Towards a 'More Perfect' Rhetorical Fortress!

Part 2 of revising and refining our ideas and arguments for the paperback edition of "Canceling"!

A couple of weeks ago, we kicked off a short series that will revisit Chapters 5, 6, and 8 from my latest book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” which I co-authored with the amazing Rikki Schlott. The idea is to get feedback from you, our audience, so we can revise and refine key concepts as we gear up to release the paperback edition in March of 2025.

Last time, we covered the Obstacle Course and the Minefield, which make up the infertile ground where extremists on both sides of the political spectrum sidestep debate and run out the rhetorical clock. Here we’ll focus on the political left’s citadel against constructive discourse, which we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.

We welcome your general thoughts and any specific ideas for additional stories you might have in the comments or via DM here on Substack — and if you caught errors or typos in the book, please let us know so we can fix them!

The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress

In “Canceling,” Rikki and I describe the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress as a series of questions that effectively barricade people from having to deal with the merits or substance of an argument. We call it “perfect” because when approached head-on it is absolutely impenetrable. Anyone secured behind its walls can divert and derail any debate or discussion they’re unwilling (or, let’s face it, unable) to have.

What makes these dodges so dynamic and effective is that they function on double standards. You’re never obligated to use them. When it suits you, you can put the walls up and effortlessly obstruct anyone you choose. When it doesn’t, you can lower the drawbridge and let people pass right through. Consistency of application is irrelevant, and consistency of principle simply doesn’t exist. Defeating “them” is all that matters.

The key to the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress’ power is weaponizing identity categories to shrink the number of people who are “allowed” to speak until no one who disagrees with you is left. And the first barrier does a great job of knocking out more than a third of the population in one fell swoop.

Barricade 1: Fasco-casting

Fasco-casting is the name I’ve given to the tactic of labeling people “conservative,” a “right winger,” “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “neo-confederate,” whether they actually are these things or not (think of the fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty just magically transforming people into Mussolini). It’s a powerful first barrier for the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress because it allows you to automatically dismiss not just the 38 percent of the American population who self-describe as conservatives but really anyone else you want by merely labeling them as such.

In fact, fasco-casting is most often used against people who don’t self-identify as conservative. If you can argue that someone is “right-adjacent,” even if they consider themselves liberal or progressive — and even if they’ve voted Democrat their entire lives — they can be dismissed as well. As we point out in “Canceling,” this balloons the percentage of dismissable people immediately, with essentially any liberal critic of Cancel Culture or the excesses of what Tim Urban calls social justice fundamentalism suddenly falling under the “conservative” label: Jon Ronson, Jonathan Chait, Alice Dreger, Meghan Daum, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Salman Rushdie (the last three of whom signed the Harper’s Letter), and yours truly, just to name a few.

You’ll see this “X-adjacent” or “by association” tactic coming back up a lot as we examine the other barriers in the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.

Barricades 2-5: The Demographic Funnel

After fasco-casting, we move to what Rikki and I call the Demographic Funnel, which comes as a series of questions focused on immutable characteristics designed to slowly squeeze people out of the conversation. Many of these hinge on the concept of “privilege,” which indicates that one’s identity relieves them of certain obstacles or sources of oppression that a more marginalized identity group must grapple with. And since you’re privileged and therefore do not experience those problems, you have no right to speak on them.

• Barricade 2: What’s the speaker’s race? This relies on overgeneralizations about the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors inherent to racial groups. When I was growing up, this was the definition of racism. When Rikki was growing up, it was the foundation of anti-racism. Essentially, if the speaker is white (or “white-adjacent,” as many Asians are now considered to be), they are at the top of the anti-racist oppression hierarchy and therefore can be dismissed on basically any topic (unless of course they’re an “ally,” in which case they aren’t a threat because they already agree. See, it’s perfect!). If the speaker is black but holds the wrong beliefs, they can be dismissed just as easily by being called white, or “inauthentically black.” My colleague

  Angel Eduardo
  has written about this phenomenon, which he calls “The One-Thought Rule,” and it has been used against everyone from Thomas Sowell to Barack Obama to Angel, himself.

• Barricade 3: What’s the speaker’s sex? Similarly to the race barricade, this relies on overgeneralizations about people based on sex, or a weaponization of a person’s sex to shut them down. Any argument made by a man, for example, can be dismissed as “mansplaining.” This is regardless of whether that man is actually condescendingly explaining something to a woman that she already knows, or knows more about. Combined with the race-based barricade, this tactic effectively eliminates anyone who is male and non-black. And of course, when you add the label “conservative” (whether actual or fasco-casted), we are talking about a minimum of 94% of the population based on demographics alone. When you factor in those within the remaining 6% with the wrong opinions, that easily takes 99% of people off the board.

• Barricade 4: What’s the speaker’s sexuality? This relies on the idea of “heterosexual privilege,” which is defined as “unearned, often unconscious or taken for granted benefits afforded to heterosexuals in a heterosexist society based on their sexual orientation.” By dismissing anyone heterosexual, when added to the other barricades regarding race and sex, you can easily shrink the cohort of “people worth hearing” to a fraction of a percent of the total U.S. population. And as you can probably guess, simply being gay isn’t enough to keep you in the conversation. If you’re a gay conservative, like Peter Thiel, you can be dismissed as being “a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man.”

• Barricade 5: Is the speaker trans or cis? An estimated 98.4 percent of the U.S. population identifies as “cisgender” or, more simply, “not transgender.” That means that only 1.6 percent of Americans could possibly be “allowed” to speak on anything related to trans issues — an increasingly prominent and contentious topic implicating everything from school curricula to professional sports and youth medicine. But just as with the race and sexuality barricades, if you’re trans and have the wrong opinions, like Caitlyn Jenner or Deirdre McCloskey, you’re out.

These barricades work in concert to render basically anybody dismissable under some combination of these traits. Black men, white lesbians, white gay men, the cisgender disabled, and white transgender people could all find themselves on the wrong side of the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress’ walls.

However, even if by some miracle you happen to get past these barricades, you’re far from finished.

Barricades 6-10: The ‘Phobias, Friends, and Feelings’ Crucible

The truth is, the Demographic Funnel is very much like the Obstacle Course and the Minefield in that it’s designed more to waste time than anything else. It gives the impression that people from certain identity groups are able to get through unscathed. But no matter what your identity is, you can still be smeared and dismissed as a traitor for having the wrong opinions, the wrong friends, or allegedly hurting someone’s feelings. That’s how the next five barricades work:

• Barricade 6: 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. Racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all quick draws for this tactic — even if you belong to the group the “phobia” or “ism” is generally directed against. In those instances, such as a black person having “anti-black” opinions, their racism is “internalized.” Rikki has been accused of internalized misogyny for her conservative/libertarian views. Kmele Foster, co-host of

  The Fifth Column
  podcast and member of FIRE’s board of directors, has been accused of internalized racism (among other things) for refusing to self-identify as black. Euphoria star Hunter Schafer has been accused of “internalized transphobia” for her views on non-binary identification.

• Barricade 7: 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 immoral for having that connection. If the Great Untruth of Ad Hominem we describe in “Canceling” (adding to the original three in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) is that bad people only have bad opinions, this tactic can be described as bad people only have bad friends. But of course, you don’t even have to actually be friends with them! Your guilt can be based on simply having been photographed with them, having been cordial with them at an event, having shared a platform with them, having agreed with them in the past, or agreeing with them on unrelated topics.

• Barricade 8: 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 or snapping. Given the other barriers in the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, and just how personally offensive and intellectually irritating they can be, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll lose your temper eventually — which, according to this barrier, automatically hands your opponent the win.

• Barricade 9: Did the speaker violate a “thought terminating cliché”? This one is simple: If you’re found guilty of breaking a rule of left-wing discourse (whether the rule makes sense or not, whether you’re aware of it or not, or whether you actually broke it or not), such as “dog-whistling,” “punching down,” “being on the wrong side of history,” or “parroting right-wing talking points,” no further engagement with you is required.

• Barricade 10: Can you emotionally blackmail someone? Emotional blackmail comes in two flavors: fury or tears. When it seems like they’re starting to lose the argument, they can always fall back on emotional outbursts and claims of harm to prevent more discussion. This is ironic, given that Barricade 8 is premised on you not losing your cool. Those within the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, however, are under no such obligations.

We’ve already gotten great feedback that emotional blackmail is, of course, an undercurrent of this entire process in the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress and not just a last resort. That’s absolutely correct. By picking at your identity, then picking at the authenticity of your identity, then by picking at your allegiance to your identity, then by delegitimizing your opinions through ad-hominem questioning, the overall effect is to put you on an uneven emotional keel so you can be silenced with relatively little effort. If at any point you can be accused of causing, perpetuating, or ignoring harm towards a protected group, the conversation is over.

Barricade 11: Darkly hint that something else is what’s really going on

If all else fails (which it won’t), those in the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress can abandon all pretense of staying on point and making a cogent argument by appealing to larger forces operating in the background of the conversation. Vague allusions to a larger “context” in which the argument is playing out — or that the thing being objected to, while not necessarily a problem or a big deal on its own, is serious in connection with various other seemingly unrelated, relatively insignificant, or sometimes outright false data points. 

For instance, when law professor Jason Kilborn was punished for using the expurgated “N_____” and “B____” in a hypothetical on an exam about workplace harassment, the situation was rightfully dubbed ridiculous. But then unsubstantiated rumors arose from unnamed sources, such as that Kilborn had once referred to minorities as “cockroaches,” as a way to bolster the overall move to have him fired. The idea is that all of these isolated incidents gather to create a Problematic Perfect Storm where the only solution is to get rid of the person.

What do you think?

We’re really looking for any feedback you might be able to offer us. Is there anything we’ve missed? Are there any tactics you think we should highlight that we haven’t already? Is there a better way we can describe the tactics we’ve already gotten down here? Can you think of any recent examples of any of these barricades in action that might be worth highlighting in greater detail?

To give you an idea of what we’re looking for,

Rob Henderson

pointed out that an easy way to avoid having to actually contend with the substance of someone’s argument is to simply dismiss the speaker as being unworthy of engaging with because they are “low status”:

This is particularly useful for elites, and elite journalists, who can ignore inconvenient arguments merely because the speaker doesn’t have the “right” credentials or is dubbed “irrelevant.” Quillette founder

Claire Lehmann

recently gave an example of it in practice on X, where you’ll see this tactic at play quite often.

Any other ideas? Any feedback? Please let us know!

Also, be sure to vote in this X poll to help us determine the best spelling for “fasco-casting.” Feel free to repost it so we can get more votes!

Next up, we’ll tackle the political right’s own citadel against constructive discourse — which Rikki and I call the “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress” because it works exceptionally well despite having so few moving parts.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

The Supreme Court is currently deciding if government officials coercing social media platforms into censoring protected speech violates the First Amendment. FIRE thinks it does—and has asked SCOTUS to stop this censorship by proxy.

Here’s FIRE senior fellow Nadine Strossen breaking down why.