So I always teach a unit of my university courses on stress, because it has such an impact on communication. And I tend to show this video in class that talks about how mothers of disabled children are too often aging 6 years for every year of caregiving of a sick or disabled child. When I get to that point, I’ve taken to stopping the video lately to explain that presidents, for all the stress of their jobs, actually age…
I’m going to be real, here. Watching the rhetorical situation change over the last few years has been absolutely WILD from the perspective of teaching communication concepts in a university classroom as well as working through these things within this project. It’s been both fascinating and disturbing to see what it takes to teach students the basic principles of communication in a world where fascistic rhetoric is attempting to portray facts, ethics, and empathy as partisan, as well as to…
Okay, so it’s been quite awhile now since fascistic Christian nationalism has been working hard to get an increasingly loud voice in US politics, and I’ve been noticing some increasingly complex dynamics at play because of this. Since a huge part of why I founded this project is to convince people to raise their voices against the unhealthy dynamics in this specific abuse of the fusion of religion and politics (alongside other unhealthy dynamics), I wanted to take some time…
Well, if you haven’t heard, another forecasted “rapture” came and went on Friday, September 22, 2023. While I didn’t grow up in a tradition that overtly used the end times as a weapon for terrorizing people within the denomination (at least not regularly that I’m aware of!), I’ve come to realize that some of those I grew up with in my right-leaning moderate denomination did—and very much still do—either wittingly or unwittingly use salvation as a weapon. In today’s blog…
I’ll confess that I was rather casually looking around for another aspect of anti-trans rhetoric to analyze for this week’s blog post. Like most of us, I knew on an intellectual level that it was absolutely a huge thing that was still happening, and I was considering writing about bathroom bills, but I’d been hearing them for so long. Were they still a thing? When I found a great source that tracks anti-trans legislation (keep reading for a link!), I…
Okay, so if you’ve been paying attention to the right-wing political rhetoric lately, you’ll be noticing that a lot of the rhetoric from (mostly male) proponents of The Big Lie about the 2020 Election “being stolen” have once again contained the phrase “witch hunt.” This phrase has been used many times in the past by the same people, and honestly I’m a little tired of it, but as so often happens with rhetorical analysis, new layers of meaning were popping…
This past week, on the AS Facebook page, I posted a meme comparing Smaug, the greedy dragon villain in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, to billionaires. As usual, the responses from the conservative trolls were extremely illuminating, saying the quiet parts out loud. Thanks to these responses, this week’s article looks at the ways ordinary conservatives find themselves defending dragons…I mean, oligarchical billionaires that are trying to keep their loyalty through shady rhetoric. Where I’m Coming From Here As always, I’m coming…
In recent weeks, I’ve posted several memes at Assertive Spirituality’s Facebook page that have, for whatever reason, gone what I like to call “troll viral.” One thread of rhetoric that has popped up a lot in this recently has had to do, interestingly to me as a scholar, with gaslighting the idea that there’s a “book banning” trend at all. No, these folks say, books are just being removed pending “finding a way to make them more age appropriate.” While…
Like many people I know, I just finished watching Shiny Happy People—that documentary about the Duggar family of the TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, their recent sexual abuse scandals,and the religious extremism behind that helps provide context for so much around this show and other American religio-political issues of the last few years. If you haven’t yet watched and want to, it’s on Amazon Prime video in the US. Today, I’m going to provide as few spoilers as…
In the last week I’ve had the dubious privilege of dealing with hundreds of alt-right trolls on a few selected posts on the FB AS page. This has obviously not been my favorite thing—not sure where they all came from, honestly. But since they came along, it was actually pretty helpful (if disturbing) to see the quiet parts the more covertly right-wing folks I came up with said out loud. In thinking about it, one of the things these (now…
As I write this, we just passed Transgender Day of Visibility AND there was yet another school shooting this week. But this time it was at a Christian school in Nashville, and by a person who used they/them pronouns (find out more in this NPR story). So yeah, let’s be clear: this is the type of LGBTQ+ visibility that is likely to make the LGBTQ+ community rightfully terrified. After all, this is the kind of edge case situation that unhealthy…
Just this past week, Tennessee became the first American state to outlaw drag shows (here’s a piece from PBS that gives some historical context on this). But if you’ve been paying attention, you already know that other red states are working on similar measures. This post will come at this issue from a rhetorical perspective, analyzing how the recent right-wing attempts to ban and demonize drag use strategic ambiguity in really unhealthy ways to target the LGBTQ+ community. Where I’m…
Okay, so there have, for excellent reasons, been really really strong negative reactions from so so many quarters to an extremely disturbing article about the theology of sex published this past week on the white Evangelical organization The Gospel Coalition’s (TGC) website. Intriguingly, the blowback came not only from progressives but also enough of TGC’s audience members that they actually removed the article really quickly while doubling down by linking to a book chapter from a forthcoming book the article…
Okay, so it’s been quite a few years now since the far-right started demonizing trans people. It’s only been recently, however, as of this writing, since right-wing pundits in the US started ridiculing the use of pronouns—as though one could demonize an entire part of speech, one asks? Of course it’s not the use of a part of speech that everyone uses that is the target of course—it’s transgender people themselves, and more broadly anyone who affirms and supports nonbinary,…
I’ll confess I didn’t watch the Super Bowl this year, but I certainly heard an awful lot about the $20 million spent on “Jesus ads” that aired there. I’ve seen a lot of articles pointing out how people from both the left and the right are critiquing various aspects of this total $100 million “He Gets Us” ad campaign, which various sources has reported is funded at least in part by the same fund connected to the founder of Hobby…