The abuse of power becoming the reversal of truth edition. Lots of Karl Rove (and Lewis Carroll) inspired, up-is-down reversals this week: voters should be subject to greater legal scrutiny than gun owners; globalism is a greater hate crime than Nazism; tax cuts are not a boon to the rich but an economic miracle for everyone; the alt-right perpetrators of hate speech are themselves the victims of hate speech; inequality amelioration only leads to more inequality, and consumer protection only leads to increased consumer risk.

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e-Verify

rhetorical claim: Trump should not only hold firm on eliminating DACA, but require e-Verify for all employees, all welfare recipients, and all voters.

rhetorical effect: converts Trumpinistas who supposedly loathe government into promoters of the most radical government intrusion into private lives ever.  Would basically disenfranchise millions of minority voters, throw minorities out of work, and end the social safety net. Would be a giant step toward a police state, where people no longer have the right to have rights.

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economic hate crimes

rhetorical claim: Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told Charlie Rose that elites on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Washington, DC, have committed an “economic hate crime” against working-class Americans by eviscerating the country’s industrial base. (see The American System, below)

rhetorical effect: turns the tables on the Charlottesville rhetoric about white supremacists by calling the anti-Trump  forces the haters, while also neatly putting them all in the same category: enemies of the people.

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3% growth norm

rhetorical claim: as Phil Gramm argues in the WSJ:

A tidal wave of new rules and regulations across health care, financial services, energy and manufacturing forced companies to spend billions on new capital and labor that served government and not consumers. Banks hired compliance officers rather than loan officers. Energy companies spent billions on environmental compliance costs, and none of it produced energy more cheaply or abundantly. Health-insurance premiums skyrocketed but with no additional benefit to the vast majority of covered workers.

…By waiving work requirements for welfare, lowering food-stamp eligibility requirements and easing standards for disability payments, Mr. Obama’s policies disincentivized work. Disability rolls have expanded 18.6% during the current recovery, compared with a 16% decline during the Reagan recovery. The CBO estimates ObamaCare alone will reduce work hours by 2% and eliminate 2.5 million jobs by 2024. At the current 1% growth in the civilian population above the age of 16, a mere reversion to the pre-Obama labor-force participation rates would supply more than enough workers to generate a 3% growth rate.

rhetorical effect: economic arrogance; belief  that tax cutting and deregulation are economic wonder drugs; maintains the illusion that economic growth can occur under Trump when all evidence points to the contrary, as explained in Business Insider:

“Six months into President Trump’s administration, there have been no signature legislative accomplishments, health care repeal appears stalled, tax reform has yet to show any public signs of progress, there is a seemingly constant barrage of investigation headlines, presidential pardoning power is a topic of conversation among real and imagined legal scholars, and the window for acting on the GOP’s legislative agenda is closing. With a quarter of the 115th Congress already elapsed, there has been no tangible evidence that the GOP is capable of legislating in a meaningful manner as nearly half of the bills signed into law thus far have either reversed Obama-era regulations or dealt with relatively minor matters

The International Monetary Fund has sharply revised its forecast for US economic growth in a direct indictment of President Donald Trump’s lack of action on promised policy changes.

The IMF downgraded its forecast for US gross-domestic-product growth to just 2.1% this year, down from 2.3%, and it also cut its 2018 estimate to 2.1% from 2.5%.

That revision is especially striking since it matched cuts not seen anywhere in the world other than two major emerging economies facing deep political crises — Brazil and South Africa.

The IMF’s chief economist, Maurice Obstfeld, said in a blog post that its “most important downgrade is the United States.”

“Near-term U.S. fiscal policy looks less likely to be expansionary than we believed in April,” he adds.

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seductive Antifa violence

rhetorical claim: The danger posed by the extreme hard left is about the future. Leaders of tomorrow are being educated today on campus. The tolerance for censorship and even violence to suppress dissenting voices may be a foretaste of things to come. The growing influence of “intersectionality”—which creates alliances among “oppressed” groups—has led to a strange acceptance by much of the extreme left of the far-from-progressive goals and violent means of radical Islamic terrorist groups that are sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-Western. This combination of hard-left secular views and extreme Islamic theological views is toxic.

rhetorical effect: reduces all anti-Trump protestors with the Antifa; equates free speech with violence, and calls it the gateway drug to jihad, Sharia law, and ISIS; belittles the very idea of “oppression”; undercuts the very idea of “intersectionality”–the idea that inequality makes many disparate groups have more in common with one another; somehow ends up accusing dissidents of being sexist, racist and homophobic.

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the American System

rhetorical claim: according to Steve Bannon (on Sixty Minutes):

America’s built on our citizens. Look at the 19th century. What built America is called the American System. From Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers and a control of our borders.”

America has had a winning game plan from the beginning — a combination of nationalism, federal government, and business coordination through which it has achieved greatness throughout history.

rhetorical effect: Bannon would have you believe that American identity is simple — that there is a clear line of logic throughout our history and that if we could just get back to that perfect place, we’ll be OK again. It’s a comforting thought, but it’s wrong. Moreover, it’s why white nationalists and neo-Nazis are attracted to him, so it’s also dangerous.

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the right time to talk about climate change

rhetorical claim: it’s hugely cynical and politically exploitative to talk about climate change during major hurricanes or other extreme weather events. Doing so is to be insensitive to storm victims, as expressed by EPA Director Scott Pruitt.

rhetorical effect: makes it never the right time to talk about climate change, just as it’s never the right time to talk about gun control. In actuality, not talking about these things is a much greater disrespect to their victims than addressing the root causes head-on. As Thomas Friedman argues in the New York Times,

Makes me wonder … if Pruitt were afflicted with cancer, would he not want scientists discussing with him, let alone researching, the possible causes and solutions? Wouldn’t want to upset him.

Frauds like Pruitt like to say that the climate has been changing since long before any human drove a car, so how could humans be causing climate change? Of course they aren’t solely responsible. The climate has always changed by itself through its own natural variability. But that doesn’t mean that humans can’t exacerbate or disrupt this natural variability by warming the planet even more and, by doing so, making the hots hotter, the wets wetter, the storms harsher, the colds colder and the droughts drier….

Trump has recently fired various knuckle-headed aides whose behavior was causing him short-term embarrassment. The person he needs to fire is Scott Pruitt. Pruitt is going to cause Trump long-term embarrassment. But instead, together they are authoring a new national security doctrine — one that says when faced with a low-probability, high-impact event like North Korea, the U.S. should spend any amount of money, and if the threat doesn’t materialize, well, we’ll have a lot of Army surplus and scrap metal.

But when faced with an actually high-probability, high-impact threat called climate change, we should do nothing and poke both our eyes out, even though if the impact is less severe — and we prepare for it anyway — we will be left healthier, stronger, more productive, more resilient and more respected around the world.

That is the Pruitt-Trump Doctrine — soon to be known as “Trump’s Folly.”

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the right word

rhetorical claim: Kris Kobach claims he didn’t “use the right word” recently when claiming that the New Hampshire Senate race was “stolen” by illegal Dem voters, adding “we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

rhetorical effect: clouds the answer to his questions of legitimacy by claiming we need more data; raises a question where there is actually no question: the New Hampshire results were certified and legal;  as one commission member put it:

Making this equation that somehow people not updating their driver’s license is indicative of voter fraud would be almost as absurd as saying that if you have cash in your wallet, that that’s proof that you robbed a bank…it’s a reckless statement to make.

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assaults on free speech

rhetorical claim: The Left is engaged in an all-out European-style war on free speech and freedom of assembly.  Today, a “racist” is someone who believes in legal immigration. An “extremist” is someone who doesn’t believe in mass, state-funded abortion. A “xenophobe” is someone who takes pride in their nation. An “anti-Semite” is — curiously — someone who supports the State of Israel, and “white supremacy” now occupies the Oval Office. The Overton window has shifted so far that even practicing Muslims are now decried by the most heavily quoted sources as “Islamophobes”.

rhetorical effect: by conflating  hate speech with free speech, sanctions hate speech; makes anti-racism positions seem unreasonable or ridiculous; confuses patriotism with white supremacy. By calling any attempt to curtail hate speech an “assault on free speech,” turns the perpetrators of hate speech into victims.

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preoccupation with inequality

rhetorical claim: Liberals are bemoaning that the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, didn’t post a significant decline last year. But income inequality drops principally during recessions as the wealthy lose a larger share of their earnings than everyone else. As we learned in the Obama years, the preoccupation with inequality leads to economic policies that reduce growth, which leads to more inequality.

rhetorical effect: in classic Roveian reversal (a form of absurdity with its roots in Swift and Lewis Carroll), black becomes white, day becomes night, and a concern with inequality only leads to greater inequality. The more you try to help the poor, te poorer they get. By extension, then, doing absolutely nothing for the poor is the quickest way to make them rich.

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fairness in lending

rhetorical claim: fair lending practices gave rise to the Equifax identity theft case. Fairness laws, in the form of protections against racial prejudice, should be relaxed or eliminated, and credit issuers be allowed to return to an open and free market where their judgment i more important than impersonal numbers.

rhetorical effect: a return to redlining. Consumer protection is once again the culprit because it makes consumers less protected.