Communication Fallacies

 Article I choose: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-race-civil-right-white-men.html 

For Trump, Civil Rights Protections Should Help White Men Administration officials pick and choose which civil rights protections they want to enforce, and for whom.

I choose this article as it was the first one that came up on my NYT subscription.

In the article, a straw man fallacy appears when critics claim the Trump administration is conveying that “white men are the most discriminated against people in American society.” This misrepresents the administration’s actual stance, which focuses on shifting civil rights enforcement toward claims of anti-white or anti-male bias—an action that, while controversial, is not the same as asserting that white men are the most oppressed. By exaggerating the administration’s position, critics attack a distorted version of the argument, which makes it easier to discredit. This is characteristic of the straw man fallacy, where a weaker version of an opponent’s stance is substituted to undermine it without engaging with its true complexity.

A tu quoque fallacy, or hypocrisy fallacy, emerges when the article points out that the Trump administration previously rejected the use of “disparate impact” as a legal standard, yet later relies on outcome-based statistics in the EEOC’s investigation into Harvard. This suggests that because the administration is inconsistent in its application of legal standards, its current actions are invalid or untrustworthy. While such inconsistency may be politically relevant, it does not inherently disprove the legitimacy of the new claims or investigations. This fallacy avoids evaluating the substance of the argument by attacking the character or behavior of those making it.

Finally, the article includes a false dilemma fallacy in the assertion that “civil rights, properly understood, do not pit one group against another but protect all of us.” This framing falsely presents only two choices: either civil rights protect everyone equally at all times, or the system is being misused. It ignores the reality that civil rights law often requires focusing on specific group disparities to achieve broader equality. By oversimplifying the issue into a binary choice, this fallacy erases the nuanced ways protections can be interpreted and applied to address evolving forms of discrimination.