After a weekend in which I battled both fire ants and tears (after receiving a vaccination reminder for my dear, departed furry one), I want to move on to happier things. Alas, it appears time instead to revisit logical fallacies, specifically false/moral equivalence.

Donald Trump is far from the only offender in this area (or in what-aboutism, otherwise known in my mind as “but her emails”), but lately he seems to be the most prolific. Please, General Kelly, take his phone away, or at least give him a new shovel for that hole he’s digging. The old one’s wearing out.

Dwight Eisenhower was also guilty of false equivalence after the Brown v. Board of Education rulings and their effects as desegregation began. Columnist Richard Cohen wrote of the episode in the Washington Post in 1990: “He never accommodated himself to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that school segregation was unconstitutional. If anything, he seemed to sympathize much more with whites who were trying to keep their schools segregated than with blacks who wanted nothing more than a better education. Ike criticized ‘extremists’ on both sides, as if racism and equality were somehow the same. If such thinking is somewhat short of racist, it also has to be somewhat short of ‘great’.”

The Post’s Lindsey Bever reminded readers of Cohen’s words, and spoke to historians about Eisenhower’s and Trump’s false equivalencies. James Grossman, the American Historical Association’s executive director, said Eisenhower’s cannot be compared to Trump’s. “Eisenhower was not making an equivalency that indicated whatsoever any disinclination on his part to condemn neo-Nazis or to compare neo-Nazis with Americans who were protesting against Nazis,” he told Bever.

And hey, that first response by Trump showed that he sorely needs an editor. Had he just stopped at “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” perhaps the backlash wouldn’t have been quite as vociferous. But that’s Trump, always going 43 steps too far and trying to equate those who sometimes violently endorse bigotry with those who fight peacefully against it.

False equivalence, says the Skeptical Raptor blog, is “a logical fallacy where there appears to be a logical equivalence (usually in quantity and quality of evidence) between two opposing arguments, but when in fact … one side has substantially higher quality and quantity of evidence. However, there is no equivalence between the two sides when one is supported by evidence, and the other side with little or no evidence, of which most is of low quality.”

But sure, go ahead and believe that story that cites chiefly opinion, fantasy and conspiracy theories over the one that cites actual evidence.

Alex B. Berezow of RealClearScience, in explaining that not all disagreements are logical fallacies, wrote in 2014 of false equivalency: “this argument is used mostly by political hacks who are trying to rationalize hypocritical beliefs and behavior. … both sides of the political spectrum—Republicans and Democrats—will throw science under the bus whenever it is politically convenient. But partisans don’t see it that way. In their minds, only the ‘other side’ is unscientific, and any comparisons between the two sides immediately draw accusations of ‘false equivalence’.”

Naw, doesn’t sound at all like the sniping we see between the left and the right nowadays.

We see this in the climate-change debate, and in countless other areas that have become hopelessly politicized. When you combine false equivalence with other fallacies like hasty generalization (no, everyone on the left is not Antifa, nor is everyone on the right a white supremacist), it’s enough to drive perfectly sane people ’round the bend. And in the case of Charlottesville, we were presented with a special kind of false equivalence—that of moral equivalence. If other people do bad things too, then it’s OK for someone else to do them because two wrongs do make a right … right?

Nobody is completely blameless; however, by laying blame equally on the Unite the Right participants and the counter-protesters, we forget about pesky things like facts. According to police, Unite the Right ralliers—including everyday conservatives as well as white supremacists and neo-Nazis—broke with the established plan which kept them separated from the counter-protesters (most of whom were peaceful, but did include anarchists and Antifa members). There were skirmishes on both sides, but, again, mostly from the extremists.

Both groups had permits, despite what was reported by the president and others, and when Heather Heyer and the other victims were struck by that car, it was after police had declared the rally and counter-protest to be unlawful assemblies, and participants were dispersing.

But most importantly, the suspect in Heyer’s death has been identified as a supporter of Nazi ideals and a participant in the rally. I think we can safely say, then, that extremists on the right merit far more of the blame in this instance.

As I noted last week, while we have freedom of speech, we are not free from the consequences of that speech, nor are we free from opposition. Blaming counter-protesters for being there at all is just madness. Yes, violence happens on both sides, but one side in particular at Charlottesville came spoiling for a fight, and with armed militia. Yes, there were weapons on both sides, but it was one side responsible for the act that killed a young peace activist.

People on both sides can see the truth of the situation, and have loudly condemned both the actions in Charlottesville and the false equivalence pronounced by the president. So why does one side prefer to believe something false?

Quite simply, it’s just easier not to take ownership of what happened and to believe they’re not the bad guys in the equation.

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I’ve always been of the mind that reacting to violence with violence just escalates any situation. Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote last week in The New York Times of a nonviolent movement against neo-Nazis in Germany that’s started to take hold elsewhere and uses my favorite weapon: humor (because we can’t all be the rock that Martin Luther King Jr. was):

Just what neo-Nazi marches need: bright, happy signage.
Image via Rechts gegen Rechts/YouTube found on RearFront.

For decades, Wunsiedel, a German town near the Czech border, has struggled with a parade of unwanted visitors. It was the original burial place of one of Adolf Hitler’s deputies, a man named Rudolf Hess. And every year, to residents’ chagrin, neo-Nazis marched to his grave site. The town had staged counterdemonstrations to dissuade these pilgrims. In 2011 it had exhumed Hess’s body and even removed his grave stone. But undeterred, the neo-Nazis returned. So in 2014, the town tried a different tactic: humorous subversion.

The campaign, called Rechts Gegen Rechts — the Right Against the Right — turned the march into Germany’s “most involuntary walkathon.” [Watch a video about it here.] For every meter the neo-Nazis marched, local residents and businesses pledged to donate 10 euros (then equivalent to about $12.50) to a program that helps people leave right-wing extremist groups, called EXIT Deutschland.

Everybody likes a good banana, even Nazis.
Image via Rechts gegen Rechts/YouTube found on RearFront.

They turned the march into a mock sporting event. Someone stenciled onto the street “start,” a halfway mark and a finish line, as if it were a race. Colorful signs with silly slogans festooned the route. “If only the Führer knew!” read one. “Mein Mampf!” (my munch) read another that hung over a table of bananas. A sign at the end of the route thanked the marchers for their contribution to the anti-Nazi cause—€10,000 (close to $12,000). And someone showered the marchers with rainbow confetti at the finish line.

Velasquez-Manoff points out that greeting violence with violence just further fuels the idea that these guys are victims, which they certainly are not, and scaring away possible supporters or your cause. “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told Velasquez-Manoff. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”

Humor, on the other hand, Velasquez-Manoff wrote, “is a particularly powerful tool—to avoid escalation, to highlight the absurdity of absurd positions and to deflate the puffery that, to the weak-minded at any rate, might resemble heroic purpose.” He pointed to a 2012 KKK/National Socialist Movement rally in North Carolina that did just that.

The Latin American Coalition organized a mocking counter-protest heavy on clowns (ewwwww) and humor, with the “white power” message greeted with white flour thrown in the air and signs touting “wife power” and other riffs. One even read “Dwight power,” and had a picture of the NBA’s Dwight Howard.

This is the kind of thing we should be promoting more of … but with fewer clowns, please. I’d like to be able to sleep at night.