This one incident is Levin’s entire supporting evidence, he claims that because Elder was a Black conservative the incident wasn’t covered by news sources, and no action was taken by law enforcement. Elder, who is Black, and his security detail were assaulted by a presumably homeless woman wearing a gorilla mask. His example for this argument is an incident in September involving California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder as he visited local homeless encampments.
There is no attack on academic freedom.Īnother of Levin’s tentacles is hate crimes towards conservatives. There is no law against conservative schools, there are no movements to shut them down. If conservative professors do not feel comfortable at a liberal college, there are plenty of conservative-leaning colleges in this country. Social trends are defined by statistics and empirical evidence, not individual occurrences. I am sure there are other cases like Boghossian’s which Levin might be referring to, however, this is far from a widespread trend. Levin is probably referring to the Portland State University Professor Peter Boghossian who recently resigned after he received backlash from the student body for speaking out against various politically correct narratives.
#Red herring fallacy examples in the news free#
Starting with academic freedom, Levin argues that “we have professors resigning because they are not free to discuss positions or viewpoints that differ from the state and Marxist movements.” This week I would like to explore a few of these arguments from Mr. Levin describes a list of, “tentacles of Marxist influence…transforming traditional American values and institutions.” These tentacles include free speech, academic freedom, free press, hate crimes, murder in America, and climate change. Littered amongst an article attacking wokeness and another attempting to spin the nation’s union membership at eight percent as a good thing, is an article on conservative talk radio host and Fox News personality, Mark Levin. When I stumbled across a copy of the November issue of the right-wing editorial Newsmax, I was not the least bit surprised to find nearly the entire issue littered with Red Scare paranoia. This tactic is almost always used by the right-wing as a way to stoke unreasonable fear and hatred of leftist policies and figures. Red-baiting is a type of informal fallacy which is used to discredit or persecute a rival politician or political initiative by falsely associating them or it with Marxism. While the Marxist state did cease to exist thirty years ago, 2022 will serve as a loose hundred-year anniversary for a particularly divisive and toxic element of the Cold War era which still wields significant influence in American politics, Red-baiting. If the Soviet Union hadn’t fallen in 1991, it would be celebrating its first centennial in 2022. Kenneth Andrews, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the New York Times: “The geographic spread of protest is a really important characteristic and helps signal the depth and breadth of a movement’s support.The Soviet Union fell three decades ago, but the Red Baiting tactics of the Cold War have been resurgent in recent years. The participation in the recent Black Lives Matter protests surpassed the Women’s March of 2017, which had a turnout of about three million to five million people on a single day.Īnother factor showing just how important the protests have been for the country’s recent history is how widespread the movement was. The actual number of people who protested according to polls are as follows: 15 million on June 4-10 ( Pew), 18 million on June 11-15 ( N.O.R.C.), 23 million on June 12-22 ( Civis Analytics), and 26 million on June 8-14 ( Kaiser Family Foundation).
Recent polls showed that around 15 to 26 million people in the country have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and other victims. With half a million people turning out in 550 places across the US, the Black Lives Matter protests reached their peak on June 6.