Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty destroying MSNBC’s Joy Reid is such a beautiful moment that I watched it twice. My interest wasn’t simply in watching again the destruction of a truly loathsome person (Justice wiped the floor with Reid); I rewatched to take in Reid’s method of propagandizing her audience. Reid does not engage in argumentation; her approach is sophistry for stupid people—and for those whose sentiments align with her progressivism who don’t care how the consensus they desire is reached.
Note her form in this segment: Because removing books from bookshelves is associated with book banning, child safeguarding is a form of book banning. This is akin to arguing that, because physicians sometimes have to cut into bodies with knives, they are therefore engaged in a criminal violence, since violent criminals also cut into bodies with knives. But Justice’s campaign to remove pornographic materials from public schools isn’t campaigning to ban those books. Her argument is that books with pornographic content—cartoon characters wearing strap-on dildos, etc.—shouldn’t be accessible to children in public school libraries because these materials aren’t age-appropriate.
Reid appeals to her audience that the people who want their children to read books with pornographic content are too poor to afford these books for their children. This point moves on the same plane of idiocy as Kamala Harris’ 2021 objection on BET to “racist” voter IDs because poor people don’t have access to Xerox machines (“Kamala Harris slammed for claiming rural Americans can’t photocopy their IDs”). And Reid’s ad hominem attacks on other members of Moms for Liberty is so transparent as to need no elaboration. There is no argument in any of this. Because Reid has no shame, she powers her way through the interaction, feigning confidence in argument. The observer must be careful here; aplomb is as much an indicator of the shamelessness of the propagandist as it is of the sophistication of a master debater.
Sophistry is a widespread mode of discourse. In many of my interactions with people, some of whom quite intelligent, I routinely encounter in place of argumentation sophistry. Sophistry in the hands of those gifted with putting others on their back foot is particularly damaging to enlightened conversation. When a reasonable person is confronted with sophistry and doesn’t respond because no argument has been made, and refuses to stoop because he has integrity, and the other person continues to press the action, the audience thinks the person engaged in sophistry has won the argument.
Those who find sophistry genuinely compelling aren’t going to know what argumentation is—that, or, aligned with the politics of the speaker, the sophisticated individual would rather it appear as if his side won the argument than to have the losing argument tested. This is why we see highly intelligent people habitually engaging in sophistry while never learning the rules of argumentation. Their adroitness has made them lazy and self-assured. The rules of argument require training (logic is only partially innate to the human primate and that part needs priming and elaboration). Sophistry only requires a clever mind and the confidence of a shameless person. Indeed, with the goal of propaganda to persuade people with fallacious discourse, thus a qualification for the job of professional propagandist is the knack for sophistry.
What Tiffany Justice does in this segment is systematically dismantle every attempt that Reid makes to push the extremist agenda of queer activists. In doing so, she puts on a clinic in how to expose sophistry. Reid’s work at every turn is to bring heat without light. Her goal is to obscure what is really at issue and turn everything back to her central “argument,” which is that child safeguarding is an illegitimate exercise by parents and public institutions when public health demands that responsible parents and responsive public institutions protect children from sexualization.
I have reviewed many of the books in question. To say they are not age-appropriate is an understatement. Those who want these books in public schools libraries know these materials aren’t age-appropriate. They are tools in a vast and admitted grooming project. This is what Moms for Liberty is dedicated to stopping. That they are successfully portrayed as book banners tells us how entrenched and widespread public acceptance of child sexualization has become in our society. This is no accident, as I document on the pages of Freedom and Reason. Queering spaces is about sexualizing children and changing popular culture to disarm parents and responsible citizens from meeting their obligation to protect children.
freedom and reason 