Sean Phelan
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s-phelan.bsky.social
Sean Phelan
@s-phelan.bsky.social
42 followers 150 following 29 posts
Teaches media and communication studies at Massey University.
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s-phelan.bsky.social
Sean Phelan @s-phelan.bsky.social · 4d
50 free eprints of a new article in a special issue of Social Semiotics

A study of how the notion of "accountability" is rearticulated in far-right discourses – recentred around a monstrous image of "the left" that ramps up hand-me-down neoliberal discourses

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IMBKX...
Reposted by Sean Phelan
rhetoricpj.bsky.social
I wrote a whole book about why the American Right is so into "doing a gender " and look a big part of it is that they think civil rights and progress are humiliating

www.uapress.ua.edu/978081732109...
I the People
Winner of the National Communication Association’s 2023 Hochmuth-Nichols Award" . . . An important contribution to studies of the American conservative mov...
www.uapress.ua.edu
January 9, 2026 at 2:57 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
The vice signalling is like a public pedagogy machine, which must be resisted with a ethico-political sensibility that isn't afraid to bring virtue to the staging of political conflict
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 23h
"...the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior."

latest for @bostonreview.bsky.social

www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...
Empire of Vice
In a perverse twist on virtue signaling, the Trump administration is training Americans in the politics of raw domination.
www.bostonreview.net
January 9, 2026 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
"Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge." - Ernst Bloch, 1954
January 9, 2026 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
feolski.bsky.social
I know we're in the midst of a catastrophe-loop, designed to desensitize us to the disaster and violence of the Trump regime. But it's still noteworthy that the official messaging of a Cabinet-level department is straightforwardly bullhorning QAnon slogans.
Tweet from the US Dept of Labor. Image: Trump's head from behind, hand raised in ersatz salute to sports arena. Text superimposed on image: "TRUST THE PLAN". Tweet text: "Trust the Plan. Trust Trump".
January 9, 2026 at 12:13 AM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
mikehixenbaugh.com
Forensic analysis of objective video evidence. This is how you serve readers searching for clarity.
January 8, 2026 at 1:00 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
think of the banality of fascistic desires that present themselves as some kind of emancipation from a "left authoritarianism". I have a piece looking at how "reactionary watchdogs" are reconstituting the meaning of "accountability", based on an analysis of two conversations between Rufo & Peterson
s-phelan.bsky.social Sean Phelan @s-phelan.bsky.social · 1d
Open-access link to Michał Krzyżanowska, Natalia Krzyżanowska & @jensrydgren.bsky.social's introduction to a special issue of Social Semiotics on the far-right's promiscuous "conceptual flipsiding" & inversion of liberal democratic discourses for illiberal ends

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
www.tandfonline.com
January 8, 2026 at 2:34 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
Open-access link to Michał Krzyżanowska, Natalia Krzyżanowska & @jensrydgren.bsky.social's introduction to a special issue of Social Semiotics on the far-right's promiscuous "conceptual flipsiding" & inversion of liberal democratic discourses for illiberal ends

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
www.tandfonline.com
January 8, 2026 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
alessandronai.bsky.social
The 📚 Encyclopedia of Political Communication 📚 is now out in the wild, and a first awesome batch of entries is available in open access!

Read them, love them, use them for your courses! 🔥

Check the 🧵 below to access them

Plz repost for maximum diffusion
January 8, 2026 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
feolski.bsky.social
What the world's richest man, with the world's largest megaphone, is currently promoting. A tweet from a patently white supremacist, antisemitic account that tours through fantasies of race war and concludes: "White solidarity is the only way to survive." Elon's response: "💯".
Elon Musk quote tweet. Original from account "Jerr". Text "If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive." Elon's addition: "💯"
January 8, 2026 at 1:49 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
feolski.bsky.social
A woman was killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis today. The first impulse of the regime? To smear the victim as a "domestic terrorist". As with Trump's J6 revisionism ("stolen election"), this is essential to far right information warfare: to repeat a slogan often enough that it short-circuits... 🧵
Tweet from DHS: "Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats. This is an evolving situation, and we will give the public more information as soon as it becomes available."
January 7, 2026 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
rosieoverell.bsky.social
A riff critiquing AI in Ed Tech, and ‘Cogniti’ in particular
AI stifles desire, destroys the social link and operates on a death drive logic
MORE-DEMAND-MORE!

art work by :mentalKLINIK ‘LUNATIC POETS’ 2025

#AI #Critique #Lacan #EdTech

tinyurl.com/58hfe7nt
November 8, 2025 at 11:54 PM
Reposted by Sean Phelan
amandathomas.bsky.social
More #BDS success against Elbit. Next up - UniSaver 🤞
January 6, 2026 at 8:53 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
a textbook example of far right normalisation. The energy of the moral panic and monstrous fantasies transfigured into everyday doxa
kathrynajoyce.bsky.social Kathryn Joyce @kathrynajoyce.bsky.social · 2d
“It’s like a hydra effect. They’ve planted seeds for a vine & now the vine’s taking off in all the directions it wants to go.” New story @inthesetimes.com & @hechingerreport.org on how the Independence Law Center spread anti-trans school policies across PA & how they continue to spread on their own.
“Clever as serpents”: How a legal group’s anti-LGBTQ policies took root in school districts across a state
In Pennsylvania, parents are challenging Independence Law Center policies while trying to avoid a legal case that could go to the conservative Supreme Court.
inthesetimes.com
January 6, 2026 at 5:55 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
and, as a species of coked-up media politics, X's ideological mission is very much a transnational one - a set of affordances for local "ideological entrepreneurs" to delegitimise the journalistic infrastructures of the nation state.
jwherrman.bsky.social John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4d
Wrote about an obvious and yet profoundly underappreciated aspect of the AI boom: its total narrative capture by Elon Musk's X nymag.com/intelligence...
The reality of the AI industry is far larger than a subculture on X with hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into physical infrastructure, reshaping jobs, and deploying into products used by billions of people. But that makes X's capture of the AI conversation all the more notable. Much as Twitter long ago captured, amplified, and distorted elite conversation in media, in sports, in parts of finance, in left politics, and more recently in right politics, the world's understanding of what's going on in Silicon Valley right now - the hype and the doom and the bubble and the progress - is first processed through the strange culture and incentives of X, which is now owned by estranged OpenAI co-founder, Google antagonist, and xAI founder Elon Musk. It has been merged into xAI, where the in-house chatbot occasionally confuses itself with Hitler. When the history of this period in tech is eventually written, it will be composed of, among other things, a whole lot of threads and replies from blue checks on X. Then, of course, there's the Musk factor. The fact of his ownership creates obvious risks for all of his competitors, who rely on his platform to supply the vibes they need to help keep their companies, and the AI boom in general, going. It's worth remembering that, back before he decided to purchase it and let it drive him nuts, Twitter was, to Musk, a platform with clear functional utility, a social network that helped make him wildly famous and use that fame to convince thousands of retail traders to buy into Tesla, the company that made him the richest man in the world. Even if we assume, against all reason, that Musk won't leverage this unusual sort of power over all the competitors gathered on his platform, X's influence over them and how they're seen by the rest of the world is undeniable. Along with "AI Twitter," some of the other communities thriving on Musk era X include MAGA guys and crypto guys, meaning that the background vibe of the primary gathering place for the industry that's trying to remake the world is quite a bit more conservative and mercenary than it otherwise might have been, and while the primary factor in the public's deep skepticism of where Al is going is clearly fear about labor, association with polarizing Muskian politics probably doesn't help assuage ambient fears about job loss and surveillance. (One important consequence of having the AI elite gathered on X is that their media diets are now substantially made up of one another's posts, effusive and dismissive responses to their oren posts, and standard "For You" page Musk-era algo-slop. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly their information diets are influenced by their timelines, and you can get a pretty good idea of what those look like by jacking into AI Twitter yourself.)
January 6, 2026 at 5:43 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
I think this is exactly right - everything is hiding in plain sight. In some ways, Trump's press conference response to the Maduro kidnapping forgoes the need for explanatory analysis, given how nakedly he connects the dots between the authoritarian ambitions at home and abroad
jensrydgren.bsky.social Jens Rydgren @jensrydgren.bsky.social · 2d
Far-right leaders surprisingly often mean what they say. The rest of us, instead of believing them, surprisingly often look for “what they really mean” or call it theater. But it’s usually wiser to take them at their word. If Trump says he wants Greenland, he’ll probably try to get Greenland.
January 6, 2026 at 5:23 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
Trump's boot-boy in chief pining the blame on "the neoliberal experiment" for the stifling of his racist colonial fantasies...as if the critique of "neoliberalism" is now the idiom of the far-right
January 5, 2026 at 7:55 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
Impressive cowardice by George Stephanopoulos to do a 14 minute interview with Rubio and make no reference to "international law" or "sovereignty". The "mainstream media" that Trump hates so much acting like the lapdogs of America first
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 4d
STEPHANOPOULOS: Trump said the US is going to 'run Venezuela.' Under what legal authority?

RUBIO: We want a better future for the people of Venezuela

STEPHANOPOULOS: I'll ask again -- what is the legal authority?

RUBIO: We have court orders
January 4, 2026 at 7:42 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
50 free eprints of a new article in a special issue of Social Semiotics

A study of how the notion of "accountability" is rearticulated in far-right discourses – recentred around a monstrous image of "the left" that ramps up hand-me-down neoliberal discourses

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IMBKX...
January 4, 2026 at 6:28 PM
s-phelan.bsky.social
@islates.bsky.social do people mainly just talk to themselves here too? I'm looking for a new outlet for my solipsism...
January 4, 2026 at 6:10 PM