How to Tell the Truth (pages 1-13) [script]

There are two primary reasons to engage with a reactionary. One is to refute, and one is to persuade. Though related, these are separate tasks requiring different sets of skills.

This is a video about the first thing.

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Let’s start with a question: what makes PragerU successful?

I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s not the production values, it’s not the internet celebrity hosts, it’s not that they have massive amounts of money that they pump into promoting new videos basically every day. These are all factors, multipliers of the base value, and the channel wouldn’t be as successful without them. But these are superficial answers and they lead to superficial conclusions.

Every so often, some new, progressive YouTuber or foundation or think tank looks at Prager and says, “We can do that, but better. We can get bigger celebrities, better production values, we can raise enough money to rival their ad budget. We can outdo PragerU.”

So they make a bunch of videos. If they’re a liberal group, they’ll talk about how The New Deal gave us the Boom Years while Reaganomics gave us recessions, they’ll talk about the American Dream and how every billionaire who achieved it made heavy use of public services so that’s why they should pay their taxes, they’ll put up this chart showing what deregulation did to the wealth gap. If they’re a leftist group, they’ll walk people through the Labor Theory of Value and how all profit is value extraction, they’ll try to contextualize current events in Venezuela or whichever humanitarian crisis is being blamed on socialism that week, they’ll put a rose emoji in their Twitter handle and get in a lot arguments about Stalin.

And, in a year or so, this channel will have either faded away or found a dedicated audience that keeps them going, but, in neither case, does it come close to rivaling the scope and impact of PragerU. And a bunch of us on the Left will pat each other on the back for having found some novel, punchy ways of making the same handful of arguments we always make, and not much will change.

What unifies all the superficial answers to the question, “what makes PragerU successful?,” is none of them engage with the contents of the videos themselves. They assume Prager’s success is a question of packaging. They don’t consider the unbearable possibility that PragerU is good at making arguments. Which is a different thing from making good arguments; Prager’s arguments are legendarily bad, as many of my fellow lefty YouTubers will attest… but they are well-made.

So we’re going to look past the packaging, past the emotional manipulation, the appeals to tradition, the outright lies, and look at how PragerU constructs an argument.

Over the course of The Alt-Right Playbook I’ve learned handful of argumentation techniques that the Left often fails to utilize. They’re solid rhetoric and I think we should adopt them. And I was rather impressed to discover that Prager University uses pretty much all of them at least some of the time. So, if you want evidence these methods work, note that they are being used effectively against us. We’re not going to cover everything - Prager also uses a number of techniques that won’t work on our side so good because they’re specifically designed to move people to the Right, and also some that are flatly immoral. I’m not going to recommend those!

What I will be doing is demonstrating how Prager uses each of these techniques. But, while we will be using segments of Prager’s scripts, verbatim, we won’t be using any of their footage or audio. This video was a lot of work and I don’t trust the YouTube copyright bots - nor, indeed, Dennis Prager - not to get it taken down. Also I don’t want to look at those videos anymore.

What I’m not interested in is giving you a set of rules. The techniques in this video are best practices. It is less important that you do what I say than that you understand the logic behind what I’m saying and can apply it in scenarios multifarious. If you go against my advice in a way that understands why I gave it in the first place? Beautiful! Nothing would make me happier than to see you improvise! I just need you to understand, really understand what it is we’re up against and why what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. All else is secondary.

Here’s our format: for each technique we will talk about (1) the technique itself, how Prager uses it, and why it works for them. We will then contrast it with (2) what the Left does instead (typically) and why it fails. And then (3) thoughts as to how these strategies may be adopted ethically. My referent for the default argumentation style of the Left will be Last Week Tonight, as I think it is highly emblematic of the Stewartification of liberal media, and, so far as such things go, I think it’s one of the better ones. If you think Last Week Tonight is a poor representative for how the Left argues, go consume some other lefty media and see if they don’t do the same shit I talk about, because I bet you a root beer they do. (Also John Oliver is, to my knowledge, a cishet able-bodied white man but he makes more money than me and his country of origin has an even worse history of imperialism than mine, so this is technically punching up.)

I’m also going to flag up top any time an excerpt from Prager you’re about to hear contains some bullshit, cuz… there’s gonna be some of that. We don’t have room to unpack it all - that’s not what we’re doing here, there will be links to people who’ve already unpacked the bullshit in the down-there part - but I’m not going to repeat lies without challenging them. We’re here to talk about how we can respond to narratives without, in the process, spreading them, and I practice what I preach.

Alright, let’s go! First:

Know Your Audience

Flags up top:

• The Keystone KL Pipeline would have cut through a number of Native American tribal lands, among them the Sioux, Lakota, and the Sac and Fox Nation
• Depending on how you interpret the treaties, the US may not have had the jurisdiction to approve the pipeline.
• A major environmental concern was the threat spills could pose to tribal water sources as well as the Ogallala Aquifer, hence why those protesting the pipeline were called “Water Protectors”
• Safety studies that pointed to a minimal threat of spills were rejected by the Environmental Protection Agency as being insufficient
• And for the human species to survive we need to be using less oil, not more

Rigorous studies by the Obama Administration in which Joe Biden served as Vice President concluded that the pipeline would not create an environmental hazard. The oil is coming out of the ground no matter what. It's only a question of how it gets to where it needs to go. The pipeline would have created thousands of construction jobs and moved large amounts of needed oil and gas from Canada to refineries in the US. Lots of upside, almost no downside. That's why President Biden's antipathy toward the project is hard to understand.

• Are Pipelines Safe? [748,969 views]

So: who is this video for? What worldview is it speaking to? Well, it’s one in which the pipeline is desirable because of its economic value: it saves money and creates jobs; the video goes on to stress how much safer pipeline jobs are than jobs shipping oil by freight. It’s one in which oil and petroleum products are not just necessities, but simple facts of life; we are going to use that oil. And it’s one where opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline is plain incomprehensible. It is not one in which the rights of Native Americans, the sovereignty of their land, nor the threat to their gravesites exist. Outside of a sign placed by a cartoon protestor that just says “Indigenous Land” with no context, they are not even mentioned. This is framed as an argument between conservatives and liberal environmentalists; people of color are, once again, non-entities; the cost of doing business. Also not appearing in this video, not even once, is the word “water.” They even change one of the Water Protectors’ slogans to obscure its meaning. You can’t fool me, assholes, I’ve led that chant! You know the Ogallala Aquifer irrigates 30% of the nation’s crops? White people need it too!

In short, this video is not for us. None of the concerns the Left - even the center-Left - would bring up are addressed or even acknowledged. They are not here to change our minds. This is messaging for conservatives about what their position on the Keystone XL Pipeline should be and who’s to blame for it not being built.

This holds true for most Prager videos, even the ones ostensibly addressed to other groups. Immigrants! Don’t Support What You Fled tells Latin-Americans who’ve come to the US that, since they came here for job opportunities, they shouldn’t support the leftist policies that Prager feels ruined their economies back home, when many of the people they’re talking about didn’t come here for a better wage, they were escaping civil wars, came legally as refugees, but were detained anyway and had their kids put in cages, a policy Prager University endorses. I feel a video that was actually addressed to immigrants would need to anticipate that argument! The most popular video on their channel, Left or Liberal?, pitches itself as asking liberals to reject socialism, but tosses out ideas like that the mainstream media is run by leftists or that capitalism is the literal only way to fight poverty as though they’re common knowledge. Even the most milquetoast, means-tested, let’s-not-be-too-hasty liberal is not going to accept that at face value; they’ll want hear your argument first so they can run some numbers on it and consider taking a position sometime before the midterms.

PragerU addresses itself to its own audience, while keeping an eye towards fence-sitters who’ve just googled a subject they know nothing about. And, by and large, that seems to be who’s watching.

Contrast this with a common liberal framing.

The Last Week Tonight episode on European immigration is structured like so:

• 3 ½ minutes detailing the conservative position on immigration using their language (they’re against it).
• 1 minute of human interest story about a 16-year-old Syrian refugee named Noujain.
• 2 minutes on how hard it is for immigrants like Noujain to enter Europe now that they’ve got you emotionally invested.
• 4 ½ minutes further detailing conservative arguments for why they don’t want immigrants.
• 2 minutes rebutting these arguments with reasons why immigrants are valuable to Europeans (they raise overall wages and increase declining populations).
• 2 minutes returning to the human interest story.
• 1 minute summarizing conservative arguments, with refutations.
• 2 minutes summarizing their own argument with a skit.

This is an 18-minute video and a full 50% of those minutes is spent detailing the conservative position. And, yes, these arguments are presented so they can be mocked; many a piss is taken. But, structurally, this is written as a rebuttal that could change a conservative’s mind on immigration. It details their complaints, addresses them, appeals to their moral character, and ends with a plea to think different.

Is that who’s watching Last Week Tonight?

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge, even if this worked, how catastrophically bad it would be for both sides of the political media to be addressing the same audience, how influential the whims of the conservative viewer would be on the discourse, and how underserved this would leave the Left.

But the audience for Last Week Tonight is not conservatives questioning their position, it’s liberals, liberals who already agreed with the episode’s conclusion before they came in but wanted a deep dive into the intricacies of the subject. And that’s valid! But, then, why isn’t it structured like a Prager video? Why not say “here’s the issue and here’s how we feel about it”? Why so much time addressing an audience that isn’t watching?

Well, because that’s the way liberal audiences like it. They like to imagine a hypothetical “reasonable conservative” who hears this argument and is convinced by it. The problem is, that “reasonable conservative” rarely exists, and, when they do, they aren’t watching John Oliver. And catering to that hypothetical conservative undermines the argument they’re actually making.

Conservative arguments tend to be factually incoherent but ideologically consistent, while progressive arguments are just the opposite. Last Week Tonight gets all the facts right, but framing them as rebuttals to conservative talking points leaves their own position on immigration a self-contradictory mush.

Like, John: you know the reason the people you’re talking about don’t want immigrants in Europe isn’t because they fear a drain on the economy. It’s because they’re racist. You know it’s because they’re racist, you call them racist in the video. So why are you treating “drain on the economy” as a real argument in need of rebuttal? Do you think they’re going to see your stats and say “oh, immigrants are good for the economy? guess I’ll stop being racist.”? Is it not clear to you how that undermines your human interest story? Noujain is in a wheelchair; she very possibly will be on public assistance, and may not contribute much to the economy, and isn’t your party that one that supports public assistance? Isn’t your whole point with her story that human beings have intrinsic value that cannot be measured in how much money they make for someone else? And why are you talking about population decline? Is population decline a concern among liberals? Is your argument that this 16-year-old girl would make a good breeder? You understand, when you say “letting in Syrians will help with population decline,” that, to a racist - which, again, the people talking about declining populations of Europeans definitely are - you just endorsed the Great Replacement?

How is it beneficial for your liberal audience to pretend these arguments are sincere or that your rebuttals would change their minds? What is it supposed to accomplish? Who is this for?

The basic units of a good argument are knowing what you believe, knowing who you’re talking to, knowing what they believe, and speaking clearly and directly to them. This structure fails on all counts where Prager succeeds. If we want to reach conservatives, we need to engage with their actual fears, needs, and beliefs, not just the ones we’d prefer they have because they’re reassuring to us and easy to make fun of. And, if we want to talk to our own side, we need to do that instead of making affordances to the audience we don’t have. And, for heaven’s sake, we need to stop trying to do both at once. Whole-ass one thing!

Put A Core Argument In The Headline or Thumbnail

Flags up top:

• Adjusting for inflation, wages for middle and working class Americans have stayed about the same since the 1960’s.
• What it means to be “masculine” varies dramatically from culture to culture and era to era, to such a degree that we can’t really point to anything as being “intrinsically masculine.”
• There is a measurable gap in how much men and women are paid for the same jobs, so measurable we can even chart it by country, and, on average, find that countries with leftier governments tend to have narrower gaps.
• Conservative values have always been tightly correlated with bigotry, but which of America’s two Parties is the conservative one has changed several times; political theorists say there have been at least five major party realignments in American history.
• One of the coolest things humanity has ever done is land on the moon, and, with a strong enough telescope, you can still see the stuff we left up there.
• Hitler originally resisted the name “national socialists” because the Nazis hated communists - like, sent-them-to-Dachau hated them - but adopted the term to present themselves as a people’s movement popular with the full political spectrum when in fact their voter base was overwhelmingly conservatives.
• People of similar class and background tend to have similar IQ’s regardless of factors like race or gender, and also IQ is a thoroughly bullshit metric.
• And the Holocaust is a thing that happened, definitely happened, ⅓ of Europe’s Jewish population disappeared because they were murdered.

YouTubers have this thing called a clickthrough rate. Your clickthrough rate is the ratio of impressions to views. That is, the number of people who watched your video divided the number of people who saw that it exists. It was put in front of them, in their recommendations, subscriptions, or algorithmically placed in their feed. And the clickthrough rate is the percentage of those people who actually went on to watch it.

Clickthrough rates are small numbers, like single digits. My average is about 3%, which is a little low; from what I can gather, the site-wide average is 4-5%. Numbers tend to skew down a bit as a channel gets bigger; The Algorithm favors popular channels, so more views means more impressions, and more impressions leads to more views, but impressions tend to grow faster. (I think. YouTube is, as ever, a black box, but this is what websites and my own informal questions to other YouTubers suggest.) But since it’s rare to increase views without increasing impressions, the clickthrough rate stays low.

Which means, for every 10,000 people who watch a video, you can trust around two hundred and fifty thousand saw the title.

These numbers get even more striking on Twitter, where clickthrough rates can be as low as half a percent, meaning, for every 10,000 who read the fucking article, up to two million see the headline. This is why clickbait is such an issue; misleading headlines may increase clicks, but they, in turn, dramatically increase the number of people who see a bit of misinformation and just go on with their day.

PragerU makes good use of this. If 25x as many people are going to see the title as will watch the video, why not put the thing you want them to take away in the title? As The Rich Get Richer The Poor Get Richer, Make Men Masculine Again, There Is No Gender Wage Gap. Even videos with less declarative titles, like The Inconvenient Truth About The Democratic Party, give the goods away in the thumbnail. [thumbnail has klan hoods and Confederate flags] (Gee, I wonder what that’s about, is it that, eighty years ago, PragerU would’ve been Democrats?)

That means this video [There Is No Gender Wage Gap], which has 6.4 million views, has, assuming a 5% clickthrough rate, 128 million impressions. That’s how many people see the condensed version of their message. And that’s just one video! Most of Prager’s 5-minute explainers and fireside chats do numbers like this. But most else in their catalog is grist. For a channel the size of Prager, 20k is basically nothing. And yet they put out a 10-50k video almost every day. Some are under a thousand! The Algorithm favors regularity so this does serve to keep the channel as a whole in people’s feeds. But, more importantly, look at the titles. It’s just a list of conservative talking points and things they want you to be angry about. If their goal was to get views, these would be a waste of time and money and they should scrap them. But if their goal is to spread a message? These are, collectively, hundreds of millions of impressions.

Contrast this with the progressive-Left tendency to just say what you’re gonna talk about. Voting Rights. Filibuster. Confederacy. Which, hey, it’s honest! But it doesn’t communicate much to the 95% of people who see the title but don’t end up watching the video other than “this is a thing people are talking about.” In recent years, this has become the standard for most lefty YouTubers: Incels. Islamophobia. The War On Christmas. And, while this is a missed opportunity, it’s actually a massive improvement over the old standard, which was titles like, Was The Moon Landing Faked? Were the Nazis Socialist? Does IQ Correlate With Race? You know, the thing where we put the conservative takeaway in the title.

Now, of course, the answer at the end of all these videos is “no.” Betteridge’s Law. But, again, whatever is contained in the title is all 95% of people are going to get. Prager also uses open-ended questions as titles on occasion, but let’s talk about “open-ended questions.” This is a rhetorical maneuver that says, “OK, there are these things we believe to be true. That we landed on the moon, that the Nazis were fascists, and that the gene determining how much melanin is in your skin does not also determine how good your brain works… [big sigh] But some people think different! So let’s consider, as a philosophical exercise, that the thing you think is true is wrong and the thing you think is wrong is true.” It’s the benefit of the doubt, the old college dry, let’s take this weird idea seriously. And, of course, where they’re going with this is “nope, we looked into it, and the question is as dipshit as we thought!”

But look how Prager uses it. What Happened in Charlottesville? Is Islam a Religion of Peace? Is Denmark Socialist? These are all videos that are going to argue that the things you think are true - that Charlottesville was a white nationalist rally, that Islamophobia is bad, and that Denmark is some flavor of socialist - are in fact false. They are not going to say that these are dipshit questions. And they’ve specifically chosen subjects where the common-sense opinion is shaky: most Americans know Charlottesville was full of Nazis, but was that who planned it? They think Islamophobia is bad, but also have a lot of Islamophobia. They know Nordic countries have leftier governments, but don’t know much about how they work.

If the overwhelming majority of people are only going to see the title, then it’s in Prager’s interest to at least suggest that the thing they want you to believe might be true. That’s not as sticky as if you heard their whole argument, but it’s something. It’s 250,000 somethings for every 10,000 who get the sticky version. And they know, if they get people talking about this, that a bunch of us will make videos about it, using the same kinds of titles Prager uses, suggesting that the thing Prager wants you to believe might be true, with only a tiny fraction of people going on to hear how it’s not. And some of those people didn’t even know anyone was saying the Nazis might’ve been socialists; you just introduced them to the idea! At that point we’re basically working for Prager.

And there’s reasons for this! Right? Partly it’s that channels like Prager use so much emotional manipulation and we want to differentiate ourselves by coming across as open-minded and curious and asking people to think for themselves… which is bullshit, we have opinions, the only reason we’re talking is to argue a position, we never actually considered that the moon landing might be faked, why are we pretending to be impartial? It’s actually kind of dishonest. But the audience likes it because they want to pretend they’re impartial, too.

But, also… we don’t wanna put the message right in the title because we’re afraid people won’t click on it. We wanna draw them in! Create suspense! Don’t you want to hear about this wacky idea? And I’m speaking for myself here! I don’t put my takeaways in the title! (If I could fit the takeaway in the title maybe the video wouldn’t be 42 minutes long.) Prager’s a huge corporation that can afford to sacrifice 150 videos a year to low numbers just to put their message in front of people. But we can’t! A lot is riding on every release. They’re putting something out every weekday; lefty YouTubers are shooting for once a month! (Remember once a month?!)

Look, I’m not going to tell you to tank your metrics. We all gotta hustle. All I’m saying is, we’re a pretty creative bunch, and there are a lot of ways to title a video, article, podcast, or whatever it is you do that make people want to click on it without spreading the exact idea we’re trying to expel, and maybe even a few that can make impressions work for us like they do Prager. You can put in a takeaway without it being the big one; you know, “the first hit is free.” Do what you gotta do, just use your head.

[SIDEBAR: I can imagine a scenario where putting the thing you’re trying to debunk in the title is defensible. If: there’s a thing that needs to be addressed - like “did the Holocaust happen?” - and you know that, thanks to these Nazi fucks, a lot of people are typing “did the Holocaust happen?” into Google, and: you have a big platform - like a big platform - such that you know, you know, that if you wrote a thing with that title it would be the top result for everyone who googles it? You could make a case for that. But you’ve got to get everything right - if you’re not Jewish a Jew better be writing that script with you - and you’ve got to be number one. Because, if you’re number one, every Nazi who writes about that thing gets that phrase trending a little more and just makes your thing that tells the truth even bigger. But if you’re not number one, if you’re even number two, then your thing just makes the number one thing - probably written by a Nazi - even bigger. And that you can’t justify. Know what you’re capable of, and, if it’s not that, don’t do it.]

Anchoring

Flags up top:

• College campuses are one of the major fronts in the culture war, in no small part because conservatives know that, on average, students come out further left than they go in. As we’ve talked about elsewhere, getting away from one’s family of origin and being exposed to lots of types of people from different backgrounds tends to make one more progressive. This is why conservatives have invested so much energy trying to control the education experience: removing topics from curriculum, banning books, painting the entire endeavor as “liberal indoctrination.” One of PragerU’s biggest videos is Jordan Bucephalus Peterson essentially describing colleges as leftist re-education camps, Peterson himself having a reputation for saying his detractors should be fired and filing defamation suits against schools that criticize him.
• In 1967, Martin Luther King wrote, “The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of selfdeception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in accepting some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. [...] The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” [Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?]
• One of the tensions of living in a democracy is what to do when people of differing values are compelled to deal with one another. To take one example from King’s time, what should happen if an interracial couple wants to marry but the minister at their church does not condone miscegenation? Should the couple go to a different church, or should the minister suck it up or appoint a different minister with different values to perform the ceremony? Who bears the burden of accommodation? The answer may seem obvious to us 55 years after Loving v. Virginia: the minister must accommodate, and not because there’s some sort of rule about churches serving every couple that comes through their door, but because, in this scenario, that minister is morally wrong.

One last thing: please write down the number 19. [in the finished script I will ask my phone to give me a random number between 1 and 100, but, for you playing at home, let's go with 19]

Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe that people should be judged by their character, not their skin color? Do you believe in freedom of religion? If you believe these things, you’re probably not a progressive. You might think you’re a progressive - I used to think I was. My show, The Rubin Report, was originally part of the progressive Young Turks network.

• Why I Left the Left [14,280,424 views]

These words are spoken by Rick Rubin - hi, Rick! - in his video Why I Left the Left. They are the first words out of his mouth; he has not yet told us what subjects he will be looking at, but he’s already introduced the frames he’ll be looking through: freedom of speech, race blindness, and freedom of religion. Rick is employing a technique known as anchoring, which is the cognitive bias wherein audiences place the greatest weight on the first thing they hear. People remember introductory paragraphs better than body paragraphs, and, typically, everything they hear after the anchor will be considered in the context of the anchor.

Here, let me demonstrate it for you: You remember that number I had you write down, 19? Well, some Americans believe in climate change, and some think it’s fake. I’m going to ask you two questions about climate change. First, do you think the percentage of Americans who believe climate change is real is higher or lower than 19%? Write that down. And, second - write this down as well - what would you estimate that percentage is?

Now, when people are asked only the second question - what percentage of Americans do you think believe in climate change? - the average answer they give is 54%. But I’ll bet you good money (or a root beer) that the answer most of you came up with was [higher/lower] than 54 because [number] is [higher/lower]. The anchor biased your answer. Even though you knew the number was random, even though I just told you what anchoring is! That’s how powerful the cognitive distortion is, that people cannot accurately compensate for it even when they know how it works.

(For the record, the percentage of Americans who believe in climate change is actually a fair bit higher than 54, which I think is pretty nice.) [this is funny because it's 69%]

This is easier to demonstrate with numbers than with rhetoric, but it absolutely applies to rhetoric, as well.

Rubin illustrates his point with three examples:

“Banning speakers whose opinions you don’t agree with from college campuses? That’s not progressive. Prohibiting any word not approved of as “politically correct”? That’s not progressive. Putting trigger warnings on books, movies, music, anything that might offend people? That’s not progressive, either.”

“If you’re Black, or female, or Muslim, or Hispanic, or a member of any other minority group, you’re judged differently than the most evil of all things: a white, Christian male. The Regressive Left ranks minority groups in a pecking order to compete in a kind of Oppression Olympics. Gold medal goes to the most offended. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color was a liberal idea, but, these days, it’s not a progressive ideal.”

“I’m a married gay man, so you might think that I appreciate the government forcing a Christian baker or photographer or florist to act against their religion in order to cater, photograph, or decorate my wedding. But you’d be wrong. A government that can force Christians to violate their conscience can force me to violate mine. If a baker won’t bake you a cake, find another baker. Don’t demand that the state tell him what to do with his private business.”

Rubin is banking on the idea that, when he arrives at these subjects, they will be tethered to the anchors he placed at the beginning. That, even if you disagree with him, you will disagree in terms of free speech, race blindness, and religious freedom. If I’ve done my job correctly, the flags I placed up top mean my anchors will be more readily to hand; that, when he talks about censorship it should be abundantly clear to you that Prager in fact does agree that some things should not be on college campuses and just disagrees about which ones, that the hypocrisy of Rubin’s video and Peterson’s being on the same channel is obvious; when Rubin has the gall to quote Martin Luther King, that King himself stressed again and again that things like race blindness in the face of continued oppression only serve to perpetuate it, that the desire for such exists purely to save white people from having to think about injustice, that you cannot will equity into being by acting as though it already exists; that, when he talks about wedding cakes, he is talking about discrimination, that homophobia is no more a Christian value than anti-miscegenation was, it is merely a bigoted value sometimes held by Christians.

And those flags? You heard them first, but I wrote them after watching Rubin’s video, and it was so hard not to rant about the First Amendment, even though I know - I know - these are not First Amendment issues! I had to step away, and think about the responsibilities of educators, the words of Martin Luther King, and America’s history of discrimination on their own, shake Rick out of my head, just to remind myself what’s really being discussed here. Because, even by his own arguments, he’s wrong! And it is so hard not to call him on it, even though I know it’s irrelevant. That’s how heavy the anchor is.

Contrast this with the Left’s tendency:

[what they say]

“It started with box cutters as a weapon, but now we- sadly, we joke that we are the machete capital of Texas.”

[what we say]

“Okay, hold on, I’m not saying someone walking around with a machete isn’t scary, but you’re making an outlier seem like the norm there.”

• Homelessness [4,964,994 views]

[what they say]

“I don’t want them in our country. And women don’t want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country, but the women do not want them, women want security.”

[what we say]

“Wow! ‘Young strong men are invading our country and coming for our women.’ That is such old-timey racism, I’m genuinely amazed that image didn’t automatically turn black and white while he talked.”

• Family Separation [5,303,306 views]

[what they say]

“Can you get the coronavirus by eating Chinese food?”

[what we say]

“No! No you can’t!”

• Coronavirus [15,616,262 views]

These are all from the first couple minutes of their respective videos. Introduce the subject, share the conservative position, and then respond; introduce the subject, share the conservative position, and then respond. Same as with the thumbnails, it’s their argument before ours. John, you’re dropping their anchor. You’re letting them control the conversation when they’re not even present for it.

The type of argument being attempted here is a kind of proof by contradiction. “Let us consider that Austin is the machete capital of Texas. Well, for that to be true, the evidence would have to control for outliers. Looking at the numbers, it does not, so we must conclude the starting premise is false.” It’s like a math problem: if you wanna check whether A is 2, plug 2 into the equation; if it comes out wrong, A isn’t 2. The trouble when you do this with rhetoric is no one can check your math. The measure of success is not “did the numbers come out right?” but “did you convince me?” And, if you stake the truthfulness of your starting premise on convincing the listener it’s false, failing to do so kiiiiiind if implies the starting premise is true.

Like, okay: “Let us consider whether killer whales are fish. Well, most fish are small. Trout. Salmon. Guppies. The list goes on! Whereas killer whales are big, like an elephant or a hippo. I must conclude that they are mammals, because they’re just so much bigger than fish.”

Now that’s a shit argument! Lotta small mammals in this world, lotta big fish. And if I have not proved killer whales are mammals, then the starting premise stands undefeated. But, of course, “killer whales are fish” never had to present an argument, I just promised to prove the opposite and failed. Which might prompt the question, “why did I ask you to assume it was true in the first place?”

Proof by contradiction comes with three major pitfalls: even the best counterargument will not convince everyone, at least a few will come away feeling the false premise won the debate; by anchoring the argument you’re trying to disprove, some people are still going to remember the false premise better than your refutation of it, even if they agreed with you; and, by opening with your opponent’s argument, you very likely bias yourself into responding on your opponent’s terms. It is very hard not to talk about the First Amendment.

If you want to talk about why killer whales aren’t fish, you might try proof by induction: start by explaining what a mammal is. By the time you’ve done that, you might find that demonstrating whales aren’t fish isn’t necessary.

This is the difference between proving that A isn’t 2 and solving for A.

The thing that kills me about this, with YouTubers at least, is we’re actually really good at this. The thing I’m talking about? We do it all the time in other contexts. It’s a stereotype at this point that, if a sociologically-minded YouTuber wants to make a video on, I dunno, the Snyder Cut of Justice League, you know that video’s gonna start with “the filmic medium began when Edweard Muybridge discovered persistence of vision in 1878” and there’ll be a 20-minute digression about Battleship Potemkin before Snyder’s name is even mentioned. And, yes, we get mocked for this, and they are right to mock us! But this is the video essay equivalent of explaining what a mammal is. We know how to start at the beginning. We know how to lay a foundation so that our argument is properly contextualized when we get to it. But the moment it’s time to talk about a current event?

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There are times you have to repeat a fallacy. (I’m gonna estimate in about 80% of cases we don’t, and we should do it less.) But when you need do, science communicators who battle misinformation for a living have a Debunking Handbook. It’s based on research into how people process information; I’ve linked the most recent version in the down-there part. Their advice is to start with the truth, explain the truth, warn the audience when they’re about to hear something false, state the falsehood, and then restate the truth. You want misinformation introduced well after you drop your own anchor and fully encased in accuracy, like a Cornish pasty. Start as you mean to go on.

[SIDEBAR: we are at a disadvantage here. Some untruths are very hard to preempt elegantly, as evidenced by my earlier “apropos of nothing, the Holocaust happened.” The instant you say that, anyone familiar with Holocaust denial immediately clocks where you’re going, calls up in their mind the lie you’re trying to get ahead of. So, even though you started with the truth, it still put the lie in their heads. It’s still part of the anchor. It takes some creativity to get around this, but you might try the following technique:]