Adhominy: If You Don’t, They Will

All too often what will be heretofore referred to as adhominy and adhominous arguments are deemed to be ipso facto invalid, as they ostensibly focus on the person making the argument rather than the substance.

In point of fact, rules of logic notwithstanding, adhominy and adhominous arguments serve several purposes which oftentimes buttress a point in a way that direct logical refutation might not.   Brevity, crucial in the Twitterverse, is always better served by an ostensibly adhominous label, speaking volumes without excessive verbiage.  As in: drawing a historical analog between powerful people appeasing hateful underlings, elevating them to positions of power under the guise of keeping them “under control” while using them as a cover for one’s own truer darker political impulses.

Hence: #NancyVonPapen.  

Additionally, labeling an opponent often serves to undermine a false premise, or several: one can invalidate both an argument and arguer simultaneously: nothing can be more devastating than a curt “you’re wrong AND you have no standing to make that assertion” with a hashtag, especially if an antagonist can be forced to either dig further in support of an unpopular position and be tied to it in perpetuity, or abandon it completely and have a lifetime of work erased. 

Hence: #AlexandriaOcastroCowfart.  

We live in an adversarial culture run by the court of public opinion—and like “real court”, juries are emotionally swayed by “arguments” that are extra-legal, or extra-logical, and are still valid, if only post-facto.  One would be well advised to keep a quiverfull of adhominous arrows.  As “ridicule is man's most potent weapon”, one can always expect no less from one’s opponent: if you don’t “freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”, they will.  

Additionally—contra Alinsky—the price of a successful attack is not always a constructive alternative (as can be evidenced by his own previous assertion that “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside”); often the negation accomplished by said “successful attack” is ipso facto the constructive alternative: to stand athwart something yelling “Stop”, until it does.  The difference in the case of adhominy is that the “Stop!!” is often accompanied by a “you ______ !!!”, but it might make the tactic more effective (and what could be more bipartisan than a marriage between Buckley and Alinsky?)

It is also crucial to note making adhominous argument or even labeling an opponent cannot and should not be an expression of “hate”—even if it’s belittling—unless it’s direct incitement.  Granted, calling an adhominous argument “hateful” is in itself an effective adhominous tactic, effective because it often works; however, on both logical and adhominous grounds, it can be often parried in an almost akaido-like manner: which one of us is taking this personally, and which one of us is really engaging in “hate”?  

Which, tangentially, is why the argument that the vitriol being leveled at Jussie Smollett for his hoax—by a usually salient source that has no truck with intersectional identity politics—is wrong.

Daniel Payne writes:

“[W]hat Smollett did was terrible. No, there was no excuse for it. Yes, he should suffer consequences for it. But you do not have to hate him for it, and in fact there is great virtue in taking pity on him. He is in a lonely, miserable place right now, set apart from the rest of us, staring down a very dark path and facing a lifetime of awful repercussions.  You could do worse things than feel compassion for a man so beset by colossal stupidity and monumental suffering. The world is never in need of more anger. Hating Jussie Smollett will not solve anything at all. And feeling sorry for him will not hurt anything.”

Payne, who is definitely not trying to either excuse Smollett nor engage in adhominy in any direction, still confuses not having compassion and being angry with “hate”.   This “hate”—if it exists—is ancillary and possibly irrelevant, and injecting it in to the conversation as the inevitable result of a perceived “lack of compassion” actually aggravates the offense and  cover up.  In fact, there is a “great” lack “of virtue in taking pity” on an offender who refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing and makes use of his family, friends and a sympathetic media to make his case; "feeling sorry for him will not hurt anything" except for the credibility of future victims, to which Smollett has already caused immeasurable hurt; "the world is never in need of more anger", except when the fear of righteous anger might serve as a deterrent to this offense being repeated elsewhere.  

Finally, Smollett “staring down a very dark path and facing a lifetime of awful repercussions” is not necessarily the most likely outcome: has Payne forgotten the examples of Jayson Blair and Jackie Coakley?  

Hence: #JussieBlair? 

#JussieCoakley?

On Second Thought, It’s You Too

One principle prevalent in Jewish “mussar” literature (loosely translated: personal ethics/self-improvement) is “Actions prove one another”.  Recent public revelations regarding several progressive icons indicate for both the abject moral bankruptcy of intersectional progressivism and its unfortunate staying power in American political life.  However, the actions of the specific icons in question leave little doubt that, when it comes to progressive “principles”, the political is almost all personal: it’s almost always about them.

Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) died last week on his 76th birthday.   Jones, having entered Congress in 1995, was ostensibly a die-hard social conservative who consistently opposed abortion and gay marriage and a libertarian anti-statist who “rarely — if ever — agreed to support bills to fund the government”; but, until two years into George W. Bush’s Iraq War, was a staunch militarist and nationalist who proposed “Freedom Fries” as an item on the House menu when the French refused to support the war effort.  (“Freedom Fries” wasn’t nearly as devastating a critique as the classic New York Post “Axis of Weasel" headline, with two Mustela heads photoshopped on the French and German UN ambassadors.)

However, what ultimately defines Jones’ tenure is the zeal with which he abandoned his former pro-war position, the zeal of the convert he was in real life (in several ways: from Episcopalianism to Catholicism; and, like another prominent Southern pol—Roy Moore—from Democrat to Republican (both in 1992)).  Like Peter Beinart, another conservative-turned-progressive once-fierce-supporter-turned-fierce-critic of the Iraq War (and then, Israel and the Jews as a result of the War), Jones was consistently the Republican most amenable to Iran and most hostile to Israel in the House, which made him a darling of hard left progressives.  Jones also told NPR in 2017 “he signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who've lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars…that was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake”, revealing, in the end, as it would be for most progressives, it was really all about him, and his own self-righteousness: “When I leave Congress, I would rather have one thing said about me: ‘I will never question Walter Jones’ integrity.’”  There’s no question, Walt: you didn’t have any.

Also last week, Colin Kaepernick settled his collusion lawsuit with the NFL for an undisclosed sum, with both parties bound by a nondisclosure agreement.   Multidirectional crowing was inevitable, from those who thought that the NFL lost to the former QB to those who thought the NFL was forced into submission because it was insufficiently amenable to the patriotic demands of its own fanbase (never mind the President).  Beyond the issues of free speech in the workplace, or how salient the claims of the on-field protesters are or were—even independent of Kaepernick’s adoption of the most radical intersectional postures, from labeling all cops as killers, lionizing Fidel Castro, or palling with Linda Sarsour—the self-serving nature of Kaepernick’s “activism”, on display long before the Nike ad, may have been cemented by his insane salary demands after the AAF invited him to play.   Speculation was that he received between $60 and $80 million; it stands to reason that he may have folded for a lesser pay day after realizing he had asked too much.   It was always about him.

Tangentially, Kaepernick’s legal representative in this matter is none other than Mark Geragos, the crack attorney who got Michael Jackson acquitted of CSA charges in 2005; apparently, successfully representing a terrorist sympathizer must be a walk in the park compared to getting a notorious pedophile off the hook.  Jackson’s legacy took another hit recently: even more sordid and graphic revelations of his predatory modus operandi through the release of Leaving Neverland led even the New York Times Op-Ed page to manifest a moral conscience for 22 seconds.  Jackson’s status as a multicultural progressive icon were best explained in Al Sharpton’s eulogies for Jackson, particularly where he noted that without Jackson, we wouldn’t have a Barack Obama; it at least partially explains why Jackson has not yet had his legacy brutally erased a la Jimmy Savile.  In Jackson’s case, it certainly wasn’t about the children.

Sharpton himself, anointer of Jackson and architect of the Brawley hoax, decided to hedge his bets this time with the Jussie Smollett hoax: maybe he has a nagging conscience like Walter Jones.   Either way, enough ink has been spilled about this elaborate-if-slapstick con job and the concomitant self-imposed gullibility of the media and progressive fellow travelers (not to mention the rap sheet of similar hatecrime hoaxes that the media pretends never happened) that the most incisive reporting on the subject has come from satirical sources such as the Babylon Bee and npcdaily; the media gaslighting surrounding this hoax also resembles the recent media gaslighting vis a vis denial of the Green New Deal’s cow fart commandment, with the bonus that some reporters are actually blaming their critics for making them lie.  However, the most disturbing element of the Smollett hoax are reports that—as Michael Davis Smith explained—“Smollett thought the police had two innocent men in custody and he said he would testify against them. Only when he realized the cops got the right guys-the guys he orchestrated the hoax with-did he refuse to comply…Smollett was willing to send two innocent people to prison for his publicity stunt.”

Progressivism is most dangerous when “it’s about me” becomes about you too.