And more (yes, this is a long excerpt; it's worth it):
Rhetorical obstacle courses, minefields, and fortresses … oh my!
The easiest way to dismiss someone in modern discussions without actually engaging (something Rikki and I call “winning arguments without winning arguments”) is to simply dismiss your opponent as a bad person. This is because of what Rikki and I describe in “Canceling” as the “Fourth Great Untruth” (continuing from the first three in “Coddling”) or the “Untruth of Ad Hominem”:
bad people only have bad opinions.
Shrier’s new book will be dismissed right off the bat because in her previous book, “
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” she committed a secular blasphemy. She questioned and criticized the move to put youth who might be questioning their gender identity on puberty blockers — or worse, start medically transitioning them — in what, thanks to a huge PR victory on the part of trans rights activists, is now referred to as “gender affirming care.”
Having authored such a book makes Shrier
persona non grata in many media and academic circles. Indeed, it even led American Civil Liberties Union staffer
Chase Strangio to assert in a now-deleted tweet, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” And since
bad people only have bad opinions, nothing new that Shrier has to say is considered worth hearing, even if it’s on a different topic.
. . . once you’re labeled a heretic it’s hard to get your detractors to take your work seriously even if you turn out to be right. That’s why Shrier is going to have to deal with the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, along with what Rikki and I call the “Obstacle Course,” the “Minefield,” and the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” in “Canceling.”
The Obstacle Course
The Obstacle Course consists of a number of rhetorical dodges and
logical fallacies you might be familiar with:
- Whataboutism: Defending against criticism of your side by bringing up the other side’s alleged wrongdoing.
- Straw-manning: Misrepresenting the opposition’s perspective by constructing a weak, inaccurate version of their argument that can be easily refuted. (I have seen Shrier’s arguments straw-manned constantly, and doubtless will again.)
- Minimization: Claiming that a problem doesn’t exist, is too small-scale to worry about, and (eventually) that even if it is happening it’s a good thing. (Thankfully we see less of this than we used to when it comes to youth mental health, but it had to get incredibly bad first.)
- Motte and Bailey arguments: Conflating two arguments — a reasonable one (the motte) and an unreasonable one (the bailey).
- Underdogging: Claiming your viewpoint is more valid than your opponent’s because you speak for the disadvantaged. (Obviously, given that trans people are a minority group, this tactic is used against Shrier all the time.)
The Minefield
If you clear the Obstacle Course, you still have work to do. The Minefield is about attacking the person making the argument rather than the argument itself, otherwise known as the
ad hominem fallacy. This is why you’ll see that the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem underpins these tactics:
- Accusations of bad faith: Asserting that your opponent is being disingenuous or has a sinister, selfish, and/or ulterior motive. (This is de rigueur if you say anything the slightest bit controversial these days).
- Hypocrisy projection: Asserting that your opponent is hypocritical about a given argument, often without actually checking the consistency of their record.
- Claiming offense: Responding to an idea you don’t like with “that’s offensive,” rather than engaging with its substance. (This is so normal now we hardly even notice it.)
- Offense archaeology: Digging through someone’s past comments to find speech that can be held against them.
- Making stuff up: Fabricating information to bolster a weak argument — and asserting it with confidence! When all else fails, why not just lie?
The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress
Rikki and I describe this in detail in “Canceling,” but in short, the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress consists of a series of questions that serve as barricades to having an argument on its merits or substance. You’ll be amazed by how effectively each identity-related barricade of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress allows anyone inside of it to cover their ears when they don’t want to meaningfully engage with an argument they don’t like.
The first barrier is a tactic I call
fasco-casting, which consists of labeling people “conservative,” a “right winger,” “far right,” “fascist,” or the hilariously absurd “
neo-confederate,” whether they actually are or not. As Shrier herself
has said, “conservative” in this space is simply another word for a bad person. And since
bad people have only bad opinions, anyone who can be labeled conservative — or even “conservative adjacent” — can be dismissed without further consideration. Despite being more of an old-school liberal, Shrier is
constantly called conservative or
conservative-adjacent by her critics. She wouldn’t make it past step one.
Next up, you’re taken through what we call the “Demographic Funnel,” which uses identity characteristics to negate people as legitimate interlocutors without addressing their arguments: What’s the speaker’s race? What’s the speaker’s sex? What’s the speaker’s sexuality? Is the speaker trans or cis?
Being on the wrong side of these questions immediately justifies your being shut down — and it ends up allowing about 99% of the population to be dismissed without a single counterargument. If Shrier could somehow convince her opponent that she is not in fact a conservative, she’s still a cis white woman and therefore easily dismissed anyway.
And the thing is, even if you
do happen to fall into the very thin sliver of people who check all the right identity boxes, it doesn’t matter. All of that is kabuki anyway — the rhetorical equivalent to taking a knee and running out the clock. The truth is that you can be smeared and dismissed as a traitor for having the wrong opinions. Tactics in this “Just Kidding!” column of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress include questions like:
- Can the speaker be accused of being “phobic”? If you can be pegged as exhibiting any kind of “ism,” or having any kind of “phobia,” then your point of view doesn’t matter.
- Are they guilty by association? If you can connect the speaker to someone considered morally “beyond the pale,” then you can accuse them of being guilty by association. It’s essentially the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem by proxy.
- Did the speaker lose their cool? We dub this the “don’t get angry” barricade, in which someone hastens their own demise by voicing frustration.
- Did the speaker violate a “thought terminating cliché”? If you can be accused of things like “dog-whistling,” “punching down,” “being on the wrong side of history,” or “parroting right-wing talking points,” no further engagement is required.
- Can you emotionally blackmail someone? When it seems like you’re starting to lose the argument, you can always fall back on emotional outbursts and claims of harm to prevent more discussion.
And if all else fails (which it won’t), you can abandon all pretense of staying on point and making a cogent argument by darkly hinting that something else is what’s really going on. All you have to do is ominously allude to the notion that something other than the issue at hand is really what the problem is. Say, “Well, really this was all about ‘a context’ in which other bad things were happening, so the community was rightfully upset — even if I was wrong,” and you’re home-free.
If it isn’t clear by now why Rikki and I call it the
Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, it’s because it’s designed to be invincible — and it is. Shrier doesn’t stand a chance against it. No one does.
The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress can’t be defeated — only rejected
The potential population of people who make it through the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and are “allowed” to speak is vanishingly small and likely in perfect lock step with today’s orthodoxy. In other words, the only people who get to speak are those who wouldn’t disagree anyway.
It’s impossible for any speaker to defeat the Obstacle Course, the Minefield, and the rhetorical fortresses, which is why I am trying to urge people to reject them instead. There is nothing about being a conservative or a liberal, and there is nothing about your race, sex, sexuality, or the friends you keep that means you are automatically wrong or right about a given issue. Indeed, there’s nothing about even being a bad person that means you’re wrong or right about any particular issue, and there’s nothing about being “good” that means you are always right.
Even though in my opinion Abigail Shrier is a brave and principled human being, it’s beside the point. Anytime critics bring up the claim that she’s a bad person, a transphobe, or the fact that she’s a cis white woman, the reasonable response must be, “Noted. Can we please get back to the argument now?” The only way to beat these rhetorical barriers and deflections is to recognize that you don’t need to fight your way through them at all.
Then, maybe, we can get to things that are actually worth our time, like Shrier’s fantastic new book. I hope everyone will read it. I hope its publication signals that we are starting to see the end of the weird ideological eruption Matt Yglesias dubbed the “
Great Awokening.”
And I hope we are now instead entering what I’d like to call the “Great Debunkening.”
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