Straw Man Argument. “He’s basically Hitler.” This one gets thrown around a lot, but it is key to be mindful of using it and wary when you hear it. “Trump called immigrants ‘animals’ . . . that is the same language Hitler used to describe the Jews!” or “Hillary called half of the country ‘deplorables’. . . that is the same language Hitler used to describe the Jews!” Hitler also said, “We must love and support our troops,” as did Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump. This doesn’t mean that when someone says something idiotic or foolish we shouldn’t point it out, but appeals to the worst human ever generally indicate some pretty strong (and irrational) bias.
Assuming the Answer. Also watch out when someone assumes the answer is automatic. “We must keep the death penalty because it prevents violent crime,” should be met with, “What evidence do we actually have that implementing the death penalty reduced violent crime?” A very common one over the last couple of decades is, “We have to reduce man’s carbon emissions because the earth’s temperature has gone up as our carbon output has increased.” You should ask, “The temperature on Mars has also gone up roughly the same amount as it has on Earth over the same period. Did our carbon emissions cause that as well?” Correlation is not causation (in either direction!), but the point is to ensure the argument is fully explored and evidence is scientifically applied.
If we spend time actually using his baloney detection kit, we may find ourselves spreading fewer errors from those who have been deceived, the Russians, or anyone else who wishes to deceive us.
Currently, the effort to discredit and discard the entirety of Western civilization is the source of much of our outrage, on both the right and left. But if we are going to be able to answer whether it is worth saving, we need to show how to find the truth in current arguments. This effort began with easy political correctness, ridding our daily language of outdated words as well as those that had become associated with deep unwarranted shame or hate, such as retarded, fag, and nigger. The list kept growing to the point that now there are conversations we have in the newsroom in which we sound like idiots. “Wait, which f-word?” There are now multiple letters that stand in for words, and sometimes multiple “no-go zone” words per letter. We are afraid to even speak to each other. And it is only getting worse. It affects not just speech but actions and even associations.
It is normal and natural to group or label things or people. We do it so our mind can process all it must to keep us moving forward. However, we are now at a point where the label or the group is all that matters.
After the shooting of the police officer in Dallas in 2016 by a member of Black Lives Matter, I asked a few of those marchers to come in and have a mini town hall. They did. We all learned a lot. First major point was that NONE of them had read the Black Lives Matter manifesto. These people were nothing like the leadership you see on TV. They were concerned about the direction of their community and were trying to get someone to listen. BLM were the only people who would. One woman, perhaps my age, said some people in her neighborhood were afraid of their own children, and she was afraid of her own grandchildren. As she put it, “Because something has changed. And we have nowhere to turn.”
As I spoke to one young twentysomething who had struck me as a bit militant, I stopped in the middle of a question and told her what I was feeling at that moment: “Honestly, I am a little afraid of even asking you anything because I am afraid of using the wrong, nonwoke language and setting people off.”
She looked me square in the eye with the same look I had on my face. She said, “I can’t believe you feel that way, because I feel the same way about you.” From then on we had a very productive conversation. Both sides were not looking for blame but reconciliation and understanding.
We must be able and willing to question even our most deeply held beliefs and be willing to live with what we find. But we also need to defend the truth against smear, association, or any of the items on the baloney test. So let’s try this out.
Currently the effort is based on the belief that some of the most prominent Founding Fathers should be discredited because of their connection to slavery—men like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison. They were rich white guys, too, which are probably their two biggest sins—and those should discredit them even more.
Recently, a law professor ironically named Carl Bogus wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “Was Slavery a Factor in the Second Amendment?” Bogus tries to convince readers that the Second Amendment is evil by tying it to slavery. In predictable progressive fashion, his jumping-off point is the recent shooting at Santa Fe High School in south Texas, which he immediately ties to the problem of that darn Second Amendment.
Next, he makes an enormous leap in logic to state that James Madison included the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights because Madison was from Virginia (a hard-core slave-owning state), and vicious slave owners there were deathly afraid of slave rebellions. So, they made sure their man Madison gave them the right to have guns so they could keep those slaves in line.
Seriously—that’s his thesis. Okay, but he is a scholar publishing in the New York Times, he must have knowledge and evidence I do not have nor have ever seen.
Warning: It is this kind of dishonest “logic” that makes your head hurt. Bogus makes it all sound like undisputed fact rather than just his own made-up interpretation of the motives of James Madison and his bigot buddies from Virginia.
One of the most bogus ideas in Bogus’s essay is that James Madison wedged the gun rights provision into the Bill of Rights because Virginians were afraid that antislavery congressmen from the northern states would use their new constitutional powers to disarm state militias. Gasp! That would leave poor southern states like Virginia vulnerable to slave attacks.
But if the antislavery states in the North were really concerned about the South wanting guns just so they’d be able to control their slave populations, why would the North go along with the Second Amendment? If that was truly the South’s main motivation, wouldn’t northern states have protested enough to delete that provision from the Bill of Rights?
Bogus points out that before the U.S. Constitution was written, “only” four of the original thirteen states’ constitutions included a right to bear arms. Following his guns-against-slaves logic, all four of those states must have been from the slave-owning South, right? Nope. Only one.
So, it had to be Virginia, right? I mean, according to Bogus, they were leading this charge to make sure people had guns so they could control those slaves. But no: Even though it damages his entire premise, Bogus admits that Virginia did not originally have an individual right to bear arms in its state constitution. The only southern state that spelled out this right in its constitution was North Carolina (1776). The other three were northern states.
Bogus tries to bolster his case by name-dropping other slave-holding Virginians like Constitutional Convention delegate George Mason, who ended up voting against ratifying the Constitution. But Mason’s opposition to too much federal power was not because he loved slavery so much and was afraid the government would take it away. In fact, even though Mason owned slaves, he was clearly troubled by the institution, and wanted the Constitution to include a ban on the importation of slaves. This is hard for modern progressives to wrap their brains around, because the same contradictions and foibles of human nature that they often celebrate in themselves, they refuse to excuse in the Founders. In other words, they have no historical imagination to grasp the distinct possibility that if they’d been born in 1700s Virginia, they too might have owned slaves.
But back to George Mason. He declared: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”
Does that sound like a guy who’s mainly co
ncerned with bearing arms to stifle slave rebellions? Even though he helped draft the Constitution, Mason ultimately voted against ratification because he felt it granted too much power to the federal government, especially in regulating commerce. The Second Amendment was not Mason’s top priority.
Still, Bogus tries to make the case that Virginia voted for the Bill of Rights only because it wanted the Second Amendment. He implies that since the Second Amendment exists because of slavery, we should get rid of the Second Amendment.
I guess you could give Bogus kudos for creativity, but especially for a law professor, his homework here is sloppy. He does not include any quotes from James Madison himself about the Second Amendment, or even any quotes from the ratification debates. In 1789, Madison said he included in his draft of the Bill of Rights only those “rights against which I believe no serious objection has been made by any class of our constituents.”
This wasn’t like progressives trying to pull a fast one and hide a highly controversial provision among the other rights. It wasn’t Madison trying to squeeze in a personal agenda item. The Second Amendment was one of the “certain unalienable rights” that come from God, not the state. Or, if you don’t subscribe to a higher power, the rights are part of natural law—fundamental to human existence regardless of how humans originated.
The Second Amendment was simply not a controversial thing to American citizens of the eighteenth century. Before the Constitution, colonial law was informed by the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which, believe it or not, included a right to bear arms (and had nothing to do with slavery).
The Second Amendment did not give us the right to bear arms. The right already fundamentally exists as a natural and inherently necessary corollary of the right to our own life. If you believe that each person has the right to his or her own life, then you must believe in the right to defend that life; otherwise your right to life is a logical fallacy. The Founders knew this and simply wrote it down as a reminder, and for legal protection from those who would take away that right.
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Fake News? Fake History!
One of the blessings of my life is to be able to preserve and share history with others. I began to collect historical items and documents fifteen years ago, to do my part in ensuring the truth was never lost. One of the items I steward is an engraving made in 1829 of Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence. People often ask, if he wasn’t a racist bigot who raped his slaves, how come he would scratch out the poetic words “All men are created equal” and then not mention slavery?
Well, as it turns out, he did. The wording was removed before the final draft. Not by him, or the eleven delegations who came that summer to devise a path to freedom. It was taken out, over his objections, by the demands of two southern states. Sorry, Mr. Bogus, but neither of them was Virginia. At the end of the list of abuses of the king’s power, Jefferson writes an entire paragraph:
He [the King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. (Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the Declaration of Independence, June 1776)
Does this sound like the words of a man, written while alone in a distant hotel room far from his dangerously ill wife, who hates black people and wants them enslaved?
“Well, why didn’t they all just break away without those two states?” Because to accomplish this never-before-done feat, they needed all thirteen colonies on board. In fact, John Hancock, as president of the Second Continental Congress, had previously ruled that the vote for independence must be unanimous. If two of the colonies broke away, the king would have paid them handsomely to fight against us.
You see that in the above quote, he was already paying slaves to fight for him. Had this union not been made, the Founders truly felt that the freedom we all enjoy today would have been lost, and the slave trade would have gone on far longer than till 1808. If the Revolution had fallen apart, all of the Founders would have been imprisoned or killed, and the idea of independence and equality would surely have been lost. How many more would have died on the king’s slave ships?
It is important to spend a minute on the line about how the king had done everything in his power to stop all American efforts to abolish slavery. Did you know that Jefferson worked almost his entire life to abolish slavery in Virginia? Though Jefferson opposed it, Virginia law made it illegal to release your slaves unless upon death—as Washington did. Virginia also made it illegal to release your slaves upon death if you died in debt. Which Jefferson did. When, in the end, he could not change the laws of Virginia or receive anything but a compromise from the southern states to stop the slave trade (but not slavery) in 1808, Jefferson wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
How about the charge that Abraham Lincoln was not a churchgoing man, that he wasn’t a “God guy”? This claim is easily debunked by Lincoln’s own words in a passage he wrote that was discovered after his death:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
And explain this letter from 1852 from Lincoln’s pastor:
I have had frequent and intimate conversations with him on the subject of the Bible and the Christian religion, when he could have had no motive to deceive me, and I considered him sound not only on the truth of the Christian religion but on all its fundamental doctrines and teaching. And more than that: in the latter days of his chastened and weary life, after the death of his son Willie, and his visit to the battlefield of Gettysburg, he said, with tears in his eyes, that he had lost confidence in everything but God, and that he now believed his heart was changed, and that he loved the Saviour, and, if he was not deceived in himself, it was his intention soon to make a profession of religion.
Or the dishonest and dishonorable lie that Lincoln never cared about slavery and stopped it only because it was the only way to win the war. If he didn’t care and didn’t want to free the slaves, then why do we have an argument written in his own hand explaining his stance on slavery to a personal friend who was a slave owner from Kentucky:
You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get
control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
In 1864, he wrote these words to Albert G. Hodges in a letter specifically to clarify his feelings on slavery after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel” (italics mine).
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong . . . yet there are many people who still believe Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist.
There are many honest mistakes, and then there are those mistakes that are nothing of the kind. They are made with the express intent to destroy the truth. And people get away with it, because we as a people are no longer curious; we do not know how to look for the original sources or even want to question with a little boldness. We are comfortable.
But the truth does matter. It always returns, because nothing else works for long. In the last lines of one of my favorite poems, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” Rudyard Kipling spells it all out. The “copybook headings” are Proverbs or Maxims, holding up age-old wisdom—virtues such as honesty or fair dealing—printed at the top of the pages of nineteenth-century British students’ special notebooks, called copybooks. The schoolchildren had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page. It was how they learned penmanship and truth. However, “the marketplaces” were areas that dishonesty and immorality ruled. The Gods (or principles) of the marketplace represent selfishness, reckless progress, overindulgence, and a failure to learn from the past.