The notion that Americans should dial down their incendiary rhetoric is undeniable, but that message cannot be delivered credibly by the person who literally sent a mob to the US Capitol, and then sat back and cheered the thugs who assaulted cops for three hours.
The plea to ease up on hate speech cannot be made by the guy who invented a patois of political violence, who prods supporters to assault hecklers, threatens to shoot undocumented immigrants and looters, jeers the husband of a rival who was assaulted with a hammer, and refers to opposition as “vermin.”
And the idea that the toxic talk has gone too far sounds hollow coming from a demagogue who thinks Hillary Clinton’s fate might best be settled by “Second Amendment people,” that Liz Cheney should be sent before a military tribunal, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, should be executed.
This is the political atmosphere that Donald Trump has nurtured, so when he whines about how “the rhetoric of Biden and Harris” has inspired two troubled people (both likely Republicans) to shoot at him with assault rifles, it can be dismissed as one of the most pitiful attempts at gaslighting from a deranged felon who has made a career of it.
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Many of his supporters do not want democracy. They want minority rule, whether that’s through an ethno-state or a homogenous ideological state of some other kind. They have glamorous fantasies that somehow they are part of the in-crowd that will enjoy a privileged position in an authoritarian regime.
Do most of them even know what an “authoritarian regime” is? They might be pretty surprised to find out what that actually looks like.
When they use their judges to steal this election (as they are currently planning to do), what will normal people do? Anything?
So this guy says things like what outlined here:
But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”
and people react with hey that is a threat to democracy and they whine us pointing out the threat to democracy is rhetoric. Its not rhetoric when its based on actual things. Whats funny is the assasination attempts both seem to be voters of his from 2016 and just before that we got one of those convicted from the riots who showed anger because they left them hanging in the wind. Seems to me all the anger they have bread into the folks they weaponized is coming back to bite them.
Is everybody else using ‘rhetoric’ wrong or am I the one off base? Afaik, it just means ‘speech’, or maybe ‘eloquence’ in certain contexts, but I’ve never seen it used to mean ‘lie’ until jd opened his mouth and everybody else followed along.
Thus is a holdover from half remembered lessons on Plato I guess. Socrates is contrasted with the rhetoricians as seeking Truth, a noumenal thing beyond us that we discover (or recall as Socrates would put it). The rhetoricians representative Gorgias has his argument famously summed up as “man is the measure of all things”, that is to say that nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Rhetoricians famously taught people how to convince others of their point of view, essentially modern debate technique. Socrates undermined this practice by pointing out that the skills employed (tone of voice, rhythm, eloquence) had nothing to do with determining truth.
With this argument in mind we can see why “rhetoric” is now used as a shorthand for emotional appeals, or style over substance. Rhetoric is what you rely on when you cannot make a structured and logical argument, while in theory the truth is the truth even if delivered in a dull monotone of limited vocabulary.
Rhetoric does mean speech. It’s usually used in a political context, so incediary rhetoric would be incidiary (political) speech.
Other than that, rhetoric is often equated with the policies talked about, so Trump’s rhetoric would be anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, pro-Russia, etc.
As for the ‘it’s not rhetoric’ part of the title - I think they meant it’s not just speech, it’s verifiable - so no direct meaning of ‘lie’ anywhere although the meaning of ‘lie’ is heavily implied.
I have to assume you learned the literal definition of rhetoric because you attended at least one higher level education course. (Just to be clear: I am complimenting your understanding of the fact that words have meaning).
Most people absolutely use the word “rhetoric” to mean “lie”, or more frequently: “a pathos that directly contrasts my own”.
It has basically been forced into a completely different meaning as part of the lexicon of internet speech.
When it’s seldom used in my language, ‘rhetoric’ acts as a sum of similar opinions, talking points etc in a negative way, as holding no water or consisting of trickery and strawmen. One can say liberal rhetoric, partisan rhetoric, prehistoric rhetoric, whatever - it’s a reference to a part of an existing discourse.
There author implies that it’s not just words from a part of the audience with some possible exaggeration, it’s all facts.
Hilarious that the thumbnail contains a Dollar General sign. It’s obviously not part of the collection of crap in front of it, but just couldn’t be more fitting from a stereotypical point of view.
