Standard Leftist Dirty Tricks
The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging its existence. Giving it a name helps with that.
Rule 1
I’ve seen the notion of “Democrat Rule #1” floating around online for a while now. As near as I can tell, it dates back to the 2016 election, when people started noticing that all of the crazy accusations made by the Clinton campaign and their supporters against then-candidate Donald Trump were all of things that Bill and/or Hillary had been caught red-handed doing in the past. And thus was born Democrat Rule #1: Any bad thing they accuse conservatives of doing, or of wanting to do, they are already doing that thing themselves.
It’s a bit remarkable to see just how infallibly this rule has held up in the years since then:
The party of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar loves to find any excuse they can to call Republicans anti-Semitic.
Charles McGonigal, one of the FBI special agents at the forefront of pushing the “the Trump campaign illegally colluded with Russian oligarchs” hoax, was recently indicted for illegally working for Russian oligarchs.
The recent media freakout over a Florida form asking female student athletes about their periods? Turns out that’s completely standard across the country and similar questions are asked in even the most liberal of cities and states.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Florida for its willingness to open up while so much of the nation was still in the grips of COVID lockdowns; guess who was caught vacationing on sunny Miami beaches?
Anytime they call conservatives “extremists” for supporting ideas that Democrats were also all in favor of as recently as the early years of the Obama Administration, while pushing policies that are to the left of what, until recently, was considered extreme-left lunatic fringe territory as “mainstream” ideas.
And so on; it seems to happen every. Single. Time. (Maybe that’s why it’s called rule #1?)
I’d like to propose a few more points to be aware of, some standard leftist traits, and more importantly some of the typical rhetorical dirty tricks that they like to use against their opponents. It’s been said that the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge that it exists. But before we can acknowledge that a thing exists, we have to know what the thing that we’re talking about is; this is why names are so powerful. So let’s give some names to these traits.
Rule 2
In the spirit of the first rule, Democrat Rule #2: Anything they don’t like is everything they don’t like. Much like a sobbing child including every single insult in their vocabulary in their litany of accusations against someone who was mean to them, Leftists seem entirely incapable of simply disliking or arguing against anything on its own terms; they always end up finding some way to shoehorn in accusations of X-ism and Whateverphobia, white supremacy, supporting Putin, and being aligned with whatever other Bad Thing Du Jour they’re all clutching their pearls over today.
Prominent examples:
The recent claim that slavery (an institution that’s been ubiquitous throughout human history) in Colonial America gave rise to capitalism in America, despite capitalism having been invented by a Scottish philosopher who never visited America as far as I can tell.
Saying in so many words that “Christian nationalism is nimble and agile enough to encompass a whole host of people, including young Republicans who may not attend church.” Got that? If you’re a young Republican, you’re a Christian nationalist even if there’s nothing Christian about you. (The author also makes completely unsupported claims about racism, anti-immigrant paranoia, and support for Russia.)
CNN attempting to tie Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to both Hitler and Putin, despite the two dictators holding to ideologies that are strongly opposed to one another. (Remember that Putin’s premise for invading Ukraine is supposedly to de-nazify it!)
The Democrat Two-Step
There’s a strange dance of accusations that they go through every time someone catches on to troubling trends they’re enabling, shifting seamlessly from one side of the debate to the other like Orwell’s crowd proclaiming they have always been at war with Eastasia. It goes like this:
Step 1: Of course this completely abnormal thing is never going to happen! There must be something wrong with you for even suggesting it could be real. What are you, some kind of conspiracy theorist?
Then it happens.
Step 2: Of course this completely normal thing is happening! There must be something wrong with you for even suggesting it could be problematic. What are you, some kind of bigot?
Prominent examples:
Loudly proclaiming that gay marriage was just a distraction and a right-wing “dog whistle” that was never going to be a real issue… right up until the Obergefell v. Hodges decision was handed down. Then it immediately became mandatory for everyone to loudly pledge allegiance to gay marriage.
Ever notice how quickly “drag queen story hour” went from a made-up conspiracy theory to something every right-thinking American has a moral duty to endorse?
As the war in Ukraine slowly escalates, witness just how many times the Biden Administration has instantly flip-flopped from “sending <insert weapon here> to Ukraine would not help them and would be escalatory and provocative” to “we need to send <insert weapon here> to them right away and it’s absolutely the right thing to do.”
Hostile Virtue Appropriation
Leftists really love weaponizing the name of something good by taking over that name.
Name your group, movement, or law after some virtue that no one disagrees with.
Do bad things.
When you get called out on the bad things you do, accuse critics of being against the virtue whose name you have appropriated.
Prominent examples:
Democratic Party
Pro-Choice
Black Lives Matter
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
The Affordable Care Act
Human Shielding
With Democrat Rule #2 being a thing, it’s not surprising that the converse would become a weapon for them: attaching members of favored/protected groups to left-wing ideas and projects as a blatantly cynical attempt to shield them from criticism.
Produce something terrible.
Prominently place protected minorities on the project.
When people point out it’s terrible, claim that this is really just an X-ist or Whateverphobic attack on the minorities involved, and dismiss the critics and their legitimate criticism as bigotry.
Prominent examples:
Every woke TV show, movie, and video game of the last decade or so. If you’ve been paying attention at all you’ve seen this pattern dozens of times.
The way progressive legislative and judicial insanity never really took off until the Obama Administration, when they could shame critics into silence by accusing them of being secretly motivated by racism against a black President, and then suddenly their entire agenda went into overdrive.
Refuting Claims Never Made
Leftists are exceptionally fond of one oddly specific form of strawman argument: disproving a “claim” that their opponents never actually claimed in the first place. They know that, with the media and the “fact checkers” on their side, there’s a low chance of getting called out on their disingenuous rhetoric where anyone will notice, so they misrepresent their opponents’ positions with impunity.
Prominent examples:
After several doctors discovered that administration of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to early-stage COVID patients was extraordinarily effective at preventing the infections from progressing to the point where patients would require a ventilator, a ton of studies quickly came out “proving” that HCQ was no good because when given to late-stage COVID patients already on a ventilator, it did nothing to help them or keep them from dying.
Pointing out that Ronald Reagan never actually participated in the liberation of Nazi death camps in World War II, because he was stationed in the USA at the time. What Reagan actually said is that he was among the first people in America to learn about the Holocaust because his job in the Army involved working with the pictures that the Signal Corps sent home.
Conflating Good Ideas With Bad Implementations
Imagine for a moment that you live on an island, with about half a mile of water between your island and the mainland. The only way to travel back and forth, at least if you want to bring your car along, is by ferry, and ferry rides are slow and expensive. No one likes riding the ferry. Then someone on your island visits San Francisco and is awed by the Golden Gate Bridge. They come home and say “we ought to build one of those here!” After consulting with an architect, plans are drawn up for a big, elaborate suspension bridge.
After a bit of time, someone else looks at the situation and says, “this plan is very expensive and over-engineered. The distance isn’t all that long, and the amount of traffic over the bridge would be relatively small; we could probably make do with a much simpler arch bridge that would be significantly less expensive and faster to build.”
To his shock, the first guy takes umbrage at this suggestion and attacks it. “That guy doesn’t want our bridge!” he screams. “He wants to keep us all riding the ferry!”
This is how you know the first guy is a Leftist: he’s conflating a good idea (build a bridge) with a bad implementation (build this specific bridge that’s a bad fit for the problem being solved.)
When dealing with actual issues, rather than our fictitious bridge, Leftist implementations always seem to involve one of two elements, and usually both: the problem needs to be solved by government, and it needs to be solved centrally at the highest level possible. Questioning their preferred implementation, even to suggest a solution that would work better, is always met with hostility. (Kind of makes you wonder how much they actually care about solving the problems then, doesn’t it? Sure seems like what really matters is compelling obedience!)
Prominent examples:
The Affordable Care Act. It’s made health insurance (nevermind actual health care, which it did nothing about) significantly less affordable, and been an all-around disaster. But when Republicans try to repeal it, they’re accused of wanting to “take your health care away” and having “no plan of their own for health care” despite the studiously ignored fact that the Trump Administration fought hard for restaurant pricing (a real, proven solution to healthcare costs) and got half of it successfully implemented before their time ran out.
Gun control. Anytime some shooting makes the news, Democrats call for federal gun control laws and accuse Republicans of wanting more shootings, ignoring two important points. 1) The shooting almost invariably took place in a Democratic city with existing gun control laws that failed to prevent it. 2) They’ve been fighting tooth and nail against the thing that’s actually known to prevent violent crime: stronger policing!
Conflating Defense With Aggression
Leftists are always trying to gaslight people into thinking that their extreme ideas are normal, are correct, and are the only proper way to do things. After decades of doing violence to our society, (sometimes metaphorical and sometimes all too literal!) when people start to resist them, you can count on them to cry foul and pretend to be the injured party. Anyone who seeks to act in self-defense against their aggression is subjected to DARVO tactics: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. “I was just standing around minding my own business, burning down civilization like any ordinary, decent citizen, when this terrible right-winger living in the civilization I was burning down came out of nowhere and attacked me for it! I wasn’t doing anything wrong! Can’t you see I’m the victim here?”
Prominent examples:
Kyle Rittenhouse. Shot three rioters who were actively trying to murder him, in one of the most clear-cut cases of self-defense in our nation’s history, and was accused of murder and white supremacy for it (despite the fact that all three of his “victims” were white too.)
Ron DeSantis. For having the temerity to push back against Leftist encroachment on American norms, the press accuses him of attacking the innocent and the weak. (It takes a real special kind of doublethink to view the Walt Disney Company as a weak and helpless victim, but that doesn’t stop them!)
Kafka Traps
A Kafka trap is an argument of the form “if you deny X, you must be guilty of X.” The name of this one comes from Eric Raymond, who likens it to the nonsensical ordeal faced by Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where “The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.”
Leftists love this one. If protestations of innocence can be made into evidence of guilt, there is then no valid way for their falsely accused victims to defend themselves! Kafka traps, or the threat thereof, lie at the core of human shielding: no one wants to be accused of X-ism or Whateverphobia because they’ve seen this pattern played out enough times to realize there is no defense to such accusations that the Left will admit as valid.
Because they are arguing in bad faith, with an argument specifically constructed to permit no defense they will recognize as valid, Raymond notes that the only effective defense is “extreme, intentional rudeness. The verbal equivalent of a kick in the teeth.” Telling them in no uncertain terms that you recognize the game they’re playing and will not play by their rules.
The Chinese Robber Fallacy
This one comes courtesy of Scott Alexander, one of the few bloggers on the Left sane enough (and courageous enough) to recognize the problems on his own side and push back against them. While he didn’t invent the term, its the discussion he adds to it that makes it germane to this subject.
Imagine you have a friend who claims that Chinese people are all a bunch of robbers. You might quite reasonably counter with the idea that of course they’re not, and please stop being bigoted. But when your friend starts showing you example after example after example of Chinese people committing robbery, you could easily come to think that he’s got a point afterall… until you realize that there are over a billion people in China. If only 1 in 1,000 Chinese people were robbers, he could give you literally a million different examples and still be completely wrong about his point.
Applications of this fallacy to Leftist narratives about “systemic” problems, particularly involving police, should be obvious.
The Principle of Revolution
Merriam-Webster defines “principle” as:
a: a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption
b(1): a rule or code of conduct
(2): habitual devotion to right principles
It’s the b2 definition I’d like to focus on: a concept that one is devoted to, that they will hold to even at some cost to them. It’s often claimed that leftists have no principles, but I don’t believe this is true; there is one principle that they will always consistently follow, and in particular it can be used to accurately predict what they will choose when two progressive ideals come into conflict with one another, as is so often the case with such an inconsistent ideology.
The whole concept of political “left” and “right” stems from the lead-up to the French Revolution. Two prominent factions formed in the French parliament: the left wing, who sat together on the left side of the assembly hall and supported the goals of the building revolution, and the right wing, who sat to the right and advocated for stability and continuity of the existing order. And these basic goals have remained remarkably consistent to this day. In particular, the political Left predates Karl Marx’s revolutionary ideas (and even his birth) by several decades. The Left didn’t get it from him; it adopted him.
And to this day, Revolution remains the one solid guiding principle of the Left, their North Star. Witness just how glowingly they use the terms “revolution” and “revolutionary,” how Rebels are made into iconic culture-heroes, and so on, despite the way that, with really only one prominent exception, political/cultural revolutions almost invariably end up making things significantly worse for the people living there.
Revolution has always been the guiding principle animating and motivating the Left. They oppose religious freedom in America, but protest against the abuse of religious minorities in Saudi Arabia and in China. Is this hypocritical and inconsistent? Yes, until you remember that their only true principle is Revolution: in both cases their position is that which will cause the maximum degree of societal disruption.
Why do today’s Democrats attack so many ideas that Democrats of 30 years ago counted as proud achievements, turning around now and calling them outdated relics of right-wing extremism? Because now that these ideas have become broadly accepted and normalized, they are a thing that must be done away with by the glorious Revolution.
Why do we see so many people sympathetic to the Left being branded heretics and enemies when the unending cycle of Revolution finally mandates something they’re uncomfortable with? They’re simply following the script written during the French Revolution: when the revolutionaries successfully deposed the monarchy and the aristocrats who had reigned over them, they immediately turned on one another in an orgy of blood and horror that they themselves — not political opponents seeking to slander them! — termed “the reign of terror.”
The One-Fact Syllogism
The most basic building block of logical reasoning is known as a syllogism. It consists of stating two facts that are related to each other in some way, and then drawing a conclusion from them. And if the premises are both true, then the conclusion will be as well.
True:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
False:
All men have beards.
Bob Frank is a man.
Therefore, Bob Frank has a beard.
The second one is logically valid, but factually incorrect because the first premise is false: there are plenty of clean-shaven men out there.
But all too often, we see Leftists not even bother with well-formed syllogisms. They’ll state a single fact, then draw a conclusion from it that does not necessarily follow from the premises. Furthermore, these arguments tend to be coercive in nature rather than deductive; the most common conclusion they pretend to reach is “therefore you must do what we want,” rather than “therefore this point is also true.” So not only is the second fact missing, two whole chains of reasoning demonstrating the desirability of this outcome and how the thing that must be done leads to the outcome are just not there. It’s an insidious way of insinuating an idea into your head and leaving your imagination and your emotions to fill in the blanks.
Take, for example, the oft-repeated idea that “gender-affirming” care is necessary for people who “identify as” transgender, because they face higher than average rates of suicide. For this to be valid reasoning, we need to add a second premise, that affirming alleviates the high rate of suicide, and to establish that having them not commit suicide is a desirable outcome. (I’m perfectly willing to grant that last point for free in this particular case. Just be aware that it is its own distinct issue in the standard pattern of coercive one-fact syllogisms. The implied desirable result isn’t always this obviously desirable!) But none of that is spoken aloud. It’s all left for your imagination to fill in the blanks in, to try to trick you into arriving at a predetermined conclusion. Why? Because it’s kind of tough to establish the second premise if you actually had to do it, because it’s just not true. The few long-term studies that have actually been done show that “affirming” actually tends to drive suicide rates up, not down.
Conclusion
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, nor a complete one. I’ll probably come back to it over time and add new examples as I see more prominent patterns emerge in Leftist behavior. But by putting these examples out there, I hope I can encourage the development of a vocabulary to define and describe the problems we are faced with, to make them recognizable as a first step to make them beatable.
Please feel free to link to this page, and to use section header anchor links to direct people to specific issues.