Adam Ellwanger

Egyptologist Jan Assmann pioneered the concept of mnemohistory to demonstrate how collective remembrance of past events plays a critical role in preserving or transforming a shared notion of national identity.

In this timely book, Adam Ellwanger adapts the notion of mnemohistory to expose the New York Times’ 1619 Project as a propaganda effort aimed destroying America in order to found a new nation defined by far-left “social justice” ideologies.

As a series of essays, the New York Times’ 1619 Project argued that the true founding of the United States was not in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but rather in 1619, when the first ship of captured Africans arrived on the shore of British North America. Further, the authors asserted that the nation that was later founded by the colonists was designed to advance the interests of white supremacy, and that whatever legitimacy there is to America’s commitment to equality, freedom, and liberty comes from the efforts of black Americans.

Through a close rhetorical analysis of the 1619 Project as mnemohistorical propaganda, Ellwanger shows how narrative inversions and strategic manipulation of memory work as techniques for fomenting a mass political movement aimed at destroying American society. Ultimately, his analysis shows that the 1619 narrative – which explicitly aims to improve the lot of African-Americans – actually locks black identity in the past, preventing the cultural transformation that the project promises.

A number of recent thinkers on technology have described the ways in which technological change often proceeds apace, in spite of the varied efforts that human beings have made to check its advance. This essay explores how these circumstances have undermined human agency in the political arena. Through a close analysis of the work of major critics of technology such as Langdon Winner, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Kaczynski, Lewis Mumford, and others, I demonstrate how technological change has reached a point where every major contingent of the liberal democratic political order has been neutralized in its ability to direct the course of future advances. After describing how the masses, the elites, and the experts have each been rendered powerless, I explore the implications of this situation for the practice of politics in human society.

Many recent studies observe that the religious genre of apocalypse has been adapted to secular purposes. In observing examples of secular apocalypses, researchers typically locate them in contexts that are nevertheless concerned with spiritual and mystical matters. In contrast, this essay demonstrates that secular apocalyptic rhetoric is also utilized in the official discourse of scientific experts and government representatives. Through a close analysis of official documents on the topics of anthropogenic climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (two urgent issues of public policy that are framed as agents of global cataclysm), I demonstrate the ways that experts appropriate religious forms of rhetoric to persuade audiences to accept the measures proposed by authorities. In the process, the essay identifies the rhetorical features of the secular apocalyptic subgenre in contradistinction to its religious predecessor. Ultimately, this study exposes the ways that secular officials – whose power is justified on the grounds of a purportedly objective, rational, empiricism that is opposed to mysticism – make use of persuasive strategies drawn from traditions that do not conform to the standards of scientific epistemology.

Following the work of Kenneth Burke, most theorists understand modern identity as something that is formed through the processes of identification, recognition, and association. Further, recent work on personal transformation suggests that new identities are legitimized through personal, confessional testimony about the self. In contrast, this essay focuses on “voluntary disappearances” as one example of a type of personal transformation that operates through dissociative practices. Voluntary disappearance is the term given to situations where a person wishes to completely cut ties with all aspects of the present life and achieves this by moving to a new place and assuming a new identity. Through a rhetorical analysis of various books on the topic of how to enact such a disappearance, this study demonstrates two central insights: a) that some modes of ethos formation are achieved by dissociation rather than association, and b) that dissociative personal transformations are achieved through disidentification, non-recognition, concealment and deception.