On today's show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on “AI” and public discourse, focusing this time on the increasing proliferation of AI applications in government writing, policy, and social media. We characterize the second Trump administration as the "first totally post-AI presidency," which has adopted the "dumbest, most unreflective, most uncritical approach" to AI's use in communication, research, and analysis. Throughout the show, we emphasize how AI technologies are themselves rhetorical artifacts at the same time as they so often produce “bad” rhetoric, reflecting the intentions, values, and presuppositions of their creators, as well as the inherent biases of their training data and text generation models. This often results in an entry-level, overly dense writing style - often referred to as "slop" - which is almost written not to be read, but rather to fill space.

We explore several concerning examples of AI's uncritical adoption by the secondTrump administration and their acolytes in the tech world. Early executive orders exhibited AI-generated formatting errors and formulaic, generic language, demonstrating a context-blind style that could lead to legal problems and erode public trust. Furthermore, the "MAHA Report" from the Office of Health and Human Services was found to fabricate studies and misrepresent findings, reflecting how large language models are "sycophantic," and can reinforce existing (often false) beliefs. Our discussion also covers Palantir's "Foundry" product, which aims to combine diverse government datasets, raising significant privacy and political concerns, especially given the political leanings of Palantir’s founders. Finally, we examine xAI’s Grok chatbot (run by Elon Musk), which illustrates how tech elites can exert incredible political power through direct interventions in AI tools’ system prompts - which in recent months has led Grok to parrot conspiracy theories and make explicit antisemitic remarks on the public feeds of X/Twitter.

Ultimately, our analyses emphasizes - once again - that these so-called “AI” technologies are not neutral; they are, in the words of Matteo Pasquinelli, "crystallization[s] of a productive social process" that "reinforce the power structure that underlies [them]," perpetuating existing inequalities. Understanding these mechanisms and engaging in what Pasquinelli terms "de-connectionism" - undoing the social and economic fabric constituting these systems - is essential for critiquing the structural factors and power dynamics that AI reproduces in public discourse.

Have any questions or concerns about this episode? Reach out to our new custom-tuned chatbot, @Bakh_reverb on X/Twitter!

Examples Analyzed in this Episode:

Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-admin-accused-using-ai-191117579.html

Eryk Salvaggio - “Musk, AI, and the Weaponization of ‘Administrative Error’” https://www.techpolicy.press/musk-ai-and-the-weaponization-of-administrative-error/ 

Emily Kennard & Margaret Manto (NOTUS) - “The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist” - https://archive.ph/WVIrT 

Sheera Frenkel & Aaron Krolik (NYT) - “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html

David Klepper - “Gabbard says AI is speeding up intel work, including the release of the JFK assassination files”
https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-ai-amazon-intelligence-beca4c4e25581e52de5343244e995e78

Miles Klee - “Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Goes Full Nazi, Calls Itself ‘MechaHitler’” - https://archive.ph/SdoJn 

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Bakhtin, M. M. (2010). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. University of Texas Press.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code (1st ed.). Polity.

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).

Our previous episode with Dr. Bender about her work

Burke, K. (1984). Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. Univ of California Press.

Burke, K. (1965). Terministic screens. In Proceedings of the American Catholic philosophical association (Vol. 39, pp. 87-102).

DeLuca, L. S., Reinhart, A., Weinberg, G., Laudenbach, M., Miller, S., & Brown, D. W. (2025). Developing Students’ Statistical Expertise Through Writing in the Age of AI. Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, 1-13.

Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2017). The surveillant assemblage. Surveillance, crime and social control, 61-78.

Hill, K. (2025, 13 June). “They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.” The New York Times.

Markey, B., Brown, D. W., Laudenbach, M., & Kohler, A. (2024). Dense and disconnected: Analyzing the sedimented style of ChatGPT-generated text at scale. Written Communication, 41(4), 571-600.

Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly journal of speech, 70(2), 151-167.

Murakami, H. (1994). Dance dance dance : a novel (1st ed.). Kodansha International.

Pasquinelli, M. (2023). The eye of the master: A social history of artificial intelligence. Verso Books.

Reinhart, A., Markey, B., Laudenbach, M., Pantusen, K., Yurko, R., Weinberg, G., & Brown, D. W. (2025). Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(8), e2422455122.

An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)

In this episode – recorded prior to Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel – Calvin and Alex unpack the alarming reality of US strikes on Iran, recently announced by President Trump on June 21, and the ensuing escalation of tensions between the US, Israel, and Iran. We situate these recent events within decades of neoconservative influence and prior escalations, including the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani by US Forces (which we covered back in Episode 31), as well as Israel’s “pre-emptive” strikes against Iran in 2024 and earlier in June 2025.

We historicize the current conflict by highlighting the success of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) in preventing escalation, contrasting it with Trump's abandonment and the Democrats' failure to defend it, and debunk media narratives about Iran's nuclear ambitions, confirming Iran's compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). 

We then dissect the propagandistic pro-war rhetoric that has been employed most recently, such as Trump's bizarre Truth Social posts announcing the "very successful attack," and exposing the dangerous slippages between US and Israeli foreign policy, evidenced by Senator Ted Cruz's admissions on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson’s show.

Finally, drawing on rhetorical scholars such as Jeffrey Tulis and Gordon Mitchell, we explore the libidinal urges driving contemporary presidential rhetoric and US war policy, and how intelligence is manipulated through "Team B intelligence coups," raising concerns about reliance on foreign intelligence like the Mossad. We conclude with a resolute call (echoing our earlier episode) for "No war with Iran," urging public dissent against these increasingly reckless and dangerous decisions.

Works and concepts cited in this episode:

Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self. London, UK: BBC Four.

Daly, C. (2017). How Woodrow Wilson’s Propaganda Machine Changed American Journalism. Smithsonian Magazine. 

Esfandiari, S. (2020, 6 Jan.). Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing because America has only fictional heroes like SpongeBob SquarePants, a prominent cleric said. Business Insider.

Flanagan, J. C. (2004). Woodrow Wilson's" Rhetorical Restructuring": The Transformation of the American Self and the Construction of the German Enemy. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 7(2), 115-148.

Haar, R. (2010). Explaining George W. Bush's adoption of the Neoconservative agenda after 9/11. Politics & Policy, 38(5), 965-990.

IAEA Director General. (2024, 19 Nov.). Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015). [IAEA report raising concerns about Iran’s stockpile of “60% enriched” uranium]

Mitchell, G. R. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92(2), 144-173.

Oddo, J. (2014). Intertextuality and the 24-hour news cycle: A day in the rhetorical life of Colin Powell's UN address. Michigan State University Press.

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

Porter, G. (2014, 16 Oct.). When the Ayatollah said no to nukes. Foreign Policy.

Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon.

Tulis, J. K. (1987, 2017). The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton University Press.

In this episode, Alex and Calvin return to a favorite hobby horse: the University of Austin (UATX). First discussed back in episode 62, this ultra-conservative "university concept" is still not accredited and has no undergraduate degrees planned until at least 2028-2031. In that previous episode, we described UATX variously as right-wing academia’s answer to the Fyre Festival and a pitch deck/PowerPoint scam masquerading as an education; this time, we call it a fast-casual university concept (Chipotle for higher ed). We catch up with the myriad ways that UATX continues to struggle under the weight of its own internal contradictions, while occasionally benefitting from being confused for UT Austin (home of some of our favorite previous guests, like Scott Graham and Karma Chávez).

After taking stock of US free speech generally in the age of seemingly intractable US-led conflicts in the Middle East and the criminalization of student peace activism, we examine a Quillette article from Ellie Avishai asking if UATX is betraying its founding principles. As Avishai explains, her UATX research center was terminated in response to her posting a rather benign (and ideologically nuanced) LinkedIn post about DEI. We discuss how UATX's claims of championing academic freedom and viewpoint diversity necessarily conflict with its increasingly extreme anti-woke conservative agenda. Given that it is bankrolled by dark money funders and figures connected to corporate interests and political power like Harlan Crow and Joe Lonsdale, the institution appears more dedicated to fortifying right-wing ideas and providing a filter bubble than fostering genuine free inquiry. This makes it particularly ironic that its corporate doublespeak response to Avishai's termination was to use language like "wind up Mill" and "restructure." In these ways, UATX seems to combine the worst of mainstream academia (neoliberal austerity measures justified through corporate doublespeak) with new heights of conservative radicalism. 

Drawing on Noah Rawlings' piece in The New Inquiry, we peek into the "Forbidden Courses" summer program held at Harlan Crow's Old Parkland office complex in Dallas, where figures like Peter Boghossian and Katie Roiphe hold court. What does it mean for a university to exist primarily as a "safe space" isolating students from opposition, or worse, a "money and influence laundering operation for some of the most abhorrent ideas" (as Alex calls it)? We conclude that despite the real structural flaws in mainstream academia, the pursuit of knowledge and evidence-based argumentation is still vital in higher ed, but it’s something that UATX seems fundamentally opposed to.

Articles Analyzed in this Episode

“Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?” by Ellie Avishai (in Quillette)

“An American Education: Notes from UATX” - Noah Rawlings (in The New Inquiry)

Previous Episodes Referenced

E62: re:joinder - The University of the Cancelled

Works and Concepts Cited

Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & society, 4(2), 249-283.

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin – briefly rebranded as Kenneth Jerke and Mikhail Shocktin, co-hosts of "Shock Docs" –  explore the state of rhetorical manipulation in the context of the second Trump presidency. We discuss the general ineptitude of the conservative movement occupying the White House and the unsettling lack of a powerful counter-rhetoric in the Democratic opposition, before turning to analyze Trump's tariff policy. We discuss how the tariff conversation is a particularly baffling current example in which raw power seems to be operating without legitimation through traditional rhetorical norms.

Applying a Critical Discourse Studies lens to understand this moment, we revisit concepts like dialogicality from Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining how discourse can be evaluated based on whether it opens up difference (ie. to what extent it is dialogical) or suppresses difference. We introduce assumptions analysis from Norman Fairclough, which examines what a writer/speaker takes for granted as truth (existential, propositional, and values assumptions) and assumptions can reduce dialogical space for manipulative purposes. As a case study, we analyze an article by left-punching journalist Batya Ungar Sargon titled "Liberation Day puts Main Street ahead of Wall Street" (published in Commonplace). We analyze the ways that Ungar Sargon’s manipulative assumptions reframe Trump's tariffs as beneficial for the American worker by ignoring corporate interests and tax policy, misrepresenting political history, and erasing important debates over national security and border policy issues. We conclude with a reminder that it’s always better to be a Mikhail Shocktin than a Kenneth Jerke. 

Texts Analyzed in this Episode

Batya Ungar Sargon - “Liberation Day puts main street ahead of Wall Street” (published in Commonplace)

Works Referenced in this Episode

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.

Relevant Past Episodes

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 3

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 2

Discourse and Manipulation, Pt. 1

re:blurb - Conceptual Metaphor

re:blurb - Dialogicality

re:blurb - Ideographs

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

Episode Image Description: 

Top text: "re:verb"; Left-center image includes a picture of Critical Discourse scholar Norman Fairclough with a laser beam shooting out of his left eye towards right center image; Right-center image is offset, includes a screenshot of an article titled "Liberation Day Puts Main Street Ahead of Wall Street"; Bottom text: "Discourse & Manipulation pt. 4 - The Economic Assumptions of "Liberation Day""

Today’s episode features our rich conversation with Dr. Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University, about her compelling new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans. On the show, Alex and Calvin are joined by guest co-host Dr. Sarah Hae-In Idzik to talk with Corinne about her multifaceted analyses of the role of Asian American racialization in the construction of the concept of the human. We delve into Corinne’s concept of "racial allegory," which illuminates how media and institutional narratives mobilize categories of difference, including Asian Americans, to stabilize the idea of "Western man".

Our discussion touches upon the significance of the title Making the Human, unpacking how Asian American racialization and gendering contribute to the social formulation of the human. We explore key concepts such as the understanding of "Western man" drawn from Black Studies scholarship, while also examining the crucial relationship that Corinne charts between anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness within communication and rhetoric studies. Corinne also explains how she applies the notion of racial allegory to a case study on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, revealing how anti-racist discourse can be used to uphold racial hierarchies, and the strategic role of the victimized Asian student trope in this context. Furthermore, we analyze Corinne’s intercontextual reading of the film Crazy Rich Asians alongside Daniel Patrick Moynihan's “The Negro Family” report, exploring allegories of family and mothering and the underlying racial narratives at play. Our discussion also considers the significance of animacy and the inhuman in relation to the boundaries of the human, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racialization of Asian Americans as potential disease carriers. Finally, we reflect upon Corinne’s nuanced perspective on the term "Asian American" itself, considering its complexities and its potential as a resource for undoing categories and fostering coalition.

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino’s Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is available now from Rutgers University Press.

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode:

Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press.

Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York University Press.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506

Maraj, L. M. (2020). Anti-racist campus rhetorics. Utah State Press.

Molina, N. (2014). How race is made in America: Immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts. Univ of California Press.

Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family, a case for national action. United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research.

Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81.

Wynter, S. (1994). “ ‘No humans involved’: An open letter to my colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1), 1–17.

Wynter, S. (2003). “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). “Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations.” In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis (pp. 9–89). Duke University Press.

da Silva, D. F. (2007). Toward a global idea of race. University of Minnesota Press.

An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here (via Descript)

Today’s episode features a thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Charles Athanasopoulos, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University, about his groundbreaking new book, Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America. On the show, Alex and Calvin talk with Charles about the intricate relationship he charts between Black freedom struggles, the power of icons (and their destruction), and the complex liminalities of social change in contemporary America. We explore Charles’s fresh analysis using his concept of "Black iconoclasm" as a guide - a process of Black radical discernment, which beckons us to constantly questioning established norms and the received wisdom of black liberation and social change more broadly.

Our discussion touches upon the personal backdrop that informed Athanasopoulos's work, particularly his religious upbringing, the emergence and mainstreaming of the Black Lives Matter movement during his time as an undergraduate, and some of his observations of the 2020 BLM protests as a graduate student in Pittsburgh. We unpack key concepts from Black Iconoclasm, such as the "twilight of the icons," where the lines between image-making and image-breaking blur. We also explore his insightful application of the work of Frantz Fanon in communication studies, exploring the idea of "Fanonian slips" as accidental rhetorical slippages that reveal deeper investments in racial iconography, using examples like comments from political figures like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, as well as Charles’s own experiences. We also examine the visual rhetoric of a BLM mural in Pittsburgh through the lens of Édouard Glissant's "poetics of visual relation," considering the transformations and defacements the mural underwent, and its broader symbolic underpinnings. We conclude by hearing the inspiration behind Charles’s creative story of “Black Icarus” that interweaves his chapters, reflecting upon his choice to include an innovative mythopoetic narrative as part of his scholarly work.

Charles Athanasopolous’s Black Iconoclasm: Public Symbols, Racial Progress, and Post/Ferguson America is available now as a free E-Book from Palgrave Macmillan (via SpringerLink)

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode

Burke, Kenneth. 1970. The rhetoric of religion. City: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 2018. Alienation and freedom. Ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of relation. Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1-14.

Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: Anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.

Matheson, C. L. (2019). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’to'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (pp. 131-162). Routledge.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Spillers, H. J. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. University of Chicago Press..

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue their series on Discourse and Manipulation by examining the role of manipulative silence in various post-mortems to the 2024 Presidential Election. 

As a second-term President Donald Trump looms, many have been debating: what went wrong in the Democrats’ campaign? What policy positions, rhetorical strategies and slip-ups, or other contextual factors led Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to be so soundly defeated? However, amidst all of the post-mortem analysis by institutional Democrats and their surrogates in the media, some salient concerns seem to be missing: namely, the various causes and effects of economic and political precarity that many communities in the US are actively experiencing, and the Democrats’ seeming unwillingness to address these issues head-on. Instead, many are using this epideictic moment to blame scores of abstract, ill-defined terms for the election loss: “wokeness,” “inflation,” “misogyny,” “political headwinds,” and “anti-incumbent sentiment,” among others. 

When we apply a Critical Discourse Studies lens, we can see that all of these concepts share a common grammatical category: each one is a nominalization, or a noun that has been made out of a verb or adjective. These nominalizations serve the useful purpose of obscuring or silencing important information, such as who is responsible for an action (or who/what is being affected by it), as well as the scale of the issue. 

In this episode, we examine a series of texts that use manipulative nominalizations and other discourse structures to erase the specific ways that Democratic leaders, campaign staff, and consultancy firms have acted ineffectively and destructively both in this failed run and in the recent past (e.g. Biden’s and Obama’s presidencies and Clinton’s losing bid in 2016). Instead of taking real stock of this history, these texts are mainly platforms for powerful actors to attack broad, abstract concepts, or worse, to victim-blame the voters themselves. We conclude by reflecting upon how these manipulative silences betray the Democratic establishment’s inability or unwillingness to reckon with how its own economic and material interests might be at odds with policies and platforms that could help uplift the most vulnerable in our society.

Texts Analyzed in this Episode:

Maureen Dowd - “Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics”

National Organization for Women President Christian F. Nunes: “Racism, Sexism, Misogyny and Hate Won This Election, But We Won’t Let Our Democracy Be Destroyed”

David Plouffe dialogue on Pod Save America podcast episode: “Exclusive: The Harris Campaign On What Went Wrong”

Works & Concepts Cited in this Episode

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse (Vol. 270). London: Routledge.

Huckin, T. (2002). Textual silence and the discourse of homelessness. Discourse & Society, 13(3), 347-372.

Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.

Cameron Mozafari's Twitter thread summarizing his work with Michael Israel on the changing meaning of “woke”

re:verb episode 71: re:pronouns

re:verb episode 14: re:blurb - Ideographs

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)

On today’s show, we once again fire up our rhetorical stovetop to roast some dubious public argumentation: Oprah Winfrey’s recent ABC special, “AI and the Future of Us.” In this re:joinder episode, Alex and Calvin listen through and discuss audio clips from the show featuring a wide array of guests - from corporate leaders like Sam Altman and Bill Gates to technologists like Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, and even FBI Director Christopher Wray - and dismantle some of the mystifying rhetorical hype tropes that they (and Oprah) circulate about the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and other “AI” technologies into our lives. Along the way, we use rhetorical tools from previous episodes, such as the stasis framework, to show which components of the debate around AI are glossed over, and which are given center-stage. We also bring our own sociopolitical and media analysis to the table to help contextualize (and correct) the presenters’ claims about the speed of large language model development, the nature of its operation, and the threats - both real and imagined - that this new technological apparatus might present to the world. 

We conclude with a reflection on the words of novelist Marilynne Robinson, the show’s final guest, who prompts us to think about the many ways in which “difficulty is the point” when it comes to human work and developing autonomy. Meanwhile, the slick and tempting narratives promoting “ease” and “efficiency” with AI technology might actually belie a much darker vision of “the future of us.” 

Join us as we critique and rejoin some of the most common tropes of AI hype, all compacted into one primetime special. In the spirit of automating consumptive labor, we watched it so you don’t have to!

Works & Concepts cited in this episode:

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021, March). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 610-623).

Rather, S. (2024, 25 Apr.). How is one of America's biggest spy agencies using AI? We're suing to find out. ACLU. [On the potential harms of the US NSA implementing AI into existing dragnet surveillance programs domestically & internationally]

Robins-Early, N. (2024, 3 Apr.). George Carlin’s estate settles lawsuit over comedian’s AI doppelganger. The Guardian.

re:verb Episode 12: re:blurb - Stasis Theory

re:verb Episode 17: re:blurb - Dialogicality

re:verb Episode 75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity (w/ Dr. S. Scott Graham)

re:verb Episode 91: Thinking Rhetorically (w/ Robin Reames) [Episode referencing the importance of following the stasis categories in public debates]

On today’s show, we bring back one of our all-time favorite guests (and emeritus co-Producer / co-Founder of re:verb) Dr. Derek G. Handley to talk about his newly-published book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement. This episode is a spiritual successor to our first episode with Derek (all the way back in Episode 6!), which focused on the rhetoric of 20th-century urban renewal policies in Pittsburgh, and African American citizens’ resistance to those policies and practices that threatened their homes and businesses.

Derek has now expanded his analysis of urban renewal rhetorics - and the modes of citizenship and resistance practiced by African American community members in response to them. His new book, Struggle for the City, focuses on urban renewal policy struggles that played out across three Northern cities in the 1950s and ‘60s: St. Paul Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In each of these case studies, Derek deftly traces the rhetorical contours of the master narrative (such as the use of the “blight” metaphor) that shaped how urban renewal policies, including highway and infrastructure development, ultimately uprooted and destabilized African American communities. In turn, his case studies center on the voices of these communities, showing how they responded using a framework he calls “Black Rhetorical Citizenship.” The rhetorical practices inherent within this mode of citizenship - which include deliberation and community decision-making, the circulation of multi-modal counterstories, and a forward-looking focus on public memory - are not only essential touchstones in the less-publicized history of Civil Rights struggles in Northern cities during the 20th century; they also provide an important scaffold for current rhetorical strategies in ongoing Black freedom and justice struggles in the US writ large.

In this conversation, Derek also shares some details of his ongoing public scholarship project (co-directed with UW-M Geography Professor Dr. Anne Bonds) Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County, which seeks to document restrictive and racist housing covenants in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and its surrounding suburbs, as well as community resistance to these and related practices. 

Derek’s book, Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement, is available via Penn State University Press on September 24, 2024

More information on the Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County project can be found here

Works and Concepts Referenced in this Episode

Handley, D. G. (2019). “The Line Drawn”: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s-2000s. Rhetoric Review, 38(2), 173-189.

Houdek, M., & Phillips, K. R. (2017). Public memory. In Oxford research encyclopedia of communication.

Kock, C., & Villadsen, L. (Eds.). (2015). Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation. Penn State Press.

Loyd, J. M., & Bonds, A. (2018). Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Sociological Review, 66(4), 898-918.

Mapping Prejudice [University of Minnesota Project on restrictive housing covenants]

Musolff, A. (2012). Immigrants and parasites: The history of a bio-social metaphor. In Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 249-258). Vienna: Springer Vienna. [on the use of “disease” metaphors in immigration discourse]

Nelson, H. L. (2001). Damaged identities, narrative repair. Fordham University. [on the concepts of “master narrative” and “counterstories”]

Pittsburgh Courier Archive (from Newspapers.com)

Wilson, A. (2007). The August Wilson Century Cycle. Theatre Communications Group.

An accessible transcript for this episode can be found here

On today’s show, Calvin and Alex analyze the rhetoric and politics of the 2024 presidential election in terms of a particularly significant job this cycle: the vice president, or veep! We begin by discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’s meteoric rise to the Democratic nomination following President Biden’s departure from the race, as well as Harris’s conspicuous similarities to HBO’s fictional Veep, Selena Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus). We then compare and contrast the aesthetics, rhetorical styles, and political stances of Harris’s vice presidential nominee and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Republican veep nominee and Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance. 

Along the way, we discuss how the Democratic Party under Harris and Walz is embracing a rhetoric of normalcy vs. “weirdness” that is genuinely novel and effective as a strategy for delegitimizing GOP policy, and how this approach may help to expand the Democratic voting base in response to state-level crises over reproductive justice and public education. We theorize the Dems’ normalizing discourse as a way of forthrightly indexing liberal values and connecting to core American ideographs while also positioning themselves as outsiders fighting a noble cause against entrenched GOP power in state governments and the national judiciary. Nevertheless, we conclude on a cautionary note about the dangers of normalization rhetoric, particularly in a country with an ongoing legacy of structural racism and imperialist foreign policy – including the brutal and unresolved conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Textual Artifacts Analyzed

Harris-Meyer comparison text:

https://youtu.be/72vUngNA9RM?si=izGYEEFsBRjQrlXj

Walz artifacts:

https://www.msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/watch/-these-guys-are-weird-gov-walz-blasts-trump-vance-obsession-with-anti-freedom-agenda-215711813835

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ajzMgbGsY

Vance artifacts:

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913476514279744

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913478808342571

https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1820913483606901062

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/us/politics/read-the-transcript-of-jd-vances-convention-speech.html

Vance RNC speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TlBHRtrvM

Vance’s TED Talk, “America’s Forgotten Working Class”

Scholarly Works and Concepts Referenced

Kiossev, A. (2008). The oxymoron of normality. Eurozine http://www.eurozine. com/the-oxymoron-of-normality/

Pollak, C. (2021). Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance. Written Communication, 38(3), 380-416.

van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446217856

Kairos:

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/28358

Ethos:

https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2024/6/28/e94-reblurb-ethos

An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here