What To Do When Jon Stewart Accuses You of Racism.

When I was in elementary school there was a kid who played a joke on the class by spraying the room with “fart spray.” This made the whole room smell awful, created a large distraction, and gave everyone a good laugh. The next day before school there was a discussion about whether or not to play soccer or four square, and so began a discussion about which game to play. While all this was happening the fart spray kid took out his fart spray and proceeded to spray the child who wanted to play four square with the fart spray covering the four square kid with an awful stench; and then told him “now you stink like farts and nobody is going to want to play with you.” He then looked around and asked if anyone else wanted to play four square.

And this is why we all played soccer that day while the child who suggested four square stood by himself on the playground.

The kid who wanted to play soccer did not want to persuade other kids to join him, he just wanted to get his own way. So, he sprayed the kid who wanted to pay four square with fart spray making him smell so awful that no one wanted to play with him, and then threatened anyone else who opposed him with the same threat.

This is how I feel about how Social Justice activists operate.

When one reads the literature written by activists in the Social Justice (AKA: “woke”) movement, one sees again and again the following tactic in play: Rather than winning the debate through rationality, reason, arguments, logic, and so fourth, the Social Justice activists accuse their opponents of being racist, sexist, homophobic, bigots, as a way to cover their opponents with social stink. This is the weaponizing of social stigma and accusations of bigotry as a way to win a debate by destroying the reputation, social standing, and moral authority of ones opponent and turn them into a social pariah. The Social Justice activist does not try to convince their opponents or the audience to change their minds; they simply spray their opponents with the social stink of racism, sexism, and bigotry and then call it a day. If the Social Justice activist is ever faced with the prospect of having to defend their position, they can just spray their opponents with social stink thereby making it so that no one wants to be associated with them.

A fine example of this can be found in this video of a debate between Andrew Sullivan Jon Stewart, and Lisa Bond, in which Andrew Sullivan challenges the idea that American history is utterly racist, and Lisa Bond promptly accuses him of being a racist with support from Jon Stewart:

Reputation and social stigma both have a very odd property whereby if you associate with someone who has a bad reputation, or who has been socially stigmatized, the scent of that stigma and the stench of their bad reputation can waft on to you. Once a person is covered with the stench of a bad reputation or has been socially stigmatized they begin to lose social status, social standing, social legitimacy, and they can end up being socially ostracized. Because humans care very deeply about their reputations and how they are perceived, and also because nobody wants to get stuck with the stench of a bad reputations or social stigma, people go to great lengths to avoid being saddled with labels which can lead to their being stigmatized and ostracized.

By stigmatizing a position as racist, sexist, bigoted, and so fourth one can create social pressure against adopting that position as people will feel both morally and socially obliged to afford publicly taking that position, even if they agree with it, for fear that the stigma associated with that position will cause them to lose social standing and damage their reputation. Social Justice activists take advantage of this fact by creating clever ways to insinuate that those who disagree with them are in some way motivated by bigotry and prejudice, or by associating their opponents with racism, bigotry, prejudice. This has the effect of creating a social force-field around the ideas of Social Justice activists which makes it socially impossible to criticize them without getting soaked in whatever social stench the Social Justice activist decided to spray dissenters with that day. Which is, of course, the point.

The way to deal with this tactic is not to simply deny the accusation; you have to “name the dynamic.” What that means is that you have to make people aware of the tactic that is being used by explaining to them what the tactic is and how it works. Denying the accusation will not work because it just puts you on the defensive; you need to point out that the accusation and accompanying social stigma are being tactically deployed by Social Justice activists as a way to insulate their views from criticism. What you do is say something like “you are trying to protect your views from criticism by smearing your opponents and socially ostracizing them for criticizing you. You want to win by destroying the reputations of people who criticize you in order to avoid having to respond to the substance of their criticism.”

When people realize the accusations are being strategically deployed as part of a bad-faith rhetorical strategy it short circuits the social mechanisms through which social stigmas take root and through which reputations are harmed. By helping people to see the cynical nature of the accusations and the strategy in play, you take the power out of those accusations and force the Social Justice activist to have to try to actually defend the substance of their views.

The way to handle Jon Stewart in this clip is to point out that the tactic Lisa Bond and Jon Stewart are using is to accuse Andrew Sullivan of being a racist as a way to destroy his reputation and social standing. This is being do so Bond and Stewart can win the debate without having to debate the substance of the issue or respond to the content of Sullivan’s criticisms. Lisa Bond and Jon Stewarts goal is not to discover truth, it is to socially de-legitimize Sullivan by spraying him with the social stink of white supremacy.

Rhetorical tactics like this are a little bit like magic tricks: they only work if people don't know how they're done. A magic trick only fools people if they do not know how the trick is done; once a person learns how a magic trick is done the trick no longer fools them. The same is true with the rhetorical tricks Social Justice activists use to avoid criticism: once people see how those rhetorical tricks work, they stop being fooled by those rhetorical tricks

To conclude, there is a humorous Post-script to the Stewart Video courtesy of Matt Walsh’s movie “Am I Racist?” In that movie Walsh works as a server at a dinner held by “Race2Dinner,” an organization which charges a $5000 fee to host a dinner in which they talk about how everyone white is complicit in racism. Hilarity ensues as the utterly cynical nature of their obvious grift is exposed. The kicker is this: he woman who called Andrew Sullivan a racist in the Stewart video is Lisa Bond who at the time of that video worked as “the resident white woman” at, you guessed it, Race2Dinner…the very same organization whose grift Matt Walsh exposed for the world.

To say that video clip has aged poorly for Bond and Stewart is an understatement.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.