‘Canceling’ readers! We need your feedback!

Help us strengthen our arguments and ideas for the paperback edition of “Canceling”!

It’s been a little over 220 days since the great Rikki Schlott and I published “The Canceling of the American Mind,” and in that time we’ve done a ton of talking, thinking, and writing about the arguments, ideas, and conclusions we draw in the book. A lot of it you’ve seen right here on ERI, of course, but I’ve also had the amazing opportunities of going on the Lex Fridman Podcast, CSPAN Book TV’s After Words (with the extremely handsome Matt Welch)  and, of course, Real Time with Bill Maher, among others.

And now we’ve reached a super cool phase of the book publishing life cycle: preparing for the paperback edition which is slated to come out in March of 2025! (I know that sounds a long way off, but it will be here in no time.)

If you’re not familiar with publishing, you may not know that paperback editions of books (as opposed to hardcovers, which tend to come out first) aren’t necessarily just reprints of the original manuscript. Oftentimes writers have the chance to amend or revise things for new editions. And given how much has happened since we finished writing “Canceling” last summer, we have a lot to add and talk about. We already know we want to add an epilogue covering the absolute rollercoaster of Cancel Culture, free speech, civil disobedience, and all the madness on campus since October 7th.

So, please give us your feedback, your general thoughts, and more specific ideas for additional stories or ideas — and if you caught errors or typos, please let us know so we can fix them in the next edition! 

In this post we want to focus on improving and deepening our arguments about the rhetorical dodges that are used to short-circuit debate and discussion both on and off campus today. Specifically, we’re looking at Chapters 5, 6, and 8 of “Canceling,” where we describe the discursive no-man’s-land between both sides’ rhetorical fortresses, and then the rhetorical fortresses themselves. Here, we’ll start by breaking down the tactics both sides use to sidestep debate and run out the rhetorical clock — basically, “keep dodging until the other side gives up” — which we call the Obstacle Course and the Minefield.

As you read through, try and think of anything we might have missed, anything we can add, or any examples we can use to illustrate how these tactics work in the real world. You can post your thoughts in the comments here, or DM us through Substack.

The Obstacle Course

As we outlined in our recent review of Abigail Shrier’s “Bad Therapy”, the Obstacle Course consists of a number of rhetorical dodges and logical fallacies designed to run out the clock, exhaust our opponents, and otherwise keep discourse from reaching any productive conclusion:

• Whataboutism: Deflecting 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.

• 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.

• Motte and Bailey arguments: Conflating a reasonable argument (the motte) and an unreasonable one (the bailey), and switching back and forth when it is convenient.

• Underdogging: Claiming your viewpoint is more valid than your opponent’s simply because you speak for the disadvantaged.

One tactic that sort of appears in the book but might need its own category — either in the Obstacle Course or the Minefield — might just be called simple name-calling. We talk about this a lot in the form of fascocasting, where simply labeling someone “conservative,” “right-wing,” “racist,” or if you really hate them, “fascist,” is a way of dismissing their argument entirely simply by labeling them. 

The same thing happens on the right when people dismiss someone as “woke,” a “libtard,” or a “groomer.” But it does seem like a lot of the discourse, if it can really be called that, on the interwebs and the Twitters involves simply insulting people, calling them mean names, and trying to piss them off sufficiently enough to derail any possible meaningful discussion. What do you think? Should “simple name-calling” be added to the list?

The Minefield

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 — “Bad people only have bad opinions” — underpins these tactics:

• Accusations of bad faith: Asserting that your opponent is being disingenuous or has a sinister, selfish, and/or ulterior motive.

• Hypocrisy projection: Asserting that your opponent is hypocritical about a given argument, often without actually checking the consistency of their record. (This has popped up all over the place since we wrote “Canceling,” and FIRE has gotten it since its founding. We discussed it at great length in a recent ERI post regarding campus protests, but one good example is Lorraine Ali’s piece in the Los Angeles Times last year, where she describes FIRE as “​​a group that claims to advocate for free speech on college campuses — except when the speakers don’t share its political views.” This is obviously absurd, since we’ve always vocally defended free speech on both sides of many major issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.)

• Claiming offense: Shutting an argument down by saying “That’s offensive” rather than doing the work of rebutting its substance or logic. (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? (We use journalist Jesse Singal as an example of someone about whom critics are constantly making stuff up. JK Rowling also gets this often, with people claiming she said all number of horrible and hateful things, but coming up short whenever someone — including Rowling herself — asks for evidence.)

We want your feedback — seriously!

Rikki and I obviously go into much greater detail on all of these in the book — including case studies that show these tactics at play as well as their consequences. But we want to hear from you: Are there any tactics we didn’t highlight here that deserve to be included? Are there any recent examples that stick out to you as particularly egregious and instructive? Are we off base with any of this stuff?

Please let us know. Our goal is to provide helpful information and ensure that we’re getting the right lay of the land here. We can’t do that without exposing our own blind spots, and there are few better ways of doing that than asking for help.

Next up, we’ll dig into the left’s Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and see if there are any additions, updates, or improvements we can make there as we gear up to draft “Canceling” in paperback.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

As mentioned above, for a quick recap (okay maybe not so quick because it's two and a half hours) of the points we made in “Canceling,” here is probably my favorite interview of the whole process: My long sit-down with the great Lex Fridman (also featuring my much-beloved Kid Cosmic t-shirt).