I really want to read a book by a rhetorician about the way this movement develops its rhetoric. Of course it’s all very annoying but I think we don’t spend enough time talking about how and why it works, which makes it harder to counter.
Replies
I would be interested in reading more as well, but my prior is that there are really a lot of white supremacists in this country, and most of the rhetoric is just signaling that Trump is one of them, a true believer. I don’t see the rhetoric as persuasive.
aug 31, 2025, 4:17 am • 1 0 • view
Learning about cognitive linguistics from George Lakoff dramatically helped me understand Republicans, but it doesn't reflect the newest levels of doublespeak. There's something about their brains loving authority.
aug 31, 2025, 4:11 am • 5 0 • view
I feel like @lastweektonight.com and @timcarvell.bsky.social do pretty great job countering this lying rhetoric
aug 31, 2025, 2:01 am • 1 0 • view
I was raised in the white/right religious "culture" and the majority of white men in any way influenced by it genuinely have a narcissistic paranoid personality. They truly believe they know others better than they do themselves, & any inconvenience or obstacle is purposely done by others
aug 31, 2025, 2:26 am • 4 2 • view
Trump and Miller and Bannon etc are just confirming their feelings that they really are the best boys and everyone else is just out to get them.
aug 31, 2025, 2:29 am • 2 0 • view
Moral Politics by George Lakoff, a linguist, is enlightening.
aug 31, 2025, 2:07 am • 12 1 • view
All I see is Baghdad Bob. No idea why it works (ever)
aug 31, 2025, 2:04 am • 1 0 • view
They just lie.
aug 31, 2025, 2:21 am • 1 0 • view
Isn't it just a shameless use of PR-speak? Identify your biggest weakness & present it as your greatest strength. Repeat w/ confidence until people who want to believe it come to believe it. Hence, RFK is a scientific mind, Trump is a genius, care for working class, attacks on "corruption," etc
aug 31, 2025, 4:24 am • 1 0 • view
George Lakoff's work on cognitive metaphors and rhetorical framing is good.
aug 31, 2025, 2:06 am • 5 1 • view
It's not a mystery. They recognize that the Media expects a level of decorum and isn't designed to challenge outright lies. Therefore they just use schoolyard bully tactics of saying the opposite of what is true, comfortable in the understanding that they will be signal boosted and unchallenged.
aug 31, 2025, 6:33 am • 3 1 • view
Why do we need a book to figure that out? People are just fucking stupid. There's your explanation.
aug 31, 2025, 2:44 am • 0 0 • view
Fear, negativity bias, in-grouping, othering (I made a video of this). Plus more but I've gotten into the booze. Attack From Within by Barbara Mcquade has some really good info on this, and has ways to fight back.
aug 31, 2025, 2:00 am • 27 3 • view
It's almost all appeal to emotion, plus some "data" to mislead
aug 31, 2025, 2:01 am • 15 1 • view
I like Proofiness by Seife about data use in disinformation. Critical Thinking by Moore/Parker is a good textbook that's easy to read by oneself with exercises and answers. Again, there's more, but the booze...
aug 31, 2025, 2:07 am • 13 1 • view
Switched from aerospace/arch to comms/rhetoric because of this kind of BS. This is super old theory and you’ll find it in most books. Incidentally, Plato in “Gorgias” even uses the analogy “justice is to rhetoric as medicine is to cookery.” My favorite is Douglas Walton’s The New Dialectic… 1/2
aug 31, 2025, 3:21 am • 2 0 • view
… which establishes a theory of argument through the identification of informal fallacies (the idea that in certain contexts fallacies are legitimate or even the point of the discourse.) Served as a research assistant on a related project where we tested fallacies in argument 2/2
aug 31, 2025, 3:21 am • 1 0 • view
Re: the right’s use of rhetoric: it’s not really magic. They do a lot of focus groups and the like, testing ideas and just trying to get vibes without necessarily locking onto any theory of accuracy or truth. Just find ideas that land well with low information audiences and run them.
aug 31, 2025, 3:28 am • 3 1 • view
This is such an excellent point!
aug 31, 2025, 3:05 am • 0 0 • view
To me, it’s very classic abusive gaslighting. It’s the same tactics used by malignant narcissists in abuse dynamics. The only question I have from a rhetoric perspective is how they all learned to do it so well—Miller, Leavitt, even Kellyanne. It’s like second nature.
aug 31, 2025, 10:07 am • 19 1 • view
I think about this a lot! A core part of it really does appear exactly like abusive relationship dynamics! 😔 Throw in a layer of doublespeak, leverage the illusory truth mechanic, and wrap it in some Calvinist/Charismatic/Pentecostal appeal to millennialism and some classic exceptionalism.
aug 31, 2025, 2:50 pm • 3 0 • view
George Lakoff (linguist) has done a lot of stuff on Trump, his team, and his base over the last 10 years.
aug 31, 2025, 2:10 am • 6 1 • view
It's hard to argue with nonsense repeated.
aug 31, 2025, 4:49 am • 0 0 • view
Juxtaposition and repetition. For example, Fox News ran a print piece with the words “trans child molester” next to each other an average of once every three days for years. Almost every article or reference was about a single person in jail in CA. “California” was often paired with those three.
aug 31, 2025, 8:24 am • 6 0 • view
Miller is a perfect example of an asshole who never got punched square in the mouth for being an asshole as a young man. Most people figure out that you behave like that, you get your fronts pushed in, and they change tack
aug 31, 2025, 2:39 am • 2 0 • view
Their technique is functionally the same as "The Secret"
aug 31, 2025, 1:59 am • 4 0 • view
Which is to say, they ALWAYS speak as if their desired outcome is already true (e.g. that comment on RFK qualifications) while we focus on every way they are wrong in opposition. To use their tactic against them, we name our own desires as truth (e.g. qualified candidates have xyz qualities).
aug 31, 2025, 2:12 am • 7 1 • view
I amazes me how Trump & MAGA have been able to get people to believe the opposite of reality and fact.
aug 31, 2025, 9:13 am • 1 0 • view
I loved innuendo studio’s series he did on “the alt-right playbook” which concerned primarily online rhetorical patterns that they use
aug 31, 2025, 4:50 am • 0 0 • view
If more people knew how things actually work, the most powerful would not be the most powerful.
aug 31, 2025, 4:10 am • 3 0 • view
A lamen will walk into an auditorium full of 3k people, and he naively sees 3k individuals. A salesman walks into the same auditorium and understands there are, in fact, only a few archetypes of personalities. All you need to do is listen and then tell them what they need to hear to buy.
aug 31, 2025, 2:10 am • 1 1 • view
Very much paraphrasing Zig Zigler
aug 31, 2025, 2:11 am • 0 0 • view
I do, too. I don't think it is strategy, though. I think it is mostly continuous effort... attack attack attack, eventually finding weak spots. And giant subsidies from oligarchs which make a failure rate of, say, 90 percent, easily priced into the effort.
aug 31, 2025, 2:17 am • 2 1 • view
Calling them stupid on a loop doesn’t win. Outsmarting them does.
aug 31, 2025, 1:50 am • 85 7 • view
They just lie all the time because they don't care about anything but their own power. It's not a strategy we can really use because we think things do matter. Apparently in the past lying was discourage and kept in check by something called the media. Would be helpful to have now.
aug 31, 2025, 3:07 am • 2 0 • view
Sometimes when I want to respond with actual comms guidance, I just bite my tongue, because I know that I'll be called twelve different kinds of coward/flack/whatever. But the fact is, messaging works for a reason. One of the key things you'll see is their message discipline.
aug 31, 2025, 2:08 am • 6 0 • view
Sure, but does it work? I don’t want to be smug, but it’s hard to believe that Stephen miller can sell stinky cheese to French people.
aug 31, 2025, 2:01 am • 2 0 • view
Yes it works, Aristotle has really great intro information about appeal to emotion being the strongest of the 3 methods of persuasion (pathos).
aug 31, 2025, 2:10 am • 3 0 • view
His team has successfully gained control so yeah it has worked on a sufficient number of people
aug 31, 2025, 2:04 am • 12 0 • view
Correct. The mechanism by which Trump's campaign won in 2016 and 2024 is classical conditioning using television, talk radio, podcasts, social media and the for-profit press that completed the race to the financial bottom during Trump's first campaign in 2015-16.
aug 31, 2025, 3:55 am • 2 1 • view
www.amazon.com/Losing-Reali...
aug 31, 2025, 4:14 am • 1 1 • view