Here is a 45-second adaptation from the above that I made for Twitter:
Dinesh D’Souza makes unsubstantiated categorical assertions and invalid arguments in support of reckless false conclusions.
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| Dinesh D’Souza admits Republican involvement in eugenic sterilization. (In fact it was 19 out of 32, not 20.) |
When somebody produces a counterexample to one of his categorical assertions, his typical reaction is to minimize the counterexample’s importance and to continue making the same general assertion. After I spent weeks in 2017 battering D’Souza on Twitter with the fact that eugenic sterilization a century ago was mainly a Republican cause, he began admitting that some Republicans like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant had supported eugenic sterilization, but marginalized them as “RINOs,” which they clearly were not. He also has put qualifiers on some of his other sweeping assertions: it is now not “all,” but “the vast majority” of KKK leaders that he says were Democrats, and he no longer says that no Republican ever enacted a segregation law, but instead no Republican after the 1880s. When one of Dinesh D’Souza’s unverified sweeping assertions is proven wrong, he makes an excuse and then keeps on saying it.
In this video I go into detail about one example, D’Souza’s argument that the Democrats were “the party of slavery,” which employs bad logic and pretends to be based on the spurious assertion that no Republican owned a slave in 1860. The text for this presentation was written on 9 June 2019, after I noticed that someone had adduced the name of Francis Preston Blair as a slaveholder who was not only a Republican in 1860 but had helped to found the party. On the following day, Dinesh D’Souza did as I predicted, minimized the importance of the counterexample that he had tauntingly solicited for several years, and asserted that he was essentially correct in spite of it.
An important principle in dealing with a dishonest interlocutor like Dinesh D’Souza is not to let him set the rules of discourse. The leftist “twitterstorians” arguing with D’Souza made this mistake. They foolishly allowed D’Souza to tell them how they must approach his argument, and now — surprise, surprise — after they’ve jumped through his hoop D’Souza is still not admitting that he was wrong.