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The Motte and Bailey Fallacy [1]
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Date: 2025-07-14
The motte and bailey is a rhetorical tactic where someone advances a controversial, hard-to-defend claim (the “bailey”) but, when challenged, retreats to a simpler, more defensible claim (the “motte”), effectively switching between positions without admitting defeat. It's a form of equivocation, where the arguer conflates two distinct positions and treats them as equivalent. We have recent examples of this paradigm in the form of book bans. Most would agree that pornographic material should not be viewed by our children, which would be the Motte. The controversy lies in the fact that intricate and complex pieces of literature are included in banned books with the excuse that we are protecting our kids from obscenity—the Bailey. Conservatives have effectively used this strategy in their reshaping of America. The complexity of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the law has been fluxed into so-called reverse racism.
Most of us have a pet peeve that is inexcusable; for me, it is pedophilia. I am a staunch anti-death penalty advocate, but if I were to be persuaded, it would be on the subject of exploiting children. Conservatives have taken that construct—that I know of no one who disagrees—that child exploitation is an abomination, and made it the basis of QAnon. The group has pointed the accusatory blood drinking-child molestation finger at everyone from the Clintons to actor Tom Hanks. The saddest part of conservative orthodoxy using the motte and bailey idea is how quickly they abandon those ideas once they no longer become politically viable for winning elections. The absurdity went so far in the case of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that a man drove from North Carolina to Washington, DC, to secure the safety of children being held in the basement of a pizza parlor run, ostensibly, by Ms. Clinton.
When future Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a U.S. District court judge, sentenced the man to four years in prison, she stressed that the gunman's actions, “literally left psychological wreckage,” according to the Associated Press.
To raise or lower the esoteric bar of this conversation, the Trump administration is now being hoist on its own petard. The Jeffrey Epstein saga, about the trafficking of young women and girls for sexual exploitation, is roiling the Trump base, who abhor facts for baseless conspiracy theories. Barack Obama’s birthplace, or the long and exhaustive investigations into the Clintons and Bidens, have turned Republicans into party peons who bury their heads like an ostrich to any semblances of absolute truth. The United States Attorney General’s Office is traditionally independent of the Executive Branch. Pam Bondi, the current AG, is now twisting in the wind because she answered—when asked about an Epstein list on Fox News—that she had it on “my desk,” for review, is now denying the existence of such a list. President Trump, who has trafficked in conspiracy theories like the late Dale Earnhardt behind the wheel of his stock car, now wants to pull into the pits, saying there is nothing to see. It may be advisable that any edicts coming from the castle of the White House be reexamined because the White House Lawn is on fire.
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