It is impressive to think out what the Jesuits accomplished in the first several hundred years of their existence, and all the more sad to think of what the order has become. I wonder what St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Borgia, and St. Peter Faber would have to say about the order today.
Tim O’Neill fisks the Cosmic Skeptic
I have trouble reading Mr. O’Neill sometimes because he takes historical facts very seriously and I am definitely not a trained historian, but it is always worth the time.
Donald Trump and the Proud Boys
Today’s example in deception comes from a September 29 article in USA Today1
We start in the first paragraph:
President Donald Trump was given an opportunity to condemn white supremacists during Tuesday’s debate. He didn’t take it, and his response has energized the Proud Boys, a known extremist group, one expert said.
The thing to note is that Pres. Trump was asked to condemn “white supremacists”, but the Proud Boys are identified as “an extremist group”. You should already be asking why the Proud Boys were not identified as white supremacists, since that is what Pres. Trump was asked to condemn.
The same sort of chicanery happens in the third and fourth paragraphs:
When pressed to condemn white supremacists, Trump asked for the name of a specific group.
Biden said “Proud Boys,” a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal advocacy organization, has designated as a hate group.
Again, Pres. Trump is asked to condemn white supremacists, but the specific group he is asked to condemn is “a hate group”.
Why are the Proud Boys not labelled a white supremacist group? Simple: they aren’t. You can look up the Proud Boys if you want to know everything they stand for, and certainly what they stand for is going to bother a lot of people, but they are not a white supremacist group and they explicitly condemn racism.
An article at the Washington Times2 puts it thusly:
Enrique Tarrio insists that the Proud Boys aren’t White supremacists, and he would be in a position to know. For one, he’s the international chairman. For another, he’s Black.
“I denounce White supremacy,” Mr. Tarrio said in a Thursday interview with WSVN-TV in Miami. “I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism. I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.”
The same article quotes Prof. Willfred Reilly at Kentucky State University:
They are an openly right-leaning group and they’ll openly fight you — they don’t deny any of this — but saying they’re White supremacist: If you’re talking about a group of people more than 10% people of color and headed by an Afro-Latino guy, that doesn’t make sense.
What is going on here?
The writers at USA Today know that if they ask about white supremacists and then immediately start talking about the Proud Boys, people who aren’t paying close enough attention will assume that the Proud Boys are a white supremacist group just because they were mentioned close together :
- Ask Pres. Trump to condemn white supremacists.
- Immediately switch to a group which are not white supremacists, counting on people not to notice you made the switch.
- Pres. Trump does not condemn the group, or does not explicitly condemn them for being white supremacists.
- Claim that since Pres. Trump did not condemn a group of people who are not white supremacists for being white supremacists he must support white supremacists.
USA Today, several other news organizations, Mr. Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all used this exchange in exactly this way.
If we want a healthy, functioning democracy we need to get to a point where the majority of people see through these sorts of lies3.
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2 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/1/enrique-tarrio-says-proud-boys-not-white-supremaci/
3 Pointing out that Mr. Biden is a politician and you can tell he is lying because his lips are moving says, literally, nothing about Pres. Trump. Criticizing one does not mean you are praising the other. Many people today have trouble understanding this, but it’s still true.
What’s with the weird name?
If I’m doing my Latin correctly, meum nomen est neminem should roughly translate as “My name is nobody.” A few online translation services think that’s right, so we’ll go with that.
I hope to remain somewhat anonymous.
I have no intention of saying anything intentionally offensive, but I also don’t intend to avoid discussing things just because people who emote rather than think get bothered by them.
Given the current social and political climate today, I’d rather not have the people who condemn hate speech and violence threatening to kill me or my family because I wrote something that isn’t an approved™ opinion.
No one of consequence 