Crime Against Logic : Candace Owens

1. Reduction Fallacy a.k.a. Fallacy of the Single Cause or Casual Over Simplification .
2. Strawman Fallacy

“Make no mistake, the Left believes that they own Black people. So when a Black person has the audacity to stand on stage and say — I no longer agree with these Democrat policies, and I would like to think with my brain as opposed to my skin tone — they lose their minds.” — Candace Owens

Candace Owens is committing the Reduction Fallacy by reducing her critics’ argument down to this:

• The Left believes they own Black people.
• Candace is not a member of the Left.
• Therefore, the Left does not like Candace Owens.

This reduction is also a Strawman Fallacy because the missing context amounts to a misrepresentation of a common criticism leveled at some Black conservatives. Candace then attacks this misrepresentation rather than the actual criticism itself.

Using this line of reasoning, it is no surprise that some people may react with “how dare she think differently.” It suggests that simply disagreeing with a group is the sole reason she is being criticized — when in reality, it is not the disagreement itself but the actual principles being advocated that are at issue. And if those principles can be argued to be detrimental to one’s own racial or social group, then the criticism is not rooted in simple disagreement. It is the political principle itself, and that person’s advocacy of it, that is being disputed.

Let’s reconstruct this argument in the context of the slavery era and the pre-Civil War period. The overwhelming majority of Black people were against slavery. The overwhelming majority of Black people disagreed with the Confederacy, which supported the institution of slavery. Yet there were a small number of Black people who actually owned slaves and therefore were not opposed to slavery. These Black slave owners sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Would we characterize Black slave owners as independent thinkers who were simply going against “groupthink” because they held a position different from most other Black people? It would be a misrepresentation of their critics’ position to reduce that criticism to a mere objection to the fact that they thought differently from the majority.

Conversely, would we characterize the majority of Black people during that same era as mindless sheep who opposed slavery simply because most other Black people also opposed it? That they were incapable of independent thought? That they could not have analyzed the conditions of slavery versus freedom and logically concluded that abolition was the most rational and desirable outcome?

Large numbers of people can arrive at the same position through their own independent critical analysis. One cannot conclude that simply because many people hold the same position, they are all committing the Bandwagon Fallacy. The Bandwagon Fallacy — also known as the Ad Populum Fallacy or Appeal to Popularity — is when someone supports a position solely because the majority of the public supports it. Reaching the same conclusion independently through reason and lived experience is an entirely different matter.