Deny! Deny! Deny! So What?

There’s a pattern used by the opponents of liberty. It is to deny some behavior, or belief, that is clearly contrary to civilization. Deny repeatedly. And then, suddenly to admit the accusations were right all along, but to admit without shame, with smugness even, and a “so what?”

The timing of the denial is important, because it’s hard to maintain shock and outrage. So the repetition allows time to dilute impact. And then, when there has been enough dilution—then comes the “so what?” The admission, with the cynical barb that, anyone outraged by this is reactionary, prudish, “on the wrong side of history.”

I've written about rhetorical strategy before, covering a few examples. Today we'll do a little review and then add a new one.

First example. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton spent half a year claiming, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” And then, of course, he finally admitted to it, but added the "so what?” It was just his private life, nothing to do with his role as president.

But that wasn’t actually true. Having sex with a presidential intern, in the Oval Office, is abuse of power, an appalling evil in itself, but also opened the president up to blackmail or coercion. With the "so what?" he admitted to the abuse, but still refused to take responsibility by claiming it didn't matter.

One more disturbing thing is, people who started out agreeing that having sex with an intern was egregious departed six months later, mainly along party lines, giving that president a pass for his bad behavior—as well as his months of lying about it.

Second example. Pro-abortion activists denied, denied, denied that an unborn baby was a human life. Then, as technology makes the facts of life ever more clear—and literally gives us a clearer view of the growing baby—those science deniers start saying “so what?” Several years ago, a Salon writer said it was just too hard to go up against the “it’s a life” argument. So why not embrace that fact and just add “so what?” Sure, it’s a human life; but that doesn’t mean it’s worth protecting, because not all human life deserves protection.

Really? Innocent life doesn’t deserve protecting? Why? Because that life might be inconvenient?

Third Example. Socialism. All through the Cold War, and the first couple of decades following that standoff, we were able to agree that communism, and its synonym socialism, was evil. Socialism is incompatible with our constitutional republic.

So proponents of socialism, knowing that, would try to push their government control schemes without using that name. It would be a “social safety net,” or “progress,” or government providing for “positive rights,” such as housing, minimum income, redistributed income from higher earners, healthcare in the form of enforced purchase of insurance, regulating to control certain industries, and more. 

Now—meaning the last few years—socialists are giving up the denial and starting the “so what?” They’re saying, “Yes, we’re socialists, and we’re proud of it.”

Examples include Bernie Sanders and his followers in the last presidential election. Then more recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist who won the Democratic primary in June of this year, defeating a more establishment Democrat, for the 14^th Congressional District of New York. She has been a darling of the media since, and a target of conservatives, who look at what she says and can hardly believe anyone would go along with her, since she makes no sense.

This past week, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her about a way to pay for the $40 trillion cost (an estimate provided by “left-leaning studies friendly to her cause.” She had no answer. She had previously suggested an increased tax on the wealthy and corporations that, assuming no change in behavior on the part of those earners, would bring in $2 trillion. What about the other $35 trillion?

Jake Tapper asks Ocasio-Cortez about a plan
to pay the $40 trillion cost of her planned programs
screen shot from here

She has no answer. Dig down enough, she believes you just tax the undeserving rich more. That of course won’t cover $40 trillion additional expenditures.

But she’s very Rah! Rah! about socialism, and is perfectly willing to call it by its name—leaving off, of course, the final result of granting government the power to take what it wishes from its people, up to and including their lives. 

Another “so what?” on socialism came from philosopher and erstwhile comedian/actor Jim Carrey. On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher," Carrey said, “We have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.” 

Jim Carrey embraces socialism with Bill Maher
screen shot from here

Carrey was called out for it by a Venezuelan journalist, Laureano Márquez. Márquez was respectful, but better informed. He explained that many people believe socialism means “the antithesis of selfishness, synonym of concern for others…support for the weakest and their needs, of seeking health and education for all.” But in Venezuela, which just a relatively short time ago, was rich in resources, and one of the most advanced countries in the Spanish speaking world, “What we find is just that our regime is not—for God’s sake—the antithesis of selfishness.” Rather, he explained. “In Venezuela, dear Jim, from what I have just told you, there is no equitable distribution of wealth; wealth is concentrated, as rarely before in our history, in very few hands.” 

In socialism, someone decides—someone other than the person earning the money—how and where money will be spent, on what it will be spent, who gets to do what. Someone decides. And that person or group of persons has all the power over people’s lives. Those few elite deciders don’t go hungry when poverty strikes the general population. Those elites aren’t inconvenienced when the people can’t even get hold of toilet paper. Those people are the ones confiscating small amounts of food at the border that people were going to try to sell in exchange for needed medicine. Those are the ones enforcing a minimum wage that no one is receiving, because no business can afford to pay it.

But Venezuelan president Maduro dines on steak, during a visit to Istanbul. People were outraged, of course. But maybe that’s fine with him.

In a New York Times op-ed, Amherst College Professor Javier Corrales writes, "An extremist government like Maduro's prefers economic devastation to recovery because the misery destroys civil society and, with it, all possibility of resisting [the regime's] tyranny." 

At this “so what?” moment surrounding socialism, our society can go either way: shrugging our shoulders and deciding it was never all that evil in the first place, or standing up to it, because we know based on principle, and based on overwhelming evidence, that socialism is just another iteration of statist tyranny, which inevitably leads to loss of freedom and loss of life, and toward abject poverty and savagery.

Life Matters

TX State Sen. Dan Patrick at TX pro-life rally Saturday
photo from Dan Patrick's Facebook page

I don’t often write about the issue of abortion, because there are so many dedicated civilized people who express well the side of life. I thank them for that. But this past week marked 40 years since the Roe v. Wade decision, and after so many millions of babies have been killed, I want to add my voice at this time.

There is a rhetorical technique used by the opposition to truth: deny and contradict over time, then admit to the veracity of the statement while adding, “So what?” Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” is a classic example. Months later, after all the denials, when the proof was undeniable, he admitted to the original accusation along with, “It was only my private life,” a version of so what?

Hillary Clinton used it this past week in her “testimony” to Congress about Benghazi. She said,

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.

We know for certain—and she knew the day of the event, if she wasn’t entirely out of the loop of national security—that it was neither a protest nor “guys out for a walk”; it was terrorists. So, months after the event, saying over and over, “we don’t know,” when we know, and we know she knows, she deflects by avoiding the real issue and saying, “what difference does it make?” or, in other words, it doesn’t matter, who cares? so what?

I had not expected the so what? technique to be used on the abortion issue. But that is what I recognized this week is now happening.

The argument over abortion has continued to be over whether the fetus is human life or not: if yes, then that human life is to be valued and protected as other human life; if not, then the woman is simply making a choice about a clump of cells that are part of her own body. This same argument has continued for decades.

As technology gets better, it has become clearer and clearer that the growing fetus is a human baby, with its own DNA separate from the mother’s, with the ability to feel and hear within the cushioning environment of the womb—including feeling pain. Technology has improved greatly on moving the viability to earlier and earlier weeks. The result of this technological progress has been that only a handful of doctors are still willing to perform third trimester abortions; people who understand the procedure are virtually unanimous in disapproving of partial-birth abortion. Laws now recognize the death of a fetus as separate and additional to the death of a mother in accidents or murders.

What I expected, being the positive, civilized person I strive to be, is that more and more people would become convinced that the growing life is a valuable human life, and would move from “the choice is up to the mother” to “because it’s human life, we need to value and protect it.” What I did not expect was the so what? at this point.

Mary Katherine Ham wrote a piece last week referring to a Salon piece that I find shocking. The Salon writer, Mary Elizabeth Williams, admits, very clearly, as practically any pro-life person would, that the fetus is a human life separate from the mother. These are the paragraphs Ham highlights:

I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

As I said, I would expect such understanding to lead to the decision to protect life. But Williams goes the exact opposite direction. On the pro-life side (actually, on the side of truth for many issues), we are subject to the imposition of terms from the opposition. Pro-choice is an example. This term is particularly repugnant because it’s not about choice to act; it is about choice of consequences. If a woman purposely engages in sex, she has made the choice to risk pregnancy—the creation of a new human life. If she does that and then finds she is pregnant when she doesn’t want to be, does she then have the right to choose to avoid the natural consequences—when a separate human life is now involved? Pro-life people are pro-choice—you get to choose your behavior, but God’s natural laws choose the consequences that follow your choice.

The president revealed his disapproval of God’s law when he said (off script at a Townhall in Johnstown, PA, during the 2008 campaign), of the hypothetical that one of his own daughters could finding herself pregnant, “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This is the same person who, in the Illinois legislature, went further than any pro-abortionist to insist a mother has the right to bring about the death of a baby after birth if she hadn’t intended for the baby to be born alive.

The Salon writer expresses her distress that the term “pro-life” is too strong to fight against. So, she grants that the fetus is indeed a human life, and then says so what?

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides….

The “life” conversation is often too thorny to even broach. Yet I know that throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.

She believes, unlike our founders, that some human life isn’t worth protecting, but calls those of us who believe “that all men are created equal” are “wingnuts” and “archconservatives” and “right wingers,” while insisting her viewpoint is the reasonable side of the debate.

So let me be clear: there is nothing civilized about a person who chooses to kill a human life because it is not convenient for her to allow him or her to live. That behavior—the very line of thinking that leads to that behavior—is savage.

Thank the Lord if you can still recognize the difference. The slip from apparent civilization to savagery among the Germans and Japanese in the last century was amazingly swift. It coincided with the faulty belief that some human lives are inferior and not worth bothering about.

In a civilized world, we can never say, “So what if it’s human life? What does that matter?” Life matters.