WRD 104: Composition & Rhetoric II Rotating Header Image

Highly recommended readings

These aren’t on the syllabus, but:

Jill Lepore: After the Fact: In the history of truth, a new chapter begins. ” … for knowing how to know what’s true and what’s not.”

Teju Cole

NYTDonald Trump Says Transgender People Should Use the Bathroom They Want

Mr. Trump’s main rival for the Republican nomination, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, immediately seized on the “Today” show comments on several platforms, pushing out a statement from his campaign, assailing Mr. Trump’s remarks both on Glenn Beck’s radio program and at a rally in Maryland, and sending out this critical message on Twitter: “Common sense: grown men shouldn’t be in bathrooms w/ little girls.”

Speaking to Mr. Beck, Mr. Cruz said the country has “gone off the deep end” and the idea of so-called genderless bathrooms is “absurd.”

“My 5-year-old knows the difference between boys and girls,” Mr. Cruz said, referring to his younger daughter. “That’s not a reasonable position. It is simply crazy. The idea that grown men would be allowed alone in a bathroom with little girls — you don’t need to be a behavioral psychologist to realize bad things can happen and any prudent person wouldn’t allow that.”

Speaking at a campaign event in Maryland, Mr. Cruz said that Mr. Trump had aligned himself with President Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Have we gone stark-raving nuts?” he asked, bemoaning what he said was a culture of political correctness.

NYT: Ted Cruz, Attacking Donald Trump, Uses Transgender Bathroom Access as Cudgel:

That did not stop Mr. Cruz from saying the country had gone “stark raving nuts.”

He attacked Mr. Trump for political correctness and yoked him to Mrs. Clinton as a liberal. “If Donald Trump dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom,” he said in South Bend, Ind. “And I apologize for putting that image in your mind.”

Earlier, Mr. Cruz said, “If the law says that any man, if he chooses, can enter a women’s restroom, a little girls’ restroom, and stay there, and he cannot be removed because he simply says at that moment he feels like a woman, you’re opening the door for predators.”