Appeal-To-Jesus Fallacies

Oh, that old rascal Saul Alinsky, who croaked in 1972 at the ripe old age of 63, and thus spared us from having to bear the typical aging-radical mumblings and grumblings that result from a life of coddled reality-detachment (see: Bernie Sanders). Before he shuffled off this mortal coil (in bucolic Carmel-By-The-Sea, no less), he gifted us with his baker's-dozen Rules For Radicals, a useful tabulation for both those who he wished to follow in his footsteps and for those of us who rejected his leftist ideas.

Ponder Rule #4:

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

It's built upon the Tu Quoque/Appeal-to-Hypocrisy logical fallacy. Street politics is rarely about logic or soundness of argument, however, so fallaciousness rarely matters. As an emotional gimmick, it's quite appealing.

And often effective. The unprepared are often trapped by Rule 4 gambits, reflexively going into defense mode rather than continuing to press an attack or challenge, no matter how valid that challenge. Even those of us clued into the tactic often have to take a moment to debunk the gambit.

Today's bit is about Biden's student loan forgiveness. The Rule 4 ploy is to do what leftists so often do whenever the Right is outraged by one of their actions - trot out a (invariably inaccurate) comparison to Christian teachings in order to undermine that outrage. As in, "Jesus forgave your sins, so you should be OK with the government forgiving others' loans." That not all not of the Left are Christians doesn’t much matter, obviously.

I won't delve into the countless ways this analogy is wrong - anyone willing to spend half a minute thinking about it without bias can see the fail. What matters is that Biden's defenders and apologists are choosing to cynically leverage other's religious beliefs rather than make a stand-alone case for why the loan forgiveness action is honorable or moral. That they don’t actually comprehend those teachings is beside the point.

Also unmade is any sort of case for how it's legal. Biden's team has trotted out the flimsiest of justifications, rooting deeply and creatively into old Congressional authorizations to find a pretext that only the willfully blind would accept. As National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke offers, with enough creativity (and no one to say no...), a President could do just about anything he wants to, if he’s brazen enough.

As we continue to see, the rule of law has become secondary to "gimme what I want" demands by the largess-from-the-Treasury masses and to "I'll do as I please" arrogance from whomever sits in the Oval Office. People need some pretext of excuse to avoid the cognitive dissonance such brazenness should engender if left naked, so they turn to rhetorical stunts and emotional ploys, such as the “What Would Jesus Do” bit we see here.

That these people are likely not embracers of Christian teachings is the joke. They don’t apply them to themselves, but instead look for reasons to call their opponents the bigger hypocrites. The default, dismissive retort should echo Pierre Trudeau:

Today’s takeaway is not to let such knock you off your attack. But, if you really do need to rebut the appeal-to-Jesus, one of countless correct ways is to point out that Jesus taught that individuals should forgive debts of their own free will, not have their money stolen by the government to forgive the freely-assumed debts of a favored few.

Or, offer them this, by way of take-down.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.