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Arguing Maher: Can We Just Assume for the Sake of Argument That Everyone Who Disagrees with Me is Hitler?
I’m sure Ricochet readers who know my work are surprised it has taken me this long to write something about the disinvitation push at UC Berkeley against comedian Bill Maher. After all, it’s one of the major topics in my latest short book, Freedom From Speech, and even the term “disinvitation season” was an internal FIRE term until this year. The truth is, I was waiting to hear back on an op-ed I’d written about Maher which fell through as the case developed.
But today, at the Huffington Post (I think it’s important not to just preach to the choir), I outline five major points that people should keep in mind even as UC Berkeley seems to be doing the right thing. But, one point I thought Ricochet readers would enjoy in particular, was my criticism of Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR for trying to shift the debate about Bill Maher over to a hypothetical about the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Here’s my take on that in full in the fifth point of my piece.
Published in General5. No matter how much more convenient it would make things, not everyone who disagrees with you is either the Grand Dragon of the KKK or Hitler.
At one point in the MSNBC debate about Maher, Hooper pivoted to: “So what if they invited the Grand Dragon of the KKK?”
If you watch the video, you can see how little tolerance I have for this tactic. It’s used as a way to do two things: First, to implicitly associate a speaker to an embodiment of human evil—typically the Klan or Nazis—while pretending not to; and second, to attempt to switch the topic over to more sympathetic ground. Such comparisons are nearly always farfetched. Generally, once an advocate for censorship starts working the Klan or the Nazis into the argument, at minimum you need to get them to clarify if they think the person they want to censor is in any way equivalent to the Klan or the Nazis. And if they answer “no,” the question quickly becomes “then why did you bring up the Klan/the Nazis?”
But there’s another reason why I have so little tolerance for this kind of evasive maneuver. It envisions a world in which the only thing standing between campuses inviting Hitler to give commencement addresses, or the proliferation of KKK student groups, is an enlightened elite that stands ready to censor us for our own good. The truth is that the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan would never be invited to be a commencement speaker in the first place. (And if he were, that would tell students something they desperately needed to know about the university they chose to attend!) The views of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan are and should be protected by the First Amendment, but the only world in which those views are popular on campus are those that exist in the hypotheticals of pundits struggling to justify why they are trying to censor a liberal atheist comedian.
Thanks for the suggestion, Greg. I will definitely use it the next time someone pulls that on me (which probably won’t be very long from now!). You do great work, there’s no doubt.
I wish you’d have called him out on his motte and bailey nonsense. He went unchallenged on his “we are ok with people speaking” but at the same time it would be “speaking is a tacit endorsement” equivocation the entire time. I’m not sure when your opponent would have agreed that speaking at a university is just speaking, and not being honored, or a tacit endorsement, or whatnot.
Anyway, found that particularly annoying. Love your work.
It would be such a shame if your allegiances should come to be regarded as questionable.
Thanks for this post. Greg, you are doing great work at FIRE.
oye, greg… no thank you for linking me to that video. The example “replace Arab with Black man” is just as insane as his KKK reference. Yeah, you replace a lot of things with “black man” and you’ll get a pretty big reaction in the US. When black men start with the suicide bombings and the beheaddings, not to mention mercy killings, female genital mutilation, and burkhas, I suppose people would be happy to replace “arab” with “black man.”
You might have asked when the last time she saw black women in the US running around in burkhas, but that might have required a bit of intellectual honesty on her part.
Also, when the guy says “it’s honoring, etc… that we protest,” he’s lying through his teeth. When asked why he protests anything, he’ll say that the person is implicitly being “honored.” Not all that clever. I could see that you were pretty annoyed with that argument, but just not enough time to really parse out how stupid (and dishonest) it is.
What if it’s someone who disagrees with vegetarianism?
The tactic is also known as a “Motte and Bailey” argument.
Source: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/