David French was once thoughtful, nuanced, and occasionally courageous. Sadly, that season is long gone.
His ideological drift doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that his new mentors have managed to pass along their signature aversion to intellectual consistency. That's why I decided to be done with French; it's no fun to critique someone who doesn't even care enough to maintain the integrity of his own reasoning.
Still, every so often, the world of social media provides a moment of unintentional clarity — a slip that reveals the very double standard people like French refuse to acknowledge. That's exactly what happened over the weekend when Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, rushed to defend French from a conservative critic online.
Here's how it played out.
First, French proudly posted about attending the "No Kings" rally in Chicago:
Notice the obligatory sarcastic jab at conservatives, saying there was "such a huge gap between scary GOP rhetoric and the completely peaceful reality."
That was a point that a conservative account known as "Oilfield Rando" couldn't let slide, pointing out that French conveniently ignored the overflow of lewd, offensive, and macabre behavior of those at "No Kings" events - including the very same one in Chicago.
The woman displaying that disgusting behavior ended up being a teacher in the Chicago public school system. Nevertheless, enter Damon Linker, senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, who decided to jump in to defend French against "Oilfield Rando's" guilt-by-association tactic.
Linker wrote:
What's hilarious is that Linker doesn't even realize he committed the very same logical sin he was condemning. In the SAME SENTENCE. And this man is an academic - someone ostensibly trained to recognize a logical fallacy when it walks up and introduces itself like this.
He accused the entire Right of engaging in this sort of reasoning, based solely on one example of a conservative doing it. In other words, his tweet was a living illustration of his own complaint. Condemning generalization by generalizing ... a self-own of Ivy League proportions.
When the irony began to dawn on him (or at least when the replies started piling up), Linker deleted the post and blamed "whataboutism" from the Right.
If anyone has any contact with Prof Linker, please let him know that's actually not what's happening here.
What he and French seem allergic to isn't whataboutism, it's intellectual consistency.
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