In aid and honor of my one-month online Critical Thinking Course that starts this weekend (Register Now!), I want to introduce you to a rhetorical (or indeed psychological) tactic that is found everywhere but you probably didn’t know someone had a name for it. I only just found out myself. And discovering its analysis was revealing and rewarding. So I thought it was important to share that discovery with you.

Critical Thinking is about but isn’t just about identifying cognitive biases and logical fallacies so you can expose or avoid them. Likewise learning how to reliably interpret and fact-check claims—from learning how to triage the reliability for sources of information to learning what facts to check and how, and of course learning to read between the lines and catch misleading ambiguities in what you’re being told, while still also reading arguments charitably, and other reading comprehension skills. It’s not just all that. It’s also about learning to spot and avoid pernicious tactics of reasoning or arguing. One of which is called ‘the motte and bailey’.

You’ve probably heard of “whack-a-mole” apologetics. Where they argue Point 1, and you refute it, so they move to Point 2, and you refute that, at which point they jump back to Point 1 as if you hadn’t just refuted it already, and then on and on, back and forth endlessly, never getting anywhere. But this is a variant of a broader tactic, the motte-and-bailey, that is actually more common, used by activists, enthusiasts, and ideologues of all varieties, not just in defense of religion, but in defense of just about any social or political position you can think of, from the left, right, and center.

Defining the Motte-and-Bailey

The best article I’ve yet found on this is by Scott Alexander, All in All Another Brick in the Motte, at his blog The Slate Star Codex. He explains the idea first named or described by Nicholas Shackel, in another quite valuable paper for building your Critical Thinking skills, The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology. Who then added his own valuable commentary on Alexander’s summary in Motte and Bailey Doctrines. Any extremist might use it, from liberal fascists or hardline feminists to centrist racists or conservartive sexists. But even moderates can use it. Whether on the right or the left or in between, whether quacks or cranks or sincere proponents of this or that, you’ve probably tangled with someone deploying this tactic, at some point or other.

I recommend reading Alexander’s whole article. But the basic idea he sets forth thus:

[A motte-and-bailey is] a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

The analogy to argument is thus: the motte is a strong position, easily defended, impossible to argue with; the bailey, however, is a perverted or highly expanded version of that, which is much weaker or harder to defend, quite easy to argue with—even if nevertheless true; though often it’s not. One can falsely equate the two, as if they were the same thing, and thus try to extend the respectability of the “motte” position to the less defensible “bailey” position, and thus pretend (to others or even to yourself) that you’ve defended the bailey when in fact all you did was give it up and retreat to the motte.

Motte-and-Bailey Theism

Alexander gives a few real-world examples. One of my favorite:

“If you don’t accept Jesus, you will burn in Hell forever.” (bailey) But isn’t that horrible and inhuman? “Well, Hell is just another word for being without God, and if you choose to be without God, God will be nice and let you make that choice.” (motte) Oh, well that doesn’t sound so bad, I’m going to keep rejecting Jesus. “But if you reject Jesus, you will BURN in HELL FOREVER and your body will be GNAWED BY WORMS.” But didn’t you just… “Metaphorical worms of godlessness!”

And thus you can never nail them down. Is Hell actually bad and therefore unjust? Or really not all that bad? This is the whack-a-mole characteristic, in motte-and-bailey format. You prove the inescapable immorality of any doctrine of hell (thus capturing the fertile bailey they desperately need to profit from), and they will retreat to some nicer position that allows them to escape the justified accusation of being horrific monsters (retreating to the motte); but as soon as you are assuaged, they will turn around and go back to defending that horrifically immoral hell idea (retaking the bailey).

Alexander also gives another common example:

The religious group that acts for all the world like God is a supernatural creator who builds universes, creates people out of other people’s ribs, parts seas, and heals the sick when asked very nicely (bailey). Then when atheists come around and say maybe there’s no God, the religious group objects, “But God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe! You’re not denying that there’s beauty and order in the Universe, are you?” (motte). Then when the atheists go away they get back to making people out of other people’s ribs and stuff.

Anyone experienced arguing with Christians could probably stack up a dozen more examples if they tried. I’ll give one myself below.

Motte-and-Bailey Feminism

Alexander then offers a more controversial but still apt example:

The feminists who constantly argue about whether you can be a real feminist or not without believing in X, Y and Z and wanting to empower women in some very specific way, and who demand everybody support controversial policies like affirmative action or affirmative consent laws (bailey). Then when someone says they [on that account] don’t really like feminism very much, they object “But feminism is just the belief that women are people!” (motte) Then once the person hastily retreats and promises he definitely didn’t mean women aren’t people, the feminists get back to demanding everyone support affirmative action because feminism, or arguing about whether you can be a feminist and wear lipstick.

He’s right, of course. Feminists do this all the time.

“You can’t be a real feminist unless you agree trans-women aren’t women” (Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) or “You can’t be a real feminist unless you agree trans-women are women” (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminists). Neither is exactly right. Just retreating to “feminism just means believing women are people” doesn’t actually resolve the debate between TERFs and TIRFs. That debate has to be resolved on other facts and principles, some of which may be quite complicated—and even when reasonably certain always retain some nonzero probability of being false—and thus are far harder to grasp the truth or consequences of. There may be a right answer here. But it can’t be found in the motte.

Alexander gives his own examples of this, one being those feminists (and there are some) who claim women who dress in a traditionally feminine way (like “wearing lipstick”) are enablers of sexism or not real feminists (and I’ve personally seen some feminists go after several women in just this way). But that is not a logically entailed property of “believing women are people,” and therefore it is not validly possible to defend the anti-makeup bailey-feminism by retreating to the motte-feminism of merely “believing women are people.”

Indeed one can sooner argue that being anti-femininity like this is being anti-feminist, as it actually amounts to criticizing women for being themselves, trying to dictate to them how to use their bodies, rather than letting them make their own decisions about their own bodies—in other words, rather than treating them like people. The same can be said of those feminists who say other feminists defending the full legalization of sex-work (“rights, not rescue”) aren’t really feminists: it’s again sooner the other way around—if, after all, “her body, her choice” is a legitimate synonym of “women are people.” And if it’s not, what of any use then does “women are people” mean?

The other example Alexander gives is “affirmative action,” which is often a motte-and-bailey all by itself (“Quotas!” “But wait, quotas have negative consequences even to those benefitting from them…” “Oh we didn’t mean quotas, we meant making a special effort to recruit minority applicants…” And so around it goes).

There are legitimate debates to be had about what kind of affirmative action is actually good policy, and where and when and how to implement any form of it. Simply labeling anyone an “anti-feminist” who is wary of the concept precisely because it is a minefield of potentially bad policies, because “feminism means believing women are people,” is not a logically valid maneuver. You would either have to prove these were logically synonymous (“there is no possible world in which women are people and any form of affirmative action is unjust,” which I seriously doubt anyone can demonstrate); or that the only way someone can reject a given affirmative action policy is if they reject the premise “women are people”—and the fact is, that’s rarely the case. They might reject it for bad or false reasons, but those are almost always reasons having to do with entirely different premises than that. Since it simply isn’t the case that most opponents of affirmative action are so because they reject the premise that women are people, it cannot be the case that one must accept any form of affirmative action in order to legitimately be a feminist. If you can be wrong about things and still be a feminist, so can they. And surely you aren’t claiming you are never wrong about anything?

One will usually have a better argument to the conclusion that some self-identified feminist is a fraud if you can catch them lying about something significant or peddling disinformation, or that person pushes ideas that logically contradict the premise that women should be treated like people—after all, “her body, her choice” had better mean something, or else it means nothing. Which argument might then hopefully pull the debate back to what “women are people” even means as a phrase—which is precisely what people should be debating, else it devolve into a meaningless slogan, and the word “feminism” with it.

More importantly for the context of activism, trying to defend a bailey feminism by assuming anyone who criticizes it is attacking motte feminism is massively unproductive—in fact, it’s self-defeating, even for the bailey feminist. The tactic only hardens anti-feminists and increases their numbers, precisely the opposite effect the bailey feminist should plausibly want. If you want to increase the number of people who support your bailey feminism, you can only do so by meeting two conditions:

1. You have to treat people who reject your bailey feminism as doing so on account of their doubting premises other than “women are people.”
2. You have to be right about those other premises—and be able to demonstrate you are effectively.

Any other form of feminist activism is self-destructive of feminism and thus contrary to the very goals of feminist activism altogether.

So instead of slagging people off as being “against feminism” merely because they are taken in by propaganda or tradition or otherwise skeptical or poorly informed of what is actually, to them, some highly complicated or novel concept or policy, you should be endeavoring instead to listen to them to find out what factual beliefs they actually do have wrong—as odds are high their sympathies are already with the “women are people” premise, and that they are only uneducated or misinformed regarding its application. So educate them—at the very least by directing them to some good resources or activists who have taken up an education front in their activism. In other words, if you don’t have the time, have on hand a researched list of who does. Or else concede you aren’t interested in there being more feminists. In which case, stop arguing for feminism.

The second condition is equally important. You had better have defensibly correct facts to educate anyone with, if you want to persuade them, which means you had better have done your critical research well. Not every bailey is a joke. But every bailey, no matter how valid, is very hard to defend, because getting it requires layers of education and understanding of what are often very complex facts and social realities often beyond the normal experience of the average person, layered with exceptions and nuances, and against which most people have already been programmed by pervasive cultural juggernauts or propaganda. Just like Christians have been.

The analogy is apt: use Christians’ respect for logic and evidence to leverage them out of the faith; likewise, use everyone’s already-standing acceptance of “women are people” to leverage them out of false beliefs and ignorance regarding what’s really going on and how to change it. This is the only valid way to use a motte. Everything else is jimtrickery. In short, don’t just slag everyone off as an unpersuadable bastard and assume you’ve done any good. You’ve done exactly none.

This does not mean you should be this charitable to everyone; some need to be exposed and denounced as impossibly delusional, irrational, or disingenuous, precisely so that fewer others will continue trusting or considering anything they have to say (though even that will backfire if you don’t do it honestly and informedly). But rather, what is self-defeating is treating everyone that way. That is precisely the surest way to change exactly zero minds. And thus gain nothing. This is as true in activism against Christianity as in activism for feminism. Or any other change in the world.

Other Common Motte-and-Baileys

Alexander offers more examples well worth reading, including advocates of “alternative medicine,” and even rationalists and singulatarians. I could add myself defenders of Evolutionary Psychology, who regularly “motte” the claim that some human psychology must have an evolved biological basis—a perfectly obvious truth—and then rush out to defend a bailey mostly occupied by pseudoscientific assertions about specific evolved psychological attributes in humans on a basis of little evidence or even plausibility; and when called out for that, retreat to the motte, indignantly asking how you can dare criticize the bailey, when the motte is so irrefutably true (for a rather thorough demonstration of this device’s widespread deployment in that field, see my article “Is 90% of All EvoPsych False?”). Even more examples come up in the comments on Alexander’s post (nearly all the comments on which are well worth reading).

Shackel, meanwhile, originally used postmodernists as his example, who bailey the notion that all reality is socially constructed, but when rightly ridiculed and soundly refuted on that point, retreat to the motte of merely claiming belief systems are socially constructed. But the latter does not entail the former; it doesn’t even imply it. That’s pulling a motte-and-bailey. Shackel’s discussions of Foucault make an excellent example that illustrates why motte-and-bailey tactics are actually counter-productive to anyone actually interested in making converts to their ideas, at least in the long run. But since people resorting to it are often delusional or otherwise unwilling to face reality, and instead see their opponents only through a filter of prejudice, they resort to it anyway—more, I suspect, to convince themselves and reinforce their prejudices than to actually accomplish anything.

Postmodernism came with some really good ideas—a motte worthy of occupying—such as that all belief-systems, even the most reliable (like science) are in fact social constructs and thus highly viulnerable to prejudices and assumptions and blindspots that any real pursuit of truth must recognize and endeavor to control for or take into account. But it then quickly equated that to absurd nonsense, a ridiculous bailey, such as claiming that if all belief systems are socially constructed, then all belief systems are equally true.

Had postmodernists not resorted to that tactic, of conflating the one with the other, they’d have succeeded in spreading and educating people in those other ideas they had that are actually valid and could have been usefully deployed. But because they wanted to defend their bailey instead, they made postmodernism into a joke, and thus ruined any chance people would notice and adopt their motte, which could have been the one useful contribution they made to society. Instead they buried that useful contribution in a well of suspicion, leaving people timidly worried that the motte is just a Trojan horse for the bailey; so people became suspicious of the motte, rather than approving of it and making good use of it. And thus the postmodernists had exactly the opposite effect on society they had wished.

The same lesson should be learned by anyone who finds their own kind often caught using motte-and-bailey argumentation. (My fellow feminists, I’m looking at you.)

My Own Example

My own example of running up against a motte-and-bailey argument occurred in my debate with Joel McDurmon.

In our debate’s cross-examination period (at video timestamp 52:00 or so), McDurmon asks me, “Are there any things in the natural universe that are non-natural?” I asked him to explain what he meant. He then asked me whether it’s true that since “nature is impersonal” it’s “impossible for nature to have values” and therefore “from the perspective of the universe” there are no value judgments on what happens, like one animal being eaten alive in the wild or rapes another animal.

Then McDurmon switched that around (at around minute 56:00) to, “If a human rapes another human, is that natural?” I answered, “It depends on what you mean by natural; it is a thing that happens in nature” but “if you use ‘natural’ as a synonym of ‘right’ or ‘good’ you’re talking about a different thing” than “natural” as, for example, “that which exists in nature” or “that which is reductively nonmental” so “maybe a billion years ago there were no moral values in the universe” because there were no valuers back then (“or at least, not on earth”).

McDurmon was foiled in his attempt to conflate “natural” with “good.” Then he came back at me (around minute 57:30 or so) with, “Are you saying human morality is contra-natural?” To which I answered, “Human morality is a part of nature, in the sense that nature created us. But nature passes no judgment; it doesn’t even have a mind [with which] to pass judgment over what we are doing, with the things nature gave us.” So, I said, if you mean by “nature” everything that exists, then you are including valuers as among those natural things that exist.

Stymied, he tried again, asking, “So morality is against nature prior to humans?” I responded, “Yeah, if you want to look at it in the same way that technology is.” He then said, “You would say it’s something like an improvement over and above nature.” I then said, “Yeah, human morality, just like human government, is an invention; we made it up; we built it, in order to make our lives better.” To which he replies, “Do you have a word for something that is over and above nature?” Catching his trickery, I answered contrary to his expected manner with, “It’s not over and above nature. It’s under and a product of nature, of entities within nature.”

He kept trying to get me to claim morality is supernatural, as in “above nature.” I saw him coming a mile away and didn’t let him get away with it. I saw this as an equivocation fallacy; he was switching between different definitions of “natural,” first switching its meaning between “good” and “naturally caused,” and then on the one hand meaning “not man-made” and on the other hand meaning “in nature.” Of course everything humans make is natural, since humans are a product of nature; but that’s not what people mean when they contrast “made by humans” (e.g. eyeglasses; democratic republics; morality) with what just arises “by nature” (e.g. eyes, laws of refraction, emotions).

However, I can now see this as a motte-and-bailey. The motte is the obviously unarguable position that some things are invented and constructed by human beings and would not exist but for us conceiving and making them, whereas some things just arise in and from nature without human or any other intelligent design. The bailey is the ridiculous position that therefore some things are “above” nature and thus cannot be explanined by natural causes and forces. And the trick is pretending these are the same thing, so any defense of the one amounts to conceding the other. Thus McDurmon aimed to get me to defend the motte, then tried tricking me into agreeing this was the same thing as the bailey. He earlier did the same between the bailey of “everything in nature is good” and the motte of “everything in nature is natural.”

I wasn’t fooled.

The Harris-Klein Motte and Bailey

Another example I’ll close with becomes clear in a very good analysis of the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein debate written up by John Nerst in A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy. Which is another really excellent article I highly recommend a full reading of, not least for its illustration of a procedure in Critical Thinking analysis of studying why a disagreement occurred and persisted between two otherwise intelligent, informed people. We can learn from such an analysis how not to fall victim to the same errors they did. And one of those lessons is: always spot and call out the motte-and-bailey. Even when you catch yourself using it. Because if that’s happening, you need to stop.

The Harris-Klein controversy had to do with human intelligence measures (in particular IQ, which only measures a narrow set of skills) and whether black people are inferior to white people on that measure. Ostensibly Harris was defending the “yes” and Klein the “no” answer to that question. For which Harris was widely derided. Which widespread derision made him angry, defensive, and belligerent, rather than sparking any improving self-reflection or genuine listening or learning. Another good lesson in Critical Thinking: check your emotions when they might be impeding your reason; stop and seriously consider whether you may be wrong.

I think Nerst’s overall assessment is correct:

I came away from the email conversation [between Harris and Klein that Harris published] with the impression that Harris got unhinged and retracted his invitation to have Klein come on his podcast for no good reason. And he had released this exchange himself, obviously thinking people would take his side and it’d reflect badly on Klein. That’s not what happened. Many thought Harris came off as the unreasonable party (and I can certainly see that). It’s quite remarkable how he could be so convinced that publishing the exchange would be primarily embarrasing for Klein. His anger also seemed out of character; I’ve listened to a few of his podcasts and he comes off as well-reasoned, balanced and rational. Nonetheless he appears to be the one responsible for the conversation deteriorating somewhere in the middle. Why this reaction from him? To find out one has to trace the conversation backwards.

Harris has a habit of this: he gets emotional when his misrepresentation of someone provokes a justifiably heated response, doesn’t listen to them at all, loses his shit, and publishes a private email conversation he had with them thinking it will reflect badly on his interlocutor, when in fact it only exposes how unreasonable and wrong Harris was, and how difficult it is to explain anything to him or have any productive arguments with him when he is for some unfathomable reason dead set on never admitting a mistake.

Harris did this with Chomsky, for example. It didn’t go well for Harris (as noted by Lew Blank, Denny Taylor, New Matilda, Andrew Aghapour, and so on). Which doesn’t mean I entirely agree with Chomsky, but Harris definitely did not learn a thing from his dispute with him, and nearly everything Chomsky said in critique of Harris was correct. Something similar happened when Harris completely failed to understand Daniel Dennett and again learned nothing.

One of the key failure modes in these exchanges is motte-and-bailey reasoning. As Nerst shows in the dispute with Klein. Nerst sums this up elegantly as follows:

[W]hat [Klein] describe[s] is a motte-and-bailey—an argument structure based on a medieval warfare metaphor where there is one conservative (as in cautious) and easily defendable version of an idea (the motte), and another more bold, far-reaching version that’s the one you really want to push (the bailey). You promote the bailey (often by implication) to get what you want, but retreat to the motte version when challenged. “I was only saying…”

Does this describe [what Sam Harris and Bell Curve author Charles Murray are doing]? Structurally, yes (although I’m not convinced it’s intentional). The motte is the largely uncontroversial claims 1-5 [that IQ is real and measurable and produced by a mixture of genes and environment, and racial differences in it exist], and them making (6) plausible…

Where “6” means, as Nerst puts it, that those “racial differences…have a significant genetic component” and “secondarily” that “there are currently no effective means of permanently raising intelligence through environmental interventions.” In other words, racial differences in IQ are genetic, and there is nothing to be done about it. Ergo (as Murray’s political activism demonstrates) we should stop helping black people and just accept their inferiority.

Nerst rightly spies that:

The bailey is that (6) is true and genetic differences plus the lack of reliable methods to raise IQ’s by manipulating the environment implies that the racial gap can’t be closed and this justifies Murray’s preferred policies.

While Klein clearly understands the structure, he doesn’t seem to get that Harris’ anger makes sense if you think of only the motte as in play.

Harris motte-and-baileyed himself. And refused to accept the fact that Murray used Harris to do that. Even after Klein extensively demonstrated it to him. Harris keeps thinking if he defends the motte, he’s defended the bailey; while simultaneously insisting he never defended the bailey, despite evidence he did indeed, and even helped Murray do so by defending him and never challenging Murray’s bailey. Nerst’s analysis makes this very clear.

Klein also rightly comes in for criticism. But the ultimate takeaway is that Harris incorrectly thought Murray was being unfairly attacked and deplatformed and so on because he argued some unconstroversial scientific facts (points “1-5,” the motte); when in fact, that opposition was in response to Murray’s advancement of a claim nowhere yet in evidence, point “6,” the bailey. No one was attacking Murray for defending 1-5. That Harris thought so is a grave error, one that recruited Harris into defending a notorious racist, and then remaining totally blind to why Harris was rightly attacked for doing that. So far as I know, Harris remains blind to this to this day. He was suckered by a motte-and-bailey. And owing to his ego, never escaped it.

Harris also keeps repeating the mistake of confusing a legitimate argument (that we should be very cautious of giving cover to dangerous ideas that aren’t empirically supported) with a completely different idea that outrages him, thus triggering his emotions rather than his reason (that we should not be allowed to explore whether dangerous ideas are nevertheless true, or not admit they are when empirically confirmed). He confuses people attacking him for what they perceive as his blindness to the former, as people attacking him for not accepting the latter. But that isn’t what’s going on. No one is really arguing the latter; they are arguing the former. Which ought not be controversial. A fact again to which Harris remains stalwartly blind. They aren’t even using that motte-and-bailey against him. He’s invented it in his own mind.

In truth, even Murray’s own science found that no more than 5 IQ points of difference between white and black people in America can be explained by genetics. And even that has not been shown to be a genetic difference. In fact, as not every environmental cause has been controlled for in any study to date (Murray’s or any other), it’s very unlikely all of those five points can be genetic. But the real kicker here is that the error margin for IQ tests is in the vicinity of 10 points. That’s right. Racial differences in IQ, should there even be any, are so trivial as to fall beneath even the error margin of measuring it. I can easily vary myself from one day to the next by as much as 10 points in IQ, if I took one test of it today and a different one tomorrow. So who the flock cares about five points? It can have no meaningful difference in outcomes or expressed abilities.

That Harris never notices or comments on this point is a large part of why people are appalled at him. He cares more about the mere abstraction of what scientists should be allowed to study than about the way Murray’s claims are actually used to support racist beliefs and policies—even by Murray himself! Which is appalling. I think Harris should attend more to the actual consequences and context of what he does and says. Most folks think the same. That’s why they are angry with him. And I don’t think Harris understands this. But good Critical Thinkers should understand this. Because if you want to minimize the harm and maximize the good you do in the world with your actions and words, you need to be much better at discerning these things.

Nerst goes on to explain several other very useful things about how and why disagreements become intractable, and what we could do about that if we cared to, using this exchange again as example, finding due fault in both Klein and Harris. All require critically analyzing your emotional reactions and re-evaluating their aptness when due, by understanding better what’s actually going on in your disagreement with someone—and what the consequences really are, and their appropriate triage. Sam Harris is notoriously bad at doing this—and seems to me almost contemptuous of the very idea that he should try to get better at it. Good critical thinkers must do better.

Conclusion

Motte-and-bailey is also a good example of how ideas can have multiple kinds of opposites depending on which axis of comparison you are keying on. Usually we say the opposite of “straw manning” is steel manning: making an opponent’s position into its strongest possible form before attempting to criticize it; or critiquing its strongest defender, rather than its weakest. Unless you are looking at a different axis of comparison, in which case the opposite of straw manning is, indeed, motte-and-bailey: a “straw man” attacks a weak position to defeat a strong one; a “motte and bailey” defends a strong position in order to protect a weak one. Both are fallacious; as in, neither device validly produces its intended conclusion.

Keep your eye out for the motte-and-bailey tactic. Defending a weaker or more difficult position by pretending it’s the same thing as a much narrower, stronger, less controversial position is not only illogical, its destructive of progress in knowledge; using it or having it used on you prevents you teaching or learning anything. It is counter to the aims of any productive activism for any cause. Just as focusing solely on straw men of positions contrary to your own will always fail to rescue you from false or inaccurate beliefs, thus ensuring you are forever buried in a lot of them.

So like the straw man, call out the motte-and-bailey whenever it gets used on you. And please don’t ever use it yourself—if you want to defend a bailey, defend the damned bailey, don’t pretend it’s identical to the motte. And when you catch others at this conflation, when you do call it out, the delusional who are using it will flee, not wishing to admit even to themselves that’s what just happened. But reasonable people might start to see the light. And everyone looking on will be inoculated against the device by your very exposing of it.

I would love to collect in comments below your own documented examples (hyperlinked and quoted or timestamped) of any motte-and-bailey argumentation you’ve seen yourself and can document for others to study.