Rhetorical escalation in alarm-raising requires ever stronger language to break through

Evidence

My doppelganger has rarely shied away from extreme rhetoric—she has predicted domestic coups and accused the United States of tipping into “fascism” continuously since 2007 and said that “Obama has done things like Hitler did.” This kind of intemperance presents a challenge, I have noticed, when Wolf is trying to raise a new alarm: How to find words powerful enough to convince people that, this time, it’s the Big One? Look, I get it: I’ve published well over two thousand pages about the climate crisis and am forever trying to find new ways to express the fact that we are unraveling the fabric that sustains human and other-than-human life—the difference being that it’s true. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 235

Categorization

• XREF: The rhetorical-escalation mechanism — each alarm must out-shout the last — parallels the siren-volume escalation tracked in The Soundscape and the noise/attention arms race themes in Klein’s broader media-critique work.