(This article is broken up into several pages. Use the dropdown menu below or the navigation menu at the bottom of each page to be sure you read the whole article, it all ties together!)
Let’s start with the first thing that caught my eye about this story: the premise. In short: a known neo-Nazi “endorsed” the Biden administration and praised their decision to send arms to Ukraine. Therefore, asserts the post and poster, the Biden administration should be opposed in every way because clearly they are Nazis.
While it’s very difficult to find specific examples and citable scholarship in a casual search on the open web, this is a well-known and widely discussed tactic of manipulation that nearly any of us will recognize. The “bad” actor deliberately associates themselves with an enemy. In doing so, they deliberately create an opening for the suggestion this proves that the person they want to discredit surely must be a bad person.
(There’s a variant of this thinking that you see in abusive relationship patterns and gaslighting, which can be loosely rendered as “you must have something wrong with you, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be with me.“)
Fundamentally this relies on exploiting a logical fallacy called “association fallacy.” It has various types and synonyms – well-poisoning is a type of this fallacy, for instance. In the case of the piece we’re looking at today, the specific type of association fallacy is “guilt by association.”
There are a couple of reasons this logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The first is because Biden has no control whatsoever over who endorses him, nor what they give as their reasons; assuming there’s any responsibility for any of this on the part of the Biden administration is childishly silly in that aspect.
The second reason is the endorsement is obviously not made in good faith. This bad actor knows what he’s doing, so much so that he’s nearly winking at you as he does it – is winking at his ideological comrades. They know there’s no way to conclusively prove he’s deliberately lying for the overt purpose of associating the Biden administration with neo-Nazism, that would require mind-reading. So they lie with just the thinnest pretense of believing their own BS, knowing that calling them out on it directly would just end in inconclusive bickering.
Millions of abusers and tyrants and bullies and bigots throughout human history have manipulated association fallacy the same way, and we’ve all seen it in our lives many times if you give it some thought. Being able to recognize this level of manipulation and cunning is critical to protecting yourself against it on all levels.
