DScience journalist and presenter Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim concluded her video statement by proposing political engagement as an anti-populist experiment. Nguyen-Kim (36) hinted in a YouTube video a few days ago that she might become politically active. Now he said in a new edition of his ZDFneo show: “I'm not going into politics.” He wanted to sincerely apologize for the calculated ambivalence of his words.
The solution (previously in the ZDF media library; linear 22:15) took place on Sunday evening: the whole thing was an experiment in the ZDFneo program “Maithink X – The Show”. At the beginning of the new season, there is an edition of the show about populism – the title: “How populist politicians are fooling us”.
Typical rhetorical figures
Nguyen-Kim clearly shows the rhetorical tricks used by populists, including the false dilemma argument, the ad hominem argument, and the straw man argument. At the end, he says, he also used some of those typical rhetorical figures that often come from the right in his video, and wanted to show how susceptible “we all” are to populism.
For example, in a widely reported video, Nguyen-Kim said, “I'm worried about the future of our country, and I'm not just looking at it anymore.”
In the nearly nine-minute clip, Nguyen-Kim also said that science alone can't make policy, but sometimes it's not so bad to “shake the deadlock with an outsider's perspective.”
Award-winning science journalist Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim became known for her YouTube channel “maiLab,” where she explains science topics in a nutshell for laypeople.