Turning Point USA: The modern liar’s paradox

Everything I say is a lie. You are all awful human beings. 

    The sentence above is an example of a formulation of one of the most famous paradoxes in history: the liar’s paradox. By claiming that everything I say is a lie, I am also claiming that my claim that everything I say is a lie is a lie, which means that not everything I say is a lie. This leaves the reader going in circles, forced to admit a contradiction and doomed to utter confusion. 

    Or so it seems. Because on further examination, we must conclude that there is a way out of the liar’s paradox. Because we are not confronted with someone that always lies, but with someone that sometimes lies. For the first sentence simply can’t logically be true and therefore the speaker can not be someone that always lies (for the sentence is untrue), nor someone that never lies (for he lied in the first sentence) and must therefore be someone that sometimes lies. Of course, when you deposit an untrue premise in the first sentence, you will come to some strange or contradictory conclusions.. We see here a classic example of the strawman: an argument that puts words in a person’s mouth that that person would not have said. In this example that is letting the sometimes liar say he always lies. There is a group today that has learned a lot from these ancient and medieval paradoxes and have made the strawman (although a much less sophisticated version of it) their main weapon: Turning Point USA

    This right wing activist group from the United States has made it their mission to fight perceived leftist propaganda on universities. Apart from initiatives like a professor’s watchlist for liberal professors, the organisation is also notorious for its attempts to dismantle leftist arguments by one of its figureheads Charlie Kirk. The vast bunch of all arguments made by him have the following structure: The left claims A, A leads to B, but the left doesn’t claim B, so the left must be hypocrite. Whether it is: “The US Government is the number one polluter in the world, so if you love the environment, why do you not want to shrink the government?” or “Bernie Sanders wants the American Government to provide every citizen with healthcare, food and housing, but aren’t those the same things that are provided to slaves and prisoners?”

    Turning Point USA uses a strawman to put words in the mouths of its opposition that they would never say. Turning Point USA is deliberately trying to mischaracterize its opponents. Turning Point USA should not have a place in serious public discourse.