My take on Miller/Acosta duel in
this thread that is by the way, started half a day ahead.
Lets look at each of Acosta's points: tradition and English. Miller had a dialectical response to each of them. He cited historical dates, and patterns of immigration to give a fuller picture of the nature of American immigration in the past. Instead of asking follow-up questions to either point out an error, or force Miller to expound on his point, Acosta responds by calling him a name: 'revisionist'. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with being a revisionist. It is a label devoid of content. It says nothing about whether Miller is correct or not. Rhetoric is always devoid of content.
Miller than responds with more dialectic. He attempts to pin down an objective standard that they can both agree upon for what would constitute historically traditional levels of immigration. Acosta pauses, and them makes a difficult to decipher slur about the nature of the proposal, calling it "press one for English philosophy", whatever that means. The point was yet again to label Miller rather than address a dialectical argument.
Then Acosta, despite Miller already pointing out the fact that English is already a requirement for naturalization, and everyone knows it hasn't been a barrier to non-white immigration, he suggests that the effect of the measure will be to bring in only people from Britain and Australia, effectively calling the plan racists, and by implication calling Miller a racist too.
At that point, Miller says "**** it", and switches from dialectic to rhetorical emotional manipulation (of the audience, not Acosta) tying to pain Acosta as the racist. Acosta left him no choice. Miller attempted to be dialectic until a typical leftist tactics of trying "racist" was used against him, and he felt to need to respond in kind with his own rhetorical strategy.
This is exactly what created the Alt-Right phenomenon in the first place. It was from day one a reaction against strident SJW tactics.
