Skyler King teaches first-year writing and research methods as an Assistant Professor of Instruction at a public R2 U.S. university, and he holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing (2025), an MA in Composition Studies (2020), and an MA in Applied Linguistics (2015).

What I post here is an explanation of Stanza 2 in a poem of over 40 stanzas. But get caught up by clicking the link below to read stanza 1:

Here is stanza 2 (mimicking aspects of the Lord’s Prayer to highlight Progressive religiosity, where professors are revered as priests who create scriptural academic canon):

Filled with our self-scorn, we are now reborn
Convicted of all our guilt, do whatever Thou wilt
For Thine is the kingdom, the Power, the 1619 story

Filled with our self-scorn, we are now reborn

‘Our’ and ‘we’ refer to me. I sensed a religiosity in my diversity training. Social Justice, implying obedience, punishment, guilt, shame,…why not social mercy or social grace? Because, as you’ll see, I learned as early as 2015, there were social sinners, wrongdoers, and those who were virtuous and righteous. To identify the wrongdoers in a classroom or society at large, one need merely see racial or gender disparity in the workplace, higher ed, movies, media, etc. and tie it to past, overt wrongdoing to today’s standard: slavery, misogyny. And vile sinners must be punished with shame, guilt, silence, confessions in group struggle sessions, and their lives canceled (for the most stubborn and resistant) for their categorical wrongdoing, maintaining the wrong performance/identity/role assigned to their skin color.

When the diversity trainers in 2015 presented America’s slavery as the defining feature of America in terms of it as an Original Sin, and no discussion or disagreement could be voiced, I felt very uncomfortable about the goal of this 40 hour ‘training’ at Chaffey College. To become diverse, or learn the ‘real’ meaning of diversity, it is requisite that I hate my country, myself, and my skin color - and before long, my sex and gender too.

The self-hatred puzzled me, for I was no stranger to criticism of the country. My upstate NY high school peers protested the Iraq War in 2003 and 2004, staging regular walkouts during lunch that some teachers supported. My ink-stained fingers during the same lunch period meant I researched the complexity of the issue by reading tangible newspapers like The New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. Using the 1st amendment to oppose overseas military intervention seems patriotic compared to 10 years later when I’m being fed subversive dogma about hating myself and my country. I learned this serious aversion is called ‘oikophobia’ (coined by British philosopher Roger Scruton in his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, where he described it as a "felt need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’").

But, trainers and other staff told us all that any feeling of discomfort we sensed really always equated to realizing one’s complicit guilt in the system, unearned privileges for being white and male, etc. My furrowed brow and quizzical looks at the dogma they fed me couldn’t justifiably be due to fuzzy logic and faulty evidence. No, I was becoming reborn to the true reality around us, to the new Original Sin.

Convicted of all our guilt, do whatever Thou wilt

The archaic ‘Thou’ honorific pronoun addresses my professors, peers, and professionals promoting the social justice ideology, expecting conformity and demanding fealty. The pronoun and whole prayer refers to the religion they love to hate, Christianity, and expresses that they are more righteous than me, more enlightened. The trainers, and my subsequent MA and PhD peers and professors, would press me until I submitted (hence do whatever Thou wilt). I learned to say certain words - my pronouns like he/him - to signal I accepted my guilt, my subservient place in society as a scapegoat of all racial inequities, all racial and gender disparities, etc. Although claiming no religion or Savior, I learned that progressives still heap sins upon an entire category to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing: the White Male. The White Male is their savior.

Now, between you and me, I know that no single theory, worldview, or religion can account for all observable phenomenon, like the holy grail called M-Theory. But, in each of the 3 contexts (Chaffey College diversity training 2015-16, CSUSB MA 18-20, and Virginia Tech PhD 20-22), it was not possible to remain a ‘sane’ person if it were true that I had read the same texts and disagreed with their prescribed solutions - like Kendi advocating legal discrimination against white people to repair past racial discrimination. A nonbeliever in our midst?!

When my peers learned I thoroughly read and disagreed with Crenshaw’s, Delgado’s, Kendi’s, or Di Angelo’s conclusions, they became confused and belligerent, insulting me and my intelligence, with no comment from the very professors who could moderate or bring sense into the seminar. They would say that it’s time for white males to submit, for the “time for patience and understanding is over”.

For Thine is the kingdom, the Power, the 1619 story

This line recognizes professors possess unassailable truth…or act like it. All glory be given to the false narratives of the corporate media complex that the 1619 Project encapsulated so well. Yet, colonial and revolutionary historians of all ideological stripes panned Nikole Hannah-Jones’s narrative. It perpetrates severe falsehoods about the history of slavery in America, Africa, and it distorts, rather than enlightens, America’s Founding realities. And that’s a problem, because by misidentifying the originating circumstances, Hannah-Jones and followers then misidentify today’s problems and their proposed solutions. Hatred of the West writ large, not just criticism of democratic or capitalistic features, remains a central feature of social justice ideology in academia.

For years, I was told by ill- and well-intended liberals, secular friends, and progressives that I wasn’t to mix religion and state (a la Thomas Jefferson). But here we were from 2015 to 2022, using higher education to forward a religion so much that many like Ibram X. Kendi (nee Ibram Henry Rogers) called for creating laws that specifically racially discriminate against today’s white majorities to rectify past injustices; to usher in a new kingdom of justice and liberation. Secular Progressives fail to see how the Panopticon leverages university authority and Liberation Theology in Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy to supplant one culture and religion with another. Their personal was now the political such that I must accept any subjective truth as objective fact or risk being cast out of the scholastic sanctums (this whole time all I could think was - I just want to teach students how to write effectively, produce knowledge, and communicate it well - the nerve).

So, in sum, it was fitting to use the Lord’s Prayer phrases to expose their religiosity that had clearly, and regularly, appeared in theories, practices, and higher ed institutions. But the believers I pressed in class refused to question its claims and methods, from any perspective like postmodernism or deconstruction, for example. In postmodern terms, I would argue that social justice is a new metanarrative that any open-minded thinker must question by definition and subvert where it becomes harmful. They could use the institution for their wills, their beliefs, but no one else’s can be supported, especially unrepentant white people and complicit-in-the-system (open-minded or disagreeing) minorities.

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Works Cited

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–99. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed., New York UP, 2017.

DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniversary ed., Continuum, 2000.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” The New York Times Magazine, 18 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole, and The New York Times Magazine, creators. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Edited by Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, One World, 2021.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.” 1 Jan. 1802. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.

Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019.

“Letter to the Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project, and We Respond.” The New York Times Magazine, 20 Dec. 2019. Adam Curry, http://adam.curry.com/art/1577133698_tWj5DR5N.html. Accessed 29 July 2026.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Edited by Michael D. Coogan et al., 5th ed., Oxford UP, 2018.

Scruton, Roger. England and the Need for Nations. Civitas, 2004.

What I post here is only 1 stanza of a poem of over 40 stanzas. Over the coming weeks, I am going to post each stanza with an accompanying explanation. I’m doing this because each stanza is dense with allusions to my personal lived context as I experienced it in the progressive academic orthodoxy at Cal State San Bernardino in 2018 and through to the end of my PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech this year. I want to capture as many reasons, feelings, and memories that I associated with each line before their vividness becomes lost to my memory and time. It expresses the thoughts my English and Composition professors deemed unthinkable and unsayable.

A note about this: I created 25 stanzas, in full, in 2 days on September 21st and 22nd, 2021. I’ve written some poetry before now…but it has never flowed out of my mind like this. I was in mental pain, and the end rhymes just bound together, audibly, as I spoke them. A journal and dedicated note-taker, I had not planned to create a poem as I paced in my home, unexpected verse spilling out of my mind into my Notes app. Grating at continued covid lockdown measures on campus, being told what to think and how to speak in doctoral seminars thru 2020 and 2021, and the broader ‘trust the science’ movement mixed with social justice hypocrisy and media lies caused me mental anguish and serious disillusionment with higher education.

Each stanza of my poem expresses how the progressive movement monitored my thought and behavior in higher education over the last 10 years, via ideology, academic discourse, and professors’ rhetoric. I’m not alone of course, because from its perch atop institutional sites of culture, politics, and education, it has monitored us all and sought to normalize its group identity categories upon us, to dictate how we define our life experiences, colonizing campuses and founding an epistemic empire by newly defining men, women, black, white, America, oppressor/oppressed, etc.

In effect, to discipline you and me via shame, guilt, and the threat of cancel culture, to live within a Prison of the Mind that we unwittingly co-create via compliance and conformity.

Welcome to the Progressive Panopticon

Enjoy your identity.

Killing all our consciences,
waking to new discourses.
Is there no counterweight
to dispel the Critical hate?
Where dogma and orthodoxy
don’t permit the moxy
Of marginal agency
and heterodoxy

Welcome to the Progressive Panopticon

Panopticon means roughly to observe (-opticon) all (pan-), and has become a metaphor encapsulating the numerous forms of surveillance used to watch and normalize social behavior. Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, used this term when he designed a kind of penitentiary in the 18th century.

As he conceived it, it’s a large round room with the guard tower erected at its center, and all inmates' cells line the wall. If an inmate is aware they are being monitored, then in theory, they double their efforts. Thus constant surveillance can lead to self-regulation and self-discipline; but the design was criticized for being inhumane, oppressive, and for causing psychological harm.

Likewise, Michel Foucault argued that regimes use surveillance to repress and manage populations. So long as the populace thinks they are being watched at any moment, then they comply - regulate their behavior without direct enforcement by the regime or state. One of my fellow Chinese grad students in 2022 monitored her behavior by using an alias to present her research at US conferences - to avoid triggering Beijing to harass her family back home. The Biden admin pressured major social media to surveil speech it deemed ‘dangerous’ or ‘misinformation’, through censorship, on its behalf.

We saw such self-regulation not only during COVID but during the preceding several years in the form of self-censorship on college campuses and at workplaces. At CSUSB from 2018 to 2020, I learned through in-class shaming and guilt-tripping to avoid confrontation (aka conversation, discussion, and questioning): we here don’t question the guard tower dogma of social justice, and the orthodoxy of new think in progressivism. Slowly, after several struggle sessions, I became an ideological inmate, regulating my thoughts, questions, and my papers. This continued well into 2022, when I would complete my final doctoral courses at Virginia Tech after my false hope that ‘things would be different in Virginia, better than at CSUSB’.

As in life, I was right and wrong. Professors were personally kind, professionally captured; some outright bigoted, others more subtly so, and others not. The dogma and orthodoxy of my most zealous peers hardened from heterodoxy and rigorous inquiry into the singular righteousness of their socially just research causes, forged by BLM, The Science, and Orange Man Bad (TDS).

Its spread via social media seemed to the uninitiated to be an organic growth, not just top-down imposition by professors from their ideological ivory tower where all learning (indoctrination) is monitored, all the right words uttered and confessed for a good grade. But, this algorithmic growth is anything but natural.

Little of this is new to you, but understanding how progressivism depends on monitoring us, as a panopticon, is my goal, and I wrote this poem in two days, and it is my means of relaying how the pain of self-regulation and self-censorship became greater than what the Progressive Panopticon in all its forms could inflict on me. I wrote most of this poem in 2 days in September 21-22, 2021 during my PhD, and originally titled it “how to not let your English Department become like mine, and how to save your kids” because I was not about to let my 4 daughters be enveloped by this unhealthy ideology.

Enjoy your Identity

I am to act, think, and speak like my pre-scripted white, heterosexual, male - perform the white guilt and shame that are my proper station in American life. Become an ally if I am worthy of it, supplicant enough to become one, to reject all prior knowledge and personal experience. Reduce all that I am and have become and can become into this broad tribal category that history says must be…ignore, no hate, my skin, sex, and gender for what it does to Black and Brown people today, worse than ever before.

Killing all our consciences…

Death of the soul and conscience when the very job of a researcher and student is to ask questions, only to be silenced or shamed into silence - imagine Plato without Phaedrus, or Socrates refusing to dialogue with his students. My refuge lay in journaling my experiences and guiding/learning from my writing students.

…Waking to new discourses…

‘Waking’ plays on the ‘woke’ realities we are all supposed to agree to accept as newly revealed truths dispensed by our culture’s institutional authorities across media, news, academia, and politics. that we all live in this new worldview, the new norm of perpetual systemic injustice, doctored ‘science’, everything is racist or sexist, and climate doomism. Waking also refers to how I was supposed to awaken to my awful state as a white male, to my supposed false consciousness, an oppressor, whose societal status is completely unearned. ‘New Discourses’ references James Lindsay’s indispensable encyclopedia of Social Justice terms.

Is there no counterweight…

Counterweight refers to an organization created by Helen Pluckrose, of Grievance Studies fame, that offered materials employees could use to begin discussions with managers and employees about understanding this new Critical Social Justice (CSJ) discourse, acknowledging the perpetual Damocles’ sword of being canceled that hung over every interaction. It answers, yes there is a counterargument. Found in this handbook.

…To dispel the Critical hate?

And, it can be used to dispel the Critical bigotry they imposed on me and other people in academia who wrote about their cancelation experiences or suffered alone without such indispensable resources. CSUSB students mocked my questioning of the Approved Social Justice narratives, supposed my identity, reacted with discomfort and even vocal anger when I voiced my genuine questions and counterarguments. Two professors, one at CSUSB in 2018 and another at VT in 2022, both spoke in bigoted manner about Latter-day Saints, false narratives, disparaging remarks about them as group-thinkers, etc. Turns out, one completed her doctorate at and the other knew professors who taught at Utah State University in Logan, UT - English departments breed hatred of any dominant group (any disparity is discrimination!) or system via CSJ and Marxism, and eat it alive, replacing it with this ‘justified’ Critical hate.

Where dogma and orthodoxy…

Dogma and orthodoxy control thought, reign it in rather than let it explore and devise replicable methods that could conclude differently rather than falsely aiming for ‘expert consensus’. Universities exist to build new knowledge about the phenomenon we observe in the world around us. Remaining open to the chance that that very new knowledge could undermine conformity was not in my professor’s interests. But no, our teaching of writing and our research must conclude the social justice truths, even my speech, when three Virginia Tech professors demanded I speak my pronouns in 3 different Fall 2020 courses, others declared my views on Daryl Davis’s conversational work detoxing Klansmen as ‘retrograde’ (cuz it’s all about decolonizing systemic racism now!), and still others recommended I read Kimberle Crenshawe’s books because my opposition to intersectionality and social justice sects must come because I didn’t read her work yet (I disagreed precisely because I read her works).

…don’t permit the moxy…

Like killing the conscience, this new discourse also weakens moxy, or my bold determination to disagree with prevailing sentiments or beliefs when countervailing data or evidence exists, or the ‘given’ theories remain limited or even flawed.

Agency to invoke change in immediate surrounding circumstances, or for my own personal life to be acknowledged. Why couldn’t my CSUSB and Virginia Tech professors just recognize my white male lived experiences as valid when every other identity was perfectly valid?

…of marginal agency…

The little acts we can perform that healthily orient us to broader society - but my fellow grad students disparaged individual actions. It’s all systemic now. Tear it down. A female lesbian English professor at CSUSB told us in class that, when analyzing culture for ‘dominant’ race narratives that stereotype, oppress, and ‘Other’ a minority like her lesbian identity, look for who is not present in the narrative. Well, Shelby Steele’s books and movies make no appearance in our course readings of Black experience and identity. As is true for John McWhorter, Thomas Sowell, Magatte Wade, Glenn Lowry, Carol Swain, Wilfred Reilly, Jason Riley, Coleman Hughes, Bob Woodson, Roland Fryer, Brandon Tate, even Booker T. Washington. These individuals don’t exist, can’t exist, if we want to group ourselves by race and power, they say.

and heterodoxy.

Great minds don’t always think alike - I joined Heterodox Academy in 2017 because I’d seen terrible social justice-based illogic and mistreatment of faculty in 2015 and 16 at Chaffey College - a multicultural training by DiversityInc arguing there is White culture in math (2+2=5), America is inherently racist and systemically so, and theologically referring to slavery as America’s original sin. From 2023-2025, I played a minor role in creating the Virginia Tech HxA campus chapter where we held readings, constructive disagreement conversations, and promoted speakers discussing viewpoint diversity and open inquiry in classes and research practices.

Associationary is a dictionary of associations. It explores how we define words based on our lived experiences and not on static dictionary definitions. I created it to reflect the actual complexity of language use and to disrupt easy definitions of English, America, and identity.

What memories and experiences define this word for you? Please feel free to share your lived definitions and associations in the comments here!

I am 38 years old. I don’t remember the the first 5 turkey days or so, so I can really only speak to 33 of them. The first 2 my family celebrated in Utah and the next 3 in Rhinebeck, NY. I celebrated the next 13 in New York at my grandma’s (we called her Nana).

How many in the corporate Media define Thanksgiving:

It’s usually about how to talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner or how to avoid talking politics. Usually, such an article suggested how to avoid that conservative uncle. But that popularized narrative is not what I experienced…or what I lived and remember. I divided the post by locations: New York, Nevada, California, and Virginia.

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New York

We’d drive 15mins south from my tiny village of Tivoli to Red Hook to eat some turkey, stuffing, and some kind of veggy. I never touched the cranberry sauce…still don’t!

In upstate NY, the drive to Nana’s house was on windy upstate NY roads that passed the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. I remember I loved staring at the trees whipping past my field of vision: the few remaining, tenacious red, yellow, and orange leaves twitched and flickered like weak flames on the exposed brown trunks and branches of the maple and oak trees, like whole fields filled with wooden candelabras on either side of the road. The last flickering light of Fall in the onsetting frigid cold…

On Norton Rd, you had to accelerate either up a sudden rise midway on Norton Rd. or down the famous yet little known 10 foot drop on the way back. My siblings and I called it a ‘rollercoaster’ on the way to Nana’s house for how it made our stomachs squeamish. I did it for our 4 girls for the first time when we visited this October (best part is they didn’t know it was coming). They each yelled, screamed, and laughed as their stomachs unexpectedly rose and fell.

We would watch some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC before watching the NFL Thanksgiving Classic. My Dad pulled for the Chicago Bears, cuz Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, William “the Refigerator” Perry, and Dick Butkiss. My curly, black-haired pilot and Uncle Geoff rooted for the Minnesota Vikings. I loved watching Barry Sanders juke around defenders, and so I rooted for the Detroit Lions…in vain. They fell like dominoes to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers of the 90s. Before halftime, about 3 adults would be snoozing on the couch cushions - my dad, Conk, and Geoff (usually). I didn’t get it - but now I do! The Bears play the Lions tomorrow…

We ate at the little kids foldout card table, decorated for the occasion. My aunt Jane often drove up from Nyack to share her thinly iced gingerbread turkey cutout cookies and walk to the aerodrome, some of us throwing footballs to each other on the way there. The adults would talk of past aerodrome events, people, and life-saving moments in those self-built WWI-era planes (they all played roles in the weekend airshow drama of Black Baron and Sir Percy Goodfellow from the 60s to the 90s). In fact, my dad loved airplanes, he persuaded my mom to name us after airplanes - Matthew (my aviator dad’s name), Sky King (after the 50s tv show), and Mitchell the B-25 Mitchell (Dooliddle Tokyo raid fame).

My brothers and I just played football outside. Once everyone woke up from the turkey nap, we’d all walk Old Stone Church Road after a couple hours of puzzles and games, and I would later walk downstairs to the garage to drink Barq’s root beer from the fridge. I wouldn’t bring it upstairs, just enjoy it downstairs in the open space away from the adults lol. We’d place on my Nana’s workout devices (she loved snow skiing, and since we didn’t, we’d pretend we were on her skiing device).

The day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday), we would drive to Battenfeld’s Christmas Tree farm just east of Red Hook where we all would meander the hilly tree lanes, drink hot chocolate, and find the ‘perfectly-shaped’ blue spruce to put in our living room (my Dad always said the prickly pine needles kept our prying fingers from feeling the gifts lol - he was partially right). My dad loved cutting it down, and we would get covered in sap as we hauled it to the packing area to strap it to the top of our car. We would also often watch A Christmas Story (bet we called it Ralphie) that night as we ate Thanksgiving leftovers. Is it crazy to say we never shopped Black Friday cuz this was our tradition? I did Black Friday shop once in California, and those shops were ransacked, especially the Redlands Walmart…

Nevada

While attending Brigham Young University in Fall 2004, a friend from Nevada drove me to his family’s place in Elko to spend Thanksgiving (my 1st Thanksgiving away). So many firsts: we got started at night and drove a massive 4-door something West on I-80 through the glowing white salt flats (even when the moon came out, less moon halo in drier atmospheres). We listened to the mellow yet peppy Postal Service songs via his 6-disc disc changer mounted in the trunk of his car. I had seen plenty of stars and planets peering through clouds and humid atmospheres as I camped in the wooded Adirondacks and Catskills growing up. But I was not prepared for the radiant brilliance of a dark sky full of crisp blazing stars. Because the thick wooded landscapes of the East prevent a clear horizon to horizon visibility like I was seeing then, for the first time in my life, I witnessed the curvature of the earth as we sped across the glowing salt flats. Peering through my telescope on top of the snow outside my house in New York conditioned me to standing in a wintery white ground, but not an entire, expansive, curved landscape stretching in every direction beyond the highway to every horizon. A true canopy or blanket of peppered light.

California

From 2011 to 2020, we ate Thanksgiving with who would become family to me - my wife’s mom, sisters, and father-in-law. Ping pong in the cold garage, or rather, sting pong with the brothers-in-law (run around the table, cycling through who hits the ball in either opposing positions, if you miss the ball, you don’t lose points, you just lift your shirt, cover your face with your paddle, and hope your opponent misses your exposed stomach and chest). Otherwise the light plastic ball leaves a quarter sized welt - doesn’t really hurt, just momentarily stings, depending on how hard your opponent wants to laugh. I only ever came away with 2 or 3 welts - and inflicted about the same on my opponents. Sadistic, and fun.

Sitting around a looong table and attached foldout table to fit all 20 of us, we would share what we were grateful for. A few years in to celebrating in California, my mother-in-law proudly reads of the Mayflower because her side of the family descends from Governor Bradford, so she displays the plaque bearing her honorary membership in the Bradford Society. It’s a poignant story of people seeking religious tolerance and political freedom, not in the least because of the anti-American sentiment I have witnessed in media narratives and my graduate programs, but because as latter-day saint Christians, we are aware of our minority Christian view that was heavily persecuted throughout the 19th century but has become more accepted since. So, we find ourselves loosely bound up in, or at least very extended recipients of, that long ago, 400-year-old event that initiated the first sense of what religious tolerance, and a thanksgiving, could be in America.

Virginia

Since Fall 2020, in our late 30s, my wife and I have made our own Thanksgiving dinners for us and our 4 girls, trying out our own recipes. We make a mean green been dish, with pepper flakes, mushrooms, and bacon. We play board games mostly, like Catan or any number of card games, which Nicole still beats me at. We make desserts the day of so they are fresh and warm later in the day, like pumpkin bread or pumpkin pie. We watch some new movie favorites like Klaus and Christmas Chronicles (both on Netflix).

We are driving East later today to Williamsburg to spend it with my sister, her husband, and their 4 kids. Cooking, musketry, and tons of other activities in Colonial Williamsburg are on the itinerary for this Friday or Saturday. Maybe I’ll post some pics here to update this post…

But that’s how my life experiences and associations define Thanksgiving for me. Feel free to share what you associate with Thanksgiving.

What I’m grateful for:

I’m just glad to have our 4 girls, and to be alive and have the opportunity to complete a PhD as hard as this freaking thing is on a regular basis. I’m grateful my wife (yes not my partner) lives with me and finds me desirable, appealing, and funny (I think I’m funny, but for her to think so - I feel like Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle!). I hope I prove her proud, and that I’m a friend and husband she can not just love but be proud of.

I also thank each of you, the subscribers to Project Luminas. Your support motivates me to draft and pursue this project (my dissertation has really taken precedence this Fall). 95 of you subscribed so far - and as a practicing writer who wishes to improve communication and understanding, and not just share my perspective, I hope to read your responses for how your experiences define Thanksgiving (or your own holiday season) for you.

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On December 2, 2020, I wrote the following entry in my personal/academic journal about the preceding 4 months of my PhD experience:

I feel I am in an abyss of meaning of presence of purpose

I feel I’m stuck. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. I have forgotten my distal purpose and aim, to enlighten students to their life goals and purposes. I lie in class to myself and others, not just refuse to speak up, but lie, speak as if I believe SJ ideology or ideas, creating this idiosyncratic ideology no one else is aware of but me.

I’ve called my current state ‘burnout’, while true it’s inaccurate, imprecise. I’m not thinking as coherently or genuinely as I’d like. I feel I need a social justice come-to-jesus moment, going from one set of Plato’s caves to another

I was teaching online and working my 20-hr GTA position in addition to taking 3 PhD courses. Graduate level coursework wasn’t new to me, I had completed 2 MAs from 2012-2020. Yet, what precipitated that entry, just weeks earlier, was that I posed the following question to my PhD classmates in our online discussion thread in order to ask what the excesses of this Social Justice movement are:

1)      One of the cautions of critical theory, critical pedagogy, and social justice that emphasize cultural studies under the binary of oppressor/oppressed is the rather pessimistic Foucauldian view that any bold emancipation in the name of justice can be dangerous to the point of inversion where the oppressed become the oppressors. What might that inversion under social justice look like? What preventative, reflective, or corrective measures, practices, or principles do we see in place at the programmatic, administrative, and pedagogical level that might perceive or detect this inversion before or as it occurs in education?

Based on the memory of my first DEI training at a California college in 2015, I asked this question in 2020 already knowing how the ‘oppressed’ had already become the oppressors in higher Ed: many academics with minority identities were already tenured professors, administrators, staff, and presidents, occupying positions of institutional power and wielding it over complicit (allies) and non-complicit white people (many others quietly did not subscribe to it).

I know what that inversion looks like because I have lived it (and still live it as I enter my final year as a PhD candidate). Leaders oppress life, conscience, and expression by abuse of power or authority, resulting in a spiritual or mental burden that can oppress and depress people. As you might tell by my post, my conscience or spirit became inordinately depressed, but was it oppressed? According to current Social Justice advocates…yes. Recent and current political dictators come to mind when thinking of oppression, as they should, yet the dogmatic and orthodox CRT/DEI advocates argue that today’s dictator is the unseen systemic White culture and law that now produce an inescapable oppression for minorities that must be cast off…beginning in universities…by righteously scapegoating an entire race. What could go wrong?

My PhD peers vehemently disagreed with my discussion question above because the implication that social justice contained excess…was unthinkable and heretical. They posted links to books and articles in our online discussion that I should read to educate myself and do the work (I replied I read all that and more…I just happen to disagree). They called my views (of not forcing people to agree) retrograde. They offered no corrective measures.

For anyone reading this who disagrees with the large-scale choice of 158 colleges in 22 states who’ve offered their own correctives by scaling back or banning DEI offices altogether since January 2023, then I recommend reading my corrective model in this post.

Because professors in my discipline, and academia at large, fail to assess the impact of DEI/social justice ideology on its students (also due to following the grant funding, the next best grade-boosting app, etc. in addition to ideological zealousness), I devised this 4-part model students could use this Fall to observe and describe the impact the antiracist, social justice paradigm, and oppressor binary has on them:

1. Ethnic Representation Crisis (students self-censor out of embarrassment, shame, guilt over how professors characterize their identity)

2. Ethnic Masochism (perform/confess - state gender pronouns, offer mea culpas etc.)

3. Ethnic Erasure (citation justice - only citing minority scholars in articles, mandatory DEI trainings, DEI statements in hiring practices)

4. Ethnocide (the destruction of one’s cultural values)

As seen below in Point 1, a rhetoric/composition scholar argues ethnic representation crisis in an article to describe oppression from minority perspectives in higher Ed, but it sparked the idea in me to use this concept to also describe White people’s perspectives under the dogmatic and orthodox dictates of the dominant Social Justice and DEI regime, so we can get to a more empowered social justice (if possible and desirable as opposed to fraught yet favorable terms like colorblindness).

I have observed myself and others experience steps 1-3 in my graduate teacher training courses and discipline over the last decade. I hope we don’t reach step 4. In those hopes, I quote a self-identified minority scholar, Aja Martinez, in her Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory (2014):

I must write this essay as testimony because I cannot continue to forge an academic career without documenting the persistence of racism in the field of rhetoric and composition and in the academy at large (66)

Ditto. Yet, contrary to her aim, I document and respond to how, via social justice, the oppressed have become the oppressors on college campuses and how anti-white and anti-male educational paradigms affect people who happen to be white and male.

Like Martinez, I also cannot continue to forge an academic career (because I’ve been ostracized repeatedly, been denied letters of recommendation despite my 4.0gpa, original research, professional/personable conduct in class, etc. effectively marginalized) without documenting what ‘socially just’ racism and sexism have done to me and others. I must share this model and write this essay to document the effects of the dominant, disempowering Social Justice discourse on me, for who it pushes me to become (to act, speak, and think as guilty, ashamed). I may catch hell for this…

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The 4-Part Oppressor Inversion Model

But, the effect of guilting and shaming students, and anyone, for arbitrary group status must be called out, beginning with a concept from my discipline:

1. Ethnic Representation Crisis

In arguing against the systemic color-blind assimilation she believes college reinforces on marginalized minorities like her, Rhetoric and Composition PhD candidate Aja Martinez argues1 (2009) such pressure creates a representation crisis in college students like her:

students of color, when pursuing a college education, are cast into an ethnicity representation crisis that is riddled with guilt, shame, and trauma concerning who the student is culturally - as this representation is juxtaposed with who the institution is pushing him or her to become (p. 585)

Sound familiar? Asians racially sidelined at Harvard (Kenny Xu). Minorities disempowered by Social Justice ideology in writing courses (Eric Smith). White people the country over called on to answer for present racial disparities (Thomas Sowell, Heather MacDonald). The entire antiracist, social justice, and critical race theory regime - institutionalized as DEI offices and officers - induces such guilt, shame, and even trauma in students such that they regularly self-censor. I was made to and expected to accept and feel guilt and shame for my skin color as a working professional at Chaffey College in a 2015 DEI training, repeatedly in my 2nd MA at CSUSB in 2018, and then in my PhD at Virginia Tech in 2020 to present. A little taste of how I was expected to think:

• Assume and confess my race and gender guilt/privilege by group identity.

• Told multiple times to shut up and listen

• Not call out false citations, mischaracterizations, invalid arguments, or misrepresented citations in humanities scholarship, for to do so is White

• Accept that I as a White, Heterosexual, Male am multiply oppressing from these intersecting privilege identities, and ignore all contrary life evidence

• Directed to research how my discipline can implement social justice and antiracist teaching practices in writing courses to decolonize the discipline from Whiteness and White ways of writing and researching (ie. don’t find the gaps in the literature, don’t cite white scholars, don’t criticize theories and methods, etc. because it’s all White ways of researching)…

These a priori identities ensured my material and cultural privileges, and therefore guilt and shame in class, despite inheriting nothing material from my parents. Realizing no one would moderate their belief in Social Justice characterizations, I ceased criticizing the fundamental premises of CRT and DEI, and adopted silence or the following point:

2. Ethnic Masochism (perform/confess guilt - use pronouns, offer mea culpas, etc.)

Masochism (noun): to enjoy one’s pain or humiliation. For years, I saw students glory in their systemic sins and redemption as allies or liberators. Feeling such conformist pressure to enjoy verbal self-flagellation in class, to enjoy taking on all of society’s guilt like my white peers were doing, I began to censor myself and offer mea culpas from 2020-2022 whenever saying anything in class to avoid becoming that guy who disrupts class with critical questions (teachers would demand we all just agree to any of the debatable fundamental ‘truths’ about America’s systemic issues so we wouldn’t undermine social justice theories and applications, so we could just ‘get on’ with our projects).

• From 2016-19 I used a colleague’s pronouns out of respect, yet I was forced to state my pronouns when introducing myself in Fall 2020 PhD courses (which identified me as the straight-white-male villain in the room). After saying he/him/his on 3 different class meetings, I asked them to use my first name: Sky.

• In addition, self-professed LGBTQIA+ professors of graduate English at CSUSB taught how to decolonize the writing class

• how to enact socially justice writing practices, how to counter white people’s arguments and falsely frame their opposition as ‘fragility’ (DiAngelo)

• to counter whiteness, topple the patriarchy, use the Bible to counter Christianity’s sense of sexuality and truth

• demean rural and poor white people as dumb and stupid, assume everything in society is systemically Racist, or, my favorite, to claim Mormons as group thinkers who fail to enact Critical Pedagogy (that happened in 2018), and in 2021 at Tech (yet I didn’t reveal I was Mormon - turns out both professors graduated from or taught at USU in Logan, UT. Shows their bigotry facilitated by their blind antinormative approach to their scholarship and teaching practice)

• that whites and males are monolithically guilty and only useful as conformist ‘allies’. Some of you likely know this from experience too. The activism they encouraged in us teachers-in-training wasn’t just to teach the ideas relative to a political ideology (American leftism or progressivism) but to witness those ideas, to try to convert broader society.

In 2015, 2018, and 2020 they repeatedly tried to gaslight me, that I am just fragile as my eyes open to systemically Racist reality and my certain privilege. I can’t accept the ‘true’ oppressor characterization of me, and I just recoil in fear. A white (or BIPOC) person like me can’t be permitted to consciously object to how they are represented as guilty oppressors (or minority victims)…cuz we’re all guilty, right? If I feel to oppose their characterization of me as an oppressor, then this is just my oppressor immune response seeking to maintain my false consciousness. Yet we come to…

3. Ethnic Erasure (citation justice - only citing minority scholars in articles, mandatory DEI trainings, DEI statements in hiring practices)

Erasure (noun): an act of expunging or erasing (in my disciplines case, based on race and gender). As I documented elsewhere, my discipline engages in citation justice - don’t cite white males in our research. Seriously. When such subtractive and disempowering approaches to human relations are foisted on people, let alone scholarship, is it a surprise that millions of college students regularly self-censor (2022 and 2023), professors have been sanctioned/fired or speakers have been deplatformed, and staff overwhelmingly report negative results from divisive DEI trainings? Undergraduate enrollment has been dropping, according to Statista, for men and women since a peak in 2010-11. This current crisis of what we are becoming…

Martinez continues:

This crisis can in turn affect the student’s very ability to maintain his or her place in academia. If the student is successful in the institution, what has the student lost? (p. 585)

It’s not just the crisis I am calling attention to - but the masochism and erasure. Despite legitimate bright spots, I have wanted to quit this program ever since Fall 2020. For me to survive, to be able to ask for letters of recommendation and be considered respectable, I must conceal myself, to censor and take on, as my own, ideas that don’t remotely describe me or 21st century America. I had to, effectively, lie to get by as a general approach. I openly confronted DEI and CRT theories and concepts at CSUSB from 2018-2020 in an effort to believe the best in them (I try not to believe what I don’t understand), yet I suffered the consequences when 2 professors who taught half my courses refused to recommend me to my PhD (they lied about why, so I’ll never know, but knowing they both openly derided Mormonism and Christianity, and my whiteness, and my maleness…).

Since then, I have questioned my place in my discipline and my PhD as I was compelled to play-act the oppressor identity. Academy cosplay. But, I also learned that the cost of successfully completing my PhD without revealing this perspective would be the loss of my conscience. So, I must speak up, the cost of silence exceeds negative career repercussions. As shown above, students lose their ability to speak and think freely, to generate refined knowledge about themselves and the world. It has eroded my ability to publish and find meaningful reason to conduct research.

After feeling successful in the social justice paradigm for several years prior to 2020, I can’t say the same since 2020.

What Does Step 4 Ethnocide Look Like?

4. Ethnocide: the complete erasure of one’s cultural values.

Via its constitutional republican structure and power checks and balances, America lacks a dictator who imposes their values to reshape society wholesale. Hence, an ebbing culture war as academic, federal, religious, and corporate seats of power shift ideological allegiance with each political cycle.

In time, it may resemble the cultural/ethnic genocide Communist Mao imposed on the Chinese when he shamed and guilted the populace out of the 4 Olds of Chinese culture, or as they currently use their 610 Office to snuff out and persecute the spiritual Falun Gong/Dafa movement. Tearing down statues, renaming buildings, etc. Or as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge razed Buddhist temples in Cambodia and destroyed any trace of Western medicine and capitalism across the country. Each leader enforced a dogma and orthodoxy to replace previous belief structures. Systemic eradication.

Thankfully, America is not there yet. Or are we, in some form in some parts of the country (as presidential statues were torn down, schools renamed from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, K-12, college curricular dogma attacking ‘Whiteness’)? Instead of the 4 Chinese Olds - we must identify and erase the 4 American Whites: White customs, White culture, White habits, White ideas.

During 2020, the Smithsonian tweeted a poster graphic for talking points about how to identify harmful Whiteness (habits like punctuality). The nation’s self-described largest employer, the Federal Government, stated it “must be a model for DEIA”. In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order directing DEI efforts in the federal government. The Dept. of Defense created its office as have most.

To assert that Social Justice is possibly limited or flawed is not acceptable correct-think. It’s wrong-think. And, I was shamed in class and in the literature for it. Merely positing an inversion could exist was heretical because after all, we are the good guys, wise and smart - our words and books say so - we academics are on the right side of history, ushering in the utopian synthesis of Hegelian thesis/antithesis via a liberatory neo-Marxism that will reveal how Whiteness forms the unseen cultural capital that oppresses all non-white people.

My Hope this Fall

The Intelleftual social justice ideology assumes inflicting harm is not possible, they say. Any discomfort the oppressor feels is synonymous with realizing one’s guilt, and ‘sitting’ with it leads to enlightenment and liberation. But, oppression and depression are more like it. That is what inversion under social justice oppression looks and feels like. So, since scholarly critique is now Racist, I took my inquiring solitude to devise this model that observes and describes the impact the antiracist, social justice paradigm, and oppressor binary have had on me.

If you know anyone remotely experiencing any part of this 4 part Oppressor Inversion model, please use and forward it. It can describe their current Fall 24 experiences or recent experiences of the past decade when CRT, DEI, and antiracism dominated higher Ed (or at work). The more we talk about this oppressor/oppressed inversion, the more we can confront it and produce genuinely liberating knowledge and truth in universities and workplaces.

My opinions are subject to change via evidence and new experience.

Ada Akpala at the Equiano Project recently published this post acknowledging what she sees as the flawed application of the social justice project of DEI. An accurate criticism of DEI to be fair, and a welcome call to assess its impact on our culture, yet the criticism fails to acknowledge that CRT theories and DEI methods align: they intend to exclude. Any racial or gender exclusion is a direct by-product.

Ada notes:

Now, let's be clear: there's nothing inherently wrong with the concepts of representation and diversity.

Oh, but there is…as DEI defines them. And I’ll explain.

Her post hints at DEI’s fundamental racist feature yet fails to address this because I believe Ada seeks to open a productive conversation in her post about how to better promote inclusion while also being skeptical of misapplication. Fair enough, and I applaud her for that, yet her choice to emphasize observations of the consequences conceals the fundamental racism of the underlying methods:

Proponents may tout good intentions, but we must scrutinise the methods and consequences of inclusion and diversity efforts. Inclusivity should be pursued in a way that embraces everyone, rather than as a tool to create new forms of exclusion.

Yet create new forms of exclusion DEI does. Why? Because CRT-based and antiracist-based DEI overtly do not seek to embrace everyone.

Were she to write a follow-up piece after scrutinizing DEI methods, as I do below and at Project Luminas, she would conclude that the underlying CRT theory informs the problematic DEI methods and exclusivist consequences she rightly observes. No true DEI practitioner fails to be inclusive by excluding white people because it is designed to do just that: target white people and ‘white’ culture. If you do not exclude white people, then you are not succeeding at fulfilling the DEI vision. Ada begins to address this euphemistic logical flaw of calling DEI ‘inclusive’:

Increasing representation may seem laudable, but framing it as a rebuke or rejection of another demographic is counterproductive. True inclusion should be about “adding seats to the table,” not playing a zero-sum game where one group must lose for another to gain. (my emphasis)

Excluding white people in a subtractive fashion from the present table (to use Ada’s analogy) is justified in CRT and antiracism. White people have set the American table for decades or centuries…for too long in their opinion (my millennial self included). It’s time for the nonwhite Others to set it, to prescribe racial identities, to balance the oppression and marginalization with new Ibram X. Kendi-style discrimination in Constitutional amendments, to repeal Civil Rights law or attack norms like punctuality as simply oppressive White culture to be eradicated.

In other words, the anti-white racism Ada observes results not from well-intended misapplication, as she optimistically posits, but from intentional, theorized exclusion.

Interest Convergence

For example, of the 8 fundamental tenets of CRT that assistant professor of writing Aja Martinez (2020) lists in Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, Interest Convergence refers to how a dominant or majority race will only tolerate minority racial advancement in society as long as the change first benefits them and their dominant ideology, as CRT scholar Derek Bell theorized it.

Martinez attempts to show how the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case was not a moral racial win but a win of interest convergence. She explains that to counter Communist propaganda that the U.S. was brutally racist and a terrible democracy, the white Justice Department and Truman administration framed the Brown decision as “not a blow to American racism but to communism” (12).

So, white people in power saw this apparent racial advancement as a challenge to their dominance over Black or Brown people and used it to further their White Supremacist ideology, cloaked as a blow to communism (no wonder that Helen Pluckrose, whom Ada interviews in her post, wrote Cynical Theories with James Lindsay). Counterstory methodology, based on CRT and intersectionality, is a common scholarly method in my discipline that Ada would do well to scrutinize along with CRT’s Interest Convergence theory.

CRT is not about lifting all demographic boats precisely because it argues the system was not built to lift all boats in the first place. Every aspect of the US System was built to subordinate one group over all Others - the only remedy? Inverse subordination - in the form of epistemic, scholarly segregation in my discipline (or DEI hiring practices).

Citation Justice

Next, take Citation Justice (CJ), or what composition scholar Erec Smith critically and correctly called Victimhood via Footnote.

One of my former PhD professors, Dr. Sano-Franchini, called for all conference presentations to engage in citation justice at our discipline’s 2024 annual conference in Spokane, WA, called the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Since citation is a form of power in a patriarchal, white supremacist society, I as a writing scholar must cite “knowledge producers based on their identity in order to uplift marginalized scholars”, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate school. Of this conference practice, described as abundant, I asked in another article similar to Ada’s question, “But, why call for the telling of indigenous stories of Spokane at the expense of white stories, in a subtractive approach? Is that really ‘abundant’ cultural change?” No. CJ, like DEI, is subtractive, reductivist, and essentialistic, and we are too good for it. It literally erases white people and the diversity of ideas they espouse from scholarship because…white.

CJ corrupts critical thinking worse than reliance on frequentist statistics and the replication crisis in science because it centers unassessable race-based thinking, that ideas and arguments are only valuable because of arbitrary racial identity, not the validity or rigor of the ideas and methods they espouse. Moreover, CJ furthers the replication crisis because these orthodox views and methods can’t be assessed, for to do so is racist and white supremacist and because CJ is based on a non-falsifiable quality called identity.

Zero-sum Methods and Consequences

To answer Ada’s question: DEI is exclusion in disguise.

Being based on the negation or erasure of white people, not to mention any minority identity as Erec Smith abundantly points out, CRT-based DEI practices seek to remove chairs from the proverbial table (or scholarly journals and discourse in my discipline’s case).

In sum, Ada’s concepts of representation and diversity are fine, so long as they exist in an idealized vacuum, sure. But they don’t. The popular CRT and antiracist versions of representation and diversity in media, academia, and workplaces define race relations as a zero-sum game. They are inherently subtractive and exclusive, by definition, as the Interest Convergence tenet and Citation Justice method demonstrate.

Understanding this will remove DEI’s disguise and free us all to create more inclusive and diverse methods and results in politics, the workplace, media, and academia.

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At Project Luminas, I scrutinize my discipline’s CRT-based DEI research and teaching methods and assess their consequences as they impact my life and profession. One PL article I wrote traces how partisan politics entered my discipline’s scholarship in the 80s and created conditions for today’s illiberal ideology to flourish in it and across campuses in the ensuing decades.

This article contains two parts:

• Political and Media Denials of CRT in Schools

• Fundamental CRT Tenets

Once you read this article, you will better understand and identify CRT and engage with people and neighbors who believe its race-relation descriptions.

Political and Media Representations and Deflections of CRT

Have you heard politicians like the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terri McAuliffe brazenly assert in Clintonian demagogic discourse that CRT was a ‘right-wing conspiracy’? His own Virginia Department of Education listed several popular CRT-based texts as staff training and pedagogy development materials. Is CRT being taught in many K-12 schools? By now, you know that the answer is yes.

If you’ve heard the Mainstream Media talking heads state that CRT is only an obscure grad school theory whose theorists (Delgado, Crenshaw, Bell, & Kynard) no K-12 teacher teaches, then realize they are technically correct…and very wrong. But, CRT has jumped the grad school tracks to land in baby books and K-12 libraries, Nicole-Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project, and in DEI staff trainings (which are everywhere).

If you’ve heard a neighbor say a group of white people lack diversity, then CRT and antiracism are behind it. If your kids’ teachers posit 1619 Project nostrums like America is fundamentally and permanently Racist rather than about novelly instituting a self-governing populace that corrects systemic Racism via constitutional reforms (amendments and civil rights), then they are learning CRT. Or, that white people only permit black and brown people their rights when doing so benefits white people, then you’ve heard CRT.

Also, if you’ve heard the simple argument below used to reference Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Larry Elder, Candace Owens, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Clarence Thomas, Ian Rowe, Erec Smith, Bob Woodson, and even Booker T. Washington, then you’ve heard CRT:

Left: racial definitions are socially constructed

Black Conservatives: we exist

Left: absolutely not! You can not socially construct yourself. We will. Racism is permanent. Act like it.

To some, they argue that right-wing media manufactured the 2021 backlash to CRT that has only grown since. And, as a media researcher, I know that media do construct realities for us all to consume yet also reflect actual events on the ground. My own two-part research into how media portrayed parent protests demonstrated how Left-wing media ignored parent voices and defended CRT being present in K-12 schools (as 5,000 k-12 teachers affirmed via the Zinn Education Project).

Others in education like the massive NEA union argue CRT opponents and conservative lawmakers are bullies for opposing CRT as the accurate approach to history its advocates think it is, that America’s defining heritage is systemic Racism. Because CRT involves criminal justice law and complex institutional funding and political discussions, some argue that:

the right-wing histrionics that CRT is being taught in primary and secondary schools strikes me as silly.

Sure. But like most people, most legal scholars have no idea CRT permeated my English Studies disciplines like English literature, Rhetoric and Writing, or Composition Studies nearly 40 years ago. And that NCTE, the flagship educational organization in America for K-12 and higher ed English teachers, regularly publishes leading books, journals, and conferences for elementary, middle, secondary, and college teachers to build their antiracist curriculum. K-12 teachers then commonly use these materials in their curriculum, lessons, and libraries to condition children (like my own 4 kids) to scapegoat American norms as products of whiteness and white people. If you’re a teacher, then I recommend supplementing with Bob Woodson’s empowering 1776 Unites curriculum to disrupt this orthodoxy and teach an empowering orientation to black history in America instead.

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Fundamental CRT Tenets Used for Cultural Transformation or Social Justice

From my teacher training at Cal State San Bernardino MA in English Composition (18-20) and my current PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech (2020-now), my professors used the following texts to instruct how to teach writing using CRT:

• Critical Race Counterstories Along the Chicana/Chicano Educational Pipeline (2006) by Tara Yosso

• Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2020)by Aja Martinez

I first studied Yosso’s text as part of a Critical Pedagogy seminar in 2018 at CSUSB.

So you don’t have to decipher the tenets amongst my scribbles:

1. The Intercentricity of Race and Racism (racism is endemic and permanent)

2. The Challenge to Dominant Ideology (neutrality and objectivity are suspect)

3. The Commitment to Social Justice (classrooms and teaching are political)

4. The Centrality of Experiential Knowledge (experiential knowledge is legitimate)

5. The Interdisciplinary Perspective (multiple methods to tell history from the bottom in opposition to popular discourse and academic research)

Now, I actually agree with Yosso that education should discuss experience and tell ‘history from the bottom’ in addition to the top. Namely, with regard to CRT, I agree because advances toward civil rights exist precisely because U.S. constitutional law and legal practice have worked against and oppressed black people, brown people, and non-dominant race, gender, religious, and ethnic identities across state and national history. Narratively marginalized as well as legally oppressed. I do believe that public school classrooms are political by nature but should not be in practice. I don’t suspect objectivity enough to deny it but to recognize our perception of objectivity arises from limited subjective and socially constructed perspectives (replete with biases to acknowledge).

Yet trying to undo, ameliorate, or erase the disparate impact of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, for example, should not require new legal discrimination (a la Ibram Kendi) in law and workplaces precisely because that breeds new discriminatory animosity, dominance, and oppression that got us all here in the first place, that no one today deserves.

In turning to Aja Martinez’s text, studied in a Theory of Writing PhD course, we see that she seeks to situate CRT generally, and the counterstory method (CM) specifically, as a pedagogical means to uncover racial bias of dominant narratives in the rhetoric and writing fields. She does so because she feels compelled as a minoritized voice who used CM to enter the academy to definitively identify and define for the disciplinary ‘gatekeepers’ what counterstory is (31) and to further write her way into the academy through a personalized tracing of a revisionist history of rhetoric and writing studies with critical race theory and counterstory methodology as her “guiding forces” (4). And yet the subjective quickly asserts its own unwarranted distorted truths about ‘dominant’ people. And via this ‘personal is political’ rubric, any ideology appears justified in politicizing classrooms to bend culture and curriculum to their will.

If CM is correct in seeking to counter erroneous dominant and majoritarian stigmas and stereotypes of marginalized peoples, as well as the negative effects those stories have on all people, then my main criticism of critical race counterstories and counterstory method is that they too easily stereotype white people, past and present. They create a minoritarian stereotyping of the race perceived to be culturally dominant. In CM research, white people (or males) often become caricatures, distant yet everpresent, dehumanized versions of some monolithic group of white people and experience; they also deny the marginal agency and heterodoxy found in the voices of dissenting conservative and liberal U.S. blacks and all minorities.

In other words, by portraying their cultural opponent in reductivist and essentializing ways, as in Marxist terms like cultural Whiteness (below), that very human opponent and its attendant cultural values and narratives easily become the oppressive Villain. I highly recommend watching Netflix’s 2023 Leave the World Behind because it condenses progressive CRT theory into a 2-hour Red Dawn-style apocalypse scenario. Most viewers watch it for the apocalypse genre and don’t grasp the utterly coherent and brilliant visual depiction of CRT Tenets that blame the apocalypse on White narratives and people.

Yet, ironically, this antagonistic framing of CRT, CM, and Obama-produced Netflix film, frustrates social justice work, for any rational opposition to its flawed meta-narratives and policy proposals then becomes distorted into white supremacy and irrational white fragility so much so that scholars (like my own Dr. Sano-Franchini) equate mere majority white presence in a city like Spokane, WA, to white supremacy worthy of citation justice (where scholarship cites non-white scholars).

Demographic data shows us that Spokane is a predominantly white place…Yet white supremacy so frequently overtakes and covers over the presence and persistence of minoritized people, and as a result, their histories, needs, concerns, and ways of knowing and being, rendering them scarce and seemingly insignificant. Why does white supremacy become the single story we tell about certain places?

Indeed. Why do ‘we’ only tell white supremacist stories about certain places? While arguing for ‘writing abundance’, each paper presentation this April must ensure it:

Practices citation justice. The proposal is situated in relation to existing scholarship and research in the field, and uplifts and amplifies Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other multiply marginalized perspectives. The proposal may also describe how the presenters will learn from other minoritized communities to further their thinking about the topic.

So, CRT and CM argue that the White supremacy story has already been told, collapsing white heterodoxy into this category. And my discipline’s 2024 CCC conference theme argues white supremacy narratives and presence dominate in 2024 simply because white demographic majorities exist. But, why call for the telling of indigenous stories of Spokane at the expense of white stories, in a subtractive approach? Is that really ‘abundant’ cultural change?

I’ll finish with 3 Untold Academy stanzas expressing my PhD experience:

Designing dichotomy
to see all this leprosy.
White skin the sinful scales
Of minoritarian tales

Got the wrong identity?
Get back in your category.

Maintain the partisan Purity
while we accrue Assurity,
drunk on our authority,
derived from a tautology:

Where if I say I’m not racist
then I am for sure racist.
On this Kafka trap basis
rests my social stasis:

absence for safe spaces.

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My discipline’s (Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies) scholarly literature began in the 1930s yet emerged in the 1970s with a leftist, activist, teaching practice that was once laughed off. No one is laughing today.

Especially in light of America’s elite universities failing to condemn antisemitic calls for genocide on their campuses as hate speech and harassment (by students or Presidents Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth) since 10/7. Thousands of scholars, myself included, at Heterodox Academy aren’t laughing. Neither were these public figures who published the Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate in July 2020. Consider The FIRE which defends professors’ free speech on campuses. At least, I haven’t been laughing for the past decade as my discipline normalizes scapegoating my race, sexual orientation, and gender (white heterosexual male) for society’s disparities. That’s across 30 graduate courses since 2012 and full-time occupation at a college since 2014.

If you’ve read any of my previous Intelleftual posts, you know I’m investigating the origins of my discipline’s ideological leftward dominance. A decades-long academic dominance so thorough and complete that any university/college student today naturally imbibes basic leftist tenets as though they are objective, given truths, and not limited partisan perspectives with serious limitations and even harmful flaws.

Tenets you might be familiar with today are the oppressor/oppressed binary, that white people are guilty, that the US is systemically and irreversibly Racist, the personal is political, that the patriarchy rules All independently of individual people’s actions because all that Men possess is Power in Mordorian fashion, etc.

In 2 ways, the English education organization, NCTE, played a fundamental role in linking leftist ideological tenets in academia with leftist ideology in politics. Before I explain my call to action, here is my call to NCTE:

Resolved: the Doublespeak Award incentivized the normalization of not just a political viewpoint at the expense of another but the professionalization of demagoguery in English scholarship and related disciplines.

Rationale

For nearly 50 years, the Doublespeak Award promoted and cultivated a professional demagogic discourse about language misuse in American society. Across the last 20 years of 4 Democratic presidential administrations, the world’s most powerful political figures’ misuse of language, rhetoric, and discourse went unexamined and unawarded. NCTE should account for its longstanding demagogic posture and practice of Othering media and political figures within its pages...and its professors’ and students’ minds.

Academic journals compose a discipline and its discourse by defining what questions can be asked and what objects can be studied. As much as journals professionalize a social and intellectual space to research in a discipline in this way, NCTE’s Doublespeak award likewise signaled to its academic audience that it is professionally permissible to attack certain viewpoints while its own preferred bias remained sacrosanct, unassailable. Such bias obstructs honest reflective practice, scholarly discourse, and democratic deliberation. Should NCTE have predominantly heaped ironic Doublespeak praise on only liberal or progressive figures, I would likewise question its ability to hold the most powerful to account in any year and era. We would also conclude it had acted in demonstrable partisan fashion.

Demagoguing the very mission of examining language and misuse of it by powerful people was itself a misuse of language and professional position and power. The only glaring irony is that NCTE demonstrates it neither considered the ethical grounds on which its award proceeded nor the rhetorical consequences of such partisan behavior on the discipline’s scholarship, professors, and K-12 teachers, not to mention its writing students.

The 1990s Inflection Point

As I began my investigation, I initially thought the spiral into my discipline’s orthodoxy began in the 1990s, and for good reason. In an article presciently titled Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing (1991), English scholar, Maxine Hairston, controversially criticizes what she labeled a disturbing trend where writing professors and instructors began teaching their personal political views as writing course content. She says they “claimed writing courses as their political territory” (183) (but as I show, they first claimed academic journals as their political territory). For this reason and many more, Hairston wished writing programs would divest from English departments.

While postmodernist views like Derrida’s deconstruction of language permeated English departments and destabilized my discipline’s respect for ‘Platonic binaries’ or broad beliefs and values like national pride or ‘traditional’ family and religious values, social justice and Marxism slowly and ironiaclly supplanted those views with a new binary of oppressor/oppressed tenets in the form of critical pedagogy, critical race theory, queer theory, antiracism, and antinormativity. Nuclear family and religious values (whatever you think of them) became capitalist constructs and cultural sites worthy of dismantling (as BLM promoted on its website yet removed as of September 2021).

As of 2012, Hairston’s article had provoked more responses than any article in the history of the journal, dating back to 1953 when it was established. The journal permitted, via their call and response practice, several instructors to respond to her criticisms of their theories and activist practices in the next volume. Warranted to some extent, yet vitriolic and caustic nonetheless, those imbalanced replies were not matched by anyone writing in support of her views. Years later, one article expressed some support for part of her views. Quite lopsided.

In Hairston’s article and its immediate replies, I find some roots of the current DEI trainings, offices, and hiring requirements, and even cancel culture in RCWS. And yet to so vehemently express and denounce one scholar’s viewpoint signals prior development, meaning the Hairston article becomes a disciplinary inflection point if not the beginning, per se, of today’s non-reflective, social justice paradigm dominance.

And, intriguingly, none of my Cal State or Virginia Tech professors brought up Hairston or the complexity and opposition in the discipline’s emerging one-sided ideological history when we studied the discipline’s formation. And as my professors are fond of saying about how to identify ideology in historical narratives, look for who is left out, omitted, or erased…

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Earlier Beginnings and NCTE

And, as I argue, the leftist lurch that Hairston began to address in the 90s arguably began in the 70s and 80s with the establishment of the Doublespeak Quarterly Journal (DQJ) and the Doublespeak Award in 1974 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). This ‘award’ left out, omitted, and erased liberals, progressives, and Democrats from its criticism. And we will see some findings…

First, for those who don’t know, NCTE began in 1911, at one point claimed 60,00 members (it’s hard to find reliable numbers), and is responsible today for publishing 12 journals, including the longest-published RCWS journals (Research in the Teaching of English, College English) and today’s flagship journal (College Composition and Communication) that form the RCWS discipline as distinct from, say, English literature, linguistics, or creative writing. From its website:

NCTE is the leading partner in giving educators a voice as the educational landscape changes and the needs of teachers from preK through college evolve.

Also, it encourages membership in terms of professional development:

When you join NCTE, you’ll be joining the best minds in English, language arts, and writing studies.

For nearly 50 years, NCTE attempted to empower English educators in part by calling out political leaders who used duplicitous or deceptively euphemistic language to obscure or confuse otherwise troubling policies or corruption. Check the powerful - a laudable aspiration. It tried to meet that bar by passing two 1971 resolutions condemning dishonest and inhumane language (in response to Nixon?), creating the Committee on Doublespeak in 1972 to combat advertisers and politicians who manipulate language (in Beyond Nineteen Eighty-Four: Doublespeak in a Post-Orwellian Age, Lutz, 1989), and founding the DQJ journal and the Doublespeak Award in 1974. Yet, within a few years, the award overwhelmingly targeted institutional or political figures from one side of the political aisle: conservatives, Republicans, even corporate executives and military or right-aligned media figures.

As you can see below, over its nearly 50-year history, liberals and progressives were overwhelmingly omitted from criticism, claiming only 3.33 awards out of 47 while conservatives claimed 24; yes, an 8-to-1 ratio. Bill Clinton, journalist Joe Klein, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, and the New York State Regents make up the 3.33 Liberal awards. You might dispute Klein’s and NY State Regents’s liberal leanings, and if you do, then the ratio increases to 24:2, leaving Clinton’s third of an award in 1993 the sole liberal presidential award recipient. And conservative politicians and media figures accounted for an astounding 52% of all award recipients to liberals’ 8.6% (or 4.3%) While I think any politician’s speech relative to their policies undoubtedly deserves to be criticized, the utterly imbalanced criticism is telling.

Here is a chart breaking down the award recipient distribution by political ideology:

As you will see here, conspicuously absent are Presidents Obama, Carter, and Biden.

Clinton’s award arguably counts as a third (as argued above) because he shared it with conservative Trent Lott and Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. No one was awarded in 2021 when NCTE discontinued the award. In 2022, the NCTE renamed the award from The Doublespeak Award to The Year in Doublespeak to publish an annual list of several examples of doublespeak, which has yet to be published.

The change comes on the heels of the last award, given in 2020, of a single phrase - the ‘China virus’ - that could be used by anyone. NCTE stated that the award was being “reimagined in order to align it with our current mission, vision, values, and policies”. For whatever reasons, they sought to change this from an individual award to a term-based collective word award, and I think the change highlights a move to align more with their postmodernist deconstructionist origins, which are to “highlight the movement of language itself, rather than [an] individual [speaker]” (Crowley, 24). The full 46-year recipient list and ideology breakdown are in Appendices 1 and 2 below.

The rhetorical effect is to imply that conservatives or Republicans regularly engage in doublespeak whereas liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not. Moreover, an inattentive millennial or Gen Z reader seeing today’s corporations advertise DEI allegiance would have no clue that from the 1970s until about 2020, liberals and progressives preached that corporations were suspect or oppressive via their profit motive and crossover with political appointments and lobbying efforts like the NRA and Exxon Corporation (the truth is the Democratic party engaged in decades of corporate funding and crony capitalism to compete with its Republican political rivals’ similar efforts). In any event, such crossover is perhaps best illustrated via Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1998). Accounting for this bias could tip the corporate award recipients somewhat into the conservative category given how those entities (State Dept., Dept. of Defense, etc.) were recipients during Republican presidencies (except for 1993 in Clinton’s first year).

Now I see that, in part, the Doublespeak Award and DQJ publication reflected a dedicated partisanship and leftist ideology that grew independently prior to and after the 1991 Hairston article dustup. Yet, how could the award not contribute to what was considered permissible perspectives and viewpoints in the discipline’s journals?

I believe Hairston was likely aware of these sentiments in part because of concurrent characterizations in rhet/comp scholarship (from 87-89) like self-dubbed critical intellectual Richard Ohmann made when stating (in Lutz 1989) that the Reagan Administration was “a particular group of maniacs” and “the lunatic Right” (97) or Edward White of CSU cynically demeaning the simplistic rhetoric of cars with religious bumper stickers as “heaven-bound chariots” exploited by “public hypocrisies of TV preachers” (61) or Charles Weingartner of USF stating “the stories are endless about how dumb the ordinary American is” (51), culminating in this dismissive gem that

[w]hat adult Americans have inside their heads (as revealed by their theology, their philosophy, their political views, their beliefs about people different from themselves, and their understanding of how their own bodies function) is indistinguishable from the contents of the heads of medieval peasants.

Utter needless disdain to discuss what he considered then-current media deception, dubbing it ‘American Dumb’. His rather accurate point about media deception is sullied by demagoguery - no retraction, no pile-on call and response. Just normal scholarly expression and discourse. Any surprise that Hilary Clinton’s 2016 ‘deplorables’ comment was ever uttered with ‘sophisticated’ insults like these permeating NCTE’s pages? I heard such dismissiveness on the daily in courses from professors and grad students at CSUSB and Virginia Tech from 2018-2022. It has become such an unthinking rhetorical trope in English scholarship to signal your ideological/political correct-think bona fides by Othering or demagoguing your conservative political opponent that UN-Reno linguistics professor Valerie Fridland refers only to Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump, Tony Blair, and Sarah Palin as examples of deceptive and inauthentic speech changes (Like Literally, Dude? 2023). Really? 40 years of recent politics and no liberals or progressives changed their speech habits to woo a crowd? Ah, but when Obama does it, it’s virtuous and respectable code-switching to forge a diverse coalition. Or he’s secretly code-meshing (Young, 2009) to change the linguistic game. His intention is pure. Intelleftuals.

Today, in our English journals and first-year writing scholarship, students unquestioningly parrot this demeaning take on American culture and religion, specifically Christianity, except via ‘sophisticated’ scholarly terms and theories, so one could ironically say of such students that they ‘know not what they do’. Intelleftuals.

Together, the Hairston controversy and Doublespeak Award contribute to the leftist academic-political atmosphere students inherit. Together, they shrank the intellectual space by more narrowly defining acceptable political speech and labeling a viewpoint as linguistically and rhetorically problematic. Does any of this resonate with online speech and cancelations today? The Doublespeak Award and the Hairston article responses are only two ongoing and past instances of a broader demagogic discourse that I will analyze in upcoming articles.

And, in upcoming posts, I’ll explain how my discipline’s journals negatively analyze Republican presidential rhetoric (Bush and Trump) yet positively analyze Democratic presidential rhetoric (Clinton and Obama) or ignore it altogether, further codifying the vitriolic and dismissive rhetoric of the leftist academic-political worldview as normal in the discipline and Othering (demagoguing) a general conservative worldview.

If anything: the Hairston dustup and Doublespeak Award suggest that what happens on campus, DOES NOT stay on campus.

Rhetorical Residue: Normalizing a Leftist (Intelleftual) Worldview

Now, what are the epistemic and cultural effects of this approach, of unquestioningly accepting a demagoguing approach? Such ideologically infused scholarship overtly and subtly shapes the academic discourse and broader cultural discourse as ardent believers shout it proudly while many silently assent, subjugated to its imposition on campus, social media, and in the market.

Now, RCWS is only one discipline, so my Project Luminas research will ultimately remain incomplete relative to its broader hold in academia. Yet tracking the rise of Intelleftualism within one discipline like RCWS provides a model for detecting it in other Humanities and even STEM disciplines. Tracking can help show us what quality of knowledge university students encounter today…and how to engage with it. Here is what I call the epistemic cycle, roughly categorizing how these initially fringe academic ideologies became acceptable, even mainstream, beliefs in America:

1. Theories (1950s-1960s)

2. Established Disciplinary Viewpoints (1970s-1980s)

3. Objective Givens/Truths (1990s-2000s)

4. Myopic Conclusions/Hollow Performance (2010s-today)

We live and work in the tail end of stage 3 and in stage 4 and are reaping the effects personally (DEI trainings, professor firings), politically (Justice Democrats), economically (ESG), and culturally (transgender surgery, distrust in higher ed, K-12). University students rarely approach social justice ideology in stages 1 and 2 today, and because of that, they more rarely learn of the ironically white male European origins of postmodern theory that undergirds so much of today’s woke Intelleftual worldview.

If only they knew…

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

As an applied linguist, ESL instructor, compositionist, and rhetoric scholar, I study not only how we use language but also how language uses us.

The Associationary logo of seemingly random red dots represents the our personal use of words and word patterns we use on a daily basis. They reflect and even shape our linguistic approach to the world as well as our identity. And, using tools and methods from corpus studies, digital text-mining analysis, and discourse analysis, I can discern patterns amidst the seemingly random. How language uses us.

What is harder to see is our distinct, personal, idiosyncratic use of those terms or how we use language.

Hence Associationary.

Association + Dictionary

A dictionary based on my lived associations?

While some might argue that dictionaries create language, they arguably capture language already in use. That said, a dictionary represents a monumental historical human achievement of attention to detail and linguistic prowess, as Samuel Johnson was certainly familiar with, as were any people involved in creating the Oxford English Dictionary (like James Murray or W.C. Minor, or even J.R.R. Tolkien who entered ‘w’ entries into the OED in the 1920s). Then the urban dictionary was created to collect colloquial language that traditional dictionaries don’t immediately recognize or accept.

But, what about our own personal usage of the language? Who is capturing that fundamental dimension of language usage? Associationary will (or will attempt to).

Via Associationary posts, predominantly about English, we will explore the concealed linguistic and experiential diversity perpetually in our presence whenever we interact with people around us. People we think we know so well. We will see how often we ‘lie in a nonmoral [Nietzschean] sense’, and how we can begin today to understand the neglected rich diversity in our homes, neighborhoods, and communities. And, because of new lived experiences and novel associations, the very same words we’ve known all our lives will inevitably take on new definitions, senses, and associations.

Our distinct and vast associations with shared words comprise what I like to think of as our personalized linguistic fingerprint. Such vastness is why word games like Scattergories, Pun Intended, or Listography even hilariously work in the first place.

Upcoming Associationary Entries

While any Luminas reader can (and should!) reply with their own associational entry in response to my Associationary posts, any paid subscriber can also recommend words I should post so you can help direct this informal research effort. Via your contributions, we will build a personalized dictionary and more completely see how language can conceal or reveal the vastness of our human experiences. And, if language divides us, maybe this can give us pause enough to agree with, tolerate, marvel at, or even unify.

A history scholar, Katherine Mohrmann, argues1 that when anticipating what a scholar might find in a community or archive, it is wise to accept that:

what we may find in them is not what we expect, that the materials we encounter have the potential to unravel our narratives, undermine our investments, and wreak havoc on our intellectual stability (155).

So, get ready for your understanding of familiar words to be enriched and unraveled. And join me if you wish by commenting on future posts!

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My Generalist, Integrated Remedy for Mitigating Misunderstanding

I’ve now spent over a decade studying, training, teaching, and researching in 3 disciplines: applied linguistics, English composition, and rhetoric and writing studies. Each offers me a unique perspective for solving language problems in the real world, or solving real-world problems via improved communication practice. This interdisciplinary approach might be called a generalist or integrated perspective that makes novel connections across related or disparate domains of knowledge possible. David Epstein might call this range. Or at least, I’d like to think so.

Through applied linguistics since 2012, I have helped college students and second-language English speakers acquire new languages. It’s not a stretch to say that I can help you acquire the written and phonetic structures of any of the 7,000 languages that exist in our world today. From English composition, I help students acquire academic discourse and practice research methods. Whether it’s drafting a critical analysis, or conducting discourse analysis, I help university students build new knowledge in rigorous, technical, and scientific ways. From rhetoric and writing studies, I can teach the history of writing and how changing modes and genres and technologies shape us rhetorically every time we text, post online, or get dressed for the day.

Everything is rhetorical because everything we do communicates a message of some kind to someone for a specific purpose. Language can start or end conflicts; in the least, language and writing shape the conflicts, and shape us, too. From the vantage point of all 3 fields of study, not to mention my BA in English literature (2010), I see how every discipline or culture, business or person, uses language and writing in its own distinct way. I also see why, because of rhetoric, ideology, discourse, and language itself, each specialized discipline, culture, or person talks past each other.

We fundamentally talk past each other, even when sharing the same language, in part because of the very confounding and constraining structure of language. More fundamentally, we misunderstand each other regularly, daily, and with seemingly increased frequency via social media…directly because of the shared nature of language words to describe unique and singular instances, people, things, etc. This is the case not least because scholars estimate English contains between 600,000 to 1 million words (including unused, outdated words). Or because the average native English speaker knows 20,000 to 30,000 of the 170,000 common words in current use. But, it’s because we share everyday domestic or workplace words to navigate getting out of bed, eating, and working, thus concealing distinctions and deceiving ourselves into easy epistemic comfort so that “language is the house of being” (Heidegger). So, the 7,000 meaning-making systems we call language help us connect our otherwise imperceptible subjective perceptions of external and internal worlds with others.

Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche points out in On Lying in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), we ironically sacrifice a measure of distinctness and complexity when we rely on words to form intelligible concepts and connect with people. We average unique experiences into a generalized, taxonimized form or concept. He argued that via language:

we make unequal things equal (lns. 98-112)

He uses a leaf and the word ‘leaf’ to illustrate. He means to say that no two leaves are materially the same, yet our word ‘leaf’ conceals their distinct natures from their obvious visible appearance so that we humans pass them and do not notice them. This is due to categorical knowledge facilitated by the shared word leaf we associated with that leaf and leafy shape formed in our minds via past memories. Two people with the same first and last names on Facebook may appear equal yet obviously signify totally different people, bodies, lives, histories, and profiles that are unequal in almost every way. We speak through language, yet language speaks through us too. Imperfectly so…

Lastly, during a conversation, if someone doesn’t challenge or oppose our use of a word, then we immediately proceed as if they accepted our definition of it. This all happens in a split second. They assent to our version of it, and us to theirs unless someone disagrees or asks for clarification. Such disagreement reveals we aren’t just arguing differing definitions, we are arguing reverberated past associations based on distinctly lived experiences; lived experiences so profoundly diverse that it’s a mystery to me we agree on any meanings or definitions of shared words at all. Richards’s abridgement of the context (misunderstanding via dead metaphors) resonates with this concept of past associations, and Bakhtin likewise speaks to them thru dialogic heteroglossia (misunderstanding via thousands of past threads of meaning, accent, social status, cultural context, etc.) whereas Aristotle’s enthymeme (misunderstanding via remote premises that don’t connect w/conclusion) also speaks to past associations.

So, my poster shows how language works by demonstrating how language doesn’t work.

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OMCC and the RIDL Model

To visualize how the language patterns we use work against us as much for us, or paradoxically produce misunderstanding by clarifying and concealing via lived associations, I created the poster above titled The Origins of Misunderstanding or Common Communication (OMCC). In this model, I present 4 communicative filters through which we misunderstand - or differently understand - an event or speech utterance (from mundane personal conversations to political addresses).

The 4 Filters are:

1. Rhetoric

2. Ideology

3. Discourse

4. Language Structure Limits

Together, they constitute the RIDL of Misunderstanding. Sounds kinda cool, right? All the more because the acronym was quite accidental. I could configure them in several orders worth discussing later. For now, this one works well.

Languages contain thousands of words and patterns to learn and acquire, and they afford us interpersonal/collective understanding and constrain us (generalize differences). Discourse uses language in particular patterns to combine with or express identity. Ideology represents ideas that appear in speech that are yet unrealized or interpreted quite inaccurately from reality. An ideograph nicely represents how multiple rhetors can easily use an ideogram (shared word) for such vastly different purposes (war, equity, God, etc.). Rhetoric describes the more conscious use of or application of communicative moves to effectively persuade or identify with interlocutors as formed within previous determining filters (ideology, discourse, language).

Via millions of past associations present at any one time, any utterance carries the potential for endless combinations of new associations: for endless understandings and misunderstandings. Can this model somehow predict what associations will be assented to or win out (if I can use machine learning and natural language processing…maybe)? It can at least provide an analyst the means to create a quite comprehensive or more complete account of why misunderstanding occurred in any given situation.

In short: misunderstanding is fundamental to our personal, professional, and national conversations. That we achieve clarity at all is nothing short of a miracle. And I use this RIDL model to mitigate unnecessary misunderstanding and reduce the impact of incomplete knowledge in communication, as I did here and here to explain how American corporate media used one word - ‘parent’ - as they covered 2021 parent protests of K-12 school policies in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, Virginia.

Read my description and rationale of the OMCC poster below; otherwise, please share this, comment, and subscribe.

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The OMCC Poster

You’ll notice a vertical vanilla bar that effectively separates the poster into a third section to its right and a two-thirds section to its left. To its right appears a red explosion-shaped object I labeled Event/Speech Act. I think the red explosion subconsciously represents any word or event at all but also the concept of trigger words or microaggressions so common to our cancel culture era.

Productive Rhetorical Responses (PRR) are contained in a white font in the shape of a vertical half-circle almost as though multiple productive angles and approaches could be used, or are required, to most completely understand the red event/speech act. I wanted this red to contrast sharply with the gray-blue scale behind it to signify how we commonly focus on what is said without understanding why it is said. All the dark blue font to the left is divided into 4 Filter columns: rhetoric, ideology, discourse, and language structural limits. I bordered each column’s title in red to subtly signify its interpretive and constructive connection to the red explosion speech act or event.

The Event/Speech Act, the Filters, and the PRRs complete the cultural context that constructs the event from the observer or participant’s perspective. By placing the act off-centered to the right of the poster, it visually attempts to depict just how much of our preceding linguistic pasts via discourse, ideology, and rhetoric inform and construct every speech event. I believe there is no utterance that has not been influenced by aspects of prior linguistic history or lived human experience. When multiple people are present, multiple splintered, branching pasts convene to comprehend, in fact create, what is said at present. Linguistic forms, rhetorical genres, modes, and fluency all collide or flow. Inherited linguistic structures from an iterative, Jackson Pollok-esque mesh of Unrealized Linguistics Constructors. Our past linguistic selves (and ancestors) constructed future linguistic probabilities and confusion as much as understanding, an inheritance we forward so profoundly ignorant of the vast multitudinous connections and associations every utterance contains and makes.

No wonder rhetoric can be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies.

In upcoming posts, I will explain each column and profile each linguist or theorist and their RIDL-relevant term. I’ll even introduce my 3rd subproject: Associationary.

Recall in Part 1 of this media case study, I showed how 40 articles presented ideological versions of reality, of parents protesting in Loudoun County, Virginia. Textual patterns (like word instances and quotation ratios) emerged among the 8 Left articles showing parents as an out-group to be ignored while 8 Right articles depicted parents as an in-group to be defended. The Left also identified teachers, administrators, and Critical Race Theory as in-group while the Right slightly identified administrators as the out-group. These are not definitive conclusions to generalize all Left or Right media in all circumstances, simply results based on assessing articles written about this 2021 rhetorical situation.

I can also highlight demagogic patterns in media through a powerful rhetorical device for detecting framing known as terministic screens.

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In Language as a Symbolic Action (1966), rhetorician Kenneth Burke argues that any discourse, any story, description, or web of terms (“woman,” “suburban,” “white,” etc.) must act as a terministic screen–that it frames an issue to reveal parts of it while necessarily concealing other parts of it (D’Angelo et al. 2009; Kuypers 2002, 2013). In terms of digital news, any article’s news lede constitutes a screen of literally written terms that draw our attention. Burke notes there is a dual nature to these screens: they are both a surface upon which our perceptions and images can be projected and also objects that block our view of all contributing elements. Like a coin, both of these aspects come into play as we view one side of the coin while this first side blocks our view of the ‘back’ side. As a result, the issue framed by a set of terms is inevitably changed:

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality. (45)

For example, in quoting 45 political and school officials and only 1 parent, the Left selects a version of the Loudoun County school issue that emphasizes Critical Race Theory and the perspective of officials while decidedly deflecting or erasing the perspective of parents. Conversely, the Lean Left, Lean Right, and Right cover both parents and officials at more balanced ratios.

The same principle holds true for each of the 5 ideological columns because which words each chooses will never fully encapsulate everything that the reality is and can be. That’s the selection aspect. The deflection aspect is also important to note, because while our own brains tempt us to think we’re being shown all there is, what limited amount we see distracts us from the rest. These language-induced expectations in turn limit what we allow ourselves to know about the issue, in Wittgenstein’s terms:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world1

I believe our bodies (eyes, ears, etc.) mediate reality and knowledge as does language. However, his point that language shapes what we can see and know at any given moment about lived experiences is well taken: look at Twitter/X and cancel culture. Each ideological view of the 2021 parent protests demonstrates how the media limit what we can know about the event.

Although I know the world exists independent of the words I use to describe it, my body being the primary mediating material through which I accomplish that, Burke’s rhetorical terministic screen powerfully demonstrates the Wittgensteinian limits of language to portray reality and experience.

That’s because - first off - news sources, no matter the ideology, optimize their publication space and thus can only tell so much of an event. Second, mix in the selective and deflective limits of language, and it’s a recipe for incompleteness and misunderstanding. Third, add in our natural acceptance of certain news sources as authoritative because they confirm our biases (they wouldn’t lie to me!), and our subjective perceptions/biases are confirmed via naïve realism as naturalized given truths. And, fouth, if an outlet or ideology does not perspective-shift, then it can easily universalize their limited perceptions, believing they falsely have a direct untarnished perception of the world. And hence demagoguery. And this is so easy because, as Burke observes, no outlet or ideology escapes the selective/deflective conditioning of terministic screens:

We must use terministic screens, since we can’t say anything without the use of terms (50).

And in the disembodied textual world of news articles, terministic screens represent the precise limits of saying and knowing anything about the world beyond our embodied, lived realities. Ok, enough theory, let me show you the linguistics limits each ideology imposed on its readers in 2021.

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The Limits of Each Ideological Terministic Screen

Let’s look at how each ideological terministic screen distributes 4 demagogic terms from Part 1 relative to each other: parents, conservative, Republican, and CRT/Critical Race Theory. We can combine several other terms to see distinct distributions, yet I chose these 4 terms to further illustrate how these 8 Left articles presented their demagogic speech to readers.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Left outlets:

I am 6 times more likely to read the terms CRT and Critical Race Theory than parent and 3 times more likely to read political terms like conservative and Republican than parent. Combined with the fact that the Left quotes 45 officials and only 1 parent, clearly officials are selected while parents are deflected here.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Lean Left outlets:

Here you would read parent much more often than CRT/Critical Race Theory while the share of political terminology (28%) remains equal to the Left (30%). Result: much higher selection of parents and CRT focus cut in half from Left.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Center outlets:

Here, political word selection is mildly toned down from Left and Lean Left while CRT and parent receive a mild boost of 3-4 points in their respective share of the terministic screen than Lean Left.

What I would read of the protests if I only read Lean Right outlets:

Here, focus on CRT increases significantly from Lean Left and Center while maintaining focus on parents yet halving political terminology. If one’s ideology is difficult to identify, then is it ideological for Lean Right to barely mention the terms which they use to identify themselves? In other words, is it then demagogic of the Left to inordinately use political terms to politically/ideologically identify those who it thinks responsible for the protests (political activists)? Is the Left leading with a binary paired term about who is really fomenting the parent protests?

What I would read of the protests if I only read Right outlets:

This Right terministic screen presents nearly identical percentages with the Left outlets yet with stark term distribution contrast: Right gives 65% focus on parents whereas Left allocates 60% focus on CRT; Right gives 24% focus to CRT yet Left gives 30% focus to political terms; and Right gives 11% focus to political terms and Left gives 10% to parents. This means the Left distributes 90% of these terms to CRT and political words whereas the Right distributes 89% to parents and CRT. The Right mentions CRT the least of all 5 ideological columns yet mentions parents the most by 20 percentage points from the nearest ideology (Center) and 6.5 times higher than the least mentioning ideology (Left at 10%).

What this means is the Left articles spent their publication space barely discussing parents who are the very actors that generated the protest phenomenon in the first place in 2019 and 2020 before the governor’s race drew national political and media attention to it in 2021. One aspect to mention is that the Left seems to attempt to counter right-wing Fox News representation of CRT and Critical Race Theory and conservatives like Christopher Rufo, Asra Nomani, and Ian Prior. Being oriented toward countering what it perceives as CRT misinformation from its Right may justifiably account for why the Left and Lean Left word distributions and instances so heavily select CRT, ideological descriptors, and officials yet deflect parents. Understandable to a degree. Regardless of whether parents organically began the protests or political stunts began it, the Left presents it one way while other outlets present it differently by quoting parents and mentioning parents more. One could say these 8 Left articles just ignored parents and their concerns to focus on relevant contextual details. Yet the story that all 40 articles reported is about the Loudoun County parents and their protesting. Without them, there is no story.

In Burke’s terms, the Left overwhelmingly selects officials and abstract theory and deflects parents. On the other hand, the Right overwhelmingly selects parents and deflects ideological and political descriptors like conservative and Republican. The Right’s relative omission of these political terms perhaps reflects a right-wing ideology that identifies protestors views’ as its own and as authentic nonpolitical concerns to be described in fuller exposure. Sharing the views as the parents, identifying them as conservatives is redundant. Therefore, they can describe parents in many other terms. Is the Right perhaps demagoguing here? I believe so. In other words, we can see the media demagogue this issue because of the differing terministic screens they employ: the Left sees the officials and theory as their own while the Right sees parents as their own.

Terministic Screens and Correlation to National Trends

This corresponds to major demographic shifts in the national parties: Democrats shifting away from working class to elite concerns whereas Republicans in the last decade have garnered increased working-class vote share. In his April 2022 Substack post, How to Fix the Democratic Brand, American political scientist and liberal, Ruy Teixeira, elaborated the point:

[The Democratic Party] is now thoroughly out of touch with its working class roots and completely dominated by college-educated professionals, typically in big metropolitan areas and university towns and typically younger. These are the people that fill the ranks of media, nonprofits, foundations, and the infrastructure of the Democratic party. They speak their own language and highlight the issues that most animate their commitments to ‘social justice’ (my emphasis).

This case study shows how much the Left, occupied by journalists who have overwhelmingly been educated within CRT and antiracist-friendly liberal and progressive programs over the last 2 decades, would likely focus on CRT and more likely identify with it to explain and defend it as their own worldview rather than focus on parent voices and concerns. The demagogic Us/Them thinking appears in their fixation on CRT/Critical Race Theory and deflection of parents.

Via a simple text-mining analysis thru demagoguery and terministic screens, we can more completely account for which version of reality we consume when we read news. Remember terministic screens when you read the news today.

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As promised in my Digigoguery introduction post, I am posting my attempt at assessing the complex demagoguery in digital news articles surrounding a single news event: Fairfax and Loudoun County parent protests in from 2019 to 2021. In Part I, I am showing here how specific media articles simply characterize parents via Binary Us/Them Thinking and Naive Realism. In Part 2, I then use Kenneth Burke’s terministic screens to illuminate the media’s ideological patterns. My main question is: as a voter and reader of what was available to me in late 2021, what would I learn from media about the protesting parents?

A Little Background:

I conducted the first analysis of these articles in a Fall 2021 doctoral course on Modern Rhetoric. In the seminar paper, I applied Patricia Roberts-Miller’s demagoguery definition as a framework for understanding how 40 media articles portrayed the protesting parents. At that time, I was (and still am) a father of 4 K-8 girls (now aged 5-12) in Virigina and began to read some 2021 articles that depicted parents as ignorant. And worse. I became curious, and though I didn’t live in Fairfax or Loudoun County, I wanted to know how the media represented people like me to the broader national public.

My Method

For this post, I selected 8 articles from each of the 5 ideological bias columns found in the Allsides.com Media Bias Chart (Figure 1), 40 articles total. Each outlet that had at least 1 article included in this study is boxed in green on the bias chart (below). I found each article by searching ‘Loudoun County’ and ‘parents’ in the Bing search engine. I’m sure Google would have returned different search results to a certain extent. I chose to only focus on how the media depicted parent protests at schools in Fairfax and Loudoun counties from 2019 (when the first small protests started) until November 2021, and these articles were the available consumable content about this issue at the time. I’ll list links to all 40 articles at the end of the final post so you can read them and conclude their level of demagoguery for yourself if you wish.

After scraping all the text from each of the 40 articles, I pasted each article’s text into one of 5 documents representing the corresponding ideological Allsides column to which its outlet belonged (Huffington Post – Left). I conducted a simple ‘ctrl + F’ search for every instance in which the ideological category’s outlets used the term parents to observe whether and to what extent LCPS parents were even discussed (Table 1).

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4 Critical Demagoguery Data Points

I argue the Left articles demagogued parents most (as ideological/political out-group) in 4 ways while the Right also does so, yet to a lesser degree:

1. 23 instances of the term parent in Left articles totaled only 7% of all 332 parent instances (Figure 2)

2. Left articles quoted 45 political or institutional officials and only 1 parent – a 45:1 ratio (Figures 3 and 4)

3. The Left articles mention the term conservative the most at 39 instances, 4x more than the Right column and 6x more than the Lean Right column (Figure 5)

4. The Left mentions CRT 44 times and Critical Race Theory 90 times (Figure 6)

When discussing how much representation protesting Loudoun County parents received in online media coverage, the answer would be not much (Fig. 4). However, while each ideological column quoted parents much less than officials (Fig. 3), the Lean Left and Lean Right each quoted 10 parents while the Right quoted the most at 13 parents.

By quoting 45 officials and only 1 parent, Figure 3 shows the Left includes perspectives from everyone but parents: school board members, political nonprofit groups, board member spokespersons, political candidates, teachers, etc. In fact, the Left articles quote officials to parents at a ratio of 45:1. If I only read the Left, then I would know little of what parents thought, and I might even suspect that these parents were certainly politically partisan, manipulated, ignorant, and not genuine in their concerns. We can visualize these ratios differently:

We can summarize these ratios here:

Despite the Center quoting officials the least and parents second-to-last, the Left, again, overwhelmingly quotes officials over parents and uses the term conservative the most to describe the people involved in this Loudoun County parent protest. Since no one else uses liberal or progressive nearly as much to describe the protest, then we must begin to conclude that the Left has framed or seen this event in a unique way.

The Lean Left overmentions parents 124 times and presents the political party binary of Democrats and Republicans more than all other columns combined. But that is largely the result of discussing a survey where respondents identified with either party. The Lean Right, on the other hand, underperforms in this binary by barely mentioning Democrat or Republican. In addition to barely mentioning conservative with zero progressive instances, it seems Lean Right sticks to mentioning parents as parents. As initial evidence of demagoguery, the Right mentions Democrat more than Republican and the Left mentions Republican more than Democrat, a function of who they choose to focus on (more on that in Part 2).

Here, the Left sticks to covering total CRT/Critical Race Theory instances more than other columns, even though CRT acronym instances are on par with Lean Right and Right. And reading the articles reveals they are trying to define CRT, defend it, and even paradoxically argue it is and is not in schools in an effort to dismiss parent concern over opposition to its teachings as merely politically motivated by conservative shadow groups and funding.

I began to see how the Left approached the parent protests by quoting officials and discussing an academic theory that was one concern among others (transgender rape cover up, mask policies, vaccine mandates, school closures, etc.). If you read the articles, they are trying to argue that political operatives injected opposition to CRT and antiracism, and not parents. I don’t think they make the case, at leats not initially. Even if they did make that case, the nonparent emphasis remains, presenting a politically and ideologically demagogued discourse to its readers.

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Summary

This study presents recognizable categories into which parents have been placed (conservative, Republican) that function as markers of undesirable and desirable qualities and values. Yet, moreso by the Left outlets, these qualities and values function as foils to narrate an outlet’s own sense of virtue and virtuous identity, to guide readers to identify the in-group and out-group in this protest event. From the sampled media sources, the initial findings demonstrate that all sources demagogue, yet those on the Left demagogue parents the most as an out-group, scapegoating them and conservative media, viewing officials like teachers and school administrators as an in-group needing protection whereas the Right demagogues the parents as an in-group needing protection and school administrators as out-group. You would not be mistaken in thinking we were reading about two different events here...

Part 2 coming soon…

One year into my Ph.D. in September 2021, I typed 25 stanzas on September 20^th and 21^st in our garage…into my Notes app. Not intending to write a poem, the ideas just…flowed. Word patterns coalesced into rhymes. Lost complete track of time. Composed now of over 30 stanzas, it viscerally describes the campus-imposed identity crisis and pressure I’d felt for 7 years in 2 graduate programs and my FT/PT academic jobs. In the coming months, I’ll explain each stanza’s allusions and specific references. Overall, it captures the cynicism and disillusionment I unexpectedly came to feel on college campuses from 2015 til 2021 (and that I still feel today, though I have hope).

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Once I wrote this in 2021, I realized I had accepted and grew numb to regular insults and sophisticated bigotry passing as scholarship and acceptable classroom discourse: ranging from the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-rural, anti-white, anti-male, to the anti-American and anti-Mormon. If I merely hinted I dissented from the prevailing socially just belief by asking a penetrating question about some limitation or flaw in a method or theory, I was immediately castigated as white supremacist, a backward thinking bigot “from Kansas”, and just plain ignorant. An unbeliever. A heretic. English Studies: a once subversive discipline, now conformist.

Where I was once encouraged to find the gaps in scholarly research and identify the unobvious realities of our society and world, to disconfirm assumptions and hypotheses, I was now discouraged from doing so. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that after a few years of this, I eventually put my head down, took the cue to shut my mouth rather than ignite the classroom inquisition, and directed my ‘divergent’ thinking to my personal journals where I wrote in silent isolation.

But no longer. This poem voices those silent moments. Replying to the subtle bigotry of smooth demagoguery.

Killing all our consciences
waking to new discourses
Is there no counterweight
to dispel Critical hate?
Dogma and orthodoxy
don’t permit the moxy
Of marginal agency
and heterodoxy

Filled with our self-scorn, we are now reborn
Convicted of all our guilt, do whatever thou wilt
For thine is the kingdom and the Power and the 1619 story

Question you’re majoritarian?
you must be contrarian, or at least republican
Blinded by your privilege and your ‘hard work’
Becoming a Racist jerk

A pandemic of perceptions
We progress to deceptions
Of verbal virtuosity
By Experts with their guarantees
While collecting all their fees
But they do not know me
My individuality

That’s the true minority
Professor, don’t you see
Don’t tell me who to be
With your ‘learned’ authority
Knowing what is good for me
While you commit perceptual perjury
And say Their body needs surgery

I will speak for myself
Put your hatred on the shelf
You took the givens and the truths
Yet you still call us rubes
when we don’t get your truths
Bout how all I have is ill-gotten
When facts make your theory rotten

You use Saussure to be so sure
That what you mean does not demean
yet even Derrida can not unravel
Truths from your progressive gavel
In this courthouse of new culture
Where the past is prosecutor

In this Church I hear the chatter
That intention does not matter
Let’s use Nietzsche as the teachuh
Cuz let’s face it, you da preachuh
In this seminary, jokingly
We still call a university

He said our man-made categories
Only tell man’s silly stories
Whether science or religion
It’s all metaphors we live in

As we classroom-congregate
About your theories contemplate
one thing you do Dissimulate
The reality that is self-hate

For although said by Burke
in Identification did lurk
conflict and division,
Yet in intersectional DEI-vision
If you’re not left, then you’re alt-right
The purity contained alright
And all the rest is garbage
According to categorical verbiage.

None of your truth is fickle
Cuz it’s made by the hammer and sickle
Cutting and dividing
Making us wary
As you deconstruct platonic binary
Yet impose a new duality
A ‘liberating’ metaphor
Of oppressed and oppressor

Designing dichotomy
To see all this leprosy
White skin the sinful scales
Of minoritarian tales

Is this distressing?
Then you’re multiply oppressing
Sit with your discomfort
feel the systemic hurt
Th’only source of your unease
To be absolved on your knees
Confess your culpability
To remake society

Now with hierarchical authority
You demand conformity
Choking rhizomatic reality
With your will to power
Atop your ‘non-ivory’ ivory tower
Eradicating the viewpoint flower
Castigating all who cower

Got the wrong identity?

Get back in your category
Maintain the partisan Purity
While we accrue Assurity
Drunk on our authority
Derived from a tautology

Where if I say I’m not racist
Then I am for sure racist
On this Kafka trap basis
Rests my social stasis:
absence for safe spaces

For the truths you do spout
Carry institutional clout
Compelling belief and assent
Denying conscious dissent

Buried Neath your Bigotry
Guilt-based geometry
Shaping not comity
But truthful triggernometry
And normative heresy
Effects of critical pedogogy

Without a hermeneutics of suspicion
You demand total contrition
To a subjective Universal
A dominant Reversal
A turn without difference
Compelling semantic silence
Quashing innate intelligence

What was true is no longer
Yet for Truth you still hunger
Where to not be white
Is to be in the right
And to not be a Dem
Is to not be a victim
Making skin-folk
The Kin folk no longer
And likeness of whiteness
as true as the Lochness

When they cackle
Like a Jekkyl
You better Hyde
Unless like Handsel and Grettel
Your outside will be their inside
Their Truth Appetite satisfied
Racial Definitions gon be bona fide
In Kendi they are codified
Civil rights become denied
Smoking all that Democrack
don’t vote Biden? you ain’t black
Only one key Demo-graphic
Givin donkeys DC traffic
Truth is, South went west and east
That’s the nature of this beast

You oppose social justice?
Then you’re Them, not Us
Unclean white supremacist
Blind to being antiracist

We who see all bigotry
Whiteness on the daily
A cultural commodity
that’s in punctuality
Any kind of normalcy

And that’s now normal, see?

State your name and pronouns
Confess for all to see
Your oppressive villainy
Borne of your biology
And cultural patriarchy
To claim your debased renown
Believe Us to liberate
Others from their fate
Forged from he/him hate
So verbally self-flagellate
State your name and pronouns

We only heard your name
Don’t evade the shame
All men are to blame
Your conscience We will claim
State your Pronouns.

And claim your role
In being Omni-culpable
- This is all I’m good for
A male scapegoated savior

Using the Good Book
To be anti-Christ
A conceptual crook
For a cultural heist

Take our great MA
A 4.0 gpa
for a Ph.D
A novel new study
A research award
And be rest assured -
Not recommended

Missing a ref’rence
on final draft revision
Insufficient def’rence
To the One True vision
Desks all in a line?
You we will confine -
Not recommended

A rhetoric is a set of rules that attempts to naturalize – an ideology – to make one particular arrangement of economic, social, and political conditions appear to be inevitable and ineluctable, inscribed in the very nature of things

-James Berlin (Rhetoric Review, 1988)

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If you’ve noticed leftist rhetoric in academia and media seeking to naturalize certain concepts, like ignoring sexual biology in favor of transgenderism in K-12 schools or using the antiracist term whiteness to describe racial disparities, then you have stumbled upon what rhetoric and writing scholar James Berlin (1942-1994) referred to as rhetoric and ideology - words (CRT and media) and behavior (DEI and ESG officers) - to make obscure academic concepts seem inevitable and part of the very nature of reality: top-down, trickle-down superimposition of the highly theorized version of reality that overwhelmingly skews from reality.

For example, my discipline supposedly speaks for minorities, yet it excoriates or ignores black conservatives while Pew research and Gallup surveys repeatedly show only 3-4% of Hispanics would use the ‘emancipating’ academic term Latinx to initiate their supposed liberation from oppression. It claims to promote ethnic diversity yet lacks a theory and gauge for assessing the ethical impact of its theories on minority students and white people who don’t conform to or express their socially just cultural white roles. This dehumanizing drama often comes off as cultural cosplay as we all try on, and are compelled to try on, reductivist guilt-induced versions of ourselves that bear no resemblance to our lived realities.

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In Intelleftuals, I will also discuss their debilitating impact on me personally because no one in my courses approached our theories with an approach to disconfirm the theories or simply question their premises and justifications…or their effects on people. Being gaslit and derided for my physical appearance as a white male, as the villain of all the problems the scholarship identified in society, was an ostracizing, mind-forged manacle that depressed my motivation and spirit for research and being enrolled in my Ph.D.. Not only did students and professors not question the theories, they berated my attempts to offer alternate explanations and disconfirming data for racial and gender disparities other than systemic discrimination in society, for instance.

The common social justice, intersectional, queer, antiracist approach to reality and scholarship I observed does not welcome or permit disconfirmation. In fact, inasmuch as disconfirmation is associated with objectivity, and objectivity with dominant colonial and patriarchal narratives about American society, disconfirmation and objectivity are considered to be manifestations of whiteness. According to Berlin’s definition of ideology, my peers argued their narratives were not just liberating but speaking to the very nature of things. Naturalizing. If anything was oppressive, emotionally and intellectually, it was their guilt-based narratives of me.

Their racially essentialized definitions of me lowered my sense of self-worth and efficacy, decreased my motivation to research at an R1 institution, weakened my desire to be in academia, and made me incredibly cynical about the discipline. I had to silence myself on a daily basis, scrub my arguments of any hint of dissension, reconfigure myself in order to make it through any discussion because I couldn’t challenge a theory without epithets being thrown at me. As close to doublethink and Newspeak as I have ever come in my life. Who would willingly invite verbal harassment on a daily basis? How was I to learn how to teach rhetoric and writing when ad hominem fallacies were how my arguments were to be engaged with by doctoral students and professors? Everything we read could only prove social justice in their minds. Could only conclude the antiracist way. I could not identify as the Latter-day Saint Christian I was my whole life but as a culpable caucasian - that’s how I was to center my identity during the Ph.D. never mind having done so over several years at other campuses and found the theory wanting.

If you know anyone who might resonate with what I am describing, and if they are attending university this Fall, then please share this post with them. I’m about to begin my dissertation after two grueling years of courses on top of 2 previous years of grad courses at CSUSB. Having been a graduate student in 3 degrees since 2012 until now, this project is something of a graduate student’s guide to surviving the stifling nature of campus culture in the Humanities at least. As a parent of 4 K-12 girls, this will also serve as a parent’s guide to understanding what your kids and undergraduate students are exposed to in school.

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Intellectual as Occupation

In Intellectuals and Society (2011), Thomas Sowell defines an intellectual as an occupational description rather than a label or title (6). Seeing intellectuals as an occupation opens a discussion of their impact on broader society in addition to campus culture and distinguishes between obscure intellectuals and public intellectuals, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Noam Chomsky, or Robin DeAngelo. While easier to discuss the historical and current public intellectuals and the impacts of their specific ideas and societal solutions, I will discuss the work of the unread everyday intellectual that often escapes public scrutiny because no one reads their work unless you’re like me and you’re in the discipline reading articles behind journal database paywalls. It is in the work of the everyday scholar that we will see how the ‘naturalizing’ intelleftual rhetoric took shape over decades in my discipline, students’ minds, and campus culture.

What is an Intelleftual?

Intelleftuals is my portmanteau of ‘left’ and ‘intellectual’ to describe the impact of the established ideology that emerged from the imbalanced ratio of liberals and progressive faculty to conservative faculty in English (48:1) and other humanities disciplines (Langbert 2018) - and that many university students are exposed to and invariably absorb. That’s Berlin’s naturalizing effect at scale of the everyday intellectual as opposed to the effect of the public or famous intellectual.

This Intelleftual subproject will explore the decades-long attempts to naturalize academic rhetoric and ideology within my English Studies discipline and American society. I will also narrate my ongoing experience within this setting beginning with my version of an English Studies research method known as counterstory methodology and an academic poem in the next post.

Digital Demagoguery. Or the divisive Us vs. Them mentality as a discursive communication strategy and less the work of a single demagogue. Siloed information by corporate media and social media algorithms feeds our identity unless somehow disrupted or disfigured. And, I have some more bad news: if we use language, then we all demagogue (not necessarily often or always). Really.

Demagoguery referred, in my mind, to a person manipulating a crowd. Meaning I knew they were saying obvious falsehoods, exhibiting or inhabits ‘bad’ qualities, appealing to populism, and pandering to the crowd through emotion and passionate speech. Yet, these metrics don’t exactly help me see when I was being misled but only when others are being misled.

But, I have some good news. While I am under no illusion that this substack may not change broad public discourse, I believe investigating the media’s and our own use of media can disfigure our curated certainties if we examine how language and demagoguery operate in our posts, our lives, etc. by revealing how we too easily ourselves demagogue. One post at a time, one daily use of media. One approach changed. Demagoguery is present in media and political discourse in spades, of course, but can we identify it in ourselves?

Article Summary:

• Digigoguery means digital media foment Us/Them mentality

• Digigoguery is a communication culture we engage in via language and social media usage

• Corporate media share incomplete information via the rumor incentive

• Frame-check, not Fact-check, to disfigure our Us/Them communication patterns

• What the Digigoguery logo means

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Anytime you read corporate news or social media posts, remember each is creating knowledge for you to consume. A few hundred or thousands of people employed in corporate newsrooms create what millions read. What are their selection methods and beliefs and the quality of their knowledge? We see every day how corporate media present differing versions and valuations of the very same events and people. I call this cornucopia of news MediaMart where corporations pack the ‘shelves’ with catchy chyrons and misleading ledes to compete for our attention.

To me, the news is no less than limited, biased knowledge backed by deep financial incentives.

Their proprietary rumor propagation models, and minute-by-minute news cycle, precipitate the sharing of deeply incomplete information, or the Fog of News. In Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content (2015), Craig Silverman identifies this practice in journalism as the rumor incentive: share the earliest version of a story with the least amount of information as quickly as possible to attract eyes to our ads and generate more clicks than our competitors. We know the common adage that runs something like “lies travel halfway around the world before the truth straps its boots on”. But what to do about the common media practice of pushing simply incomplete information at scale over hundreds of news outlets and within bias-confirming social media silos?

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Let me define demagoguery before I go too far.

From a Spring 2021 Ph.D. course on modern rhetoric, we discussed how Patricia Roberts-Miller (RM) defines demagoguery as a culture of discourse where deliberation about policy via arguments is replaced by arguments about identity wherein we ‘solve’ our societal problems by scapegoating some out-group. In Digigoguery, I apply her definition to digital contexts because it centers on the ways we accept demagoguery not just by how we easily find it in others. Our acceptance of certain social and corporate media ‘news’ unwittingly drives demagoguery. RM posits that when we rely on any of the following to make our arguments, then our conversations engage in demagoguery:

• binary paired terms (us/them; in-group/out-group scapegoating)

• naive realism (my subjective beliefs are unbiased, objective facts)

• projection (I condemn corruption, ergo, I’m not corrupt)

• apocalyptic metanarratives (my group faces extermination, compromise is disloyal)

Does any of this identity-based argumentation sound familiar? Because Others are faulty and not Me, My policies and conclusions are right and There’s are definitely wrong? Like speaking in broad terms about liberals v. conservatives, Democrats v. Republicans, elites v. deplorables, my opponent will end democracy, democracy is about to end, white supremacy v. black sanctity, etc. Now, none of these characteristics denies that people are threatened or that injustice occurs, it just reflects how we go about problematically and unnecessarily simplifying complex conditions to sidestep deliberation.

That scapegoating can occur by “appeals to expert opinion, a calm affect, in elitist language”, not just emotional populism, explains how the professional class’s blatant pandemic-era scapegoating of lab-leak theory adherents or Covid-19 vaccine efficacy skeptics was so accepted and divided the American public, as David Brooks seemed to acknowledge yesterday in the NYTimes. While Biden drew appeal for his apparent calm, grandfatherly contrast to Trump’s irreverence and bombast, each demagogues: even President Reagan (who demagogued with his “we win/they lose” line about the USSR) noted in 1987 that then-Senator Biden was a “smooth but pure demagogue”, with others in 2020 observing Biden is purely transactional and “will say whatever it takes” to become president, “discarding his demagoguery” on any wrong issue and moving on to the next issue (more on Biden’s and Trump’s demagogic style in another post). Essentially, demagoguery reduces policy arguments into in-group/out-group loyalty assuming “good people do good things, and so we don’t need to argue policy” but figure out “who is good and put them in power” (RM 177).

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Frame Check not Fact Check

To illuminate the demagogic and rumor-filled nature of corporate news media and social media, each week by Friday, I plan to publish a text-mined content analysis of 30-40 articles on the same event from the prior week. As when I teach writing students, I will use news aggregation sites, tools, and bias charts from Allsides, AdFontesmedia, NewsGuard, Media/Bias Fact Check, Ground News, and Sourcer to conduct what I call a Frame-check of each article instead of a Fact-check. Checking facts is useful for labeling speech true or false, right or wrong, according to one’s definition of facts (naive realism) yet limited and insufficient for revealing underlying fact-framing patterns and how we accept certain ‘facts’ over others.

Arguing about facts conceals what commonly informs and defines ‘facts’ to begin with: ideology and demagoguery. Via Frame-check, we will see how ‘facts’ and events are defined via the outlet’s ideological leaning, demagogic rationale, and article framing. And according to ideology scholars like Therborn, an ideology determines what exists, what is good, and what is possible. We can see how each outlet and even article argues what problems exist, what virtues exist, and what solutions are possible. This ideological frame-check understanding will reveal how easily we allow demagogic media to influence how we engage with each other in town, at work, online, and at school.

The Digigoguery Logo

The 3-D curved logo of oval-shaped round bubbles represents the isolating incompleteness of and global siloing effect of social media feeds and the corporate news cycle. Each red oval can represent someone’s algorithm-constructed bubble and how we tend to project our subjective curated feed as global common knowledge. Each red bubble can represent a news outlet’s limited grasp of information and events. And, by seeing multiple bubbles curved as if over the earth, then I imagine we can better see how commonly we and the media easily identify Others from these bubbles. I don’t wish to replace this with one big bubble. Rather, I wish they become more opaque and less deeply ‘red’, as if the richness level of the color indicated the level of demagogic behavior (where more red = more demagogic and less red = less demagogic).

I intend for this logo to symbolize how our news feeds are not based on disconfirming information, that we are severely deluded into accepting a corporate/social mediated world that reflects our biases back to us by projecting our subjective perceptions as largely shared objective truths so that “the premises of our life become the premises of Life” (RM18).

Thence the demagoguery and Othering and the division, much of it created by algorithms disguised as our own identities and biases.

Within the next few months, I expect this Frame-check analysis strategy will become the first step in developing an analytical method I plan to call Epistemic Emissions wherein the rhetorical quality of knowledge (source reliance, incompleteness, ratio of objective terminology, sentiment analysis, etc.) in each article and outlet receives a demagogic assessment and rating to illuminate our perception of demagoguery in our social media usage.

See you next Friday!

When have you asked, really asked, yourself:

• How do I personally know what I know about myself and the world?

• By what means do I come to know anything beyond my daily interactions? beyond my campus or city or country?

My answer is quite simple: language.

It is the semiotic sea in which we humans swim whether in-person or on our phones. We take its structure for granted yet ignore how it conceals reality as much as it reveals it to us. Language is, ironically, a root cause of misunderstanding as are our assumptions that every word has a single essential definition when it is my lived contexts and backgrounds (associations) with each word that define each word differently from yours (ie. as when spouses, family, and friends disagree on a newborn’s name - everyone expresses disgust or alarm over certain names based on someone they knew with that name).

Then, Major League Media, social and corporate, compete viciously toward their bottom lines, producing their proprietary knowledge for us to consume and think is our own: ideological inception that distorts world events into clarity. MLM construct our knowledge by generating consumable clickbait via the rumor incentive of ‘breaking news’ iterations of incomplete information (what I call the fog of news).

Project Luminas - Digigoguery and Associationary - are my response to checking the ideological framing of their epistemic production and their use of language.

DEI. CRT. ESG. You’ve heard of one of these I’m sure.

Right now, universities, public schools, and companies create offices to implement the first. Universities teach the second while many U.S. K-12 schools teach the second via antiracist books and resources. Blackrock and Vanguard investment firms demand the latter. Media parrot and promote these ideas ad nauseam (until the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light stock blow-up and boycott gave them momentary pause).

Each of these entities wields incredible power over us, and they demand that I conform to their vision of who they think I am. Often via guilt and shame per my higher education experiences which consist more of coercion and shame rather than research results free from ideological conformity.

So, the problem is: the Media and academia form ideological silos that need breaking.

Project Luminas - Intelleftuals - is my counterstory answer to this problem.

Some Useful Context

I conceived this project in 2019 at 33yrs old during my second MA in English Composition (at CSUSB) after observing and suffering under students’ zealous and evangelistic fervor for academic theories like intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory, and social justice. They (students/professors via theories) interpreted and valued me according to my skin color and the past. Project Luminas is to be my counterstory (to use a research method from my discipline) set against the dominant stigmatized minoritarian valuation of my skin and place in society.

The project’s first iteration began as a blog called The Sky King Show: Hacking the Academy that infrequently documented some of my experiences being racially and gender scapegoated, shamed, and guilted (I’m white and male) in grad school and at Chaffey College where I directed a language learning center full-time. It was my inconsistent workaround to the unfamiliar linguistic terms and needless moral judgments I’d experienced. Inconsistent in part because due to the very real effect of orthodox conformity and cancel culture in academia, so several posts remain in draft format. It’s a justifiable concern that viewpoint diversity can sink my academic job prospects and the completion of my current dissertation (not to mention interrupt my ability to provide for our 4 girls who are 5-12yrs old).

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Why risk those possibilities and achievements now?

Remaining silent in isolation is mentally more costly to me than speaking up. While I am by no means the first to discuss the prevailing ideology afoot in campuses, culture, corporations, Congress, and media, I do offer a unique, if limited, understanding of it that I hope will further complete the picture of its academic origins: since 2012, I have worked within and studied this broad ideology in over 30 graduate courses across 3 related disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Composition Studies, Rhetoric and Writing Studies). And, I risk speaking up for 4 reasons:

One is professional: academics are changing culture, intentionally so, and often obviate responsibility for the negative consequences of their efforts. I wish to share how I’ve navigated (failed and succeeded) this change in classrooms and assignments so I might live my own culture, viewpoint diversity, and speak in its defense free from unnecessary guilt and shame. Just maybe universities that value viewpoint diversity will notice I value the same heterodoxy. A second is personal: it is not enough for me to remain silent while our 4 girls, and millions more, are exposed to reductively racial and gendered aspects of this Intelleftualism at their K-12 schools. Many of these disempowering ‘critical’ theories remain untested to dangerous effects yet are advocated for and now manifest as curricular, social media, and peer trends. I want to hold my disciplines to account for their theories’ impacts on students and society. And third: encouraging this awareness in ~160 of my writing students a year is good, yet also reaching thousands more via Project Luminas is even better, better than an obscure academic journal. A fourth: collaborating is best. I aim to partner with individuals in ideologically dominated disciplines (communications, religion, sociology, history, etc.) to trace and cite where and when these ideas entered their respective discipline’s scholarship.

If you know interested individuals, will you please forward this to them?

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Tracing the ideology via texts is critical because RCWS practices citation justice wherein publications written by any muliply oppressing and omniphobic identity (explicitly white males) must not be cited in articles or presentations (subtractive identity) so that identities deemed marginalized are cited and thus empowered.

Because of what I’ve read and studied for the last decade, I can’t be gaslighted when ‘experts’ or politicians argue we don’t see evidence of anyone fundamentally changing cultural norms in our communities or kids’ schools. Sometimes I feel to call this substack ‘I survived academia’, yet I want to create my space within it and become collaboratively constructive, not vindictive. You might detect bitterness at my discipline’s severe flaws and hypocrisy, dogmatism and orthodoxy, and conformism and uniformity while preaching diversity and subversion. I want this project to provide solutions in addition to naming problems, to contribute constructively to the American society in which I live.

To that productive end, in a trilogy of PL subprojects, I can articulate in great detail why the Media and my disciplines fail to assess the effects and impacts of their theories - in my project of creating a modern rhetorical ethic of Epistemic Emissions. Via text-mining, rhetoric, discourse, and content analyses, I can identify the roles my disciplines have specifically played in propagating what is commonly referred to as the ‘woke’ worldview or discourse (Intelleftualism). In addition, I can also point to where some of my disciplines’ theories do succeed and where aspects of underutilized theories are misapplied to leftist partisan ends that yet could be applied to centrist or conservative ends (such as counterstory methodology).

These three subprojects and portmanteaus are:

• Digigoguery (Digital + Demagoguery)

• Intelleftuals (Left + Intellectuals)

• Associationary (Association + Dictionary)

An upcoming post for each will describe each subproject’s objects of study, goals, and publication schedule in more detail. I have given myself a year from today to demonstrate this project’s viability which depends on subscribers (paid and unpaid).

So, if you, like me, use language ;) and social media, and have been exasperated at how academia and media coverage influenced your knowledge of the world, then feel free to share and subscribe to Project Luminas.

-Sky King

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