Why Democrats use the 'false equivalency' argument

President Trump was acquitted of impeachment charges for the second time. Whether he should have been convicted or subject to impeachment in the first place will be forever debated. The residual question is when are comparisons fair and when are they false equivalencies? This topic matters not just for understanding the impeachment, but for our continued national dialogue.  

However inappropriate Trump’s actions and rousing words were after Nov. 3 through Jan. 6 it’s hard to believe he foresaw the fatal uprising. And that is the issue: whether Trump incited the mob’s assault on Capitol Hill that left five people dead on Jan. 6, 2021. The House charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection.” The word incitement means the “action of provoking unlawful behavior or urging someone to behave unlawfully.” This is not a cut-and-dry analysis. The burden of proof for both provocation and insurrection are high, in light of the highly-charged rhetoric coming from Democrats in the last year with impunity. 

Democrats, such as NBC News anchor Chuck Todd, says bringing up what others have done is a “lazy version of whataboutism,” a tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without disproving the argument. In other words, Democrats' use of inflammatory speech in the past that resulted in violence is a false equivalence to Trump’s rhetoric which ended in violence. 

Why is it that some see these situations as morally equivalent while others do not? Who gets to decide?

It comes down to whether there is alignment on what is true. Clearly, there is very little  alignment between conservatives and progressives on what is true or false, wrong or right, good and evil. And if there is no alignment, how can then there be equivalence? Everything is a false equivalence.

In the last year, a new social-cultural system of truth - aka religion, whose moral compass is driven by a sense of collective social justice has come into full force. And while it should be separated from government, it’s very much entwined and embraced by the Democratic party. This new religion believes the US is a racist and oppressive nation rigged against anyone in the minority, and morality is defined by the good works performed in the name of equal outcome (read socialism). 

Anyone who stands up for this supreme truth is justified and righteous. Anyone against this truth is considered violent, harmful, intolerant, immoral, in denial, unaware, unenlightened, and of course racist, deplorable and stupid. In other words, not “woke” to the racist and oppressive sin that bedevils us.  

This is the lens we must look through to understand Trump’s second impeachment trial and why the Left believes their words or actions and similar words and actions carried out by conservatives are considered a false equivalence. 

What the trial videos revealed

During the trial, Democratic House managers offered up a lot of emotional provocation through a 13-minute video dramatizing the Jan. 6 uprising laced with Trump’s words as mobs attacked the Capitol. No one wants to see footage of the Capitol being ransacked. But to make the causal link requires a high bar of evidence, which was not presented. Importantly, the House might have gone against its own rules, which bars the dissemination of videos “distorted or manipulated with the intent to mislead the public.” Indeed, reports are already referring to the carefully-edited film as “a massive body of video evidence of the alleged offense.” Next time I go to trial I’d like to be able to create my own video montage of the defendant, and set it to evil Star Wars music.

If Republicans wanted to create causal links between rhetoric and violence, they would have far more b-roll to choose from to recreate the months’ long inflammatory language and encouraging calls for unruly protests in 2020 while showing buildings burning down, police killed and dozens of statues toppled. Trump’s defense team didn’t take that cheap shot. 

Smartly and accurately, they produced a nearly 10-minute clip capturing many Democrats using incendiary remarks (such as putting a bullet in Donald Trump) as well as the often-used political rallying word: “fight.” Why did Trump’s lawyers zero in on that word? Because Democrats did. Here are some of the words spoken by Trump they say incited the mob. “We fight like hell,” said Trump. “And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” 

Immediately, Democrats dismissed the video comparing their rhetoric with Trump’s as a false equivalency.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) remarked that the comments in the video did not have the same dire consequence but rather shows “a history that in no cases resulted in deaths, deaths of police officers, rioting behavior.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) called the argument a “distorted equivalence” because Trump “invited this mob to Washington.” 

Never mind that in one of the video snippets from August 2020, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) invited unruly behavior, saying there needs to be “unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives.” Another clip showed CNN’s Chris Cuomo in early June 2020, saying “Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” Or when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) insouciantly said in July 2020 that “people will do what they do” referring to the destruction of the Christopher Columbus statue. 

Those permissive comments were just a few of the many that created the tolerance for violence.  In September 2020, two LA County sheriff’s deputies were shot in the head in Compton. Protestors outside the hospital tried to block entryway to the hospital and shouted “Death to the police” and other “derogatory” words, according to an eye-witness. In October 2020, the Guardian reported that at least 25 people died in the 2020 Floyd protests. Let’s not forget how Seattle’s Mayor Durkan allowed protesters to take over several city blocks in her city, an uprising she referred to as a “summer of love.” The takeover ended in shootings and two deaths. In Minneapolis alone, fires were set to 150 buildings, some burned to the ground. Billions of damage had been caused across the country; Rampant iconoclasm on government property ensued. 

Another senator who appears in the video saying “fight,” sought to ridicule his clip by explaining that he used the word in the context of changing healthcare reform. Never mind that Bernie Sanders’ spirited speeches about healthcare reform inspired a rabid follower to critically shoot Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA). Scalise didn’t blame Sanders.

The point is causal links aren’t often made because they’re hard to prove and often don’t explicitly exist. It’s hard to know what triggers any crazy person. Moreover, what insane radicals do should not undermine and delegitimize the protests - an argument often used by the left in 2020. Democratic protests were to fight for social injustice which is held to a different standard because the system is racist and oppressive. 

The Jan. 6 protests on the other hand, Democrats say, were driven by baseless lies and conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Never mind that Trump protesters were fighting for election integrity. A fight Democrats were 100% behind since 2016, spending tax-payer dollars to fund a $32 million investigation into alleged Russian collusion with Donald Trump. After a two-year investigation, it was determined there was no collusion. That fight for election integrity wasn’t considered a lie or unjust then. Why should it now?

When standards matter

To be sure, Trump’s conduct in isolation was not good. It was unpresidential and narcissistic. But if that were the bar, then presidents would be impeached in their first 100 days. It was also right to investigate the situation, albeit in a cursory way. It was found, rightly so, that his words and actions were not impeachable. There was no causal link made. There was no evidence of a concerted premeditated coup. There were no constitutional grounds. All this matters.  

What also matters is context. We just witnessed the year - 2020 - in which violence across the country ensued, largely with impunity. And yet in August at the Democratic National Convention, Democrats failed to condemn the violence, destruction and killings after the death of George Floyd. Protests were encouraged; unruliness was encouraged. Punishment was ignored in the name of social justice.

Punishment matters. In a Ted Talk, Jonathain Haidt, a professor of moral psychology, said that “cooperation decays without punishment.” To solve cooperative problems it’s not enough to appeal to people’s good motives, but to have punishment applied to everyone for the same actions. We’ve become a very permissive society when it comes to rude and entitled behaviors in the name of social justice in order to redeem a guilty conscience. Since 2015, we have seen a rise of micro-uprisings across college campuses, where in some cases professors were taken hostage, fires were set off, people were pepper sprayed -- all in the name of social justice. Much of these actions by progressive activist students went on with impunity by progressive college administrators who felt the weight of the guilt of their forefathers. But permissiveness should never be allowed to compensate for guilt.  

President Trump should be rebuked for his words, as should the senators, representatives and mayors I mention above!

Should we be surprised therefore that we saw similar and broader uprisings in 2020 with progressive leaders falling back on the same claim that the protests were “mostly peaceful.” Jonathan Turley in an Op-Ed piece said it well: “The search for moral clarity will be lost if Americans cannot distinguish between the behavior of the accused and that of his jury.” In other words, standards matter. If there are no standards for the accused and the accuser, there will always be a false equivalency.

But let’s just get the big fancy terms out of the way. 

If you hear someone say, “It’s a false equivalence or whataboutism,” just say, “What you’re really saying is, ‘the right is bad and the left is good.’” What Democrats are really saying is that there is no equivalence because conservatives are guilty for everything that seems wrong in the world. Some on the left care about social justice but many use it as a convenient cudgel for guilt they feel inside. Why do Democrats use the “false equivalency” argument? Because they want to release themselves of their guilt. They want to feel innocent. The only way they can is to place that guilt on someone else. That’s often done through double standards. 

Case in point: Gina Carano and Pedro Pascal, both stars of the Disney show “Mandalorian” compared a group of Americans to Nazis. Lucasfilm, the company that owns Disney, said the  “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent.” Carano, a conservative, was fired; Pascal, a progressive, was not. Why?

Because we can’t compare the two situations. You see, it’s a false equivalence. But hey, at least Gina, and by extension all conservatives, are carrying the guilt.