Do you smell something burning? It must be all these Election 2020 ~Hot Texts~! Here at re:verb we try to practice "addition, not subtraction" (to quote former President Obama), so we don’t engage with "takes" anymore. As true postmodernist podcasters, we analyze texts. 

On this two-part show, Sophie, Ben, Calvin, and Alex analyze a collection of Hot Texts responding to the 2020 presidential election results. In part one, Calvin shares how presidential candidates have used the word "rhetoric" on Twitter recently, usages which we analyze as attempting to tacitly circumscribe US political ideology and stigmatize dissent. Then, Alex brings in former President Obama's critiques of the slogan "defund the police", as well as Obama's own preferred wording: "reform the police department so that everybody's being treated fairly, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there's a homeless guy, can we maybe send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?" We discuss how, just like the candidates' ideological usages of "rhetoric", Obama's hamfisted rhetorical criticism here serves a disciplinary function, both erasing the history of past failed police "reform" efforts and denouncing abolitionist organizing. 

If you liked this re:joinder, tune into next episode, when we’ll engage with more Hot Texts: on gender representation in the incoming Biden Administration vs. the outgoing Trump Administration, and purported Liberal Media "rigging" of the 2020 contest. 

Hot Texts corpus

Joe Biden on “rhetoric”

Donald Trump on “rhetoric”

Bernie Sanders on “rhetoric”

Barack Obama critiques “defund the police” slogan

References

Previous re:verb episodes:

Interview with Dr. Cameron Mozafari

Interview with Dr. Karma Chávez

re:blurb on ideographs

re:blurb on dialogicality 

Episode of our sibling podcast, The Blurst of Times, on “defund the police”

Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press. [Canonical study of the rhetoric of science.]

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.

Perelman, C., Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., Wilkinson, J., & Weaver, P. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. University of Notre Dame Press.