On October 26, I will deliver a “Rhetoric Unbound” lecture as part of a series developed by Dr. Joshua Trey Barnett of Pennsylvania State University. The talk, entitled “Twisted Endings: From the Secret Report to the Deep State,” will take place at 8.00 p.m. Eastern via Zoom. The lecture will last 30 minutes and will be followed by an audience-led discussion.
To register for the lecture, click here.
Although the lecture previews my forthcoming monograph, it is comprised of materials that were ultimately not included in the book. The presentation is the shadow side of the book’s conclusion, foregrounding Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a key public figure whose troubled political legacy foreshadowed many of the secret exigencies — urgencies marked by concealment, hiddenness, and conspiratorial rumination — that characterize current crises in the United States.
Lecture Description
Drawing on material excised from Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie (Ohio State University Press, forthcoming 2026), this presentation argues that the secret is a dynamic and rhetorical interplay of absence and desire. Whereas the book addresses the rhetorical form of scandals, dogwhistles, national security leaks, and settler-detective narratives, this talk focuses on the connection between the Moynihan Report (1965), the Pentagon Papers (1971), the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (2014), and “the deep state.”
The connection between these texts is encapsulated in two principles: (1) there is always a “beyond” to the secret, or that hidden meanings come to light through the restoration of rhetorical context, and (2) the secret is that there is no secret, or that much of what is concealed is a going-through-the-motions that repeats a similar form across many, temporally distant, instances.
I critique the appropriation and dilution of appeals to transparency in contemporary political discourse, particularly in reference to conspiracy theories like the “deep state.” Such theories do not just distort public perceptions by fostering mistrust while masquerading as revelations; they underscore the necessity of discerning the secret’s form and function, a continuous thread that stretches from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Donald Trump.
Pictured Above: Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William F. Buckley. Credit: © Wally McNamee/CORBIS; Copyright: © Corbis. All Rights Reserved. Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal PDM 1.0 Deed. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
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