Rhetoric is not a parlor trick. It is the current that moves civilizations. Aristotle called it “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” as if persuasion were neutral, clinical, bloodless. But history shows us rhetoric is rarely bloodless.
Logos, ethos, pathos—these are not academic abstractions. They are levers that move masses. Logos built the case for revolution in 1776 and the case for segregation in 1896. Ethos crowned the Founding Fathers with sainthood while they built a nation on stolen land. Pathos is why we still know the sound of “I have a dream” sixty years later, and why propaganda posters could send boys to die overseas with a single image of Uncle Sam pointing.
Today, rhetoric doesn’t wait for the printing press—it lives in our pockets. Every tweet, every push alert, every chyron is tuned to make us feel before we think. Rage travels fastest. Fear sticks longest. The algorithm doesn’t care if it’s true, only that it keeps you scrolling.
And rhetoric has consequences. Donald Trump knew this when he told a crowd to “fight like hell” before January 6th. He knew it when he branded migrants as “poisoning the blood of the nation,” knowing someone would take it literally. Charlie Kirk knew it when he turned outrage into a business model. South Park knew it when they turned him into a punchline—and now, just weeks later, he is dead in Utah. I don’t celebrate death. But I refuse to pretend this is random. Rhetoric plants seeds. Someone always harvests.
To study rhetoric is not to sit back and admire the symmetry of a well-built argument. It is to interrogate every sentence like evidence. Who benefits if I believe this? Who is silenced if I repeat it? What action is this trying to pull from me—my money, my vote, my apathy?
If we fail to learn this language, we are doomed to be ruled by it. And I refuse to let my privilege buy my silence. The writers in the Norton Anthology got to canonize themselves. So will I. I intend to write into the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde—those who spoke until the room went quiet, until history flinched.
Because rhetoric will not save us. But it might just arm us.
Until next time—read closely, listen harder, and don’t let anyone tell you words don’t matter. They always have.
Words are weapons. Wield wisely,
—Rebecca M. Bell
www.rmbellwrites.com
P.S. The selective empathy has been noted. Where is this same level of outrage for school shootings? Where is this level of outrage for the literal genocide happening in Gaza? I certainly don’t condone political violence; I just want to know why President Trump is ordering flags to half mast for Charlie Kirk—when he didn’t do the same for democratic speaker Melissa Hortman when she and her husband were both shot and killed in their own home a couple of months ago. Furthermore, why is the media coverage between this shooting and another school shooting that happened, in Colorado, on the very same day, so disproportionate?
Why are we prioritizing the man who can be quoted saying, “I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Make it make sense.
Never stop asking questions.
Filed Under: Selective Empathy, Rhetoric, Collective Trauma