As we near the completion of President Trump’s third year in office, the partisan divisions on the problem of illegal immigration grow ever deeper. For the first two years, Democrats and the mainstream media insisted that there was no crisis at America’s southern border: it was a “manufactured” situation, fake news designed to manipulate the […]
These words from the Mueller Report—allegedly uttered by President Trump upon learning of the appointment of a special counsel—are catnip to Trump’s enemies: “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.” Why, they ask, would an innocent man respond with such fatalist resignation? And thus, the quote becomes […]
As someone who is paid to study rhetoric, I am not an easy guy to convince. But when I first read Michael Anton’s essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in the run-up to the 2016 election, I immediately knew it had joined the few dozen seminal texts that have shaped my political thought. It wasn’t that […]
In today’s world, no two men are more responsible for the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the English word empire than George Lucas and Ronald Reagan. In his seminal “Star Wars” films, Lucas introduced us to Darth Vader’s Galactic Empire: it embodied institutionalized evil and served as a foil for the noble Rebel Alliance, which in […]
As a public service, here are some things that are in no way responsible for creating a “climate of political violence” in the United States: Public performances of plays that depict the execution of Trump-like figures. Publishing a Trump assassination fantasy in the New York Times. The constant, deliberate misrepresentation and denigration of mainstream conservative […]
At the university where I teach rhetoric, an organization called the Center for Public Deliberation promotes events where students, faculty and other citizens can discuss issues that are relevant to American democratic life. Among the goals listed on the Center’s website are decreasing political polarization, creating safe spaces for dialogue between “co-creating agents in our […]