"Are rural white Christians the real Americans? Should teachers be armed or should the Second Amendment be repealed? Is abortion murder or an ethically sound choice for women? Should migrant babies be caged or should ICE be abolished? Should billionaires exist while children go hungry? These are some of the bitter ideological disputes that have turned social media into a political battlefield. In Digital Civil War, Peter Daou, a veteran digital-media adviser to presidential candidates, investigates the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties, arguing that democracy itself is under assault by an emboldened and empowered Far Right. Daou shows how the digital civil war is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. And he explains that the relentless toxicity of social media - often treated as an aberration - is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare."--Amazon.com.

"The book is arranged by theme and occasion: Memorials and Patriotic Speeches, War and Revolution Speeches, Tributes and Eulogies, Debates and Argumentation, Trial Speeches, Gallows and Farewell Speeches, Sermons, Inspirational Speeches, Lectures and Instructive Speeches, Speeches of Social Responsibility, Media Speeches, Political Speeches (in Safire's words, "the anthologist's mother's milk"), and Commencement Addresses. Each speech is expertly introduced by the editor, who places the speech's occasion in historical context and analyzes the particular techniques that give the speech its force and effect. William Safire enlivens many of these introductions with personal anecdotes of the circumstances of the speechmaker and the speech. His Introduction is a brisk, compact, effective short course in how to make a great speech - with a cornucopia of examples to follow." "No one faced with the need to go before an audience of any size to argue, persuade, uplift, introduce, memorialize, or amuse should be without Lend Me Your Ears. It serves equally as a work of permanent reference use and as a treasure-house for the browser in search of inspiration, instruction, and entertainment. In this anthology, editor and subject matter have met to result in a book that draws from the ages - and that will last for decades as the definitive word on human eloquence."--BOOK JACKET.

Every week on the public radio show On the Media , the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.” Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point . The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not. And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it. Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.