Episodes

In the last few days, the president has taken to just randomly tweeting out the words “LAW & ORDER” in all caps. He and Sean Hannity also discussed this in his interview/town hall on Thursday the 25th.  He mentions “law & order” in just about every communication he has with the public. It is clear that “law & order” is going to be a big theme of his campaign. He is, as he did once before, going to position himself as a “law & order” candidate. But the context is different this time. [Read More]

On Saturday, June 20th, Trump had his first rally in months. It was a bit of a mess from the word go. The rally was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was originally scheduled on June 19th. This caused a great deal of controversy because Tulsa is the site of the worst incident of racial violence in American history. [Read More]

On June 15, 2020 the Supreme Court released a decision that will have major historical significance and implications, and if we’re going to say that we are all about how rhetoric functions in the real world, this is as big as it gets. This is legal rhetoric making real, lasting change in people’s everyday life. So we want to take a few minutes to look at the arguments in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia and what they say and how they are built. Because this has real life implications for some dear friends of ours. Probably yours, too. [Read More]

If you’re not from America, the Confederate memorial controversy must seem really confusing. The Confederacy was the losing side of our Civil War. They were the traitors. The bad guys. They were the ones defending slavery. They’re pretty indefensible. And yet we’ve got monuments to them all over the US and military bases named after them and parks dedicated to them – there’s this heroic narrative about the traitors who lost the Civil War that you just don’t have in other countries. [Read More]

If you are one of our international listeners (we’re pretty clearly based in the U.S.) you may have looked at what’s been going on in America for the last few weeks and wondered “What the actual hell?” We cannot seem to get our crap together. We completely screwed up our response to the coronavirus leading to unparalleled death and contagion, our economy collapsed in the face of our delayed and poorly executed and planned response, and now we find ourselves in a state of civil unrest in response to years of racial tension and police brutality with our leadership calling the military on its own citizens and evidence of state violence against its own people pouring in from EVERYWHERE. This is not our finest hour. [Read More]