Columnists Essay practice
For each of the three articles below, quickly note the following: Title? Author? Central claim? Your impressions?
Then, go through the argument carefully, making marginal notes on the following:
What kind of lead, or hook, opens the argument?
How's the author set up a central claim? Where does s/he present that claim?
What's the structure? How's it organized?
Where do the appeals (logos, ethos, pathos) come from? anecdotes? interviews? statistics? assertions? observations?
What figurative language do you notice? What rhetorical devices?
How inflamatory or reasonable is the diction? How simple or complex is the syntax?
What is the columnist assuming about the reader? Who is her/his audience?
What holes can you poke in the reasoning?
How does the last line of the column function? how's s/he close?
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Donald Trump is Making America Meaner
August 13, 2016
FOREST GROVE, Ore. — ALL across America, in little towns like this one, Donald Trump is mainstreaming hate.
This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”
The same white students had earlier chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Soon afterward, a student hung a homemade banner in the school reading, “Build a Wall,” prompting Latinos at area schools to stage a walkout.
“They openly express their dislike of my race,” Briana Larios, a 15-year-old Mexican-American honor roll student who hopes to go to Harvard, said of some of her white classmates. Wounded by accusations that she doesn’t belong in the country in which she was born, Briana is thinking of being home-schooled rather than returning to the high school when classes resume.
“People now feel that it is O.K. to say things that they might not have said a year ago,” she said. “Trump played a big role.”
Among any nation’s most precious possessions is its social fabric, and that is what Donald Trump is rending with incendiary talk about roughing up protesters and about gun owners solving the problem of Hillary Clinton making judicial nominations.
Trump only mildly distanced himself when an adviser suggested that Clinton should be executed by firing squad for treason, and his rallies have become toxic brews of hatred with shouts like “Hang the bitch!” The Times made a video of Trump fans at his rallies directing crude slurs not just at Hillary Clinton, but also at blacks, Latinos, Muslims and gay people.
We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.
“We’ve spent the last 15 years fighting bullying in schools, and the example set by the Trump campaign has broken down the doors, and a tidal wave of bullying has come through,” said Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The center issued a report documenting how Trump’s venom has poisoned schools across the country. It quoted a North Carolina teacher as saying she has “Latino students who carry their birth certificates and Social Security cards to school because they are afraid they will be deported.” Another teacher reported that a fifth grader told a Muslim student “that he was supporting Donald Trump because he was going to kill all of the Muslims if he became president!”
Here in the Forest Grove area, west of Portland, students of Mexican heritage at four high schools — most of them born in the United States — described to me how some local whites take cues from Trump.
“They say, ‘We’re going to deport your ass,’” said Melina McGlothen, 17, whose mother is Mexican. “I don’t want to say I hate them, but I hate their stupidity.”
Ana Sally Gonzalez, 17, said a school club had put up posters criticizing racism, and they were then marred by graffiti such as “Go back where you came from” and “Trump 2016.”
The tension reflects deep resentment among some white working-class families. They are angry at immigrants who have taken over some jobs, at the way communities they cherish are changing demographically and linguistically, and at what they perceive as a stifling political correctness that leaves whites accused of racism when they speak up.
Many of my old Oregon farm-town friends are strong Trump supporters, and they will completely disagree with this column. Their headline would be, “Big Media Suffocates Real Americans With Political Correctness.”
The upshot is that this election year, we’re divided not only by political party and ideology, but also by identity. So the weave of our national fabric unravels. And while our eyes have mostly been on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the nation’s history is being written not just in the capital and grand cities but also in small towns and etched in the lives of ordinary people.
I wrote a column recently exploring whether Trump is a racist, and a result was anti-Semitic vitriol from Trump followers, one of whom suggested I should be sent to the ovens for writing “a typical Jewish hit piece.” In fact, I’m Armenian and Christian, not Jewish, but the responses underscored that the Trump campaign is enveloped by a cloud of racial, ethnic and religious animosity — much of it poorly informed.
The Trump-inspired malice seems ubiquitous. A Georgetown University study found a surge of anti-Muslim violence, from murders to attacks on mosques, coinciding with Trump’s hostility toward Muslims. In March, a man attacked Muslim and Latino students in Kansas, shouting “brown trash” and “Trump will take our country from you guys.”
I hope Trump and his aides will soon come to recognize that words have consequences that go far beyond politics, consequences that cannot be undone. It’s perhaps inevitable that some overzealous supporters will periodically go too far, but Trump need not incite them, and he certainly shouldn’t joke about harming protesters or tolerate advisers who propose a firing squad for his rival.
So far, Trump has arguably benefited from his fondness for over-the-top rhetoric. He gets attention and television time and is always at the center of his own hurricane. But in November, after the ballots have been counted and the crowds have gone home, we will still have a country to share, and I fear it may be a harsher and more fragile society because of Trump’s campaigning today.
Inflammatory talk isn’t entertaining, but dangerous. It’s past time for Trump to grow up.
Yet if bigotry has been amplified by his candidacy, let’s remember that there are still deep reservoirs of social capital — including in conservative neighborhoods — that have proved impervious to Trump’s insinuations.
In Georgia, an India-born Muslim named Malik Waliyani bought a gas station and convenience store a few months ago and was horrified when it was recently burglarized and damaged. He struggled to keep it going. But then the nearby Smoke Rise Baptist Church heard what had happened.
“Let’s shower our neighbor with love,” Chris George, the pastor, told his congregation at the end of his sermon, and more than 200 members drove over to assist, mostly by making purchases. One man drove his car around until the gas tank was empty, so he could buy more gas.
“Our faith inspires us to build bridges, not to label people as us and them, but to recognize that we’re all part of the same family,” the pastor told me. “Our world is a stronger place when we choose to look past labels and embrace others with love.”
This is a wrenching, divisive, polarizing time in America, and we have a major party nominee who is sowing hatred and perhaps violence. Let’s not succumb. Good people, like the members of Smoke Rise Baptist, are reweaving our nation’s social fabric even as it is being torn.
Nicholas Kristof, NYTimes
COULD HILLARY TELL US WHAT PERCENTAGE OF MUSLIMS ARE 'DEPLORABLE'?
September 14, 2016
It wasn't just the well-heeled donors at the Cipriani Club who laughed and applauded when Hillary called half of Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables" -- "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”
Her campaign advisers also thought it was a killer line. This wasn't an off-the-cuff remark captured on a bartender's cellphone. We know that because: (1) nothing is ever off-the-cuff with Hillary; (2) it was part of her scripted remarks, and (3) she's used it before.
Nor did anyone in the media mind one little bit. They've been calling Trump's supporters racists for more than a year now. Calling other people "racist" is the media's favorite thing to do.
Whenever the left talks about "racism," it has nothing to do with what's good or bad for black people. It's just another event in the Fabulous White People competition, where black people are the chips.
There was a period in this country when racism was a big problem. Unfortunately, when it mattered, liberals were on the wrong side. Only when the principal danger facing most black Americans was that they'd be patronized to death, did liberals start seeing "racism" everywhere.
Sad people with meaningless lives were suddenly empowered to condemn other people. I beat you in blacks yesterday; I'm going to beat you in women today. This is what makes them feel superior to other people, especially other white people. It's not about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.; it's just a self-actualization movement for people with emotional issues.
The dead giveaway is that all the hacks on the left are using the same jokes. Compare the opening lines of James Kirchick of the New York Daily News and Dana Milbank of The Washington Post in their columns on Hillary's "basket of deplorables" insult:
Kirchick: "Hillary Clinton was way off base Friday night when she claimed that 'half' of Donald Trump supporters are 'deplorable' racists, sexists and nativists. ... It's not 50 percent of Trump supporters who are bigots. It's closer to 100 percent.”
Milbank: "Hillary Clinton may have been unwise to say half of Donald Trump's supporters are racists ... If anything, when it comes to Trump's racist support, she might have low-balled the number.”
It never occurs to a hack that someone else may have had the same idea. But as long as liberals are such perfect thermometers of deplorableness, could they tell us how many Muslims are "deplorable”— specifically, what percentage are “sexist” or “homophobic"?
For decades now, the most important job of anyone covering a presidential election is to unceasingly demand that the Republican candidate disavow David Duke. This laughably irrelevant man must be trotted out as a bogeyman to frighten NPR listeners. Instead of reporting news, journalists have become Official David Duke Disavowal Demanders.
The only way we find out that Duke is still alive is that Republicans are asked to denounce him every four years. For all we know, Duke died 20 years ago and the media are using a body double.
Will Hillary ever be asked to "disavow" Al Sharpton, George Soros, Black Lives Matter or Colin Kaepernick? These are people who have power and visibility even when it's not an election year. In fact, the only time some of them are not in the public eye is during election years, when, for example, Al Sharpton is sent off to a safe house for six months. By contrast, the only time Duke is in the news is during election years.
It doesn't matter who the candidate is -- the GOP could run Bobby Kennedy, and journalists would incessantly demand that Bobby "disavow" Duke.
The same people who move heaven and earth to make sure their kids aren't blocked out of the right colleges by affirmative action, who couldn't care less about the astronomical unemployment rate and rampant crime in the inner cities, who think there's a lovefest going on between African-Americans and the illegal aliens taking over their neighborhoods and jobs, are just showing off to other white people by calling Trump ... "RACIST!”
Donald Trump has never been accused of racism in his life. Unlike self-righteous PC enforcers, who go to extraordinary lengths to avoid extensive contact with blacks, he's hired lots of black people. His golf clubs famously admit blacks, Jews and Asians -- and are often the only clubs in town that do.
Black celebrities as well as ordinary black Americans all say the same thing about Trump -- that he respects them.
Jamiel Shaw, whose son was killed by an illegal alien, spoke at Trump's first presidential rally, saying: "He's the kind of man you would want to be your dad. He's a nice guy. He put himself out there for black people. I know I can trust him.”
Mike Tyson said of Trump: "Listen: I'm a black motherf–ker from the poorest town in the country. I've been through a lot in life. And I know him. When I see him, he shakes my hand and respects my family. None of them -- Barack, whoever -- nobody else does that. They're gonna be who they are and disregard me, my family. So I'm voting for him. If I can get 20,000 people or more to vote for him, I'm gonna do it.”
In 2006, long before Trump was thinking of running for president and was still a regular on "The Howard Stern Show," Stern pressed him on whether Ivanka would ever date a black guy:
Stern: Would (Ivanka) ever date a black guy? That would not go over at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump: Yes, she would. She would. Yeah. Absolutely.
Stern: You would have no problem with that?
Trump: I would have no problem. I would have no problem. I would love that. That'd be wonderful.
Robin: He would love that.
Trump: The answer is: She would. She would have no problem.
And then in 2015, Trump decided to run for president as a Republican and, for the first time in his life, became a "racist.”
ANN COULTER