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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationship dynamics between the executive office and the free press; and how these dynamics have been altered under the Trump administration. Donald Trump has questioned the validity and accuracy of claims, even going as far to call some organizations (CNN and The New York Times) “fake news.” The authors discuss the historically contentious relationship between the executive office and the free press as well as the ways in which Donald Trump has altered the dynamics of this relationship.

In this paper, the authors explore the role of the free press in American politics. The authors designed two classroom-ready activities by drawing on the best teaching practices advocated for in the C3 Framework. To elaborate, both activities allow students to research and analyze arguments made by Donald Trump and challenge false claims. This enables students to engage in the four dimensions of the Inquiry Arc in the C3 Framework.

The authors provide two activities that can be utilized in the high school social studies classroom to enable students to dissect American politicians’ messages. These two activities can be adapted and utilized to enable students to examine political candidate’s messages. By completing the steps of these two activities, students are better prepared to be critical consumers of political media messages and take civic action to challenge false claims.

Donald Trump has attempted to undermine the free press in the USA. He objects to stories that do not paint his administration in a positive light. This manuscript uses the media literacy position statement from NCSS and Ochoa-Becker’s framework for truth claims to explore Trump’s statements and claims.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of angry political rhetoric employed by George Wallace and Donald Trump. The authors start by discussing the civic thinking skills stressed within the C3 Framework, specifically the ability to analyze politicians’ arguments. Then, the focus shifts to look at angry political rhetoric within the US history. Next, the authors discuss the parallels of the angry political rhetoric employed by both Wallace and Trump. Finally, two activities are provided that enable students to grasp the convergences with the angry political rhetoric utilized by both Wallace and Trump.

In this paper, the authors explore angry rhetoric in American politics. The authors designed two classroom-ready activities by drawing on the best teaching practices advocated for in the C3 Framework. To elaborate, both activities allow students to research and analyze arguments made by George Wallace and Donald Trump. This enables students to engage in the four dimensions of the Inquiry Arc in the C3 Framework.

The authors provide two activities that can be utilized in the high school social studies classroom to enable students to dissect American politicians’ messages. These two activities can be adapted and utilized to enable students to examine a political candidate’s messages, especially those that draw on angry rhetoric. By completing the steps of these two activities, students are better prepared to be critical consumers of political media messages.

In this paper, the authors explore the role of angry political rhetoric in American politics. The authors examine the parallels of political style between George Wallace and Donald Trump. Two activities are provided to help students break down the angry political rhetoric employed by these two controversial figures.

This paper tests the degree to which Sunstein's law of group polarization predicts the increase or decrease in polarization among individuals in an out-group during a polarizing event. The authors use the discourse on Parler surrounding the events of January 6th as a case study.

The study includes an overall sentiment analysis, a statistical analysis of emotions, along with eight other feelings, including anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise and trust. Specifically, the authors measure the differences in feelings related language used in posts as they pertain to Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement vs. Trump's Vice President Mike Pence both before and after January 6, 2021. The authors use this empirical analysis to show whether polarization in the Parler community increased or decreased after January 6th.

The authors find evidence that there is more complexity to polarization than Sunstein's theory would predict. The authors would expect a very polarized outed group to become more polarized relative to the general public after a central event; however, the authors see two extremes emerging within the Parler community (both strongly positive and strongly negative feelings toward Trump). The authors do not see unanimous consent across the Parler platform as Sunstein's theory would suggest; the out-group is becoming more polarized relative to the rest of the population. Instead, the authors observe a wide mix in reactions. The results of this study demonstrate that there is dissent even among the Parler echo chamber. For many themes surrounding the January 6th riots, Parler users express strong disagreement with each other and a lack of unity in their feelings for former President Trump.

The results suggest further research into polarization of outed groups and the policy implications of their polarization changes over time.

Increases in group polarization are often a motivator for public policy and are further becoming a major focus for research. Brookings' authors Stephanie Forrest and Joshua Daymude point to polarization as a substantial threat to American society, claiming “reducing extreme polarization is key to stabilizing democracy” (2022). Researchers Diana Epstein and John D. Graham demonstrate that polarized politics has impacted the “substance of rulemaking, judicial decisions, and legislation” along with “complicating long-term policy changes” (2007). The authors study how entrepreneurs have responded to this increase in polarization and its implications for public policy.

Not only does group polarization impact all types of groups, from the social to the economic, but also it has “particular implications for insulated ‘outgroups’” (Sunstein, 1999, p. 21). Groups that are excluded by either coercion or choice from dialog with other groups become even more polarized and extreme (Sunstein, 1999; Turner et al., 1989).

The authors have engaged in an empirical analysis that no other paper has addressed. This paper summarized the Parler sample data set and analyzed various themes associated with the events of January 6th, namely President Trump and MAGA themes and Vice President Pence. The analysis demonstrated a dramatic increase in negative sentiment and emotion related to Vice President Mike Pence after January 6th as well as mixed support for President Trump and an increase in disgust before and after the Capitol riot.

Contemporary American politics has been characterized by excessive, vitriolic rhetoric since the 2016 presidential victory of Donald Trump. However, Donald Trump’s brand of politics is nothing new. He is the inheritor and latest proponent for a brand of American politics that utilizes demagogic rhetoric. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of demagoguery along with the traits of demagogic rhetoric. Two activities for the high school classroom are given that look at the demagogic rhetoric employed by Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, two of the most infamous political demagogues of the twentieth century.

With the first activity, McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within Speech” is analyzed by breaking down the speech with Gustainis’ seven traits of demagoguery (1990). Similarly in the second activity, George Wallace’s inaugural address is examined with Gustainis’ seven traits of demagoguery, and then, the authors provide a series of activities that students can do to protest the demagogic rhetoric in Wallace’s inaugural address. Finally, an appendix is provided with additional speeches from American demagogues that social studies teachers can use to teach about elements of demagoguery.

In this paper, the authors provide an overview of demagoguery along with the traits of demagogic rhetoric. Two activities for the high school classroom are given that look at the demagogic rhetoric employed by Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, two of the most infamous political demagogues of the twentieth century.

Contemporary American politics has been characterized by excessive, vitriolic rhetoric since the 2016 presidential victory of Donald Trump. However, Donald Trump’s brand of politics is nothing new. He is the inheritor and latest proponent for a brand of American politics that utilizes demagogic rhetoric. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of demagoguery along with the traits of demagogic rhetoric. Students need to be able to critically examine demagogic rhetoric to hold elected officials accountable for their words, actions and policies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing – a linguistic mannerism that conveys high-arousal emotion – based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect.

The study performs a series of mixed-effect logistic regressions to investigate the contagious potential of offensive comments collected from YouTube in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign videos posted between January and April 2016.

The study examines non-random incidences of two types of swearing online: public and interpersonal. Findings suggest that a first-level (a.k.a. parent) comment’s public swearing tends to trigger chains of interpersonal swearing in the second-level (a.k.a. child) comments. Meanwhile, among the child-comments, a sequentially preceding comment’s swearing is contagious to the following comment only across the same swearing type. Based on the findings, the study concludes that offensive comments are contagious and have impact on shaping the community-wide linguistic norms of online user interactions.

The study discusses the ways in which an individual’s display of offensiveness may influence and shape discursive cultures on the internet. This study delves into the mechanisms of text-based contagion by differentiating between mimicry effect and social interaction effect. While online emotional contagion research to this date has focused on the difference between positive and negative valence, internet research that specifically looks at the contagious potential of offensive expressions remains sparse.

This paper aims to examine how exposure to a presidential candidate's high engagement Instagram images influences a citizen's candidate evaluations.

Data were collected via Amazon MTurk. A 3 × 2 experimental design was employed to test the persuasive effect of exposure of the “most liked” and “most commented on” images of the top four 2016 US presidential primary candidates on a US citizen's candidate evaluation.

Results reveal that highly engaging Instagram images of unfamiliar presidential candidates positively influenced candidate evaluations. However, the same was not true for more well-known presidential candidates.

This study was not conducted during a live campaign and only examined four of the top 2016 presidential primary candidates.

The research includes implications for marketers seeking to increase engagement and reach in Instagram marketing campaigns. This study shows that even brief exposure to a highly engaged post involving an unfamiliar person/product on social media can significantly alter evaluations of that person or product.

To the authors' knowledge, no experimental designs have addressed how Instagram posts influence users' political attitudes and behaviors within the political marketing and communications literature.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and experiment a framework for analysing the tweets to find the basis of popularity of a person and extract the reasons supporting the popularity. Although the problem of analysing tweets to detect popular events and trends has recently attracted extensive research efforts, not much emphasis has been given to find out the reasons behind the popularity of a person based on tweets.

In this paper, the authors introduce a framework to find out the reasons behind the popularity of a person based on the analysis of events and the evaluation of a Web-based semantic set similarity measure applied to tweets. The methodology uses the semantic similarity measure to group similar tweets in events. Although the tweets cannot contain identical hashtags, they can refer to a unique topic with equivalent or related terminology. A special data structure maintains event information, related keywords and statistics to extract the reasons supporting popularity.

An implementation of the algorithms has been experimented on a data set of 218,490 tweets from five different countries for popularity detection and reasons extraction. The experimental results are quite encouraging and consistent in determining the reasons behind popularity. The use of Web-based semantic similarity measure is based on statistics extracted from search engines, it allows to dynamically adapt the similarity values to the variation on the correlation of words depending on current social trends.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed method for finding the reason of popularity in short messages is original. The semantic set similarity presented in the paper is an original asymmetric variant of a similarity scheme developed in the context of semantic image recognition.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a humanistic perspective on practice and prompts us to think about some of the implications for a more connected perspective on work and learning.

This paper takes literary and metaphoric approach to discussion to evoke and engage the audience. It uses the primary device of the thriving of forests to prompt reflection.

This paper prioritises concepts of sustainability and responsibility and aims to prompt the reader in thinking about connectedness in relation to their own life and work.

This paper attempts to challenge an overly economic concept of work and learning, and offers an alternative humanistic metaphor to evoke and engage the reader. It values and encourages an experimental form of writing.

Daring to challenge the status quo impacts innovation. Yet, successful outcomes depend on individual risk-taking and choice to influence others to support new ideas. This Challenging the Status Quo exercise illustrates how leaders use power and influencing tactics to challenge norms by analyzing Donald Trump’s journey as the 45^th U.S. President to defy experts and successfully influence followers to support his non-traditional candidacy: businessman lacking political experience becoming leader of the free world. Through integrating videoclips and polls, instructors make power visible, relevant, and thought-provoking as students apply power theory and influencing tactics perspectives to analyze (a) how leaders impact followers’ perceptions, (b) students mutual-influencing strategies, (c) power’s relationship with social identity and privilege, and (d) social impact on innovation via activism and free speech.

Two questions broadly drove this research: Donald Trump promised to fix the economy and create jobs, and he is ending or renegotiating trade treaties. Is he creating more jobs? How can Trump create a more inclusive economy? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper closely examines Trump’s economic policies and draws from past Democratic and Republication track records to explain how Trump’s policies will contribute to greater income inequality.

By all measures, President Trump fails on measures of equality, diversity, and inclusion.

This original paper examines the implications of the Trump administration’s policies in the areas of tax cuts (for small- and medium-sized enterprises rather than large corporations), incentives to support small business growth, entrepreneurship training, education and skills training (to retool Americans), and infrastructure spending.