energy dominance

rhetorical claim: America is once again pursuing a policy of energy dominance rather than being beholden to foreign oil. This means unleashing America’s great energy potential through more mining, fracking, oil drilling, and offshore oil production.

rhetorical effect: this dominance comes at the expense of environmental safeguards and replaces the Obama-era policy of mixed use, and to put an end to all collaborative, locally-grounded land management. Reinforces the whole nationalist agenda of America First–the need to “dominate” a world much better suited to collaboration.

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American Greatness

rhetorical claim: throwing out the Iranian deal, cracking down on the Chinese trade cheaters and ending NAFTA , reigning in the North Koreans, and walls and Muslim travel bans are some of the moving parts of MAGA.

rhetorical effect: the nationalist narrative of American greatness: the highest profits and the biggest bombs. This populist narrative is grounded in 1) a core conspiracy theory of history: Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim; foreigners like him and immigrants are trying to steal “our” elections, 2) the Koch brothers’ experiments in crushing labor unions, denying women reproductive rights, dismantling public schools, poisoning the water and the air, and disfranchising minority voters, and, 3) defending  the “real people” against their enemies by manipulating and pressuring the courts, the civil service, the Constitutions, and the media. The violence of Donald Trump’s verbal assaults on the media, the courts, and other institutions suggests a similar mindset, and he leads a political party that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to trample on institutional norms and bend the mechanisms of government toward undemocratic ends. That is the meaning of the GOP’s voter-suppression campaigns, aggressive gerrymandering, and theft of a Supreme Court seat in the name of letting “the people have a say.” With Trump leading the way, America’s ruling party is lurching down the road of  “damaged” or “illiberal” or “defective” democracy.

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left-wing NGOs

rhetorical claim: George Soros and his fellow travelers make up the left-wing NGO cabal, with its so-called human rights campaign masking greed, corruption, hypocrisy and lawlessness. They have become an extra-judicial paramilitary of their own.

rhetorical effect: spreads vast cynicism about any human rights campaign, labeling them “so-called” “extrajudiciary” and destabilizing of the rule of law. In most countries where Soros operates, human rights are endangered daily, and this smearing of the very concept of human rights turns them into their opposite. Any NGO championing basic human rights is now automatically tagged, Nancy Pelosi style, as “left wing.” Apparently human rights have become a solely liberal concept.

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failed socialist experiment

rhetorical claim: desegregation efforts are a failed socialist experiment, and that’s why HUD is now allowing local and state governments to continue receiving grants even if they don’t comply with the full requirements of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

rhetorical effect: justifies and encourages residential segregation; makes the federal government itself an agent of discriminatory housing policies; allows states to look the other way when it comes to housing discrimination complaints. Equality is reduced to being a theory or “experiment”, human rights are made into a pejorative when branded as “socialist,” and the claim of failure is undefined and treated as a fact rather than an assertion.

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pulling out of the Iran deal

rhetorical claim: the US is pulling out of the Iran deal because it is so one-sided and does not guarantee that Iran won’t develop nuclear capability. It is the worst deal ever drawn up by anybody.

rhetorical effect: masks the fact that, since the agreement had no escape clause, the US is simply violating the agreement, not just pulling out of it. Even so, we continue to claim that the Iranians are the ones doing the violating, despite no supporting evidence. Trump claims that Iran is cheating on the deal, but his own intelligence directors have said there is no evidence of this claim whatsoever. The International Atomic Energy Agency has certified Iran’s compliance 10 times since the deal was signed. Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified to a Senate committee last month that, after reading the 140-page agreement three times, he was struck by how “robust” the deal’s verification provisions were.

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ornamental political correctness

rhetorical claim: liberals excel at promoting phony, ornamental, politically correct issues they know nothing about, such as the uncertainties of climate change theory

rhetorical effect: undercuts any liberal position as being unthinking, automatic and knee jerk. Delegitimizes liberalism by equating it with fake news, posturing, and ignorance.

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civil terrorists

rhetorical claim: gun control advocates are civil terrorists, The NRA has become the target of a cyber war, death threats and intimidation from the mainstream media. Gun owners’ civil rights have been trampled at least as much as blacks were under slavery and Jim Crow.

rhetorical effect: criminalizes any call for gun control as a civil rights violation. Uses the logic of social justice to justify violence and turn gun owners into victims. Part of the rhetorical attempt to equate dissent (aka, terrorism) with treason  and turn non-violence an act of violent aggression.

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the excellent Kim Jong -un

rhetorical claim: Kim Jong-un is, according to Donald Trump,  “honorable” and “excellent.”

rhetorical effect: If a mass murderer such as Kim is deemed “honorable” and “excellent”, what heinousness does it take for Trump to condemn human rights violations? Ignores Kim’s bloody, dictatorial rule, in which he rules a police state with no human rights whatsoever. As with strongmen ruling Russia, China, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, the Philipines, etc., Trump is willing to look the other way if he can somehow get a diplomatic “win”–even a symbolic one. Notice also that Trump’s very limited vocabulary seems to be rooted in meaningless superlatives such as excellent, great, incredible, etc., as if he has a 10-year-old publicist.

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disparate outcomes

anti-racism pc

rhetorical claim: Liberals maintain the unfounded assumption that “there would be no disparate outcomes unless there were disparate treatment,”  despite abundant evidence to the contrary. The knee jerk liberal charge of racism used to explain disparate outcomes is itself racist, and part of the grievance mentality that is holding blacks back from economic prosperity. Anti-racism has become a new civic religion, a kind of über pc. The relatively new legal standard of “disparate impact” disregards the American legal principle of “burden of proof.” Economic outcomes vary greatly across individuals and groups and concepts like “disparate impact” fail to take into account these variations.

rhetorical effect: strips the moral dimension from claims of racism and inequality, reducing them to mere opinions at best and kniving forms of cynical “grievance-mongering” at worst. Defies common sense by arguing that unequal effects have nothing to do with causes rooted in inequality and prejudice.