The artifact that I will be talking about is an interview with Paul Rand. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kEZroWTlK5I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The interview with presidential candidate, Paul Rand links Orwellian dystopia to today’s use of technology within our current government. His persuasive interview hits on the same concepts of “Presence of Conspiracy”, within Larsen’s six traits of Persuasive Cultural Premise.
To build his argument, he pulls us into our common knowledge of high school literature, one book in particular, Orwell’s 1984. He sites his emotions then, when he first read the fictitious novel, dismissing the idea it could happen. But he has now changed his mind and emotions, pointing out that...“when I was a kid and read 1984, in the 1970s, probably, I say I was somewhat comforted because we didn't have the technology to spy on everybody all the time. Now I think we literally do have the technology, and a large amount of data and information can be gotten from metadata. Some people say, "Oh that's just boring old medical, or boring old business records," but the thing is, you put it all together, and a lot can be determined about a person”. Everything we have, technology wise, has a built in backdoor. There is access to our personal lives in every device we use and the data we look at.
Paul then refers to General Hayden’s statement: “the Fourth Amendment doesn't protect records at all”. He sites the commanding case of his point, Maryland v. Smith. He continues his point by stating “that worries me. I think we need to have another ruling at the Supreme Court level, because I think the information in the cloud should get the same amount of protection as the information in the castle”.
Rand Paul uses the common cultural myth in America to persuade and influence his audience to trust him to lead action as president in the coming election. Paul specifically uses Larson’s fourth cultural myth, the presence of conspiracy.
It is interesting to note that Rand Paul points to the emotion of fear, the feeling at the root of conspiracy. “I do think that people use fear to try to allow government to grow larger and that the surveillance state and Patriot Act and all of that stuff has come out of fear. And I want people to know that you can stop terrorists, you can collect the records of terrorists using the Fourth Amendment”.
Rand Paul succeeds in making his point by specifically pointing to a common myth. The belief, all American’s who have read Orwell, that governmental spying is invasive and eventually controls our very existence against our will. He was effective in the way he built his argument as he referenced Orwell’s 1984, reminding us that it preceded the technology, therefore it wasn't a real threat. Now that the technology is here, and being utilized by our government, we are at risk of living in a totalitarian society
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