Introducing My New Production Studio: Rhetorical Light & Magic
By Michael Portney
There’s a reason I didn’t call it Rhetorical Flatulence.
There’s also a reason I almost did.
See, when you’re working in the arena I operate in—somewhere between Socratic jiu-jitsu, narrative sabotage, and philosophical slapstick—every name is a spell. A brand name is not just a label. It’s a frame. It dictates how your work is perceived, filtered, feared, or miscategorized. Pick wrong, and you’re mistaken for a YouTuber. Pick right, and you become a source of doctrine.
So after weeks of prowling the thesaurus like a jaguar with ADHD—high on Cicero, McLuhan, and secondhand gas station weed—I landed on it:
✨ Rhetorical Light and Magic™.
Say it again. Feel it in your jaw.
It sounds like Industrial Light & Magic if George Lucas had grown up debating schizophrenics behind 7-Eleven instead of directing space operas.
But it’s more than a clever remix. It’s a mission statement disguised as a production company.
🎭 Why This Name?
Because that’s what I make:
Rhetoric — the ancient and eternal tech of persuasion.
Light — illumination, exposure, revelation, metaphor.
Magic — the spectacle, the misdirection, the transformation.
I don't just write. I don't just film. I don't just code.
I engineer meaning. I weaponize language. I build illusions so persuasive they collapse regimes or resurrect them—depending on the client.
Rhetorical Light and Magic is where you go when you’re done asking what’s true and you’re ready to ask who benefits.
🔥 The Why Behind It All
I built this company because the culture has been hijacked by cowards.
Look around.
The right memes better than the left.
Corporations meme harder than activists.
Elon Musk is out-messaging entire governments while journalists are still tweeting like it’s 2014.
And every institutional voice—from higher ed to Hollywood to NGOs—has calcified into a bland, focus-grouped tofu paste of safe ideas and passive phrasing. It's not just boring. It's vulnerable.
When messaging fails, fascism fills the vacuum.
When storytelling collapses, branding takes over.
When meaning erodes, people don't seek truth—they seek spectacle with a soul.
That’s where Rhetorical Light and Magic steps in.
This is a studio for people who understand that the medium is the battlefield, and the story is the siege weapon.
🧠 What We Actually Do
We build mythologies.
We tear down narratives.
We simulate futures.
We do narrative engineering with the flare of street magic and the weight of strategic doctrine. Every project—whether it’s a film, a campaign, an AI tool, a media experiment, or a piece of satire—is built with one goal:
Move people’s perception the way generals move armies.
We don't just persuade. We position.
We don’t entertain for attention—we entertain for leverage.
We don’t create to express—we create to dislodge, destabilize, and rebuild.
At Rhetorical Light and Magic, we treat language like circuitry and emotion like voltage.
You can say that’s manipulative.
I say it’s post-literacy survival.
🕯️ The Lineage
This company wasn’t born in a VC office or spit out by an AI brand name generator.
Rhetorical Light and Magic was dragged screaming out of the American psyche, mid-collapse. Its bloodline runs through:
Greek agorae and Roman forums
Vaudeville and pro wrestling
Russian samizdat and punk zines
The Colbert Report, The Art of War, and meme pages banned by Meta
It speaks fluent Socratic, but it can also do wrestler promos, TikTok bait, DARPA-funded psychops, or a Nic Cage monologue—depending on the medium.
This studio was designed to operate across regimes of meaning. From lowbrow to high concept. From satire to sacred. From sensory overload to whispered truth.
We’re not loyal to genre. We’re loyal to effect.
🧙♂️ Magic as Methodology
Why “Magic”?
Because truth doesn’t scale.
Emotion does.
People don’t seek information—they seek transformation. They want to feel like their reality shifted. Like they saw behind the curtain.
Magic is not deception.
Magic is the craft of revelation.
The art of controlled distortion.
The weaponization of awe.
In rhetoric, that’s called pathos. In storytelling, it’s called catharsis. In business, it’s called conversion. But it’s all the same spell dressed in different fonts.
At Rhetorical Light and Magic, we don’t cast spells to fool people.
We cast spells to free them. Or trap them. Depending on the contract.
🔭 The Endgame
This isn’t just a studio. It’s a doctrine-generating machine.
Yes, we make content. But that content is a vehicle for something bigger than virality or profit. Every project is a probe. Every piece is a signal flare. Every script, essay, or video is a seed for something older than influence and stronger than truth:
Belief.
Belief is upstream of policy.
Belief is upstream of culture.
Belief is upstream of everything.
This studio doesn’t chase audiences. It builds believers. It trains rhetorical soldiers. It invents cultural archetypes that linger like cigarette smoke in a dive bar after closing.
We’re not trying to win the algorithm.
We’re trying to reprogram it.
🏗️ Our Philosophy: Make the Frame, Control the Game
Want to know the single most important law in media?
He who defines the frame wins the debate.
If you’re arguing inside someone else’s terms, you’ve already lost.
That’s why every project we touch begins with frame control. Not marketing. Not outreach. Not aesthetics. Frame.
What metaphor will define this issue for the next decade?
What symbol will bypass the brain and hook the gut?
What tone makes truth taste like candy—or poison?
We don’t play chess. We design the board.
🧱 Foundations of Our Craft
Everything we build at Rhetorical Light and Magic rests on four pillars:
Psychological Realism
We don’t create for ideal audiences. We create for real nervous systems. Scarred, addicted, bored, angry, overstimulated nervous systems. That’s the battlefield.Rhetorical Combat
We study debate like warfare. We don’t play nice. We strike strategically. Logos, ethos, pathos, kairos—we use the full arsenal.Memetic Precision
A good message spreads. A great message mutates. We design media to evolve in the wild.Emotional Thermodynamics
Every emotion is a fuel. Rage, joy, envy, shame—each one has a conversion rate. We don't moralize feelings. We deploy them.
🧨 Projects You’ll Never See
Some of our best work will never have our name on it.
It’ll be anonymous satire.
It’ll be quiet influence campaigns.
It’ll be documents that circulate in Telegram groups.
It’ll be phrases that sneak into the mouths of politicians or TikTokers who don’t know where they heard them.
We don’t need credit.
We want impact.
This is not clout-chasing. It’s cultural infiltration.
🌪️ Closing Argument: This Is War. And Theater.
In a world where the Overton window is dragged by billionaires, bots, and bedroom fascists, there’s no room left for neutral voices.
You either shape meaning, or you are shaped by it.
At Rhetorical Light and Magic, we chose the first path.
We don’t play “content.” We play narrative warfare with special effects.
We don’t do "edutainment." We build philosophical ordnance wrapped in meme-friendly packaging.
This is not a media company.
This is mythological resistance.
And it’s just getting started.
Rhetorical Light and Magic.
Est. 2025.
We’ll leave the light on for you.
