All posts tagged: rhetoric

Trump’s Escalating Rhetoric – The Atlantic

Trump’s Escalating Rhetoric – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

How will voters react as Election Day draws nearer? Courtesy of Washington Week With The Atlantic October 26, 2024, 4:06 PM ET Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. With Election Day just over a week away, Kamala Harris is calling Donald Trump a fascist following reports revealing the former president’s deepening dictatorial obsession, including that he expressed admiration for the way that Hitler ran his army. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists discussed how Trump’s language is unlike any other rhetoric used in the modern era of American politics. Language that Trump has used, such as saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that his opponents are “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin,” can be traced back to authoritarian leaders of the 1930s, Anne Applebaum explained last night. “Leaders who use fascist tactics will divide the nation into the real people and the …

Between hollow rhetoric and war: how sanctions work – and why they often don’t | US foreign policy

Between hollow rhetoric and war: how sanctions work – and why they often don’t | US foreign policy

Published by skeptic

In the year 432BCE, the Athenian empire sought to teach its smaller neighbour, Megara, a punitive lesson after various acts of defiance. Instead of going to war, which would break the peace with Sparta, Athens took the novel path of blocking the Megarians from using all the ports in the region. It was known as the Megarian decree, and it was arguably the first recorded case of economic sanctions. It was also a failure, at least when it came to fending off a conflict. The Peloponnesian war, pitting Athens against Sparta, erupted a year later, and some ancient historians believe it was triggered by the Megarian sanctions. It set a pattern for millenia to come. Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, a comprehensive survey published first in 1985 and updated since then, found that since the first world war, state efforts at economic coercion succeeded only about a third of the time at achieving a range of aims, from “modest policy changes” to “disruption of military adventures” to regime change. Defining success can be complicated and subjective. Edward …

Senate Races Are Roiled by Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza as Campaign Rhetoric Sharpens

Senate Races Are Roiled by Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza as Campaign Rhetoric Sharpens

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The student protest movement disrupting university campuses, classes and graduation ceremonies over the war in Gaza is also roiling Senate contests across the nation as Democrats tread cautiously over an internal divide and Republicans play up their rivals’ disagreements. The political impact of the protests on the White House campaign has drawn considerable attention, with opposition to President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war reverberating from Columbia to UCLA. The fast-evolving landscape of the demonstrations is shaping pivotal Senate races, too. Tent encampments have popped up at universities in many states where Democrats this election year are defending seats essential to maintaining the party’s razor-thin Senate majority. At some schools, police crackdowns and arrests have followed. The protests have sharpened the campaign rhetoric in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan, among other places. Republican candidates in California and Florida have stepped up their criticism of the Democratic president for the U.S. response to the war or for chaotic scenes on American campuses. Some Republicans have shown up at encampments, including one …

“It makes me really sad”: Daniel Radcliffe on J.K. Rowling’s anti-transgender rhetoric

“It makes me really sad”: Daniel Radcliffe on J.K. Rowling’s anti-transgender rhetoric

Published by skeptic

“Harry Potter” actor Daniel Radcliffe has issued a response to series creator J.K. Rowling’s steady stream of anti-transgender remarks. Speaking to The Atlantic about his role in the Broadway musical, “Merrily We Roll Along,” Radcliffe addressed Rowling’s controversial comments. “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” Radcliffe said. “I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.” Radcliffe also noted that he has not had any director contact with her since 2020 when she first shared her first public sentiments against transgender people. The actor at the time published a brief essay for the “Trevor Project,” in which he indicated his allyship with the trans community. “Transgender women are women,” Radcliffe wrote.  “I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments. And to say that if those are Jo’s views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the ‘Potter’ franchise,” Radcliffe said.  He …

Barr suggests people may take Trump rhetoric ‘too literally’

Barr suggests people may take Trump rhetoric ‘too literally’

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Former Attorney General Bill Barr suggested Friday that people may take former President Trump “too literally,” and Trump wouldn’t carry out serious actions he threatens against other people. When CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins asked Barr if he remembered when the former president said the person who leaked information about him going to a bunker during the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s death should be executed. “I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but, I, you know, I wouldn’t dispute it,” Barr said, highlighted by Mediaite. “The President would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually carried it out.” Collins pressed Barr, asking if Trump would say things like that on other occasions. “I think people sometimes took him too literally and you know, he would say things like, similar to that, in occasions, to blow off steam, but I wouldn’t take him literally every time he did it,” Barr said. The former attorney general said he wouldn’t take Trump’s threats …

Trump attends wake for fallen NYPD officer as he ramps up rhetoric on crime

Trump attends wake for fallen NYPD officer as he ramps up rhetoric on crime

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After attending the wake Thursday of slain New York police officer Jonathan Diller, former President Donald Trump expressed outrage over the killing and used the opportunity to tout his position on the need to curb crime. “What happened is such a sad, sad event — such a horrible thing and it’s happening all too often and we’re just not going to let it happen,” Trump said to cameras outside of the Massapequa Funeral Home after the wake, flanked by about a dozen police officers. Diller was shot and killed Monday in Queens after he approached an illegally parked vehicle. Trump called the suspect a “thug” and said that he and the driver of the vehicle had a prior arrest record. “They don’t learn because they don’t respect,” Trump said. “They’re not given the respect…police are the greatest people we have. There’s nothing and there’s nobody like ’em.”  Trump used the opportunity to push his views about cracking down on crime, saying, “We have to get back to law and order. We have to do a lot …

US Jews upset with Trump’s latest rhetoric say he doesn’t get to tell them how to be Jewish

US Jews upset with Trump’s latest rhetoric say he doesn’t get to tell them how to be Jewish

Published by Sam

Since the start of his political career, Donald Trump has played on stereotypes about Jews and politics. He told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015 that “you want to control your politicians” and suggested the audience used money to exert control. In the White House, he said Jews who vote for Democrats are “very disloyal to Israel.” Two years ago, the former president hosted two dinner guests at his Florida residence who were known to make virulent antisemitic comments. And this week, Trump charged that Jewish Democrats were being disloyal to their faith and to Israel. That had many American Jews taking up positions behind now-familiar political lines. Trump opponents accused him of promoting antisemitic tropes while his defenders suggested he was making a fair political point in his own way. Jonathan Sarna, American Jewish history professor at Brandeis University, said Trump is capitalizing on tensions within the Jewish community. “For people who hate Donald Trump in the Jewish community, certainly this statement will reinforce their sense that they don’t want to have anything to …

Trump takes bizarre turn as he ratchets up racist rhetoric against migrants | Donald Trump

Trump takes bizarre turn as he ratchets up racist rhetoric against migrants | Donald Trump

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Reaching for racist rhetoric bizarre even for him, Donald Trump compared undocumented migrants to the US to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer and cannibal famously played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. “They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” the former president and probable Republican presidential nominee claimed in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday. “You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff. “Hannibal Lecter? Anybody know Hannibal Lecter?” To laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump added: “We don’t want ’em in this country.” Trump has made such statements before, including in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month. As framed to Right Side, they were the latest piece of extremist and dehumanizing invective from a candidate seeking to make immigration a core issue of the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump has a long history of such racist statements, having launched his successful 2016 presidential campaign …

How France’s far right switched rhetoric on pesticides

How France’s far right switched rhetoric on pesticides

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Marine Le Pen, then the Rassemblement National (far-right) party candidate in the 2022 French presidential election, on a farm in Courtenay, central France, March 19, 2022. GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP “Look at pesticides, herbicides and other phytosanitary product, whose economic results are undoubtedly negative once all the side effects are taken into account. They cost the community more than they bring in […] France must be guided by concern for its own resources: soils, forests, water, pollinators, species diversity.” This speech was given by a candidate in the 2017 French presidential election, one whose rhetoric was closer to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, a radical environmentalist collective, than to the FNSEA majority farmers’ union. That candidate was Marine Le Pen. In 2017, during her second presidential election campaign, the far-right leader had positioned herself as a determined protector of the environment, as well as of farmers’ and consumers’ health. At the time, the Front National (now Rassemblement National, RN) candidate promised to enshrine the French people’s right to “environmental security” in the Constitution, invited farmers …