On November 25, 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents fired tear gas at hundreds of people after some of them tried to use force to get across the border from Tijuana, Mexico and into San Diego, California. In response, many people took to Twitter to express their anger, notably Democratic Congressmember-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ocasio-Cortez's first tweet about the use of tear gas on the U.S.-Mexico border was in response to a picture from NBC News of "a migrant family, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America en route to the United States, runs away from tear gas in front of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Mexico." She tweeted the following about the situation:
Asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rwanda. It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America.
This tweet from Ocasio-Cortez then resulted in a Twitter thread with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who clearly disagrees with the Ocasio-Cortez's opinion that "asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn't a crime." In response to her initial tweet, Graham then tweeted the following:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez then fired back, tweeting, "@LindseyGrahamSC, the point of such a treasure museum is to bring its lessons to present day. This administration has jailed children and violated human rights. Perhaps we should stop pretending that authoritarianism + violence is a historical event instead of a growing force."
Within this Twitter thread, it's interesting to note that what Graham is essentially doing within his reply to Ocasio-Cortez is attempting to identify a fallacy within her argument, but in a way that perpetuates call-out culture. Call-out culture, as I discuss in the research section of my website, is pointing out a fallacy in a way that can feel demeaning, and is often used to try to invalidate an entire argument.
To explain a bit more, Ocasio-Cortez makes a comparison in her initial tweet between the use of tear gas at the border and other refugee situations in different places and different parts of history. Graham then responds, and without saying the actual fallacy name, claims that Ocasio-Cortez has committed the fallacy of False Analogy--a fallacy in which you make a comparison between two things that are more different than alike; therefore, the comparison is illogical. He recommends that she take a tour of the Holocaust Museum, and claims that her comparison of Jewish refugees from Germany in WWII to refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border is illogical, and that those two situations are more different than alike. In addition, the way that Graham phrases his tweet also comes across as an example of call-out culture through his condescending tone: he assumes a lack of intelligence on Ocasio-Cortez's part about the Holocaust, that she doesn't understand what both events are about, and thus belittles her.
However, unlike many examples of call-out culture, Ocasio-Cortez refuses to be silenced (which is partly due to the fact that this argument happened over Twitter and not real life--Graham can't actually interrupt her and stop her from speaking). She responds, telling Graham that the point of the Holocaust Museum is to actually bring its lessons to the present day, and makes it clear that the analogy she made in her original tweet is not, in fact, a fallacy, but is rather a valid comparison between two similar forms of authoritarianism and violence involving refugees. Thus, this Twitter conversation illustrates some of the problematic nature of fallacies, but also ways that one can combat that.
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