Category Archives: scripts

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Feb. 7-12, 2017.

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Islamic reform

rhetorical claim: We imperil America so long as we blithely ignore the fact that a significant minority–perhaps even a majority–of Muslims worldwide support sharia law. As Andrew McCarthy puts it in the National Review,

We are talking about a framework for the political organization of the state, and about the implementation of a legal corpus that is blatantly discriminatory, hostile to liberty, and — in its prescriptions of crime and punishment — cruel. Islam must reform so that this totalitarian political ideology, sharia supremacism (or, if you prefer, “radical Islam”), is expressly severable from Islam’s truly religious tenets. To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution.

rhetorical effect: builds in a way to discriminate against Muslims while all the while sounding like a common-sense ban of just terrorists. How sharia radicals would be identified, or how this term could help but be applied to any Muslim, is unclear. How this doesn’t constitute a religious test is also unclear. But this lack of clarity won’t matter because the public will be be skeptical of any Muslim accused of being a Shariaist. Should ICE be deciding what is “truly religious”?

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individual health empowerment

rhetorical claim: Obamacare repeal will lead to greater consumer choice (see below), cost savings, greater access to health care, health savings accounts, and greater consumer responsibility for their own health care.

rhetorical effect: the only things empowered will be the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The will be more choice, but the choice will be between shoddy, junk policies with high deductibles and lots of restrictions. These policies might cost less, but in the long run will cost much more because they won’t begin to cover even such things as a broken leg or kidney stone. The health savings accounts are a chimera–like the junk policies, they won’t begin to cover any even semi-expensive medical condition. Worst of all, shifting responsibility to the patient is just con-artist talk for blaming the victim.

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scare campaign

rhetorical claim: Opposition to the repeal of Obamacare is just hyper-hysterical posturizing, aimed at needlessly scaring the voters.

rhetorical effect: opposition to any Trump policies or executive orders will soon be characterized this way. All dissent is thus framed as being in bad faith, and cynically aimed at recapturing power.

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college speech codes

rhetorical claim: free speech has become so suppressed on college campuses that their lecture halls and classrooms have turned into re-education camps. Students are being brainwashed, infantalized, and turned into prudish censors by over-protective college administrators.

rhetorical effect: creates a hostile atmosphere condoning the expression of ideas of racial hatred, bullying, discrimination, homophobia, misogyny and American imperialism. By not considering both the causes and effects of speech, manages to de-contextualize hate speech and make it seem morally equivalent to tolerant and inclusive–while still critical and probing–discourse. By confusing “free” speech with “hate” speech, this position incites violence and prejudice.

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politically-connected special interests

rhetorical claim: the corrupt Obama administration doled out political favors to politically-connected special interests, including teachers’ unions, Solyndra and other “green” companies, minority and LGBT groups, etc.

rhetorical effect: leads to the ridiculous claim that Trump is ‘cleaning the swamp,” despite his billionaire cabinet, Goldman Sachs alumni club, and flood of tax and regulatory and breaks that have happened the the first three weeks, including green-lighting the Keystone Pipeline, calls to eliminate class action suits; calls to eliminate essential benefits or price controls in the ACA; doing away with with fiduciary requirements for investment advisers working with retirees, ending limits on the dumping of mining waste in local waterways, eliminating the Dodd-Frank transparency rules for corporate executive compensation, etc.

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nullification

rhetorical claim: sanctuary cities are akin to secessionist South Carolina in 1832 insofar as they unconstitutionally deny federal power in their borders. By nullifying the constitution,  they make immigration reform that much harder.

rhetorical effect: falsely equates community safety with a crackdown on immigrants; inhibits undocumented immigrants from co-operating with law enforcement; spreads fear throughout the immigrant community; equates the protection of immigranr rights with subversion of the US Constitution.

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vouchers and charters

rhetorical claim: Betsy DeVos scares liberals because she cares more about the education of black children than she does about teachers’ unions. Anyone opposing her is a racist (because they in essence support failing inner city schools) and a bigot (because they support vouchers for religious schools.) All her opponents care about is keeping the paychecks flowing to the teachers’ unions.

rhetorical effect: further erosion of under-funded public schools; emergence of a two-tiered education system, one public, one private; the privatization of thought in American education; the destruction of teachers’ unions.

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consumer protection

rhetorical claim:  consumers want less “protection” and more choice (competition); in terms of the ACA, consumers want fewer mandated essential benefits and more price competition.  Especially courtesy of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, consumer “protection” is a government shakedown of businesses and a threat to consumers caused by less competition. Policies that would actually benefit consumers would include limits on class action suits, relaxed laws on consumer credit and fraud, and less regulation of payday lenders, etc. The best consumer protection is to let the free market work its magic.

rhetorical effect: the end of class action suits; increased consumer fraud; misleading advertising, and fraudulent and exorbitant loan practices. What consumers are said to “really want”–lower prices, more choice–runs counter to what they “need”–transparent business practices, fraud protection, essential benefits, price controls to stop monopoly pricing, etc. To the GOP, consumer protection actually means business protection.

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what people actually want

rhetorical claim: whether referring to health care options, school choice,  financial planners, or consumer protection, consumers want less regulation, lower costs, and  and more options. Only the free, competitive market can provide this trifecta. Aka, putting students, patients, retirees, and businesses first.

 rhetorical effect: do people actually want the right to be bilked? Beware of any populist voice supporting positions that cater to the elite and further inequality.

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nationalism

rhetorical claim: winner-take-all politics; no more multilateral trade deals; America First; the relaxation of moral norms when fighting terrorism; justification of torture, invasion of other countries, plunder of other countries’ resources, etc.

rhetorical effect: perhaps best expressed by the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens:

Mr. Trump’s purpose… isn’t to prevent a recurrence of bad behavior. It’s to permit it. In this reading, Mr. Putin’s behavior isn’t so different from ours. It’s largely the same, except more honest and effective. The U.S. could surely defeat ISIS—if only it weren’t hampered by the kind of scruples that keep us from carpet bombing Mosul in the way the Russians obliterated Aleppo. The U.S. could have come out ahead in Iraq—if only we’d behaved like unapologetic conquerors, not do-gooder liberators, and taken their oil.

This also explains why Mr. Trump doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, calling the idea “insulting [to] the world” and seeing it as an undue burden on our rights and opportunities as a nation. Magnanimity, fair dealing, example setting, win-win solutions, a city set upon a hill: All this, in the president’s mind, is a sucker’s game, obscuring the dog-eat-dog realities of life. Among other distinctions, Mr. Trump may be our first Hobbesian president.

 

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 2017

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enlightened nationalism

rhetorical claim: According to the National Review,

Domestically, since the 1960s and 1970s, what the late social scientist Samuel Huntington called a “denationalized” elite in this country has waged war on the nation and its common culture. Conservatives have fought back on issues such as bilingual education, the downgrading of traditional U.S. history in curricula, racial preferences, the elevation of subnational groups, and mass immigration — anything that has been part of the multiculturalist onslaught on national solidarity.

Instead of this denationalization:

Nationalism should be tempered by a modesty about the power of government, lest an aggrandizing state wedded to a swollen nationalism run out of control; by religion, which keeps the nation from becoming the first allegiance; and by a respect for other nations that undergirds a cooperative international order. Nationalism is a lot like self-interest. A political philosophy that denies its claims is utopian at best and tyrannical at worst, but it has to be enlightened. The first step to conservatives’ advancing such an enlightened nationalism is to acknowledge how important it is to our worldview to begin with.

rhetorical effect: conflates patriotism with nationalism; leads to “America First” rhetoric, but frames jingoism as high-minded idealism, as “enlightened.”

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limiting choices

rhetorical claim: the rollback of the fiduciary rule for retirement investors will open up more investment choices for retirees. This is one way to expand the economy.

rhetorical effect: reinforces many lies and mendacities: the market is always right in the long run and should not be limited;  regulation always hurts the economy; retirement advisors’ vested interests in commission-making never get in the way of sound financial advice, etc. It’s like a doctor who orders losts of unnecessary tests because he has a financial interest in the lab. As explained by New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait,

“Americans are going to have better choices and Americans are going to have better products because we’re not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year,” National Economic Council Director and Goldman Sachs veteran Gary Cohn tells The Wall Street Journal.

Cohn is planning to weaken the fiduciary rule, which he believes robs Americans of their freedom to hire financial advisers who might want to rip them off. “This is like putting only healthy food on the menu,” he tells the Journal, “because unhealthy food tastes good but you still shouldn’t eat it because you might die younger.”

Cohn’s metaphor is worth exploring. Healthy food, in Cohn’s example, is equivalent of investment advice that’s good for the client. Unhealthy food is like investment advice that’s bad for the client (but good for the adviser he has hired). Why shouldn’t people choose how much healthy versus unhealthy financial advice to hire? Well, the reason financial advisers are required to follow their clients’ fiduciary interests, rather than assuming that the logic of the free market will naturally produce optimal scrupulousness, is that investing is extremely complex. There is a huge asymmetry of information between professionals who work at investment firms and their customers. A customer at a restaurant might be able to eyeball the menu and guess that the spinach salad is healthier than the pizza, but a customer shopping for financial advisers is not going to know which ones will give them the best financial advice versus the ones who might might be trying to enrich themselves at the customer’s expense.

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failed

rhetorical claim: the mainstream media outlets, as represented by the NY Times,  are failing financially so they should be discounted as legitimate news sources. The public has rejected them.

rhetorical effect: Everyone opposed to Trump is a failure, a loser or, as in the case of the Seattle federal judge, a fake. as Frank Bruni explains in the NY Times:

Trump’s analysis of people and situations hinges on whether they exalt him. A news organization that challenges him is inevitably “failing.” A politician who pushes back at him is invariably a loser. Middle-school cliques have more moral discernment.

He railed against executive orders until they were his. He denounced the coziness between politicians and Wall Street until he was doing the snuggling. He cried foul at presidential getaways that cost the taxpayers millions until Mar-a-Lago beckoned.

During the campaign he demonstrated no special concern for free speech, advocating looser libel laws and barring certain news organizations from events. But he took to Twitter on Thursday to register fury over the University of California at Berkeley’s cancellation of an appearance by the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

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that’s not who we are

rhetorical claim: in defending multiculturalism and globalism, liberals consider themselves to be the moral arbiters of what constitutes the “real” America and the “real” American historical narrative.

rhetorical effect: Islamophobia, chauvinism,  and white resentment become the norm. Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and America First become ubiquitous and unchallenged. The “we” in “who we are” is identified as white, European/Anglo-Saxon, and Judeo-Christian.

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fake news

rhetorical claim: the NY Times and other “failing” mainstream media are the main opposition party to Trump, and every story they run about Trump is biased, distorted, annoying and negative. This “fake news” is nothing but a propaganda machine.

rhetorical effect: renders the term “fake news” meaningless because it has been totally politicized and made it impossible to even agree on facts. Trump is free to concoct his own narrative, metrics, and “alternative facts.” To Trump supporters, lying becomes impossible for Trump, just as the truth becomes impossible for the press to represent.  When the truth can no longer be agreed upon or is subject to change, “lies disappear into the past,” as Orwell explained.

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identitarian

rhetorical claim: Trumpism is a return to identity politics for white people. America has always been a homeland for white Europeans, and Trump is merely restoring that heritage to its rightful place as the lodestone of Americanism.

rhetorical effect: For the first time in a long time, people feel they can express themselves openly on questions of race, nationality, ethnicity and patriotism. This is not necessarily a good thing. Even as the so-called “dominant European culture” of America is being eclipsed by immigration and racial blending, Trump and Bannon are doubling down on white ethnoracialism. This destabilized language of citizenship is much more exclusive than inclusive, and uses national pride as a euphemism for the whitewashing, or obliteration, of racial and ethnic identity. It’s like a nightmare of a melting pot where what really melts down is America’s brain.

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postmaterialist values

rhetorical claim: the liberals’ mantra of personal fulfillment, openness to new ideas, and support for previously marginalized populations has lead to their crushing defeat and marginalization. Their key concepts of globalization, internationalism, multiculturalism, self-expression,affirmative action and redistribution have been repudiated by history.

rhetorical effect: marginalization of the so-called “self expression” values has made it nearly impossible to define national success as anything other than  the predominance of white culture, nationalism, and material well-being. Success is now defined as a zero-sum Darwinian struggle with clear winners and losers, and patriotism defined as adherence to white supremacist, divisive, exclusionary, and populism.

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non-stop hyperpanic

rhetorical claim: Dems’ hyperventilating over every Trump policy initiative and executive order will shortly lead to resistance fatigue. Dem tantrums only help Trump because they either lack common sense or run counter to what Trump’s supporters want–stopping terrorists from entering the country, for example.

rhetorical effect: makes dissent always seem extreme and hysterical. Favorite verbs and nouns used to describe any opposition to Trump include: hysterical, barrage, hyperventilating, hysterical, unhinged, doom-mongerers,  rancor, dopey, reflexive,  snarling, undifferentiated. Downplays the cumulative effect of Trump’s executive orders by isolating them and belittling any opposition to them. By claiming opposition to each particular Trump policy is foolish and self-defeating, the overall effect is to render any opposition fatuous and juvenile.

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essential benefits

rhetorical claim: the fastest way to ACA reform is through eliminating mandated “essential benefits” so insurers can design economic policies that the public would actually find worth buying.

rhetorical effect: you have to wonder what will be left to cover if the  ACA’S 10 “essential benefits” (see below) are made optional. Let the race to the bottom in terms of reliable coverage begin:

    1. Ambulatory patient services (Outpatient care). Care you receive without being admitted to a hospital, such as at a doctor’s office, clinic or same-day (“outpatient”) surgery center. Also included in this category are home health services and hospice care (note: some plans may limit coverage to no more than 45 days).
    2. Emergency Services (Trips to the emergency room). Care you receive for conditions that could lead to serious disability or death if not immediately treated, such as accidents or sudden illness. Typically, this is a trip to the emergency room, and includes transport by ambulance. You cannot be penalized for going out-of-network or for not having prior authorization.
    3. Hospitalization (Treatment in the hospital for inpatient care). Care you receive as a hospital patient, including care from doctors, nurses and other hospital staff, laboratory and other tests, medications you receive during your hospital stay, and room and board. Hospitalization coverage also includes surgeries, transplants and care received in a skilled nursing facility, such as a nursing home that specializes in the care of the elderly (note: some plans may limit skilled nursing facility coverage to no more than 45 days).
    4. Maternity and newborn care. Care that women receive during pregnancy (prenatal care), throughout labor, delivery and post-delivery, and care for newborn babies.
    5. Mental health services and addiction treatment. Inpatient and outpatient care provided to evaluate, diagnose and treat a mental health condition or substance abuse disorder . This includes behavioral health treatment, counseling, and psychotherapy. (note: some plans may limit coverage to 20 days each year. Limits must comply with state or federal parity laws. Read this document for more information on mental health benefits and the Affordable Care Act).
    6. Prescription drugs. Medications that are prescribed by a doctor to treat an illness or condition. Examples include prescription antibiotics to treat an infection or medication used to treat an ongoing condition, such as high cholesterol. At least one prescription drug must be covered for each category and classification of federally approved drugs, however limitations do apply. Some prescription drugs can be excluded. “Over the counter” drugs are usually not covered even if a doctor writes you a prescription for them. Insurers may limit drugs they will cover, covering only generic versions of drugs where generics are available. Some medicines are excluded where a cheaper equally effective medicine is available, or the insurer may impose “Step” requirements (expensive drugs can only be prescribed if doctor has tried a cheaper alternative and found that it was not effective). Some expensive drugs will need special approval.
    7. Rehabilitative services and devices – Rehabilitative services (help recovering skills, like speech therapy after a stroke) and habilitative services (help developing skills, like speech therapy for children) and devices to help you gain or recover mental and physical skills lost to injury, disability or a chronic condition (this also includes devices needed for “habilitative reasons”). Plans have to provide 30 visits each year for either physical or occupational therapy, or visits to the chiropractor. Plans must also cover 30 visits for speech therapy as well as 30 visits for cardiac or pulmonary rehab.
    8. Laboratory services. Testing provided to help a doctor diagnose an injury, illness or condition, or to monitor the effectiveness of a particular treatment. Some preventive screenings, such as breast cancer screenings and prostrate exams, are provided free of charge.
    9. Preventive services, wellness services, and chronic disease treatment. This includes counseling, preventive care, such as physicals, immunizations and screenings, like cancer screenings, designed to prevent or detect certain medical conditions. Also, care for chronic conditions, such as asthma and diabetes. (note: please see our full list of Preventive services for details on which services are covered.)
    10. Pediatric services. Care provided to infants and children, including well-child visits and recommended vaccines and immunizations. Dental and vision care must be offered to children younger than 19. This includes two routine dental exams, an eye exam and corrective lenses each year.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 24-30, 2017

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therapeutic foreign policy

rhetorical claim: Obama’s feel-good, apologetic, fuzzy-headed foreign policy assuaged liberal neuroses about asserting American power, but amounted to a “speak softly and carry a small stick” policy. Those near-treasonous, cosmopolitan, globalist days are over because Trump is not reflective or apologetic about putting “America first” in foreign policy.

rhetorical effect: such swaggering belligerence condones, even demands, bullying, jingoism, military adventurism, foreign entanglements, encouragement of militant Islamic jihadists, and knee-jerk, hair-trigger aggression. The opposite of therapeutic isn’t unreflective, but, instead, untreated; raw id  should not be driving foreign policy because recklessness exacts a heavy psychological price later on.

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dissent

rhetorical claim: dissent has meant many things to liberals over the years: the highest form of patriotism during the Bush era , obstructionism during the Obama years, and now resistance in the Trump era.

rhetorical effect: dissent becomes potentially criminalized during the Trump era.

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traditional partnership with the states

rhetorical claim: the Obama EPA set itself up as the sole regulator of every waterway in America, but the Trump EPA  will defer to the states, which should reassure developers that jobs and profits are just around the corner.

rhetorical effect: as with health care, the Trump administration will destroy unwanted programs and policies using the smokescreen of turning them over to the states. Thus underfunded programs or policies will just turn people away or disappear, and federal environmental regulations will go unenforced.

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America First

rhetorical claim: American unilateralism incarnate: any foreign policy decisions or actions will be based solely on American interests, American gain. Foreign Policy is a zero-sum game of only winners and losers.

rhetorical effect: the end of the post-1945 era of American enlightened, liberal self-interest. In Trump’s instrumentalized vision, it’s the US vs. the world, with no thought to helping allies prosper. As best argued by Charles Krauthammer,:

Some claim that putting America first is a reassertion of American exceptionalism. On the contrary, it is the antithesis. It makes America no different from all the other countries that define themselves by a particularist blood-and-soil nationalism. What made America exceptional, unique in the world, was defining its own national interest beyond its narrow economic and security needs to encompass the safety and prosperity of a vast array of allies. A free world marked by open trade and mutual defense was President Truman’s vision, shared by every president since.

Until now…..

We are embarking upon insularity and smallness. Nor is this just theory. Trump’s long-promised but nonetheless abrupt withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is the momentous first fruit of his foreign policy doctrine. Last year the prime minister of Singapore told John McCain that if we pulled out of the TPP “you’ll be finished in Asia.” He knows the region.

For 70 years, we sustained an international system of open commerce and democratic alliances that has enabled America and the West to grow and thrive. Global leadership is what made America great. We abandon it at our peril.

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sympathy fatigue

rhetorical claim: minorities and immigrants have unfairly taken advantage of America to get unwarranted advantages over white Americans, especially older white men. They sneer at American norms and values, and consider themselves better than everyone else. Their greed and laziness has worn out any natural sympathy white Americans once had for them

rhetorical effect: life becomes a Darwinian, zeo-sum, tribal struggle. The social safety net gets destroyed, racism , misogyny, and homophobia become normalized, and bitter national divisions widen.

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pro-active policing

rhetorical claim: “stop-and frisk” and “broken windows” policing tactics are the best defense against crime, but Black Lives Matter activists and the Obama Justice Department have made the police unwilling to do their jobs in controlling crime. Pro-active policing is what the citizens of the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods want. The federal government will no longer punish police for stopping people who are acting suspiciously.

rhetorical effect: the end to all Justice Dept. police conduct consent decrees, and thus the effective end of any external monitoring of police conduct. The racist practices of pro-active policing will thus go on unchecked, creating more racial animus.

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union giveaways (aka, carveouts)

rhetorical claim: the Obama National Labor Relations Board wnt beyond the law to strengthen unions–especially public sector unions. Their weapons of choice were illegal administrative orders, many of which were overturned in the courts. The days of catering to labor unions are gone forever.

rhetorical effect: any concession to a labor union is now considered nothing but an illegal usurpation of power or an unwarranted handout. Worker rights and workplace safety will no longer be protected in an environment where the prevailing ideology is “you’re lucky to have a job.”

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in dispute

rhetorical claim: “alternative facts” are necessary because the media always lies and distorts. As the opposition party, the media has declared war on Trump and truth. Everything they say can and should be disputed.

rhetorical effect: Truth is the first casualty of war.  Facts become lies from the “dishonest media” and lies become facts. E.J. Dionne, in the Washington Post puts it this way:

When confronted with untruths, all journalists have one and only one choice: to call them what they are. They cannot, without misleading the public, pretend that there are two sides to a purely factual question. Further, they need to avoid vague language about facts being “in dispute” when there is absolutely no question about what the facts are. Partisans might well emphasize some facts over others. But facts themselves aren’t partisan.

This, in turn, means that reporters may indeed seem “oppositional” when they confront an administration that, day after day, shows so little regard for fact or truth. But this is not the media’s problem. It’s Trump’s.

After a while, no one can differentiate facts from lies, and we enter a form of collective mental illness, as explained by Chris Hedges:

Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 18-23, 2017

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everybody will have insurance


rhetorical claim: everyone will have healthier insurance that is better and cheaper than anything offered in Obamacare. When insurance can be sold avross state borders and deregulated, consumers will have more choice.

rhetorical effect: it all depends on what you mean by “everybody”, “have,” “choice” and “insurance.” The GOP seems to mean “the opportunity to have access” to coverage  rather than a guarantee of coverage; available rather than affordable coverage, and greatly restricted Medicaid coverage with ultra-high deductibles. These hedges and obfuscations only insure that most Americans now covered under the ACA will be pole-axed  by medical bills because their cut-rate “choice”  won’t cover any major medical bills. As a NY Times editorial puts it:

It is hard to argue against choice. But in the ideological world inhabited by Mr. Price, House Speaker Paul Ryan and many other Republicans, choice is often a euphemism for scrapping sensible regulations that protect people.

Some Americans might well be tempted by this far-right approach. They would have to pay less up front for these skeletal policies than they do now for comprehensive coverage. But over time, when people need health care to recover from accidents, treat diabetes, have a baby or battle addiction, they will be hit by overwhelming bills. The Trump administration seems perfectly willing to sell those people down the river with false promises.

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free trade

rhetorical claim: trade is a zero-sum game, not an exchange of mutual benefit, and running a trade deficit is a sign of economic failure.

rhetorical effect: tariffs and other trade barriers and protectionist measures; inflation; mercantilism; trade wars with China, Mexico, Japan and others.

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anecdotes

rhetorical claim: Republicans offer the facts but not enough examples, whereas the Dems only offer anecdotes because the facts are against them on every single issue. For example, when it comes to the ACA, the Dems are only going to offer anecdotes about people dying if they lose their coverage, whereas the fact is that Obamacare is woefully undersubscribed because it’s a bad deal for young, healthy people. We have to get away from the ttranny of the anecdote.

rhetorical effect: makes all accounts of the effects of Trump-era cutbacks sound disingenuous and misleading. Assumes the GOP has cornered the market on facts, the Dems on colorful, woe-is-me fictions. Turns Trump critics into “outrage mongers.”

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high corporate taxes

rhetorical claim: America has the highest corporate tax rate  (39%) in the world, making  it impossible for US businesses to compete globally.

rhetorical effect: obscures that fact that the effective US corporate tax rate–what US businesses actually pay after deductions and amortizing–is only 14%.

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conflicts of interest

rhetorical claim: the media’s hysteria over so-called conflicts of interest among Trump and his appointees has reached a fever pitch, mistaking the appearance of an ethical lapse with an actual ethical lapse. It’s all based on sanctimony, jealousy and resentment. The reign of the aphid-like Beltway liberals, lawyers, lobbyists and journalists who make a living telling others how to live their lives is now over.

rhetorical effect: makes it impossible to criticize any Trump policies or people for ethical lapses without appearing to be a jealous scold or hypocrite, Erases the notion of conflict of interest because economic prosperity is now America’s  primary interest, so anyone prospering by definition has no conflict of interest. Ethics are merely an interpretive “gotcha” parlor game.

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ethnonationalism

rhetorical claim: Economic patriotism and ethnonationalism, personified by Trump, seem everywhere ascendant. Transnationalism is yielding to tribalism.

rhetorical effect: privileges “America first” sentiments and white supremacy; tariffs and trade wars; militarism; racial hatred and intolerance; protectionism and isolationism.

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social and political preoccupations

rhetorical claim: Obama and the Dems always put social and political preoccupations ahead of economic growth. Trump will restore growth as the lodestone of national progress. Business investment will be unleashed from the dead hand of over-regulation.

rhetorical effect: Economic might makes right, and crowds out or nullifies consideration of most rights. As long as GDP grows at least 3%, no one will care much about civil rights, voting rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, womens’ reproductive health, equal pay for equal work, workplace safety, environmental regulation, minimum wage, police violence, mass incarceration of African-Americans, etc.

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up-from-poverty agenda

rhetorical claim: Trump can control the narrative and upend enemy rhetoric by bringing African-Americans up from poverty through economic prosperity, a tough new doctrine of individual responsibility, and the elimination of the social safety net. Responsibility will come to be seen as the most important component of equality.

rhetorical effect: if there is still poverty at the end of Trump’s first term, it will be due to  minority laziness, self-pity, and drug use. Assumes the economic playing field is level, that everyone is getting the same head start, and that inequality is inevitable and shouldn’t be a part of the political-economic discourse, which will no longer even mention dead ideas such as The War on Poverty, the Great Society, affirmative action, or political correctness.

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static idealism

rhetorical claim: liberals’ intransigent belief in principles and ideals –“equality” in which injustice is anything less than perfect parity between all people; “diversity” that is color-coded and optically correct; stressless “spaces” of social and moral perfection, etc–that crowd out contingency,  choice, opportunity, innovation, and free markets.

rhetorical effect: masks the unyielding ideology of the right in the name of freedom, choice, and opportunity, and makes idealism seem naive, rigid, and stultifying.

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stopgap liberalism

rhetorical claim: The War on Poverty, the Great Society, affirmative action, political correctness—all this failure reveals a stopgap liberalism of expedience that sought only the fastest route back to moral authority and thus to power. Beyond this it was all dreams and self-congratulation.

rhetorical effect: liberalism is equated with expediency, the will to power and self-congratulation. Stripped of its idealism and moral compass, it becomes mere cynicism and opportunism, worthy of contempt. Conservatism thus becomes the only principled approach to public life.

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the rule of law

rhetorical claim: Obama’s big government, redistributionist policies favored environmentalist causes over economic growth. He disregarded the rule of law, distrusted markets, disregarded property rights, and was obsessed with economic equality over liberty.

rhetorical effect: opens up the carbon, extraction economy for unfettered development, all in the name of growth. Environmental degradation becomes synonymous with liberty, property rights, the rule of law and free markets

 

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 11-17, 2017

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consequences

rhetorical claim: According to Trump, Buzzfeed will “suffer the consequences” of publishing the Russian dossier allegedly showing Trump to be “compromised” by Russian intelligence.  CNN, the other major media outlet to release the story, was equally accused of being only about “fake news.”

rhetorical effect: “fake news” and “consequences” are  both forms of media intimidation. This is true innuendo territory: consequences could simply be public opprobrium or real legal or economic repercussions. (CNN has already suffered some “consequences” : Trump refused to let them ask a question at his news conference). When negative news stories are axiomatically regarded as either “fake” or consequential for the publisher, there is a chilling effect on a free press. This is true innuendo territory: consequences could simply be public opprobrium or real legal or economic repercussions. (CNN has already suffered some “consequences” : Trump refused to let them ask a question at his news conference). To anticipate a bullying response to any negative story will certainly make the media think twice before going with that story.

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conflict of interest

rhetorical claim: in Trump’s case, a perception only, since by definition the President cannot have a conflict of interest. But, by setting up a trust, he is going beyond what is required in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He himself says he “doesn’t like the look” of him directing his company while President, even though he could easily and ethically do both.

rhetorical effect: Uses the perception of a solution to stand in for an actual solution. Appears to solve the ethical issue but only papers it over, since Trump did not divest himself or set up a blind trust. Substitutes the look of a solution with a real solution. By not divesting his businesses, Trump invites corruption by signaling that corporations and foreign actors have many ways to curry favor with him and his administration through his family. Ethics is always a technicality to Trump, not a principle or norm.

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asset

rhetorical claim: “if Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That’s called an asset, not a liability.”

rhetorical effect: as Charles Lane argues in the Washington Post:

close partnership with Putin would legitimize his brand of illiberal rule by making it seem effective against a greater evil, terrorism; conversely, it would delegitimize liberal-democratic politics.

This is precisely the sort of devil’s bargain people have in mind when they warn against “letting the terrorists win.”

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obstructionist

rhetorical claim: anyone person or agency critical of President Trump is automatically part of the “Democratic obstructionist campaign” against Trump, including the head of the US Government Ethics Office. This kneejerk opposition is part of post-election bile and bombast.

rhetorical effect: Could the intelligence community and press be next? It’s a long and slippery slope from responding to criticism to suppressing it to demonizing or even criminalizing it, but those first steps ate being taken.

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hyphenated Americans

rhetorical claim: identity politics are now a relic of the past since Trump’s election–we’re all just Americans now. The only question the government should ask you is if you are a citizen.  So why not do away with hyphenated designations all together. This would help put an end to the left’s false narrative of victim versus oppressor, white male versus everyone else, white privilege versus black “empowerment,” capitalist versus worker, and now enlightened sexual liberators versus the bigoted, hateful traditional Americans.

It is an effective strategy for obtaining and holding power, but the whole country suffers for it.  President Obama and his fellow liberals have unleashed racial hell on our country, moving us away from our vision of “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

rhetorical effect: enshrines white male supremacy as the new normal–part of the return to the 1950s. There will be no more questions about race on any government forms, so all it will be impossible to prove inequality or racial disparity. This would also cripple the social sciences, demographers, and epidemiologists.

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progressive carbon panic

rhetorical claim: Democratic CO2 obsessions have reached new heights as they panic about the looming major change in US environmental policies.

rhetorical effect: renders any  concerns about environmental degradation or poluution sound hysterical, overblown, uninformed, and frivolous.

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indecorous

rhetorical claim: Trump has at times lead an indecorous life, but his indiscretions don’t matter so long as he delivers economic growth and defeats  ISIS.

rhetorical effect: euphemism like “indecorous” and “indiscreet” work to normalize Trump’s moral, ethical, and political repugnancy. They absolve him of any responsibility for the consequences of his words or actions, and lead inevitably to “ends justify the means” arguments.

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crime-infested

rhetorical claim: John Lewis is a man of all talk and no action, who, like all liberals and black leaders, has completely turned his back on the “burning”, “crime-infested” and “completely falling part” US inner cities.

rhetorical effect: characterizing black culture as a dystopian hellhole and blacks themselves as too stupid to realize they are wallowing in their own filth lays the groundwork for the elimination of all social safety net programs, the crushing criminalization of political dissent in the inner city, and the continued incarceration of most young black men. Equates blacks with insects, in much the same way the Nazi’s called Jews “vermin.”

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scandal

rhetorical claim: Not only was the Obama administration marked by scandal of the most serious sort — perverting the machinery of the state for political ends — it was on that front, which is the most important one, the most scandal-scarred administration in modern presidential history. Using the machinery of the state to seek political power and to aggrandize the political power one holds is the most destructive form of political corruption there is. A sane society would prosecute it the way we prosecute murder or armed robbery. It is a scandal and more than that: It is an assault on the foundations of a free society.

rhetorical effect: demonizes and delegitimizes the entire Obama administration, making it impossible to defend any of its policies or actions. Equating all political strategies and initiatives with the word “scandal” implies the entire administration was a criminal enterprise.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 7-10, 2017

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relevant

rhetorical claim: the lamestream news media and the lib-Dems are increasingly irrelevant in Donald Trump’s America. The people have spoken in a crushing landslide, so the libs just need to go along with the Trump agenda.

rhetorical effect: normalizes shouting down and bullying anyone critic as unAmerican, and contemptuous. It’s a short step from being judged irrelevant to being judged superfluous, dangerous, and, ultimately,  expendable. Relevance is of course a relative, relational, contextual term, and to claim it is to claim that only your version of reality is operative.

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hate crimes

rhetorical claim: The whole category of “hate crimes” should be eliminated. The hate-crime label diminishes actual crimes and promotes different standards of justice for different victims. It politicizes crime. Charges should be based on criminal law, not politics. Calling something a “hate crime” only leads to more hate because everyone distrusts the politicization of criminality and blames the other side.

rhetorical effect: makes it sound as if hate crime doesn’t actually exist, but is only a made-up  form of political coercion. Lays the groundwork for repealing any hate-crime laws, thus leading to more racist and homophobic speech.

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dignified

rhetorical claim: Lamestream media criticism of Trump or his followers on Inauguration Day would be undignified. The people should be allowed to express their support without being belittled or mocked by the media.

rhetorical effect: any political dissent or mockery of Trump is branded as morally-unworthy behavior. Dignity itself comes to be defined as supporting the true American values of Trump supporters. Everything else is, at best, a cheap shot, and, at worst, seditious.

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health care plan

rhetorical claim: to Dems, an expensive, constricting federal regulatory scheme that forces Americans to participate through a series of mandates; to the GOP,  a proposal for doing or achieving something. Dems believe that coverage can only exist either through phony state-run exchanges or welfare.

rhetorical effect: Opens the door to repealing but not replacing, or replacing with a so-called “free market” approach that will amount to no insurance policy whatsoever.  The GOP plan no regulation whatsoever, and the ultimate aim is to strip nearly 30 million people of health care insurance.

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Trump Derangement Syndrome

rhetorical claim: According to Los Angeles Times guest columnist Justin Raimondo.

The country is in the throes of a major epidemic, with no known cure and some pretty scary symptoms. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, and it’s rapidly spreading from the point of origin – the political class – to the population at large. In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect’s every tweet provokes a firestorm, as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world…

In the advanced stages of the disease, the afflicted lose touch with reality. Opinion is unmoored from fact.

rhetorical effect: well beyond calling any criticism of Trump “undignified”. Pathologizes or psychologizes Trump critics. This is a classic totalitarian rhetorical move, in line with threatening more draconian libel laws, encouraging violence against political opponents, and aligning himself with the most virulent white power forces both domestically and internationally. As Chauncey DeVega argues in Salon,:

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a preview of the narrative framework that will likely be used by conservatives and their allies in a compliant corporate news media to silence Trump’s critics. To that end, those who oppose Trump and his administration will be described as “crazy” or “unhinged.” The mainstream news media — because of its slavish adherence to false equivalency and a “both sides do it” narrative — will insist that Trump’s critics should “give him a chance” and are somehow “hypocrites” if they complained about Republican obstructionism against Obama.

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driving the news

rhetorical claim: Trump’s tweets are said to be driving the news because any pronouncement of a President is inherently newsworthy.

rhetorical effect: legitimizes government by threat, innuendo and edict. As Robert Reich argues, this defense of trump tweets normalizes Trump’s bullying, and  rests on a tautology–they’re newsworthy only because they drive the news. And they drive the news only because they’re considered by the media to be newsworthy–that could lead to tyranny. As Reich argues, the media needs to pay attention to what Rump does, not what he says. But also keep in mind that what he says is itself a speech act, with real political consequences. Since most of his tweets are filled with lies or distortions, their overall effect is to make language and reality polar opposites if the media repeat the tweets in their misguided attempt at “balance”.

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workers of the world

rhetorical claim: Trump represents the workers of the world, in opposition to global elites.

rhetorical effect: the so-called “populist billionaire” performs egalitarianism even as his policies and cabinet picks ensure monopoly power for the wealthy and for corporations. Even as his administration erodes wage support, workplace safety, workers’ rights, guaranteed health insurance, environmental protections, etc, and even though its top priority is tax cuts for the wealthy and for business, it will insist that it is defending the “little guy”. The government is now at the disposal of business interests.

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civic engagement

rhetorical claim: the lib-Dem mantra for taking over college campuses with a New Civics agenda of  indoctrination for community activism, radical politics, and America-hating. College has become the center of left-wing brainwashing, not critical thought.

rhetorical effect: makes it un-American to question the status quo and argue for justice and equity. “Civics” in this case becomes less about dissent and questioning and more about conformity and silence with the federal government’s programs and policies. GOP civics takes power away from the people and transfers it to the federal government. Engagement comes to mean agreement, not questioning.

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pajama-boy Ivy League culture

rhetorical claim: Obama-era elitism is over, and the smug Ivy League elites and their political correctness are forever marginalized. Making something with your hands is infinitely superior to the abstract world of Ivy League culture.

rhetorical effect: no academics in any power positions in Washington; increased pressure on colleges and universities to allow right-wing speakers; threats to cut off federal funds to sanctuary universities. Emasculates ideals of learning, questioning, and advocating for social change.

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debunked


rhetorical claim: whatever Trump  claims never happened or else anything claims he never did or said.

rhetorical effect: outright lies and denials. Makes it impossible to take anything he says seriously, so he can get away with anything once he has decoupled language from reality.  As Kellyanne Conway put it, “Why is everything taken at face value? You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.” Of course, this is a circular, self-fulfilling argument: whatever is in Trump’s heart is known only to Trump’s heart and thus is unverifiable. The only solution is to ignore both what he says and what he feels, but look only at what he does.

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Judeo-Christian nation-states

rhetorical claim: according to Stephen Bannon, once there was a collection of Judeo-Christian nation-states that practiced a humane form of biblical capitalism and fostered culturally coherent communities. But in the past few decades, the party of Davos — with its globalism, relativism, pluralism and diversity — has sapped away the moral foundations of this Judeo-Christian way of life.

Humane capitalism has been replaced by the savage capitalism that brought us the financial crisis. National democracy has been replaced by a crony-capitalist network of global elites. Traditional virtue has been replaced by abortion and gay marriage. Sovereign nation-states are being replaced by hapless multilateral organizations like the E.U.

Decadent and enervated, the West lies vulnerable in the face of a confident and convicted Islamofascism, which is the cosmic threat of our time.

rhetorical effect: Bannon’s ethno-nationalistic populism leads the way to undo human rights and shift away from the postwar global consensus and toward an alliance with various right-wing populist movements simmering around the globe.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Jan. 3-6, 2017.

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accountability

rhetorical claim: Donald Trump is only accountable to his supporters, who gave him his mandate.

rhetorical effect: Trump can do and say anything because his supporters are so fanatical and dismiss any critical reporting as “fake news.” Trump has never been accountable to anyone–shareholders, a board of directors, etc.–so why should he start now?

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fear-mongering

rhetorical claim: Liberals are so unhinged over Trump’s victory that they are caught up in a hysterical, irrational, ever-spiraling  anti-Putin campaign that does nothing but spread false fear. It is the equivalent of fake news, and spearheaded by the Washington Post.

rhetorical effect: makes any claim of Russian interference in US affairs sound cynical, panicky, and even dangerous. This could be another step toward making any veiled criticism of Trump dangerous and suspect. Calling news reporting fear-mongering suppresses free speech.

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government watchdogs

rhetorical claim: So-called “government watchdogs” are really just progressives posing as lovers of transparency but actually only advancing their own agendas. They wage fact-free outrage campaigns.

rhetorical effect: marginalizes or even criminalizes dissent. Watchdogs and whistle blowers are considered traitors and will be muzzled at any cost. The foxes will be guarding the hen house.

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wealth creation

rhetorical claim: Trump’s cabinet is the most promising in decades because almost all of them are already wealthy so won’t try and enrich themselves in office (and after they leave office) and so understand that wealth creation is the cornerstone of American society.

rhetorical effect:the American Dream of freedom, equality, and equal justice before the law gets reduced to wealth creation. In a society where everything is reduced to its cash value, there are no longer any moral or ethical values; or, to be more precise, morals and ethics are moot because you can’t price them. Americans’ morals and ethics get bought out by economic prosperity.

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white genocide

rhetorical claim: according to the About White Genocide Project, White Genocide includes:

▪ Moving millions of non-White immigrants into traditionally White countries over a period of years. This alone is not genocide, but the next step makes it a part of genocide.

▪ Legally chasing down and forcing White areas to accept “diversity“.This is known as “Forced Assimilation“.

A combination of mass immigration (of different groups of people) plus forced assimilation would qualify as genocide, as defined by Article II, part (C) of the United Nations Genocide Conventions:“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

▪Government refusal to remove genocidal policiesthat are in place today. By keeping these policies in place, they ensure that the genocide is ongoing.

Society is widely aware that White people are becoming a minority in several countries, but anti-Whites don’t want us to bring an end to the policies which are turning us into a minority everywhere.

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has re-tweeted posts from this group.

rhetorical effect: whites get turned into the victims and everyone else, or anyone who speaks out against this hate group, is what Trump is now calling an  “enemy” and part of the anti-white conspiracy.

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inequality

rhetorical claim: freedom can’t exist without inequality. When  Obama claims that his presidency  helped reverse inequality in America (“We’ve actually begun the long task of reversing inequality.”), he is being disingenuous. Reversing  inequality inevitably requires reversing freedom–as in all totalitarian countries.

rhetorical effect: intentionally conflates inevitable human difference with systematic prejudice, racism, and exploitation of the less-well-0ff. Claiming the inevitability of unequal outcomes does not axiomatically mean that we should cease all efforts to reverse inequality. In its most extreme form, this rhetorical ploy is the same as saying since we all are going to die, we may as well not use medicine.

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globalism

rhetorical claim: the view that we should regard ourselves as having no greater obligations to fellow citizens than to foreigners.

rhetorical effect: enshrines “America first” as the cornerstone of our democracy–a historically dangerous and short-sighted view that will inevitably lead to displays of American strength in the form of wars or long-term foreign entanglements. Globalism should not always be a pejorative ter, especially when it refers to free trade, international canons of justice, universal human rights, etc.

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politicized intelligence

rhetorical claim: The appointed leadership of the U.S. intelligence community, under Barack Obama in particular, has been politicizing intelligence (downplaying ISIS and Islamic terrorism generally, hyping the extent of al-Qaeda’s degradation, soft-peddling Iran’s intentions, etc.). Skepticism toward what they say on the way out the door is warranted (though perhaps not in the way Trump has expressed it). Even if Russia meddled in the election, Trump was legitimately elected.

rhetorical effect: makes it possible to Trump to cherry-pick intelligence reports that help him politically, and dismiss inconvenient ones as biased. There of course won’t be any inconvenient reports once he gets all his own people in control of all intelligence reports.

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Obama as outsider

rhetorical claim: The Obama presidency has been different from any other administration in the last two centuries. From the start, he has gone out of his way to defy the very essence of the American Republic, our constitutional limits on the power of any single dictatorial individual. Under Obama, the US Congress and even the Supreme Court have failed to assert their constitutional independence, presumably out of fear of this president and the accusations of racism that followed opposition to him or his policies….For Obama, the US Constitution is just an obstacle to be circumvented or simply ignored.

rhetorical effect: Totally undercuts and delegitamizes any accomplishments of the Obama era. Calling Obama a jihadi Marxist may be over the top, but in more subtle ways Trump’s tweets really fall back on this point: that the liberal Dems are so outside the American mainstfream that the real Americans routed them in the election, even though they got three million more votes.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Dec. 15-23, 2016

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suitable financial products

rhetorical claim: the Labor Dept’s new Fiduciary Rule should be replaced with the “suitable product” rule,  a looser standard for the products financial advisers offer to retirees.

rhetorical effect: the Fiduciary Rule simply says that financial advisers must offer retirees financial products that are in the clients’ best interests. “Best interests” are not necessarily served by one-size-fits-all products, whose “suitability” is thus defined by the financial firms, not the clients.

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global warming scare

rhetorical claim: To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with “science,” EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy.  In fact, under Obama, EPA’s principal role on the “science” has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming. The US will no longer cripple its economy with meaningless fossil fuel restrictions.  All of the money spent on alternative “green” energy under Obama was completely wasted on things that are uneconomic and will disappear as soon as the government cuts off the funding spigot.

rhetorical effect: belittles any fact-based, scientific theories of man=made climate change, calling it nothing more than a “scare” tactic. (Just as during the campaign, Trump called climate  nothing more than a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the US economy.) Scare tactics are hyperbolic fictions created to make something that doesn’t exist appear to be real. Thus this rhetorical tactic aims at entirely undoing even the theory of climate change as the Trmp administration agenda, as defined by Eugene Robinson, is to “fire up the smokestacks, stop collecting all that annoying climate data and marginalize federal employees who best understand global warming.”

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school choice

 rhetorical claim: school choice vouchers are the most effective way to improve US educational outcomes. Teachers’ unions are the main obstacle in the path of the voucher revolution, and Betsy DeVos will be the death knell for teachers’ unions.

rhetorical effect: makes the conversation about school choice rather than improving school quality. This emphasis on choice is a political agenda, not an educational strategy. Choice and quality should be pursued in tandem.

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neo-Confederate arguments

rhetorical claim: sanctuary cities are making an illegal, neo-Confederate claim of sovereignty from US law. They also talk of secession in order to protect violent alien criminals.

rhetorical effect: undermines any attempts to protect the human rights of immigrants by branding them all as potential or actual criminals, and likens the urge to protect human rights as akin to the Confederacy’s defense of slavery. The GOP wants it both ways: to say very power should devolve downward from the federal government to the states, but then to attack any state or city policy they disagree with as “neo-Confederate.”

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emperor-has-n0-clothes syndrome

rhetorical claim: as Victor David Hanson puts it in the National Review, the key to understanding Trump is

his emperor-has-no-clothes instinct that what is normal and customary in Washington was long ago neither sane nor necessary. And so far, his candidacy has not only redefined American politics but also recalibrated the nature of insight itself — leaving the wise to privately wonder whether they were ever all that wise after all.

rhetorical effect: excuses any Trumpian abuses of power as his “animal instincts” at work. Justifies any breaking of law or custom as Trump’s unmasking of the “old” ways of Washington.

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labor flexibility

rhetorical claim: Right to work is an example of how the interests of workers and unions divide. Unions want to coerce workers into joining unions and paying dues even if this means there will be fewer jobs available. Workers want to be free to join a union, or not, and the best guarantee of higher pay is a buoyant job market that comes from more business investment and labor flexibility.

rhetorical effect: flexibility in reality means lower wages, differential wages, curtailed workplace safety rules, abusive overtime rules, and a loss of the ability to strike for better working conditions or higher wages and benefits. It turns labor from a collective movement to an every-worker-for-himself free-for-all.

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Trump’s campaign promises

rhetorical claim: Trump should be taken fig but not literally. None of his campaign promises are binding because they are just opening moves in his art of  deal-making. In the same way, no one should worry about his conflicts of interest because everyone knew ahead of time that, as a businessman, he has personal stakes in the economy. No one objects to his getting rich.

rhetorical effect:  campaign promises were just slogans. Nothing Trump says can be used against him because he’ll just change his mind, lie, or ignore criticism.

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conflicts of interest

rhetorical claim: No one should worry about Trump’s conflicts of interest because everyone knew ahead of time that, as a businessman, he has personal stakes in the economy. No one objects to his getting rich.

rhetorical effect: by definition then, he is above the law, and any so-called conflicts of interest are just fake news, hate, jealousy, or speculation. Trump can’t have a conlficy of interest because he only has one interest–Trump.

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post-truth

rhetorical claim: the lamestream media has so distorted the news with lies and innuendos that it can no longer be relied upon to tell the truth. Thus we live in a post-truth world.

rhetorical effect: the media no longer covers issues, but only candidates, controversies, and scandals. According to one reliable source, the three major US networks only devoted about 45 minutes to issues coverage –as opposed to candidate coverage, horserace stuff-during the entire 2016 presidential election. This trend continues in the Trump transition period, with most of the coverage devoted to conflicts of interest, Trump’s appointments, Trump’s tweets, and political rumors.

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midnight regulations

rhetorical claim:  Obama has to resort to clandestine executive orders because he has no support from Americans. Obama’s only legacy will be the abuse of power.

rhetorical effect: undercuts the Presidency, confuses our allies,  mistakes rule-making that comes after years of hearing and comments  for arbitrary rules that come out of nowhere.

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monopoly rents

rhetorical claim: unions only exist because they extort money from workers and demand monopoly rents from government. Infrastructure projects should insist on non-union workers.

rhetorical effect: makes unions sound like nothing but shakedown artists and obstructionists, and in doing so denigrates any notions of qworkers’ rights, workplace safety, living wages, social justice, etc.

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Dec. 9-14, 2016

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entrepreneurial federalism

rhetorical claim: the economy most thrives when states compete to lure business. GOP state-level attempts to  oppose the Obama administration weren’t based on opposition to Obama’s policies, but to the usurpation of states’ right by the federal government. The Trump era heralds a new federalist revival.

rhetorical effect: amounts to a new industrial policy that does everything it can to unshackle business: provide direct subsidies, impose tariffs, cut or end all federal regulation, and effect what Lawrence Summers calls a transition from a rule-based economy to a deal-based economy, with the White house totally taking over:

Presidents have enormous latent power, and it is the custom of restraint in its use that is one of the important differences between us and banana republics. If its ad hoc use is licensed, the possibilities are endless. Most companies will prefer the good to the bad will of the U.S. president and his leadership team. Should that reality be levered to get them to locate where the president wants, to make contributions to the president’s reelection campaign, to hire people the president wants to see hired, to do the kinds of research the president wants carried out, or to lend money to those that the president wants to see assisted?

Going along with authoritarianism will come to be the norm for doing business.

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fake news hysteria

rhetorical claim: Dems’ mainstream media bootlickers, panicked over Trump’s election, have engaged in a hysterical witch hunt accusing every Trump claim of being “fake news” and part of some vast conspiracy theory. Even though they make up their own facts and spin stories their way, the mainstream media mendaciously is claiming the moral high ground and their exclusive claim to the truth. It is part of their rage against reality. “Straight news” has become an oxymoron. Every mainstram media news story is a “false flag.”

rhetorical effect: the suppression of the media and the undermining of any possibility of establishing the barest facts: did the Russians try to influence the US election? is there such a thing as global warming? are there any racists left in America? are fracking and other forms of energy exploration harmful to the environment? According to this doublethink strategy, the fake news stories are real and any critical news stories are fake. Calling the media “hysterical” is exactly what women are called when they object to male behavior or gender power relations. Hysteria is an irrational state based on a misapprehension of reality, an overreaction to an imaginary threat. The ultimate outcome of this branding of your political opponents as crazy can lead to the Stalin-era move to put political opponents in mental wards.

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very strong control

rhetorical claim: that Putin is a good model for leader who has “very strong control” over his country, and that Putin is “far more of a leader” than Obama ever was.

rhetorical effect: justifies authoritarian government, with claims of “leadership” justifying the suppression of  free speech and the media, and mass arrests and deportations.

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the real Americans

rhetorical claim:  the flyover country voters who elected trump are the real Americans, the honest Americans, the hard-working Americans. Liberal elites live in an elitist bubble that keeps them separated from America and makes them un-American.

rhetorical effect: labels anyone who criticizes Trump as un-American–free speech becomes a thought crime. When they said that without phony California votes, Trump would have won the popular vote, they were laying the groundwork for claiming that coastal elites are not welcome in Trump’s America.

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paycheck protection

rhetorical claim: mandatory union dues payments are a form of indentured servitude, and all states should adopt right-to-work laws that crush labor unions.

rhetorical effect: makes it sound like union dues are a form of robbery. Safety protection, environmental protection, wage protection are no longer considered, especially when the only real protection left will be profit protection.

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self-appointed ethics watchdogs

rhetorical claim: Trump can’t avoid conflicts of interest, and to ask him to divest his business interests and give up the Trump name is ridiculous. Only scolds and self-appointed hypocrites are worried about Trump’s conflicts of interest.

rhetorical effect: makes it impossible to draw any line between ethical behavior and  Trump conflicts of interest. Renders him completely above the law. Calling ethicists “self-appointed” also undercuts them and makes it appear they have no moral authority whatsoever because morality in a post-truth, post-ideology world is situational and political.

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soft despotism of government

rhetorical claim: according to William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, the real authoritarian regime has been the “unelected and increasingly assertive class that populates the federal bureaucracy and substitutes rule by regulation for rule by law.” Federal agencies meddle in our lives, and we’d be better off without these social engineers imposing their values on the rest of us.

rhetorical effect: demonizes governmental regulation, thus making it impossible to enforce or interpret any laws. Gets Trump off the hook for any of his authoritarian acts by calling government bureaucracies the root of all evil.

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the Europeanization of the economy

rhetorical claim: Obama has entangled the US in financially ruinous international regulations, trade agreements, monetary policy goals and business taxation. This has lead to the weakest economic growth, the largest surge in government debt, the riskiest monetary expansion and the gravest deflationary pressures of the postwar era. This is part of a larger picture of centralized arbitrary financial powers, as explained in the Wall Street Journal by Michael Solon:

 After the 2008 financial crisis, the G-7 massively expanded international coordination. The Financial Stability Forum was expanded into the Financial Stability Board, charged with integrating the monetary policy of central banks and supervising financial institutions such as banks, insurers and asset managers. The G-20 worked to protect government revenues through the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project.

The result? Since 2007 the public debt of the G-7 nations, excluding sober Canada and Germany, has leapt to 130% of gross domestic product from 52%, according to each nation’s own reports. The EU’s monetary base has doubled, the U.K.’s is up 350%, and

The U.S. government has helped itself in debt financing, paying almost the same interest costs today as it did in 2007, despite almost tripling the publicly held debt. At the same time, bureaucrats won arbitrary and self-serving power over financial services. International regulators now override national and state laws without authority or input, turning domestic “independent regulators” into puppets. Political commissars embedded in banks own no shares yet veto board decisions. Money-market rules burden equities and public-purpose bonds, but favor federal debt. So do swap collateral rules and Basel rules on liquidity and capital.

The list goes on: Dodd-Frank’s Volcker rule threatens liquidity in market-making operations but exempts U.S. government securities. Housing regulators again proclaim that the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a “duty to serve” low-income buyers by underwriting higher risk mortgages. International regulators direct insurers to invest in public infrastructure, proclaiming the profitability of these projects when experience demonstrates otherwise. Ubiquitous capital requirements force financial institutions to buy highly leveraged government debt that pays ultralow returns.

 Meanwhile, America’s punitive 35% corporate tax rate—the highest in the developed world—has discouraged U.S. firms from investing at home and sets a global tax floor to stabilize government revenues and foster government growth. The result is average U.S. GDP growth of only 2.1% since 2010—40% less than the administration’s projected 3.6%. According to my firm’s analysis of Congressional Budget Office projections, that dismal growth rate has taken a $9.5 trillion bite out of U.S. GDP since 2010—$29,400 on average for every American.


rhetorical effect: removes all financial regulation (including liquidity requirements and “ubiquitous capital requirements”), justifies huge corporate tax cuts (as if tax policy isn’t “centralized, arbitrary authority”), discourages mortgages to minorities, etc.

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pro-Iranian tilt

rhetorical claim: Obama has abandoned American interests and allies in the Middle East by prematurely with drawing from Iraq and making favorable deals with the Iranians. He has thus allowed the Russians to dominate the region, confused our allies, and failed to differentiate between friends (Israel) and foes (Iran).

rhetorical effect: demonizes any agreements with the Iranians; makes war in the region far more likely, characterizes any criticism of Israel as being pro-ISIS.

 

Glossary: Key memes, counterfactuals, dog whistles, canards, euphemisms, innuendoes, insinuations, fake outrages, and obsessions in The Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories and fever swamps, Nov. 28-Dec. 2, 2016

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consumer protection

rhetorical claim: Borrowers need and want payday lenders, and the federal government should completely deregulate the industry,  and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  (editorial: “Consumer Financial Protection Rewrite”).

rhetorical effect: the belief that consumer “protection” distorts the free market and only protects the vested interests of progressives. Consumers are best protected by no protection laws whatsoever, since the market always sorts things out.

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Castro

rhetorical claim: to the Dems, a liberator for the ages. Actually, a brutal dictator who killed millions. Dems consider Gitmo the ultimate symbol of moral barbarity, but what Castro was doing in the rest of Cuba was far worse.

rhetorical effect: relativizes the torture and mass violation of human rights going on at Gitmo.

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privatization

rhetorical claim: the Dems’ all-purpose pejorative for everything bad.

rhetorical effect: excuses any private sector, for-profit public works. Pull up a chair and watch how fast the US economy gets privatized, Thatcher style. Roads, bridges, Medicare, prisons, water supplies, etc. will all be run by private companies. Government oversight will be minimal.

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power grab

rhetorical claim: any progressive law or regulation based on theories of global warming, inequality, racism, etc. In the name of these fabricated boogie men, Dems use the law to exercise power, while all the while claiming the moral high ground.

rhetorical effect: undermines any moral authority for progressive causes, reducing them all to hypocrisy or an insatiable will to power. Dems are said to “grab” power, whereas the Tea Party/GOP  is said the exercise the will of the voters.

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 collective bargaining

rhetorical claim: mandatory collective bargaining makes the government the unions’ automatic dues collector. In right-to-work states,  where collective bargaining has been all but eliminated, economies are thriving. Unions, especially public workers’ unions,  are the worst thing that ever happened to workers, state finances, educational quality, and economic growth. Cutting back public unions also guarantees that state taxes won’t rise every year. There is a nexus of of public-union donations and government officials.

rhetorical effect: demonizes public unions by making them sound as if their ultimate aim is to cripple the economy and bankrupt the states. This rhetoric never mentions union members’ benefits, and the tremendous gains unions have made for workers’ rights over the decades. This rhetorical technique is akin to only discussing the cost of environmental regulations without considering the benefits, such as health and safety. It’s a form of reductio ad absurdum argument.

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meddling

rhetorical claim: as with school choice and vouchers, any top-down, government control over the choice of the people leads to disaster. Any coercive public policy that runs counter to the will of the people is a form of meddling.

rhetorical effect: attempts to unionize teachers, give more support to public schools, avoid the privatization of education, or set educational standards is now defined as meddling.  How long before policies based on principles of equity, justice, and social responsibility are themselves characterized as meddling?

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social justice warriors

rhetorical claim: liberals, aka social justice warriors, champion tolerance and open-mindedness, yet are among the most intolerant of Americans, especially towards Christians.  They ostracize and demonize Christians; replace right and wrong with healthy and unhealthy; steadfastly maintain that the state, not God, defines marriage;  and consider faith to be worse than racism. As memorably explained by David French in the National Review:

With their trademark combination of arrogance and stunning ignorance, they’ll tear down your faith and replace it with a philosophical dumpster fire, a belief system that’s four parts emotional and physical impulse, two parts junk psychology, and one part corrupted intellect. It’s about desire and ambition only partially modulated and limited by consent. Do what you want with your body and your life, so long as you’re not harming anyone else and have the consent of your partners. Wait, that’s not entirely right. You can harm and kill your unborn child. You can rip your family to pieces pursuing your heart’s desires. You can leave spouses in the dust and children in their cribs if you decide you love a different person — especially if that person is of the same sex. Then you’re brave and courageous. At the end of the day, I suppose, the Left believes there’s really only one relevant rule of sexual conduct: Don’t rape.

rhetorical effects: legitimizes  religious intolerance of LGBT; assumes Christians are morally superior to non-believers; makes all progressives seem soulless and morally dissolute, caring only about desire and ambition; assumes social justice is inherently immoral and unchristian, and renews all the culture wars–abortion, gay marriage, even divorce and birth control–as once again fair game for social control rather than settled law or custom.

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banning Islamic refugees

rhetorical claim: immigrants from”jihadi states” should ber banned from the US because of the risk of their being terrorists. Otherwise, you are arguing that the inevitable human death toll in America is the price we have to pay for compassion toward immigrants. Immigrants from jihadi states should have to prove that they are not terrorists.

rhetorical effect: demonizes all immigrants as terrorists-in-waiting, and places all Muslims in America under suspicion and scrutiny.

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regulatory clarity and predictability

 rhetorical claim: infrastructure spending will be unleashed if there is regulatory clarity and predictability. The private sector will only take the investment risk if the government gets off their back

rhetorical effect: the overall strategy of privatizing public works and turning everything into a concession (toll roads, airport fees, etc.) depends on massive tax credits to lure the private sector. In order to loosen the reigns, government agencies are going to have to overlook or abrogate environmental, land use, and equity considerations when granting permits, as well as relinquish all oversight. “Regulatory clarity and predictability” has always been GOP shorthand for doing away with government regulation.

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banking regulation

 rhetorical claim: Dodd-Frank turned banks into public utilities.It needs to be repealed to unleash the “animal spirits” of the market.

rhetorical effect: Making this exaggerated claim  requires the belief that any regulation of the financial sector is destructive and robs banks of any choice or agency. Consumer protection is just another form of socialism.

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a functioning marketplace

rhetorical claim: American health care is teetering because it relies too much on government coercion. A functioning marketplace can deliver high-quality care at lower cost.

rhetorical effect: a “fully functioning market” presumes a fully dysfunctional government and regulatory apparatus. “Fully functioning” means fully unregulated.

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 school vouchers

rhetorical claim: a market-based approach to improving the schools, give parents the choice over their own children’s school, and make public school teachers actually teach.

rhetorical effect: undermines teachers’ unions; guarantees the continual decline of public schools via underfunding; privatizes the education system.