E107: No War With Iran 3: Rise of the Machines
On today’s show, Calvin and Alex return to a grim and perennial topic in American politics: US military aggression against Iran. We look at the rhetoric of key political figures in the catastrophe currently unfolding in the Middle East, examining recent statements and audio clips from US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. We also look at the official justifications that the White House provided for the recent strikes.
In our conversation, we examine the audio artifacts and official documents that surround the newly launched military campaign, which the administratioin is Reddit-ly calling "Operation Epic Fury." We talk about how the Trump administration is using justifications that function a lot like generative AI, in that their arguments seem to be a synthesized remix of past right-wing and neoconservative rhetorics offering very little of substance to clarify the situation. We also explore the dissociation of concepts, a rhetorical strategy defined by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca as a way to separate a current idea from negative past associations. The administration uses this strategy in an effort to distance the current conflict from Bush-era "endless wars," while maintaining those wars’ bellicose premises. Furthermore, we track how the concept of "freedom" operates as an ideograph in administrative rhetoric. This term has historically been a potent political buzzword, but it increasingly seems to function as a brand identity rather than an actual measure of political capacity.
Later, we look at how the mainstream Democratic leadership in Congress has responded with feckless and purely procedural objections, and we contrast these responses with the morally clear anti-war stances of progressive politicians, whose rhetorics prioritize human lives over abstract process complaints. Finally, we preview an upcoming discussion about the chilling intersection of artificial intelligence and foreign policy, focusing specifically on the recent partnership between OpenAI and the "Department of War”, enshrined on the eve of the current bombing campaign against Iran.
Past episodes in this series:
No War with Iran! (February 2020)
No (More) War with Iran! (June 2025)
Works & Concepts Referenced in this Episode
McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16.
Pecheux, M. (1975). Language, Semantics and Ideology. (Referencing the concept of the pre-constructed phrase).
Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. (Referencing the dissociation of concepts).
An accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript)