. (2014, 16 Oct.). When the Ayatollah said no to nukes . Foreign Policy . Said, E. (1978). Orientalism . Pantheon. Tulis, J. K. (1987, 2017). The Rhetorical Presidency . Princeton University Press.…

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E102: Escape from the University of the Cancelled 1:14:36

8 weeks ago1:14:36

1:14:36

In this episode, Alex and Calvin return to a favorite hobby horse: the University of Austin (UATX). First discussed back in episode 62, this ultra-conservative "university concept" is still not accredited and has no undergraduate degrees planned until at least 2028-2031. In that previous episode, we described UATX variously as right-wing academia’s answer to the Fyre Festival and a pitch deck/PowerPoint scam masquerading as an education; this time, we call it a fast-casual university concept (Chipotle for higher ed). We catch up with the myriad ways that UATX continues to struggle under the weight of its own internal contradictions, while occasionally benefitting from being confused for UT Austin (home of some of our favorite previous guests, like Scott Graham and Karma Chávez ). After taking stock of US free speech generally in the age of seemingly intractable US-led conflicts in the Middle East and the criminalization of student peace activism, we examine a Quillette article from Ellie Avishai asking if UATX is betraying its founding principles. As Avishai explains, her UATX research center was terminated in response to her posting a rather benign (and ideologically nuanced) LinkedIn post about DEI. We discuss how UATX's claims of championing academic freedom and viewpoint diversity necessarily conflict with its increasingly extreme anti-woke conservative agenda. Given that it is bankrolled by dark money funders and figures connected to corporate interests and political power like Harlan Crow and Joe Lonsdale, the institution appears more dedicated to fortifying right-wing ideas and providing a filter bubble than fostering genuine free inquiry. This makes it particularly ironic that its corporate doublespeak response to Avishai's termination was to use language like "wind up Mill" and "restructure." In these ways, UATX seems to combine the worst of mainstream academia (neoliberal austerity measures justified through corporate doublespeak) with new heights of conservative radicalism. Drawing on Noah Rawlings' piece in The New Inquiry, we peek into the "Forbidden Courses" summer program held at Harlan Crow's Old Parkland office complex in Dallas, where figures like Peter Boghossian and Katie Roiphe hold court. What does it mean for a university to exist primarily as a "safe space" isolating students from opposition, or worse, a "money and influence laundering operation for some of the most abhorrent ideas" (as Alex calls it)? We conclude that despite the real structural flaws in mainstream academia, the pursuit of knowledge and evidence-based argumentation is still vital in higher ed, but it’s something that UATX seems fundamentally opposed to. Articles Analyzed in this Episode “Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” by Ellie Avishai (in Quillette ) “An American Education: Notes from UATX” - Noah Rawlings (in The New Inquiry ) Previous Episodes Referenced E62: re:joinder - The University of the Cancelled Works and Concepts Cited Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & society, 4(2), 249-283.…

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E101: Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day" 1:03:19

11 weeks ago1:03:19

1:03:19

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin – briefly rebranded as Kenneth Jerke and Mikhail Shocktin, co-hosts of "Shock Docs" – explore the state of rhetorical manipulation in the context of the second Trump presidency. We discuss the general ineptitude of the conservative movement occupying the White House and the unsettling lack of a powerful counter-rhetoric in the Democratic opposition, before turning to analyze Trump's tariff policy. We discuss how the tariff conversation is a particularly baffling current example in which raw power seems to be operating without legitimation through traditional rhetorical norms. Applying a Critical Discourse Studies lens to understand this moment, we revisit concepts like dialogicality from Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining how discourse can be evaluated based on whether it opens up difference (ie. to what extent it is dialogical ) or suppresses difference. We introduce assumptions analysis from Norman Fairclough, which examines what a writer/speaker takes for granted as truth (existential, propositional, and values assumptions) and assumptions can reduce dialogical space for manipulative purposes. As a case study, we analyze an article by left-punching journalist Batya Ungar Sargon titled "Liberation Day puts Main Street ahead of Wall Street" (published in Commonplace ). We analyze the ways that Ungar Sargon’s manipulative assumptions reframe Trump's tariffs as beneficial for the American worker by ignoring corporate interests and tax policy, misrepresenting political history, and erasing important debates over national security and border policy issues. We conclude with a reminder that it’s always better to be a Mikhail Shocktin than a Kenneth Jerke. Texts Analyzed in this Episode Batya Ungar Sargon - “Liberation Day puts main street ahead of Wall Street” (published in Commonplace) Works Referenced in this Episode Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge. Relevant Past Episodes Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 3 Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 2 Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 1 re:blurb - Conceptual Metaphor re:blurb - Dialogicality re:blurb - Ideographs An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript) Episode Image Description: Top text: "re:verb"; Left-center image includes a picture of Critical Discourse scholar Norman Fairclough with a laser beam shooting out of his left eye towards right center image; Right-center image is offset, includes a screenshot of an article titled "Liberation Day Puts Main Street Ahead of Wall Street"; Bottom text: "Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day""…

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E100: Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (w/ Dr. Corinne M. Sugino) 1:06:33

14 weeks ago1:06:33

1:06:33

Today’s episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans . On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne’s concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man". Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human , unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne’s intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne’s nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press. Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode: Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect . Duke University Press. Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world . New York University Press. Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506 Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics . Utah State Press. Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts . Univ of California Press. Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research. Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics , 17(2), 65-81. Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved’: An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17. Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review , 3(3), 257–337. Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press. da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race . University of Minnesota Press. An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)…

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E99: Black Iconoclasm in Post/Ferguson America (w/ Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos) 1:31:01

17 weeks ago1:31:01

1:31:01

Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America . On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles’s fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly. Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm , such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles’s own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles’s creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work. Charles Athanasopolous’s Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink) Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode Burke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books. Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press. Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14. Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press. Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press.. An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)…

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E98: Discourse & Manipulation, Pt. 3 - Manipulative Silences in Post-Election Post-Mortems 1:17:00

32 weeks ago1:17:00

1:17:00

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election. As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing : namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others. When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization , or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue. In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society. Texts Analyzed in this Episode: Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics” National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed” David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong” Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge. Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society , 13 (3), 347-372. Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage. Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke” re:verb episode 71: re:pronouns re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)…

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E97: re:joinder - OI: Oprahficial Intelligence 1:27:57

40 weeks ago1:27:57

1:27:57

On today’s show, we once again fire up our rhetorical stovetop to roast some dubious public argumentation: Oprah Winfrey’s recent ABC special, “AI and the Future of Us.” In this re:joinder episode, Alex and Calvin listen through and discuss audio clips from the show featuring a wide array of guests - from corporate leaders like Sam Altman and Bill Gates to technologists like Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, and even FBI Director Christopher Wray - and dismantle some of the mystifying rhetorical hype tropes that they (and Oprah) circulate about the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and other “AI” technologies into our lives. Along the way, we use rhetorical tools from previous episodes, such as the stasis framework, to show which components of the debate around AI are glossed over, and which are given center-stage. We also bring our own sociopolitical and media analysis to the table to help contextualize (and correct) the presenters’ claims about the speed of large language model development, the nature of its operation, and the threats - both real and imagined - that this new technological apparatus might present to the world. We conclude with a reflection on the words of novelist Marilynne Robinson, the show’s final guest, who prompts us to think about the many ways in which “difficulty is the point” when it comes to human work and developing autonomy. Meanwhile, the slick and tempting narratives promoting “ease” and “efficiency” with AI technology might actually belie a much darker vision of “the future of us.” Join us as we critique and rejoin some of the most common tropes of AI hype, all compacted into one primetime special. In the spirit of automating consumptive labor, we watched it so you don’t have to! Works & Concepts cited in this episode: Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? 🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623). Rather, S. (2024, 25 Apr.). How is one of America's biggest spy agencies using AI? We're suing to find out . ACLU . [On the potential harms of the US NSA implementing AI into existing dragnet surveillance programs domestically & internationally] Robins-Early, N. (2024, 3 Apr.). George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over comedian’s AI doppelganger . The Guardian . re:verb Episode 12: re:blurb - Stasis Theory re:verb Episode 17: re:blurb - Dialogicality re:verb Episode 75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity (w/ Dr. S. Scott Graham) re:verb Episode 91: Thinking Rhetorically (w/ Robin Reames) [Episode referencing the importance of following the stasis categories in public debates]…

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E96: Urban Renewal and Black Rhetorical Citizenship (w/ Dr. Derek G. Handley) 59:32

44 weeks ago59:32

59:32

On today’s show, we bring back one of our all-time favorite guests (and emeritus co-Producer / co-Founder of re:verb ) Dr. Derek G. Handley to talk about his newly-published book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement . This episode is a spiritual successor to our first episode with Derek ( all the way back in Episode 6 !), which focused on the rhetoric of 20th-century urban renewal policies in Pittsburgh, and African American citizens’ resistance to those policies and practices that threatened their homes and businesses. Derek has now expanded his analysis of urban renewal rhetorics - and the modes of citizenship and resistance practiced by African American community members in response to them. His new book, Struggle for the City , focuses on urban renewal policy struggles that played out across three Northern cities in the 1950s and ‘60s: St. Paul Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In each of these case studies, Derek deftly traces the rhetorical contours of the master narrative (such as the use of the “blight” metaphor) that shaped how urban renewal policies, including highway and infrastructure development, ultimately uprooted and destabilized African American communities. In turn, his case studies center on the voices of these communities, showing how they responded using a framework he calls “Black Rhetorical Citizenship.” The rhetorical practices inherent within this mode of citizenship - which include deliberation and community decision-making, the circulation of multi-modal counterstories, and a forward-looking focus on public memory - are not only essential touchstones in the less-publicized history of Civil Rights struggles in Northern cities during the 20th century; they also provide an important scaffold for current rhetorical strategies in ongoing Black freedom and justice struggles in the US writ large. In this conversation, Derek also shares some details of his ongoing public scholarship project (co-directed with UW-M Geography Professor Dr. Anne Bonds) Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County , which seeks to document restrictive and racist housing covenants in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and its surrounding suburbs, as well as community resistance to these and related practices. Derek’s book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement , is available via Penn State University Press on September 24, 2024 More information on the Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County project can be found here Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Handley, D. G. (2019). “The Line Drawn”: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s-2000s. Rhetoric Review , 38 (2), 173-189. Houdek, M., & Phillips, K. R. (2017). Public memory . In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication . Kock, C., & Villadsen, L. (Eds.). (2015). Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation . Penn State Press. Loyd, J. M., & Bonds, A. (2018). Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Sociological Review , 66 (4), 898-918. Mapping Prejudice [University of Minnesota Project on restrictive housing covenants] Musolff, A. (2012). Immigrants and parasites: The history of a bio-social metaphor. In Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 249-258). Vienna: Springer Vienna. [on the use of “disease” metaphors in immigration discourse] Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair . Fordham University. [on the concepts of “master narrative” and “counterstories”] Pittsburgh Courier Archive (from Newspapers.com) Wilson, A. (2007). The August Wilson Century Cycle . Theatre Communications Group. An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here…

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E95: veep:verb 1:21:38

48 weeks ago1:21:38

1:21:38

On today’s show, Calvin and Alex analyze the rhetoric and politics of the 2024 presidential election in terms of a particularly significant job this cycle: the vice president, or veep! We begin by discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’s meteoric rise to the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s departure from the race, as well as Harris’s conspicuous similarities to HBO’s fictional Veep , Selena Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). We then compare and contrast the aesthetics, rhetorical styles, and political stances of Harris’s vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Republican veep nominee and Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance. Along the way, we discuss how the Democratic Party under Harris and Walz is embracing a rhetoric of normalcy vs. “weirdness” that is genuinely novel and effective as a strategy for delegitimizing GOP policy, and how this approach may help to expand the Democratic voting base in response to state-level crises over reproductive justice and public education. We theorize the Dems’ normalizing discourse as a way of forthrightly indexing liberal values and connecting to core American ideographs while also positioning themselves as outsiders fighting a noble cause against entrenched GOP power in state governments and the national judiciary. Nevertheless, we conclude on a cautionary note about the dangers of normalization rhetoric, particularly in a country with an ongoing legacy of structural racism and imperialist foreign policy – including the brutal and unresolved conflict in the Gaza Strip. Textual Artifacts Analyzed Harris-Meyer comparison text: https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXj Walz artifacts: https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsY Vance artifacts: https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571 https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html Vance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvM Vance’s TED Talk, “America’s Forgotten Working Class” Scholarly Works and Concepts Referenced Kiossev, A. (2008). The oxymoron of normality. Eurozine http://www.eurozine. com/the-oxymoron-of-normality/ Pollak, C. (2021). Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance. Written Communication , 38 (3), 380-416. van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach . SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217856 Kairos: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358 Ethos: https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethos An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E94: re:blurb - Ethos 35:29

1 year ago35:29

35:29

Have you ever wondered why you immediately gravitate towards some speakers and writers? How they form a connection with you and make you want to pay closer attention? Or why you react with disgust and revulsion to other kinds of communicators? What is it about strategic discourse that fosters and nurtures deep connections with some audiences while (intentionally or unintentionally) turning other kinds of people off right away? On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a wide-ranging discussion of the classical rhetorical concept of ethos , one of the three classical appeals (along with logos and pathos). We begin by overviewing the origins of ethos in ancient Athenian courts of law, recounting debates between Plato and Aristotle about whether ethos is core to the corrupting (or liberating) influence of rhetoric in society. We then explain modern theories such as Kenneth Burke’s identification and Michael J. Hyde and Calvin Schrag’s notion of ethos as a “dwelling place” shared by speakers and audiences. Ultimately, we argue that the history of ethos theory is defined by attention to how credibility, trust, and persuasion are not accomplished unilaterally or unidirectionally, but rather occur in the dynamic, situated, dialogic interplay between communicators and their audiences. This particular understanding of ethos enlivens our sample analysis, which shows the concept’s enduring utility as a critical tool. We introduce and critique the pro-Biden X account @BidensWins, which has been strategically constructing Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign ethos. We describe how the posts’ recurring language patterns constitute an identity grounded in “win”-quantification and newsworthiness, and how their hyper-patriotism and policy stances seem to be targeting specific voter constituencies for persuasion (while ignoring or disavowing others). We question both the pragmatic wisdom of this ethos strategy and the moral consequences of it for various core Democratic voter blocs that Biden will need in order to defeat Donald Trump. @BidensWins X Posts Analyzed: https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1802423240876331122 https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803251566356426859 https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1803451317098074344 https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1778407786302341419 https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1797668724008489005 https://x.com/BidensWins/status/1798060384487948536 https://x.com/POTUS/status/1803176039603957883 Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Baumlin, J.S. (2001) Ethos. In T. Sloane (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (pp. 209-217). Oxford University Press. Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives . University of California Press. Hyde, M. J. & C.O. Schrag (Eds.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press. Ridolfo, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (2009). Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 13(2), n2. An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E93: Queer Techné and Queering A.I. (w/ Dr. Patricia Fancher) 1:02:15

1 year ago1:02:15

1:02:15

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Patricia Fancher, a Continuing Lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In her fabulous new book Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing , Dr. Fancher offers a groundbreaking history of how the Manchester University Computer and discourses about it were shaped by queerness, embodied gender performativity, and invisibilized gendered labor in the early 1950s. Some of the figures that Fancher’s book offers new understandings of include Alan Turing, Christopher Strachey, Audrey Bates, and Cicely Popplewell, with each case study capturing how technical communication and technology development are about more than just usability, efficiency, and innovation. A recurring theme in Dr. Fancher’s rhetorical reading of Turing and his colleagues is that there is something queer, performative, and playful about intelligence, and that these dimensions are mostly ignored by the hype around so-called “artificial intelligence” tools like large language models. To explore this theme, we chat about Christopher Strachey’s rudimentary love letter generation program, comparing its output to ChatGPT’s for similar prompts. We ultimately explore what Turing might have thought of LLMs, and how we can begin to ask queerer questions of our digital tools to produce more interesting and intelligent discourses and technologies. Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Edenfield, A. C., Holmes, S., & Colton, J. S. (2019). Queering tactical technical communication: DIY HRT. Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), 177-191. Fancher, P. (2024). Queer Techné: Bodies, Rhetorics, and Desire in the History of Computing . NCTE. Fancher, P. (2016). Composing artificial intelligence: Performing Whiteness and masculinity . Present Tense, 6(1). Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277-310. Henrik Oleson exhibition about Turing. Matt Sefton and David Link’s web version of Strachey’s love letter program Rhodes, J., & Alexander, J. (2015). Techne: Queer meditations on writing the self. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press.…

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E92: Academic Organizing and Palestinian Solidarity (w/ Olivia Wood) 54:03

1 year ago54:03

54:03

On today’s show, Alex is joined by Olivia Wood, a lecturer in the English Department at City College of New York (CCNY) to discuss the recent escalations of force by the NYPD and campus administrators against student protesters in solidarity with Palestine over the past several weeks. In particular, we touch on the flashpoint raids by police - at the behest of campus administrators - at Columbia and CCNY on Tuesday, April 30th, the rhetorical strategies used by student organizers at the encampments to advocate for their causes of disclosure and divestment, and the problematic discourse that mainstream journalists have been circulating when discussing these movements. We conclude by reflecting on the ways that academic worker collectivities (including but not limited to unions) can help show critical support to student demonstrators exercising free speech on campus and advocating for justice in Palestine. References Remembering Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) The Killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab ‘This machine bonks fascists’: US student protester’s water jug becomes symbol of resistance Doctor in Gaza refuses to evacuate, pleads for Israel-Hamas war to stop Links to some of Olivia’s reporting on academic and student organizing in solidarity with Palestine : Faculty, Staff, and Students Must Unite Against Repression of the Palestine Movement (4/23/24) Faculty at University of Texas Austin Strike in Solidarity with Student Protesters (4/25/24) CUNY Students Occupy Campus in Solidarity with Palestine, Building on the University’s Legacy of Radical Organizing (4/27/24) CUNY Rank-and-File Workers Stand With the Student Encampment (4/30/24) An accessible transcript for this episode is available upon request - please send us an email at reverbcontent[at]gmail.com or DM us on Twitter / X…

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E91: Thinking Rhetorically (w/ Dr. Robin Reames) 45:01

1 year ago45:01

45:01

On today’s show, Calvin and Alex sit down with Dr. Robin Reames - Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago - to discuss her new book The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times . In this book, Robin synthesizes rhetorical theories and concepts from Greek antiquity to the 20th century to deliver some of the most practical lessons that rhetorical knowledge can offer. In our conversation, we discuss what it means to be a rhetorical thinker, some of the key characters from ancient Greek rhetorical history who hold important lessons for our current era, and illustrate some examples of how thinking like a rhetorician can help us reason more critically in our day-to-day lives. We conclude with a meditation on how rhetorical knowledge can help us better understand disagreements - from those in our interpersonal relationships to the larger divides that seem to define and constrict our current political reality. Robin Reames’s The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself is available now from Basic Books Listen to our episode on Stasis Theory here An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E90: reel:verb - Civil War (Garland, 2024) 1:12:59

1 year ago1:12:59

1:12:59

Spoiler Alert: This episode contains numerous plot spoilers for Civil War . On today’s show, we inaugurate a new episode series called reel:verb , in which we rate, review, and analyze a recent movie from the perspective of politics, culture, and language in action. In the first installment, Alex, Olivia, and Calvin tackle the 2024 dystopian thriller Civil War , directed by Alex Garland ( Ex Machina, Annihilation ). Civil War depicts a near-future US torn apart by domestic warfare, as seen from the perspectives of a small group of journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, respectively) who are documenting the fighting and plotting to photograph and interview the besieged US president (Nick Offerman). We begin by providing our individual ratings of the film (out of 5 verbs ), and then we recap the major plot points and set pieces that take place along Dunst et. al’s roadtrip from hell. We conclude with a wide-ranging analysis of the film’s politics and rhetoric, in which we unpack how it depicts journalism (and journalists) and consider its social significance in the midst of ongoing US-backed conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Ultimately, we argue, this film’s vision of civil war is too far-fetched, abstracted, and underdeveloped to serve as a true cautionary tale for US audiences – perhaps because Garland, like his cast of photojournalists, is apparently more invested in aestheticizing violence than cogently critiquing it. Works and Concepts Referenced In this Episode Chouliaraki, L. (2005). Spectacular ethics: on the television footage of the Iraq war. Journal of language and politics, 4(1), 143-159. Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture . The Ohio State University Press. Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader . Vintage. Our previous episode with Dr. Roger Stahl on US military cooperation in entertainment products Reuters photographer [Mohammed Salem] wins World Press Photo of the Year with poignant shot from Gaza Transcript of Pod Save America episode featuring Alex Garland (interview begins at 38:50) An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.…

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E74: Jordan Peele and the Speculative Fiction of Blackness (w/ Dr. andré carrington) 1:12:28

3 years ago1:12:28

1:12:28

For this year’s Halloween special, we wanted to take a journey through the filmography of one of our favorite film directors, Jordan Peele. From the breakout success of his 2017 thriller Get Out , to 2019’s creepy and horrifying tour-de-force Us , to this year’s action-packed monster movie Nope , Jordan Peele is becoming arguably one of the most important American directors working today. His films not only bend and play with the ostensible genre conventions he works within, they also deliver substantial, semiotically rich critiques of racial politics, class struggle, and media in American society and culture. Not to mention, his films are just immensely entertaining - equal parts deeply cerebral, outrageously funny, and heart-stoppingly terrifying. To help us discuss this topic, we’re very excited to be joined by Dr. andré m. carrington, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. We use concepts from Dr. carrington’s (and other scholars’) work to discuss all three of Peele’s films, charting the salience of “paraspaces” and “Otherhoods” in each as spaces where speculative imaginaries of trauma and alterity can become bone-chillingly real (such as “the sunken place” in Get Out , or the subterranean tunnel dwellings of the tethered in Us ). In addition, we cover the various ways Peele incorporates “fanservice” into his films, tipping a cap to fans of horror and sci-fi and providing moments of cathartic release amidst the deluge of dread, and playing with the various conventions of speculative fiction genres to create unique and cerebral insights against a tableau of terror. Follow Dr. andré m. carrington on Twitter , find links to more of his work on his UC-Riverside faculty profile , and check out his book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction . Be sure to follow UC-Riverside’s Mellon Sawyer Seminar (which Dr. carrington is participating in this year), entitled “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.” Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode: Dash, J., & Baker, H. A. (1992). Not without my daughters. Transition , (57), 150-166. Delany, S. R. (2012). Shorter views: Queer thoughts & the politics of the paraliterary . Wesleyan University Press. Tananarive Due’s course on The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and Black Horror Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination . U of Minnesota Press. Lavender, I. (2011). Race in American science fiction . Indiana University Press.…

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E73: re:joinder - The CIA's Podcast 1:10:23

3 years ago1:10:23

1:10:23

We at re:verb can neither confirm nor deny whether the truth will set you free - but it certainly provides good fodder for rhetorical criticism! On today’s show, Alex and Calvin present a re:joinder episode with a unique rhetorical artifact: an “unclassified” podcast recently released by one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first episode of The Langley Files: A CIA Podcast features hosts “Dee” and “Walter” interviewing current CIA Director Bill Burns about the history and current state of the agency, in their own words. But, of course, there’s more to it than that! We examine this podcast as a rhetorical genre with a specific social action in mind: gaining the assent and trust of the center-left-aligned American public, and recruiting educated liberals to work for the agency. From their straight-out-of-true-crime theme music to the hosts’ vocal performances echoing the likes of Sarah Koenig and Roman Mars, we note the eerie formal parallels between The Langley Files and some of the most popular informative/investigative podcasts currently running. In addition, we talk about some of the new (and some old) propaganda tropes that the CIA uses to describe its work, from its essentially “apolitical” function, “working in secrecy to protect the American people”, “organizing assets to do hard work in hard places,” all the way to the now-vaunted “competition” amongst “great powers” (a.k.a. the U.S. and China). We also critique and contexualize the strange virtue-signaling at play in how the CIA describes two of its recent “successes”: their prediction that Russia was going to invade Ukraine earlier this year, and their targeted assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. What emerges from our analysis is a clearer picture of why the CIA might produce a podcast like this. For one, they outline a need to recuperate the agency’s image in the face of what they call “a short supply” of “trust in institutions” from the American public. But more troublingly, we theorize that this podcast is designed as an avenue for humanizing the labor of the people who work in the agency, and as a way of recruiting educated liberals who face slim job prospects and harbor revulsion for the reactionary, anti-“deep state” American right-wing. Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode CIA's own journal on what the Intelligence Community means by "customers" "Humans of CIA" Recruiting Video Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi's thread on the US role in propping up recently elected far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Lee, M. A. (2001, 1 May). The CIA’s worst-kept secret: Newly declassified files confirm United States collaboration with nazis . Foreign Policy in Focus . Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 92(2), 144-173. New Yorker report on CIA's targeting of military-age males in Pakistan for drone strikes . Rosenberg, C. (2019). What the CIA’s torture program looked like to the tortured . The New York Times . Weiner, T. (2008). Legacy of ashes: The history of the CIA . Anchor. Wikipedia article for “Limited Hangout” An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E72: Tenant Organizing and the Cult of Property Values (w/ Luke Melonakos-Harrison) 39:07

3 years ago39:07

39:07

What’s a tenant union, and why does it matter? On today’s show, Alex and Calvin get some fascinating answers to this question from Luke Melonakos-Harrison, a Masters student in Yale University’s Divinity School, tenant union organizer with the Connecticut Tenants Union and the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, and aspiring Methodist pastor. In the course of our conversation, we learn about the kinds of unresolved housing issues, often exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, that led Luke and other tenants to begin organizing. We discuss these issues’ intersectional dimensions: how they most severely affect individuals marginalized by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status, as well as how housing issues intersect with other political problems such as the prison-industrial complex and gender-based violence and discrimination. A crucial concept Luke introduces to us is “the cult of property values,” which captures how landlords, real estate developers, and dominant media and political classes attach almost religious significance to the value of property, while neglecting other, competing sets of values like human rights and economic justice. Along with these stinging critiques, Luke shares some amazing gains that he and his fellow organizers have been able to make at a local policy level in Connecticut, and explains some of their inside-outside strategies in response to the quirks of state law. We close by seeking Luke’s tips for anyone listening who may be interested in forming a tenant union of their own. Luke’s main suggestion is rather simple, but inspiring: get to know your neighbors! It’s a welcome reminder – and the whole conversation is a bit of a salve – in a time when it’s quite easy to surrender to alienation and despair. We hope you enjoy it! Follow Luke, the CT Tenants Union, and Connecticut DSA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/l_melo_h https://twitter.com/cttenantsunion https://twitter.com/centralctdsa News coverage of recent tenant organizing efforts in Connecticut: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/tenants_union_bill_heads_to_full_board_of_alders https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/Mayor-No-excuse-for-conditions-at-17361141.php https://www.ctinsider.com/hartford/article/A-week-after-hearing-cries-for-help-from-17370301.php https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/quinnipiac_gardens_tenant_union_ https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-30/new-haven-could-be-among-the-first-in-ct-to-recognize-tenant-unions-under-local-law…

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E71: re:pronouns 1:01:33

3 years ago1:01:33

1:01:33

At the recent 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), right-wing movement leaders couldn’t stop whining about “pronouns.” For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz said that his preferred pronouns are “kiss my ass,” and former Trump official Matt Schlapp complained that instead of carrying out his “duties” like dealing with the “open border,” President Biden is “talking about pronouns.” However, 2022 was not the first CPAC in which this particular part of speech caught heat; back in 2019, Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin began her remarks, “my pronouns are ‘U-S-A’!” Why do some conservatives attack and mock “pronouns”, and what exactly do they mean when they use the term? As our entry in the Big Rhetorical 2022 Podcast Carnival on “Spaces and Place In and Beyond the Academy”, this episode unpacks the history and politics of gendered personal pronouns such as “he” and “she,” genderless and non-binary pronouns (e.g. “they”), and various discourse practices in academic and activist circles that relate to personal pronoun usage. After analyzing some recent and relevant policy documents, Alex and Calvin explain the epistemic and ideological bases for “pronouns” as a negative ideograph–a one-word slogan encapsulating everything scary and “un-American” about the increasing tolerance of LGBTQ+ people in public life. “Pronouns,” we find, doesn’t only index a debate over present-day gender expression; it also draws from the legacies of settler-colonialism and hyper-nationalism, which have always co-constituted hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality in US society. However, we also note the ironic fact that strict use of gendered pronouns such as “he” and “she,” especially to refer to a generic person or non-human objects and entities, is historically recent and linguistically arbitrary. We conclude by shifting from history and theory to a question of action : what is the pragmatic case for putting your preferred pronouns in your social media bios and email signature lines, and giving students the opportunity to “share your name and pronouns” in classroom introductions? How do these practices make everyday learning and social action more feasible and manageable? We break down some practical benefits for teaching, political organizing, and ordinary personal interaction. Overall, we hope this episode helps demystify and defang the issue of “pronouns”, which are really not as confusing or threatening as some make them out to be. From Connecticut to Utah, in academia and beyond, we all use them, and they haven’t caused the sky to fall (so far!). Works and Concepts Referenced Allen, J. M., & Faigley, L. (1995). Discursive strategies for social change: An alternative rhetoric of argument. Rhetoric Review , 14 (1), 142-172. Baron, D. (2018). A brief history of singular ‘they.’ Oxford English Dictionary blog . Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Conrod, K. (2018). Pronouns and gender in language. In K. Hall & R. Barrett (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality . Oxford UP. Hinchy, J. (2019). Governing gender and sexuality in colonial India: the Hijra, c. 1850–1900 . Cambridge University Press. McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. Miranda, D. A. (2010). Extermination of the joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies , 16 (1-2), 253-284. Swyers, H., & Thomas, E. (2018). Murderbot pronouns: A snapshot of changing gender conventions in the United States. Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 3(3), 271-298. “Wisconsin District Bans Pride Flags From Classrooms, Pronouns in Emails” - Education Week Tennessee bill on pronouns Biden-Harris Executive Order that mentions pronouns twice Transcript of this episode’s audio from Otter.ai…

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E70: We hold these Truths & Replies to be self-evident: What is Truth Social? 1:09:00

3 years ago1:09:00

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On June 28, 2022, explosive public testimony was delivered by a former Trump Administration aide named Cassidy Hutchinson in front of the United States House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attacks. Hutchinson’s testimony corroborated and deepened the Committee’s case that President Trump had led the attacks. In addition, Hutchinson divulged an extraordinary anecdote in which, after learning that his attorney general, William Barr, had refused to back Trump’s claims of election fraud, Trump purportedly slammed a plate against a wall; according to Hutchinson, the wall was dripping with ketchup. The 45th president himself seems to have been watching Hutchinson’s testimony in real-time, because immediately after it aired, he dashed off a flurry of enraged posts on an obscure social media site, Truth Social, which he founded in late 2021 after Twitter and Facebook banned his accounts following January 6th. Trump’s comments about Hutchinson quickly circulated on the more popular and mainstream social media platforms, but their users could not directly interact with Trump’s incendiary content unless they also had accounts on the strangely named (and uncannily designed) Truth Social. On this episode, Calvin and Alex dig into Truth Social in real-time–so you don’t have to. What is it? How does it work? Which accounts (other than Trump’s) are most popular there? How does its glossary define “Truth”? Is all of the content shared on TS overtly right-wing propaganda, or is there more benign stuff as well? (And if there is, what does it look like?) We answer all of these questions and more, in addition to providing context about Trump’s recent legal maneuvering in relation to the site, as well as complaints from some of its users that censorship and “shadow banning” are just as much problems there as on Facebook and Twitter. We close by breaking down the strange philosophical notions of “truth” promulgated both within the conservative movement and in more liberal approaches to “fact-checking”, and we argue that for all of its flaws, at least in its terminology Twitter doesn’t claim to be offering anything other than what it is: a collection of random bird sounds that may or may not mean anything. Works and Concepts Referenced Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software . University of Michigan Press. Burke, K. (1966). Chapter Three—Terministic Screens. Language as symbolic action . University of California Press. Ellul, J., Merton, R. K., Kellen, K., & Lerner, J. (1973). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes . New York: Vintage books. [Introduces concept of horizontal propaganda .] Gruwell, L. (2018). Constructing research, constructing the platform: Algorithms and the rhetoricity of social media research. Present Tense , 6 (3), 1-9. Trump left social media company board before federal subpoenas, filing shows– CNBC Trump Throws New Tantrum After Former Aide Exposes Jan. 6 Tantrum– Rolling Stone Truth Social Users Are Fuming Over “Censorship” on Trump’s Platform– The Daily Beast…

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E69: "We're all trying to find the guy who can do something about this" 1:14:05

3 years ago1:14:05

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In the wake of shooting massacres in Uvalde, TX and Buffalo, NY, public outcry has been sustained and vociferous, recalling similarly intense reactions to previous mass shootings over the past 10 years. But in the US, public policy responses to such events are rarely as swift or sweeping as most of us would prefer. Just two days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, in which 19 children between the ages of 9 and 11 were shot and killed in their classroom, the US Senate recessed for its annual Memorial Day holiday, delaying any possibility of legislative action to address mass shootings by nearly two weeks. Yet, while the Senate's flaws as a democratic institution have received lots of attention from scholars, journalists, and activists, less often critiqued in terms of public accountability for resolving ongoing crises is the office of the presidency. On today's show, we attempt to fill this gap by examining President Biden's public statements about the massacres in Uvalde and Buffalo, the impending Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Across these issues, we've noticed a common discursive trope that demands closer scrutiny, which we've dubbed, "we're all trying to find the guy who can do something about this!" In President Biden's rhetorical style, this strategy connects to his cultivated identity as “Eulogizer-in-Chief.” Under our Eulogizer-in-Chief, we are constantly reminded of how sad and unjust ongoing events are, and we are often told how much these events "are not who we are as Americans", but we are rarely if ever informed about what our MOTUS (Mourner of the United States) plans to do about them. In terms of classical speech genres, epideictic (ceremonial) rhetoric has crowded out deliberative (policy) and forensic (legal) rhetoric. The result is a public discourse of despair, in which the only actions that leaders frame as feasible are individual citizen actions -- "vote harder!" or "organize harder!" -- rather than concrete government plans and policies. Politics becomes increasingly marketized and commodified, with engagement by grassroots activists compared in terms of pure numerical value to that of astroturfed corporate lobbying efforts, and the "winner" of such contests (invariably the side with more money) granted the executive or legislative action of their choice. Leaders, for their parts, dispassionately analyze these market dynamics in their public messaging, creating a feedback loop of demobilization that comes to affect even their own perceptions of their power to act. However, we hasten to point out, many significant executive actions have been taken over the past 20+ years to combat terrorism and other security threats, often without formal approval of the other branches of government. This suggests that Biden has the capacity to do much more than he is currently doing. Overall, we argue that it is crucial to demand something other than hollow words of grief and virtue-signaling tweets from the most powerful people in the world. Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Beasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs , 13(1), 7-35. Blanchfield, P. (2018). The market can’t solve a massacre. Splinter News . NBC News - Alex Seitz-Wald & Mike Memoli: “‘Grief must be witnessed’: Joe Biden’s first 100 days as consoler-in-chief” (28 April, 2021) NYT - Katie Glueck & Matt Flegenheimer: “Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief” (11 June 2020) Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity . Univ. Press of Mississippi. Rood, C. (2018). “Our tears are not enough”: The warrant of the dead in the rhetoric of gun control. Quarterly journal of speech , 104(1), 47-70. Too, Y. L. (2001). Epideictic genre. Encyclopedia of rhetoric , 251-57. See also the Wikipedia entry for epideictic . WaPo - Jennifer Rubin: “With Joe Biden, we finally have a mourner in chief again” (23 Feb 2021) Zarefsky, D. (2004). Presidential rhetoric and the power of definition. Presidential Studies Quarterly , 34(3), 607-619. Speech w/ Biden defining Buffalo shooting as “domestic terrorism” https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1527064065314627584?s=20&t=ehy5LY4DwBd_zfF_sfHYXQ Speech w/ Biden calling Buffalo shooting a “racially motivated act of white supremacy”: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1525946642519793666…

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E68: How can podcasting help us re:engage with social justice (inside and outside the academy)? // 2022 Computers & Writing Conference Special Episode 1:17:33

3 years ago1:17:33

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This episode was produced as a virtual panel presentation for the 2022 Computers and Writing Conference. It has been 2 years in the making, and we’re so pleased to finally present it to you! Academics have been increasingly using podcasts as rhetorically rich tools for achieving pedagogical goals and re-theorizing the power and potential of sonic rhetorics. While academic podcasts can serve as a useful medium for scholarly conversations among insiders, less explored has been the potential for such podcasts to accommodate critical knowledge practices and disciplinary concepts for broader audiences. Our podcast, re:verb, attempts to bridge the divide between intellectual knowledge and activist practice, showcase movements and causes, and discuss activist practice through rhetorical lenses. Through these discussions, we attempt to synthesize knowledges inside and outside the academy, and demystify activism by rhetorically analyzing the thought processes that go into planning and executing it. For this panel presentation and special episode of re:verb , three of our co-producers - Calvin Pollak, Alex Helberg, and Sophie Wodzak - reached out to individuals working on social justice projects in our own local communities. Alex presents his conversation with Dani Singerman, a food justice advocate in Hartford, CT, who has been working on a project to mobilize resources for constructing a grocery store in the North End neighborhood of the city. Sophie Wodzak reconnects with previous guest and friend of the show Crystal Grabowski, who has been advocating for reproductive justice and abortion access in Western Pennsylvania for years. And finally, Calvin Pollak shares a conversation with his colleague Avery Edenfield, a faculty member in the English Department at Utah State University, about his work advocating for LGBTQ+ issues in a variety of different contexts. For the “Q&A” portion of our panel, the three co-producers reconvene to discuss our major take-aways from our conversations, and reflect on the rhetorical dimensions of contemporary activist practice, including: how to break down a “big” issue into smaller, more actionable “chunks”; the need to account for the “slow” work of activism, and how seemingly small actions it can still have a massive impact on others’ well-being; and finally, the importance of ethical collaborations between scholars and activists, celebrating the different situated expertise(s) that everyone can bring to the table.…

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E67: re:read - Bartleby, the Scrivener 1:09:50

3 years ago1:09:50

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We would prefer not to write a description for this episode… but here’s one anyway! Today’s episode is a re:vival of our re:read series, where we create dramatic interpretive readings of short fiction with contemporary political and cultural relevance. In this installment, inspired by our recent conversation with Dr. Kendall Phillips on “rhetorics of refusal,” Calvin, Ben, and Alex bring to life the classic Herman Melville story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” originally published in Putnam’s Monthly magazine in 1853. This story documents the tribulations of a Wall Street lawyer who hires a morose figure named Bartleby to work for him as a scrivener. Bartleby quickly turns from an industrious copy-writer to a passively resisting automaton, whose only response to any request is simply: “I would prefer not to.” As the fallout from Bartleby’s absurdly principled behavior continues to unfold, the narrator finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about social life, language, and labor. Join our crew of voice actors - Calvin as the narrator, Ben taking the role of the eponymous Bartleby, and Alex playing various minor characters - as we traverse this darkly comic tale of 19th-century alienation and absurdism, scored with period-specific music to accentuate the drama. Our dramatic reading is followed by a reflection on some of the story’s themes and implications: the literary works and political actors that “Bartleby” presaged, its critique of alienated (and alienat ing ) labor, the co-optation of refusal rhetorics under neoliberal capitalism, and the affordances of individual vs. collective resistance in social and political movements. Accessible transcript of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11231/11231-h/11231-h.htm Music featured in this episode…

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E66: Food, Culture, and Intimacy (w/ Dr. Anita Mannur) 58:13

3 years ago58:13

58:13

On today’s show, Ben and Alex have the privilege to dish with Dr. Anita Mannur, Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Miami University, about her research on the intersections that food has with culture, race, and gender. We begin the conversation by reflecting on how discourses around food and consumption practices, especially in postcolonial contexts, reflect our ideas of national identity and “authenticity” - for instance, the debate over whether Chicken Tikka Masala is an “authentic” Indian dish, despite its origins as an accommodation of traditional Indian cuisine to Anglo-European sensibilities. As Anita notes in her work, cultural conversations around food, and reactions to those foods’ smells, tastes, and appearance are often tied to various social identities that we carry in other aspects of our lives, and can tell us a great deal about what happens as we negotiate those identities through various sensory experiences. Throughout our discussion, we trace the transformative (often homosocial and even queer) practices that emerge in intimate spaces of food production like the kitchen - exchanging knowledge, gossip, and other affective sensations. We also examine some sites that constitute of what Anita calls “intimate eating publics,” such as the now-defunct Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh, PA (RIP). Between talking about Anita’s analyses of some of these eating publics from her new book Intimate Eating (such as The Great British Baking Show ), we share intimate stories from our own culinary lives, and make a few delicious food puns along the way. It’s a delightful conversation that we hope you’ll find comestible and digestible! Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Ku, R.J-S., Manalansan, M.F., Mannur, A. (Eds.). (2013). Eating Asian America: A food studies reader. New York University Press. Mannur, A. (2009). Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture . Temple University Press. Mannur, A. (2017). Un-homing Asian American studies: Refusals and the politics of commitment. In Schlund-Vials, C. (Ed.), Flashpoints for Asian American studies (pp. 82-98). Fordham University Press. Mannur, A. (2022). Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures . Duke University Press. Trinh, L., Wong, K.S., Schlund-Vials, C.J. (Eds.). (2015). Keywords for Asian American Studies . NYU Press.…

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E65: I The People: Conservative Populist Rhetorics (w/ Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson) 1:17:02

3 years ago1:17:02

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Although “populism” is a term that has been rigorously discussed and theorized in political science and communication studies, the term has received special attention ever since the political rise and presidency of Donald Trump. But what does populism actually mean, and how can we trace the lineage of populist conservative discourses that prefigured the Trump presidency? To guide us through the rhetorical history of this fraught concept, we are joined on the show today by Dr. Paul Elliott Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His recently published book, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States , tells a captivating story of how conservative politicians and rhetors from the mid-20th-century to the present have appealed to the values of “the people.” Johnson elucidates how the conservative variant of populism has reduced the category of “the American people” through its focus on a possessive individualism constantly under threat by new ways of being and modes of organization. This sense of “the people under siege” has been undergirded by a reactionary response to blackness, which is ultimately traceable to the US’s foundation in settler-colonialism and chattel slavery. In our discussion, we talk through several of the rhetorical case studies in Johnson’s book, including the political ascendency and presidency of Ronald Reagan, the 1994 midterm elections and the year of the “angry white male,” the astroturfed revanchist “Tea Party” surge during the Obama presidency, and the rise of Donald Trump and the contemporary right-wing. Finally, we discuss some alternative methods of articulating “the people” that might help to expand, rather than reduce, the meaning of US popular democracy. References : Beasley, V. B. (2011). You, the people: American national identity in presidential rhetoric (Vol. 10). Texas A&M University Press. Cooper, M. (2017). Family values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism . MIT Press. Corrigan, L. M. (2020). Black feelings: Race and affect in the long sixties . Univ. Press of Mississippi. DiPiero, T. (2002). White men aren't . Duke University Press. Goldberg, J. (2009). Liberal fascism: The secret history of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change . Crown Forum. Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard law review , 1707-1791. Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America . Oxford University Press on Demand. Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair . Fordham Univ Press. Kelsie, A. E. (2019). Blackened Debate at the End of the World. Philosophy & Rhetoric , 52 (1), 63-70. King Watts, E. (2017). Postracial fantasies, blackness, and zombies. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies , 14 (4), 317-333. Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason . Verso. Lee, M. J. (2006). The populist chameleon: The people's party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the populist argumentative frame. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 92 (4), 355-378. Lee, M. J. (2014). Creating conservatism: Postwar words that made an American movement . MSU Press. Matheson, C. (2016). “What does Obama want of me?” Anxiety and Jade Helm 15. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 102 (2), 133-149. Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics . Duke University Press. Moffitt, B. (2020). Populism . John Wiley & Sons. Moten, F. (2013). Blackness and nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly , 112(4), 737-780. Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and opposition , 39(4), 541-563. Nash, G. H. (2014). The conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945 . Open Road Media. Ore, E. J. (2019). Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity . Univ. Press of Mississippi. Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics , 17 (2), 65-81. Vats, A. (2014). Racechange is the new Black: Racial accessorizing and racial tourism in high fashion as constraints on rhetorical agency. Communication, Culture & Critique , 7 (1), 112-135. White, K. C. (2018). The branding of right-wing activism: The news media and the Tea Party . Oxford University Press. Wright, M. M. (2015). Physics of blackness: Beyond the middle passage epistemology . U of Minnesota Press.…

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E64: "Rationality" Bites - Steven Pinker's Disciplinary Drift (w/ Dr. Nathan Pensky) 40:13

4 years ago40:13

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In his most recent book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters , Harvard University cognitive psychologist and noted Jeffrey Epstein associate Steven Pinker argues that “rationality” is what distinguishes good thinkers from bad, that societies which encourage rationality are superior to those that do not, and that making the world a better place requires that we all think more rationally about our past, present, and future. Sounds plausible, right? In making these sweeping claims, though, Pinker wholly ignores relevant research and writing in disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies, which have already provided crucial insights into the very questions he claims to be answering for the first time. Pinker’s “disciplinary drift” is the focus of today’s show, in which Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Nathan Pensky, a literary scholar and critic who reviewed Pinker’s latest for the Chronicle of Higher Education . In the review, Nathan explains why Pinker’s wanton disregard for existing humanities scholarship is so galling, and he contrasts this with the approaches of more generative and thoughtful interdisciplinary scholars such as Anil Seth, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist and author of Being You: A new science of consciousness . Unlike Pinker, Seth engages deeply with existing scholarly debates in the humanities–in particular, the field of philosophy of mind–before introducing a STEM innovation that bears directly on philosophers’ existing questions. Nathan goes on to argue that Pinker’s work is simply more rude than Seth’s, reminding us of the value of basic respect and dignity in scholarly writing. To conclude this episode, Alex introduces Nathan and Calvin to a fun new game: “Pinker or Stinker?” He introduces three quotations: two of them are real excerpts from Pinker’s latest work of discipline-drifting drivel, and one is a stinker–a fake quote written by Alex in his best imitation of Pinker’s trademark style. Will Nathan & Calvin be able to tell the difference? Can you? Play along while you listen, and if you get them all correct, shoot us an email or a Twitter DM to receive your complimentary re:verb t-shirt! References Dwyer, P., & Micale, M. (Eds.). (2021). The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence . Bloomsbury Publishing. Pensky, N. (2021, Oct. 29). Steven Pinker’s Disciplinary Drift . The Chronicle of Higher Education . Pensky, N. (2021, Dec. 2) Finding the poet of ‘Paradise Lost’ . The Boston Globe . Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters . Viking. Pinker, S. (2019). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress . Penguin. Pinker, S. (2012). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined . Penguin. Seth, A. (2021). Being you: A new science of consciousness . Penguin.…

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E63: Rhetoric and Violence at the Capitol (re:visited) 1:26:58

4 years ago1:26:58

1:26:58

One year ago this week, a large crowd of Trump supporters disrupted what ought to have been boring and bureaucratic work: Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory over then-President Trump. Instead, a massive melee ensued, resulting in five people dead and over a hundred wounded–mostly Capitol and Metropolitan Police Officers. Loyal re:verb listeners will recall our episode from shortly thereafter , in which we provided our initial spit-takes on the events themselves as well as Twitter’s related banning of Trump’s official account. On today’s show, Calvin, Alex, and Sophie return with our most up-to-date thoughts on the meaning and significance of the Jan. 6 attack. We consider questions like: How much emotional energy did and does this incident warrant? Aren’t there more systemic issues that dwarf this by comparison? Or, is it actually misguided to dissociate Jan. 6 from larger problems plaguing the U.S. political system and the world? Meanwhile, one year into Joe Biden’s neoliberal presidency, how can we draw clear lines between the governance offered by the two parties? If we can’t, is it rational to be concerned about one party attempting (and failing) to subvert a victory by the other? And if they are distinguishable, what areas of policy reveal the sharpest distinctions? We air our nuanced disagreements on these topics, as well as our much clearer agreement on the horror of far-right violence and bipartisan failures to address climate change. One twist on last year’s discussion, though, is that we offer a close reading this time – specifically, we analyze Tucker Carlson’s recent Patriot Purge documentary for FOX Nation, which provided the definitive far-right revisionist narrative of what happened on Jan 6. We unpack the documentary’s many bizarre arguments by analogy, such as Carlson’s comparison of the post-Jan 6 plight of Trump supporters to the post-9/11 plights of Muslim and Arab Americans. Carlson also equates one faulty media story about the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with the many, many examples of world-historically harmful propaganda disseminated by the mainstream media in the run-up to the Iraq War, and he later analogizes the “movement” that protested on Jan. 6 to the Black Lives Matter movement. The documentary culminates in a direct assertion that Jan. 6 was an inside job by the FBI, which we debunk from multiple angles before elaborating on the broader significance of Carlson’s rhetorical strategies: the coalitions that they may or may not promise between right and left, and the tactical and theoretical value of analyzing propaganda in terms of political imaginaries and aesthetics.…

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E62: re:joinder - The University of the Cancelled 1:49:54

4 years ago1:49:54

1:49:54

Last month, former New York Times columnist and current Substacker Bari Weiss took to Twitter to announce “a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth”: the University of Austin (UATX). Not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, UATX is thus far only a university concept –a pitch for a “new” kind of higher education institution–but the details are murky, it is not accredited, and by its own website’s admission, there are no concrete plans for undergraduate degrees until 2024 at the earliest. More than anything, this “University” appears to be an ideological project of social media and op-ed columns, in which its conservative culture warrior backers rail vaguely and haphazardly at existing universities for various tangled, often contradictory sins. Even more oddly, they are proposing a fairly standard liberal arts education, with few obvious “fixes” to traditional models beyond a vague insinuation that their discourses will be “freer” and their students will not be “coddled.” On today’s show, Alex and Calvin are joined for the first time by co-producer Mike Laudenbach. Together we unpack two key texts from the University of Austin’s public announcement: “We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.” by Pano Kanelos (a UATX founding trustee) and “I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken” by Niall Ferguson (another trustee and a legendary cheerleader for the British and American empires). As is typical of our re:joinder episodes, we have lots of laughs taking apart these articles’ unsupported, illogical, and downright bizarre claims about the industry we all know so well: academia. But we also do our best to earnestly and fairly engage with key questions that these writers raise (but don’t really address), such as: To what extent is higher ed broken, how is it broken, and–perhaps most importantly– who or what broke it? Are there social and intellectual taboos within universities, and if so, which ones bear most significantly on academics’ lives and livelihoods? What is the current state of free speech on campuses, and how does it fit into a historical context dating back to the red scares of the Cold War, student protest movements that began in the 1960s and ‘70s, and political correctness debates of the ‘80s-90’s? Along the way, we draw on our experiences and knowledge as students, researchers, and faculty, and we propose an innovative institution of our own: re:verb University (RVU). GO VERBIES! Stay tuned, as applications for our august academy will open soon–once we succeed in getting cancelled for truth. Texts Analyzed in this Episode Ferguson, N. (2021, Nov. 8). I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken. Bloomberg . Kanelos, P. (2021, Nov. 8). We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One. Common Sense (Bari Weiss’s Substack). Works and Concepts Cited Mishra, P. (2011, Nov. 3). Watch this man. London Review of Books . [Article critiquing Niall Ferguson’s apologetic writing about imperialism. Below the article, its author Pankaj Mishra and its subject Niall Ferguson exchange a series of letters debating Ferguson’s scholarship.] Nichols, A. (2018, Apr. 2). So-called ‘intellectuals’ can’t let go of “The Bell Curve.” The Outline . [Article explaining how Andrew Sullivan and other conservative intellectuals continue to circulate modern race science ideas originally espoused in Charles Murray’s 1994 The Bell Curve .] Sohege, D. (2021, Apr. 25). In fairness @epkaufm's resistance to academic institutions maintaining their right of academic freedom to call out poor work, and his views on "political minorities", are understandable when placed In the context of his own apparent lack of academic rigor. Twitter . [Tweet highlighting shoddy scholarship in the CSPI study “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.”]…

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E61: A Cinema of Hopelessness (w/ Dr. Kendall R. Phillips) 1:02:22

4 years ago1:02:22

1:02:22

Look upon these films, ye mighty, and despair! In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome back Dr. Kendall R. Phillips, Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University - this time, to discuss his hot-off-the-presses book, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture . In it, Kendall examines how some of the most emotionally-charged moments of 21st century U.S. public memory - from 9/11 to Occupy Wall Street to the presidential election of Donald Trump - have resonated in the biggest box office hits of popular cinema. Within each of these conjunctures of hit movies and widely-felt cultural sentiments, Kendall incisively traces a common theme: “the rhetoric of refusal,” in which characters shout “no!” in the face of the powerful and seek societal destruction rather than reform. We discuss some of the topics and films covered in the book, from the influence of the Occupy movement on films like Snowpiercer, Cabin in the Woods, and The Purge , to Kendall’s unique reading of 2017’s Joker as a musical, to the themes of betrayal, loss, and nostalgic longing that have permeated both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and post-2016 U.S. national politics. We conclude with some thoughts on the collective, affective power of “movie magic,” as well as how nostalgia might be productively re:imagined to move our political culture forward. Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion . Routledge. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism . Duke University Press. Biesecker, B. A. (2002). Remembering World War II: The rhetoric and politics of national commemoration at the turn of the 21st century. Quarterly Journal of Speech , 88 (4), 393-409. Biesecker, B.A. (2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paregoric rhetoric. In K. R. Phillips (ed.), Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press): pp. 212–247. Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; or, the Formula. Essays critical and clinical , 86 . Gunn, J. (2008). Father trouble: Staging sovereignty in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Critical Studies in Media Communication , 25 (1), 1-27. Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures . New York University Press. LeMesurier, J. L. (2020). Winking at Excess: Racist Kinesiologies in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly , 50 (2), 139-151. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural critique , (31), 83-109. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect . John Wiley & Sons. Mitchell, W. T. (2013). Iconology: image, text, ideology . University of Chicago Press. Muensterberg, W. (1985). De gustibus: Notes on the genetics of taste. In Visible religion: Annals of religious iconography (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill). Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling . Duke University Press. Spinoza, B. (2009). The Ethics (R.H.M. Elwes, Trans.). Project Gutenberg . Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Original work published 1677). Villadsen, L. (2017). “Bartleby the Scrivener”: Affect, agency, and the rhetorical trickster.” Presented at Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, Norwich, UK. Williams, C. (2007). Thinking the political in the wake of Spinoza: Power, affect and imagination in the ethics. Contemporary Political Theory , 6 (3), 349-369.…

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E60: re:blurb - Publicity and Counterpublicity 44:06

4 years ago44:06

44:06

Have you ever wondered why some issues are treated as private and personal, while others are self-evidently public concerns? Meanwhile, certain topics are discussed freely and openly, but only among niche subcultures: local interest groups, expert practitioners, hardcore enthusiasts, and even marginalized communities. How can we better understand these kinds of diverse audience groupings, which are so critical to the circulation of political text and talk? On today's re:blurb episode, we address these questions through a deep-dive into the rhetoric of publicity and counterpublicity. In so doing, we overview the landmark public sphere theories of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as well as later feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory contributions from scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, Michael Warner, and Daniel Brouwer. Finally, we highlight the importance of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony for unpacking our inherited ideas about “civil society.” To illustrate this point, we offer an analysis of a recent controversy involving Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, in which activists pursued her into a public restroom to protest her obstruction of immigration reform. Considering the incident and its broader reverberations in media discourses about privacy and civility, we argue that these ideas are contested because hegemony itself is contested . In a deeply unequal society like ours, publicity and counterpublicity are contingent upon groups' positions within hierarchies of power. An early draft of this episode was prepared as a submission for the 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on “The Trouble with Publics and Counterpublics.” That workshop unfortunately did not take place, due to the unexpected passing of workshop co-leader Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Dan Brouwer was a critical force in rhetorical studies, public sphere theory, and queer studies - a strong mentor, friend, and crucial voice across academic fields. It is in this spirit that we humbly dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr. Daniel Brouwer. Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition . University of Chicago Press. Aronoff, K. (2021, 21 Sept.). Joe Manchin’s vote isn’t that mysterious. Look to the fossil fuel money. The New Republic . Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/163723/joe-manchin-vote-fossil-fuel Asen, R. (2000). Seeking the “counter” in counterpublics. Communication theory , 10 (4), 424-446. Boguslaw, D. (2021, 26 Sept.). Kyrsten Sinema used the winery where she interned to fundraise with private equity. The Intercept . Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/26/kyrsten-sinema-private-equity-tax-loophole/ Brouwer, D.C. (2001). ACT-ing UP in congressional hearings. In R. Asen and D.C. Brouwer (Eds.) Counterpublics and the State (pp. 87-110). SUNY Press. Cloud, D. L. (2018). Reality bites: Rhetoric and the circulation of truth claims in US political culture . The Ohio State University Press. Cloud, D.L. (2015). “Civility” as a threat to academic freedom. First Amendment Studies , 49 (1), 13-17. Davenport, C. (2021, 19 Sept.). Joe Manchin will craft the U.S. climate plan. The New York Times . Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/climate/manchin-climate-biden.html Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text , (25/26), 56-80. Gramsci, A. (2011). Prison Notebooks (Vol. 2) (J.A. Buttigieg, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society . MIT press. (Originally published in 1962). Hauser, G. A. (1999). Vernacular voices: The rhetoric of publics and public spheres . Univ of South Carolina Press. Klippenstein, K. (2021, 8 Oct.). Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is literally teaching a course on fundraising. The Intercept . Retrieved from: https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/ Luchetta, J. (2021, Oct. 4). Activists ambush Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in public bathroom over immigration, infrastructure. USA Today . Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/10/04/sen-kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-arizona-immigration-infrastructure/5990516001/ Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication theory , 12 (4), 446-468. Treene, A. (2021, 7 Oct.). Scoop: Sanders’ Sinema spat. Axios . Retrieved from: https://www.axios.com/sanders-sinema-spat-harrassment-a8c9f7a2-6579-4800-aa28-43a71fe2639b.html Walsh, K. N. (2021, 5 Oct.). Protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom undermined their efforts. The Independent . Retrieved from: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/kyrsten-sinema-bathroom-protest-privacy-b1932844.html Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics . Zone Books.…

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E89: Distance and Suffering in News Reporting (w/ John Oddo, Cameron Mozafari, & Alex Kirsch) 1:07:11

1 year ago1:07:11

1:07:11

On today’s show, Calvin and Alex sit down with the co-authors of a hot-off-the-presses article in Discourse & Society about journalistic reporting on US drone strikes in the Middle East: Dr. John Oddo (Carnegie Mellon University), Dr. Cameron Mozafari (Cornell University), and Alex Kirsch (MA Professional Writing graduate, CMU). In their article, entitled “Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes,” they examine deictic language - words and phrases that “point” to contextual elements construed as “close” or “far away.” Specifically, they analyze how this type of language is used to make US audiences feel sympathetic or apathetic toward the US drone war and the suffering it caused to ordinary civilians in the 2000s and 2010s. In our conversation, we talk with the authors about how deictic language can position a reader audience as “near” or far” from descriptions of suffering in terms of space, time, veracity, sense perception, emotion, and perspective. They take us through the major findings in their article’s comparison between how the Associated Press and The American Prospect used this language - to different extremes - in order to render people suffering from US military violence as immediate, worthy of attention and sympathy, or distant, opaque, and foreign. We also discuss the implications for how this language is used in reporting on other policy issues both foreign and domestic, and the affordances of this model for helping us understand how language in news reporting creates mental images. John, Cameron, and Alex’s co-authored article: Oddo, J., Mozafari, C., & Kirsch, A. (2024). Sustaining or overcoming distance in representations of US drone strikes. Discourse & Society . Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode: Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion . Random House. Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics . Cambridge University Press. Cap, P. (2008). Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics , 40 (1), 17-41. Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice . Routledge. ————. (2014). Language, space and mind: The conceptual geometry of linguistic meaning . Cambridge University Press. Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism . John Wiley & Sons. Kopytowska, M. (2015a). Covering conflict: Between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse, genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics , 7 (2), 308-339. ————. (2015b) Ideology of ‘here’ and ‘now’: Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3): 347-365.…

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E88: re:joinder - Lose Bigly with Scott Adams, pt. 3: Movies, Moist Robots, and Mass Delusions 1:27:43

1 year ago1:27:43

1:27:43

Do you consider yourself to be a rational person? If so, Scott Adams (a.k.a. “The Dilbert Guy”), has some bad news for you. On today’s show, we attempt to surmount our various cognitive dissonances and confirmation biases to better understand “How to See Reality in a More Useful Way,” according to the third chapter of Scott Adams’s 2017 pseudo-rhetorical quasi-treatise, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. This chapter takes us headlong into Scott’s psychology, charting his journey through various “filters” he developed to help him “predict the future” at various stages in his life: among them, the “Santa Claus filter,” the “Alien Experiment filter,” and most ridiculous of all, his self-proclaimed current “Moist Robot filter.” This one has to be heard to be believed, trust us. Among other topics covered in this chapter are Scott’s “two movie” theory of reality, and his assertion that beliefs are really just “mass delusions” that determine how we react to new events and information. As usual, this chapter uncovers yet another layer of Scott’s solipsistic nihilism toward the world and its social dynamics. It also contains a whole section on how to become a trained hypnotist. He’s a man of many talents, folks. An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E87: Self-Immolation as Rhetorical Protest (w/ Dr. James Chase Sanchez) 48:07

1 year ago48:07

48:07

Disclaimer: This episode covers sensitive issues related to suicide and self-harm. If this topic makes you uncomfortable, we recommend skipping this episode. If you or someone you know is in crisis, in the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. On the morning of February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Air Force service member, posted a link to his Twitch channel on Facebook, commenting: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” Several hours later, around 1pm Eastern, Bushnell live-streamed himself walking toward the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. carrying a metal bottle without a lid. Bushnell recorded himself saying: “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” After setting up his camera several feet away, still live-streaming, he poured the liquid from his bottle over his head, and lit himself on fire from his feet, shouting “Free Palestine,” over and over, with increasing agony. Bushnell’s is the second nationally documented instance of self immolation in response to the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza. In December, a protester - whom the media has refused to name - set themselves on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta while holding a Palestinian flag. How can we best understand these cases: as noble and heroic protests? Or irrational acts of self-harm and self-destruction? To help us think through these questions, we are joined by Dr. James Chase Sanchez, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College and eminent scholar of racism, white supremacy, and social movements. James has published two relevant books: the co-authored collection Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, and Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy , both published in 2021. He also produced the 2018 documentary film Man on Fire , which tells the story of Charles Moore, a 79-year-old minister who self-immolated in protest against racism in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. We discuss Moore’s and Bushnell’s acts in the context of the history of social movement rhetorics, and consider how to reframe current conversations away from Bushnell the individual and towards issues of collective and internationalist solidarity. You can find more information on James’s documentary Man on Fire at this link James’s 2021 book Salt of the Earth can be purchased at this link…

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E86: Discourse & Manipulation (Part 2) 1:17:09

2 years ago1:17:09

1:17:09

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue to break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse, recapping part one of this series , demonstrating strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discussing how this kind of large-scale “mind control” is affecting contemporary foreign policy discourse in the US. The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation. This time, to put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding US foreign policy, specifically as it relates to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza: President Joe Biden’s November 18 opinion article in the Washington Post , entitled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas.” We closely analyze how President Biden uses manipulation strategies straight out of Van Dijk to persuade WaPo-reading liberals to ignore both the US’s constant and substantial material support for Israel’s war and its own military’s history of bloody and destructive imperialism throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We also note various tactics that the president deploys to naturalize inequality and normalize bigotry, all while touting the US’s role as the “essential” peace-loving, freedom-spreading nation. “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas” - Joe Biden Link to Part One of this Series Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode: Azoulay, A., & Ophir, A. (2012). The one-state condition: occupation and democracy in Israel/Palestine . Stanford University Press. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research . Psychology Press. Fifield, A. (19 March 2013). “Contractors reap $138B from Iraq war.” CNN.com . McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech , 66(1), 1-16. [ Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here .] Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror . Penn State University Press. [ Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here .] Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation . Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press. Schneider, T. (8 Oct 2023). “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.” The Times of Israel. Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society , 17(3), 359-383. An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.…

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E85: Discourse and Manipulation 1:22:35

2 years ago1:22:35

1:22:35

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse. We outline some key strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discuss its social and political implications as a form of large-scale “mind control.” The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation. To put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding student protests against the most recent flare-up in Israel’s war on Gaza: Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian’s email to university students and faculty in response to a recent student vigil where the phrase “from the river to the sea” was chanted. We closely analyze the careful manipulations of emphasis and value that Jahanian creates in his discourse, which subtly demonizes student demonstrators advocating for peace and the cessation of violence between Israel and Hamas, while reaffirming the supposedly apolitical “commitments” of the institution he represents. Full Text Version of Farnam Jahanian Email Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode: Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research . Psychology Press. McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech , 66(1), 1-16. [ Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here .] Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror . Penn State University Press. [ Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here .] van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society , 17(3), 359-383. An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent@gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.…

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E84: Toward a Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (w/ Dr. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez) 1:11:47

2 years ago1:11:47

1:11:47

On today’s show, Ben sits down with Dr. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss his research at the intersections of border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American and Latinx diasporic media. We begin by discussing Juan’s approaches to media studies and challenges in the field, then dive into his new book, Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press) . Together, we reflect on the role of media representing border tunnels–underground networks of built and excavated spaces circumventing the above-ground border. As Juan notes, these tunnels are “nearly inaccessible” to the general public, so through their representation, we see media’s capacity to give meaning to “spaces and structures in excess of their real referent.” Importantly, Juan shows us how the “figure of the border tunnel” relates to the escalating efforts to violently fortify and police the U.S.-Mexico border. Juan helps us understand the affordances and limitations of border tunnels’ depictions in reality television, newscasts, action films, video games, and speculative design projects. We reflect on the role of popular films that appear in the book, such as the Fast and Furious franchise, video games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel , and the reality television series Border Wars in constructing what Juan calls the “racial infrastructures of the border.” This timely conversation helps us rethink our relationship with popular media and culture, drawing out the seemingly invisible role of border tunnels in shaping our understanding of the borderlands. Works referenced in this episode Agudelo, E. (2008). A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales . Borderwall as Architecture. Fojas, C. (2021). Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures of the US-Mexico Frontier . New York University Press. Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities . New York University Press. Howarth, D. (2016). Beautifying the Border Proposal Replaces US–Mexico Fence with Landscaping . Dezeen . Hernández, K. (2010). Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol . University of California Press. Knight, K. & Llamas-Rodriguez, J. Migrant Steps Project . Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2023). Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground . University of Minnesota Press. Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2017). The Datalogical Drug Mule . Feminist Media Histories , 3 (3), 9-29. Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Border . Lateral , 10 (2). Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2022). Ruinous Speculation, Tunnel Environments, and the Sustainable Infrastructures of the Border . Social Text , 40 (4), 97-123. Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2021). “ The Sewer Transnationalists .” One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play , 2. Mattern, S. (2018). Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures. The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities , edited by Jentery Sayers. Routledge. Parks, L. (2015). “ Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures . Between Humanities and the Digital , edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. The MIT Press. Patterson, C. (2020). Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games . New York University Press. An accessible transcript of this episode can be viewed here: https://otter.ai/u/xK1Y3uUOPeEXGBnErGd6_8eszXM…

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E83: Criminalizing Protest: The Stop Cop City RICO Charges

2 years ago

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Ever since its announcement in 2021, the Atlanta police training facility project known as “Cop City” has been the subject of much criticism from activists concerned with police violence and environmental justice. The proposal included razing 85 acres of forest in DeKalb County, Georgia (just South of the city of Atlanta) to build, among other things, a mock “city” in which police would conduct training exercises. In response, members of the surrounding community and beyond have engaged in swift, voluminous, and continuous protest. But in September 2023, in a severe escalation against the protest movement, Georgia Attorney General Michael Carr indicted 61 protestors under the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. Given that this act has historically been used to charge members of organized criminal syndicates (and of recent note, Donald Trump and his campaign staff for seeking to overturn the state-level presidential election results), its use to indict political protesters as part of a criminal conspiracy is a worrisome landmark in Georgia’s prosecutorial history. More broadly, it represents a critical abrogation of speech and association freedoms, and it sets a terrifying precedent for the suppression of political movements. On today’s show, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie dive into the actual language of the 109-page indictment document to analyze its rhetorical conflation of political protest and free association with a “criminal conspiracy.” In addition to critiquing the document’s numerous typographical errors and sloppy, imprecise prose, we assess how its language of threat-construction renders advocates of racial and environmental justice “violent anarchists,” whose expressions and practices of “mutual aid” and “solidarity” allegedly constitute illegal associations in a broader “conspiracy.” We also discuss the dark implications of this case for free speech and free association, the chilling effects the indictment could have on political movements nationwide, and some of its particular significance for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and technical communication. You can read the full indictment document against the Defend the Atlanta Forest organizers here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictment You can donate to the Legal Defense Fund for Stop Cop City organizers here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/atllegalfund For a full list of mutual aid funds, including payments to individual defendants, see the following LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/weelauneearresteefundraisers…

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E82: The Rhetoric of AI Hype (w/ Dr. Emily M. Bender) 53:02

2 years ago53:02

53:02

Are you a writing instructor or student who’s prepared to turn over all present and future communication practices to the magic of ChatGPT? Not so fast! On today’s show, we are joined by Dr. Emily M. Bender, Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and a pre-eminent academic critic of so-called “generative AI” technologies. Dr. Bender’s expertise involves not only how these technologies work computationally, but also how language is used in popular media to hype, normalize, and even obfuscate AI and its potential to affect our lives. Dr. Bender’s most well-known scholarly work related to this topic is a co-authored conference paper from 2021 entitled, “ On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? ” In our conversation, Emily explains why she and her co-authors chose the “stochastic parrot” metaphor – how this helps us to understand large language models and other related technologies more accurately than many competing metaphors. We go on to discuss several actual high-stakes, significant issues related to these technologies, before Dr. Bender provides a helpful index of some the most troublesome ways they are talked about in the media: synthetic text “gotcha”s, infancy metaphors, linear models of progress, inevitability framings, and many other troublesome tropes. We conclude with a close reading of a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about using synthetic text generators in writing classrooms: “Why I’m Excited About Chat GPT” by Jenny Young. Young’s article exemplifies many of the tropes Emily discussed earlier, as well as capturing lots of strange prevailing ideas about writing pedagogy, genre, and rhetoric in general. We hope that you enjoy this podcast tour through the world of AI hype media, and we ask that you please remain non-synthetic ‘til next time – no shade to parrots! 🦜 Check out the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, hosted by Dr. Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna: Audio Podcast Video Podcast Works & Concepts Cited in this episode: Baria, A. T., & Cross, K. (2021). The brain is a computer is a brain: neuroscience's internal debate and the social significance of the Computational Metaphor . arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.14042. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜 . In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623). Bender, E. M., & Koller, A. (2020, July). Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data . In Proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics (pp. 5185-5198). Birhane, A., Kalluri, P., Card, D., Agnew, W., Dotan, R., & Bao, M. (2022, June). The values encoded in machine learning research . In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 173-184). Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach . Patterns, 2(2). Doyle-Burke, D. & Smith, J. (Hosts).(2020, 8 Jul.). Episode 17: Science Fiction, Science Fact, and AI Consciousness with Beth Singler . [Audio Podcast Episode]. The Radical AI Podcast. Radical AI. Dubal, V. (2023). On algorithmic wage discrimination . Washington Center for Equitable Growth Working Papers Series. Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts . Written communication, 3(3), 275-296. Greene, D., Hoffmann, A. L., & Stark, L. (2019). Better, nicer, clearer, fairer: A critical assessment of the movement for ethical artificial intelligence and machine learning . Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Li, H. (2022). Language models: past, present, and future . Communications of the ACM, 65(7), 56-63. [Provides overview and context of Claude Shannon and Andrey Markov’s work on language modeling]. McDermott, D. (1976). Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity . Acm Sigart Bulletin, (57), 4-9. [on the concept of A.I. as a “wishful mnemonic”] Mitchell, M. (2021). Why AI is harder than we think . arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.12871. [More on A.I. as “wishful mnemonic”] Quintarelli, S. (2019, 4 Nov.). Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI) . Quinta’s weblog. Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in NLP . arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.02243. Torres, É.P. (2023, 15 Jun.). The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares . TruthDig. [Émile Torres on the background behind the TESCREAL ideologies]. An accessible transcript of this episode is available here…

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E81: Academic Labor Solidarity (w/ Dr. James J. Brown, Jr.) 54:16

2 years ago54:16

54:16

On today’s episode, we’re thrilled to be joined once again by friend-of-the-show Dr. Jim Brown, Jr., Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. While Jim is mainly known to us as an expert in digital rhetorical studies, today we speak to him about his experience as outgoing president of the Camden chapter of Rutgers’ faculty union, the AAUP-AFT, amid its recent historic labor strike and contract negotiations . The Rutgers faculty strike was a massive success, earning pay increases and structural bargaining changes that will redound not only to the benefit of Rutgers’ precarious faculty but also to colleagues at peer institutions–including, perhaps, at your own university, listener! In a wide-ranging conversation, Calvin picks Jim’s brain about the general duties of serving as a union chapter president, the events leading up to the April strike (including the university president’s threat of a legal injunction ), the details of the union’s victories, the broader issue of neoliberalism in academic labor, and the challenges of forging solidarity across so many different job categories (e.g. tenure-track faculty, non-tenure track teaching faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate faculty, and graduate researchers–all across many different disciplines). Finally, Jim explains how he applied his rhetorical training to the strike and negotiations, and how the strike and negotiations continue to influence his digital rhetoric research. Works and Concepts Referenced in this episode: Brown, J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software . University of Michigan Press. Chronicle of Higher Ed: Rutgers’ President Threatened to Take Striking Instructors to Court. Then He Walked It Back. DuFord, R. (2022). Solidarity in conflict: A democratic theory. Stanford University Press. Eric Blanc on Twitter: Rutgers workers sing “Hey Holloway” Murch, D. J. (2010). Living for the city: Migration, education, and the rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. UNC Press Books. NBC News: Rutgers University reaches deal with faculty unions to end historic strike The Progressive: The Rutgers Strike is a Turning Point for Higher Ed Rutgers Office of the President: Regarding the Faculty Unions’ Strike Rutgers historian Dr. Donna Murch on Democracy Now! State of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s Office: Governor Murphy Announces Framework Agreement Between Rutgers University Administration and Labor Union Representatives An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Otter.ai)…

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E80: re:joinder - Scott Adams & Persuasion: The Squeakuel 1:07:34

2 years ago1:07:34

1:07:34

The cognitive scientists at re:verb couldn't get enough of Win Bigly, Scott Adams' bizarre treatise on persuasion in a supposedly post-fact era. After tackling the introduction in December ( listen to the first installment here! ), we bring you our reading and re:joinder critique the first full chapter, which discusses why ordinary people like us fail to grasp reality for what it is: a mere plaything of the mastermind behind Dilbert. From Adams' ramblings, Alex, Calvin, and Sophie unearth top-secret persuasion techniques, such as lying, making speling errors, and incorrectly citing facts. Disclaimer: These techniques are not proven to convince anyone of anything, only to garner attention and “distort reality.” And according to Adams, manipulations of “reality” and “truth” should not be used by we ordinary folk - only Master Persuaders™ like Trump can handle their raw power. In this episode, we tackle the big question at the heart of this chapter: is it ethical to intentionally mislead an audience while trying to persuade them? Since our December episode, Dilbert is no longer in print in any newspaper after Scott Adams referred to Black people as a "hate group" on his "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" livestream. He now posts "Dilbert Reborn" comics on Locals, a right-wing subscription site, where Dogbert et al can wax cynical on "wokeness" to their hearts' content. Join Calvin, Alex, and Sophie in their Chipmunks-inspired squeakquel to Win Bigly, because a mere sequel wouldn't do it justice. An accessible transcript of this episode can be accessed here…

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E79: Legitimizing Situated Knowledge in East Palestine, Ohio (w/ Sophie Wodzak & Dr. Erin Brock Carlson) 1:00:46

2 years ago1:00:46

1:00:46

On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Fearing an explosion, emergency crews conducted a controlled burn of several of the cars, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and forcing the evacuation of local residents. In the ensuing weeks, pictures and videos were shared across social media of dead fish in local waterways and other sick animals throughout the region, followed by official reports of soil, air, and water contamination posing health risks to wildlife and human beings . In spite of conflicting safety information coming from the EPA , Norfolk Southern, and other government officials, residents have continued to express concerns over the long-term environmental and health consequences for Eastern Ohio. On today’s show, we explore the perspectives of East Palestine residents with our co-host, co-producer (and reporter!) Sophie Wodzak, who traveled to the area and interviewed local residents in the aftermath of the derailment. Her co-authored article in the New York Times explores conflicts between East Palestine residents and the local, state, and federal officials who shaped its mainstream media narrative in the wake of the disaster. Joining us in this conversation is Dr. Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University, whose research focuses on the ways that rural communities organize to self-advocate on issues of environmental justice. Together, we explore the importance of legitimizing the local residents’ situated knowledge - a type of knowledge grounded in a person’s direct experience of an issue’s consequences - in environmental policy conversations and media framing. Sophie’s co-authored article in the New York Times : “Federal Officials Send Help After Ohio Derailment, but Residents’ Frustrations Persist” Dr. Erin Brock Carlson’s relevant research on situated knowledge and environmental organizing : Carlson, E. B., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Legitimizing situated knowledge in rural communities through storytelling around gas pipelines and environmental risk. Technical Communication , 68 (4), 40-55. Caretta, M. A., & Carlson, E. B. (2023). Coercion via eminent domain and legal fees: The acceptance of gas extraction in West Virginia. Environmental Justice , 16 (1), 36-42. Carlson, E. B., & Gouge, C. (2021). Rural health and contextualizing data. Journal of Business and Technical Communication , 35 (1), 41-49. An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here…

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E78: Campus Misinformation and Academic Freedom (w/ Dr. Brad Vivian) 1:12:56

2 years ago1:12:56

1:12:56

Trigger warning: if you are offended by evidence-based arguments against moral panics surrounding higher education, listen with discretion! Light kidding aside, this episode addresses a very serious issue: restrictions on free speech in higher education. And no, we’re not talking about the exaggerated culture war invocations: “angry mobs” of “coddled students” yelling about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” to shut down speakers they don’t like. Rather, we’re talking about real, top-down legislative attempts to restrict free speech on college campuses, such as Florida’s HB 999 bill – and the long-running rhetorical strategies and tropes that have reappeared in the language of anti-speech laws like Florida’s. On today’s show, Alex speaks with Dr. Brad Vivian, Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences, and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University, about his new book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education . We work to rhetorically dissect some of the most common campus culture war tropes that developed over the 2010s, such as the rallying cries for increased “viewpoint diversity” (read: more speakers with bigoted, discredited, or easily discreditable viewpoints), the pseudoscientific myth of the “coddled” student popularized by writers such as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathon Haidt, and the incessant fear-mongering over the so-called “indoctrination campaign” of Critical Race Theory. In examining the rhetorical history of these tropes, we chart their strange evolution from somewhat disingenuous calls for “more speech” in higher education spaces to our current moment: in which 44 states (so far) have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of a number of subjects ranging from Gender Studies to “Critical Theory.” Why have these ostensibly pro-free speech arguments redounded to authoritarian attempts to crack down on academic freedom, and how might speech restrictions in US higher education serve as a kind of “trial balloon” for further governmental restrictions in the broader public sphere? As we grapple with these questions, we consider how colleges and universities might recommit to a more just and genuine vision of intellectual freedom. Dr. Brad Vivian’s book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education is available now from Oxford University Press Draft text of Florida’s HB 999…

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E77: Theaters of War (w/ Dr. Roger Stahl) 52:26

2 years ago52:26

52:26

Was your favorite film approved by Uncle Sam? And just how much of your streaming watchlist did the CIA curate? On today’s episode, Calvin and Alex are joined by Dr. Roger Stahl, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia, to discuss the widespread problem of US information operations in the motion picture industry–including, most recently, the 2022 box office smash Top Gun: Maverick . Thanks to Roger’s research team on his recent documentary Theaters of War (2022), we now know much more about the curious scripting and production relationships between entertainment studios and the US security state than we did until very recently. Their work has uncovered thousands of screen properties whose content was directly altered to serve US propaganda goals – as well as many hundreds of shows and movies that never saw the light of day due to lack of official support. So, with Roger’s help, we analyze the recent history of major military- and intelligence-approved cinema and TV hits, working our way backwards from Maverick to the original Top Gun (1986) , Zero Dark Thirty (2012) , Rules of Engagement (2000) , and even – huh??? – the comedy Meet the Parents (2000), among others. We also discuss the recent Amazon streaming success Jack Ryan (2018-present) and how its second season manufactured consent in real time for US coup-mongering in Venezuela. As we work through these examples, we also consider the overarching rhetorical ideologies in the military documents Roger’s research team has been studying: from the military’s curious appeals to the value of “accuracy” to patterns in types of content they deem to be “showstoppers” (leading to withdrawal of official support). We also ask whether this gigantic domestic influence operation can be properly termed “information warfare,” and what kinds of policy changes are needed to address it. For example, should there be a disclaimer included with trailers and posters for movies co-produced by the US military? Or, more radically, should these aspects of military policy be simply abolished? We hope you enjoy our deep-dive into an extremely fascinating and timely topic with a rhetorical studies expert doing valuable investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking. If you have a Kanopy subscription, check out Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary Theaters of War to learn much, much more. Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode Jenkins, T. (2016). The CIA in Hollywood: How the agency shapes film and television . University of Texas Press. Tom Secker’s investigative journalism website Spy Culture . Stahl, R. (2022, May 30). Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’? . LA Times . Stahl, R. (2009). Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture . Routledge. Stahl, R. (2022). Theaters of War . Media Education Foundation. Available on Kanopy . Stahl, R. (2018). Through the crosshairs: War, visual culture, and the weaponized gaze . Rutgers University Press. Stahl, R. (2016). Weaponizing speech. Quarterly journal of speech , 102(4), 376-395.…

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E76: re:joinder - Lose Bigly: Scott Adams Explains Business, Politics, and Persuasion 1:09:36

3 years ago1:09:36

1:09:36

Are you winning bigly? No? Neither is Scott Adams, the infamous cartoonist, blogger, and self-proclaimed “expert predictor”, whose formerly ubiquitous comic strip Dilbert was recently pulled from national syndication. In September , Dilbert featured “anti-woke” content caricaturing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the corporate world, and it was promptly “cancelled” by Lee Enterprises, owner of about 100 newspapers that had formerly carried the strip. Nevertheless, back in 2017, Adams claimed to be an expert on the subject of winning–as well as communication and “political reality”–in his book / political manifesto Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter . Adams famously predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election, and he grounds most of the book’s arguments in the ostensible ethos he has garnered from this single successful prediction. Win Bigly is the subject of our latest re:joinder episode, in which Alex reads some of its most head-scratching passages for Sophie and Calvin, and all three co-hosts learn far less than they expected to about what makes Donald Trump a “master persuader.” We do our best to make sense of Adams’ arguments before picking apart their most spurious assumptions: Adams’ questionable narrative of the 2016 election, his bizarre heuristic / coding scheme for “persuaders” (from “weapons-grade”, to “cognitive scientist”, down to “commercial grade”... ?), as well as his overall epistemology and ethics, featuring the claims that Trump’s victory “blew a hole in the fabric of reality,” and that this is a good thing -- not politically, but because it proved Scott Adams right. All told, Adams draws on his questionable credentials as a business person, communication expert, and philosopher to provide one of the most bizarre analyses of Donald Trump’s rhetoric ever written. This is (probably) part one in a series, since we were only able to get through the introduction. Please join us for future installments! As cognitive scientists – rather than weapons-grade persuaders – we need all the support we can get. Works and Concepts Referenced Beasley, V. B. (2010). The rhetorical presidency meets the unitary executive: Implications for presidential rhetoric on public policy. Rhetoric and Public Affairs , 13 (1), 7-35. Bitzer, L. F. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy & rhetoric , 1-14. Our re:blurb ep on rhetorical situation . Hume, D. (2003). A treatise of human nature . Courier Corporation. Hume, D. (2016). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy (pp. 191-284). Routledge. Tulis, J. K. (1987). The Rhetorical Presidency . Princeton University Press. Our re:blurb episode on Dialogicality (featuring Clint Eastwood’s “Empty Chair Obama” speech)…

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E75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity 32:08

3 years ago32:08