Conference Presentations » SAMLA 2024 Presentation

SAMLA 2024 Presentation

Original Title: Argumentum ad Civilization: White Nationalist Rhetoric and the Enduring Myth of Manifest Destiny
Settled Title: More Flies with Honey: Tempering Inflammatory Rhetoric in the MAGA Era

Scope of the Presentation

  • Expressivist Rhetoric
  • No One Size Fits All
  • Logical Fallacies and Messaging
  • Anti-Intellectualism
  • Trust, Enrollment, Managed Expectations

Cy Knoblauch’s “Expressivist Rhetoric“

Discursive Ideologies: Reading Western Rhetoric. Utah State UP, 2014

  • “expressivist rhetoric” is not concerned with “objective reality independent of the perceiving subject,…but rather what…[it] means to the perceiving subject” (105)
  • “expressivist rhetoric emphasizes the importance of the individual and of personal liberties” (23)
  • “Sophistic and romantic ideologies are, by contrast, intrinsically iconoclastic, relativizing truth and thereby rendering the social as a patchwork of competing claims for sovereignty while exalting values of personal expression, freedom of thought, individual autonomy, and the authenticity of personal voice” (119)

White Supremacy Spectrum

  • KKK to Aryan Nation to Proud Boys
  • Worldwide Movements
  • Claim Persecution
  • Richard Rorty defines…”irony means holding to beliefs and attitudes which one knows are contingent and could be otherwise, that is, they have no universal foundations” (Barker & Jane 626).
  • Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

Multicultural Coalition

  • Latino Men
    • Voted for Trump: 55% (CNN), 47% (FOX/AP)
    • Enrique Tarrio, imprisoned Proud Boys Leader and former Florida state director of Latinos for Trump
  • Increased support among Black men
  • Kamala Harris’s working class appeal
    • “As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree” (Mason and Singh).

Anti-Trans Groups and Women’s Sports