While most Americans initially supported the lockdown, a fraction of the population  engaged in (often armed) protests. While the topic of protests is primarily a matter for political philosophy and ethics, critical thinking applies here as well. Given the political success of the anti-health movement in America, we can expect protests against efforts to mitigate the next pandemic. Assuming that any efforts are made.

While the protests were miniscule in size relative to the population of the country, they attracted media attention—they made the national news regularly and the story was repeated and amplified. On the one hand, this makes sense: armed protests against efforts to protect Americans from the virus was news. On the other hand, media coverage is  disproportional to the size and importance of the protests.  The “mainstream” media is often attacked as having a liberal bias and while that can be debated, it the media does have a bias for stories that attract attention. Public and private news services need stories that draw an audience. Protests, especially by people who are armed, draw an audience.  It can also be argued that some news services have a political agenda that was served by covering such stories.

While it can be argued that such stories are worth covering in the news, disproportional coverage can lead people to commit the Spotlight Fallacy. This fallacy is committed when a person uncritically assumes that the degree of media coverage given to something is proportional to how often it occurs or its importance. It is also committed when it is uncritically assumed that the media coverage of a group is representative of the size or importance of the group.

Form 1

Premise 1: X receives extensive coverage in the media.

Conclusion: X occurs in a frequency or is important proportional to its coverage.

Form 2

Premise 1: People of type P or Group G receive extensive coverage in the media.

Conclusion: The coverage of P or G is proportional to how P and G represent the general population.

This line of reasoning is fallacious since the fact that someone or something attracts the most attention or coverage in the media does not mean that it is representative or that it is frequent or important.

It is like the fallacies Hasty Generalization, Biased Sample and Misleading Vividness because the error being made involves generalizing about a population based on an inadequate or flawed sample.

In the case of the lockdown protests, the protests were limited in occurrence and size, but the extent of media coverage conveyed the opposite. The defense against the Spotlight Fallacy is to look at the relevant statistics. As noted above, while the lockdown protests got a great deal of coverage, they were small events that were not widespread. This is not to say that they have no importance. As such we should look at such protests not through the magnifying glass of the media but through the corrective lenses of statistics. I now turn to an ad hominem attack on the protesters.

Some critics of the protesters pointed out that the protesters were also being manipulated by an astroturfing campaign. Astroturfing is a technique in which the true sponsors of a message or organization create the appearance that the message or organization is the result of grassroots activism. In the case of the lockdown protests, support and organization was being provided by individuals and groups supporting Trump’s re-election and who were more concerned with a return to making money than the safety of the American people.  While such astroturfing is a matter of concern, to reject the claims of the protesters because they are “protesting on AstroTurf” rather than standing on true grassroots would be to commit either an ad hominem or genetic fallacy.

An ad hominem fallacy occurs when a person’s claim is rejected because of some alleged irrelevant defect about the person. In very general terms, the fallacy has this form:

Premise 1: Person A makes claim C.

Premise 2: An irrelevant attack is made on A.

Conclusion: C is false.

This is a fallacy because attacking a person does not disprove the claim they have made. In the case of a lockdown protester, rejecting their claims because they might be manipulated by astroturfing would be a fallacy. As would rejecting their claims because of something one does not like about them.

If the claims made by the protesters as a group were rejected because of the astroturfing (or other irrelevant reasons) then the genetic fallacy would have been committed. A Genetic Fallacy is bad “reasoning” in which a perceived defect in the origin of a claim or thing is taken to be evidence that discredits the claim or thing itself. Whereas the ad hominem fallacy is literally against the person, the genetic fallacy applies to groups. The group form looks like this:

Premise 1: Group A makes claim C.

Premise 2: Group A has some alleged defect.

Conclusion: C is false.

While it is important to avoid committing fallacies against the protesters, it is also important to avoid committing fallacies in their favor. Both the ad hominem and genetic fallacy can obviously be committed against those who are critical of the protesters. For example, if someone dismisses the claim that the protesters are putting themselves and others at needless risk by asserting that the critic “hates Trump and freedom”, then they would be committing an ad hominem. The same will apply to future protests about responses to pandemics. Again, assuming there will be a response.

To many Americans the protests seemed not only odd, but dangerously crazy. This leads to the obvious question of why they occurred. While some might be tempted to insult and attack the protesters under the guise of analysis, I will focus on a neutral explanation that is relevant to critical thinking. This analysis should also be useful for thinking about the next pandemic.

One obvious reason for the protests is that the lockdown came with an extremely high price—people had good reason to dislike it and this could have motivated them to protest. But there is more to it than that. The protests were more than people expressing their concerns and worries about the lockdown. They were political statements and thoroughly entangled with other factors that included supporting Trump, anti-vaccination views, anti-abortion views, second-amendment rights and even some white nationalism. This is not to claim that every protester endorsed all the views expressed at the protests. Attending a protest about one thing does not entail that a person supports whatever is said by other protesters. Because people try to exploit protests for their own purpose it is important to distinguish the views held by various protestors to avoid falling into assigning guilt by association. That said, the protests were an expression of a polarized political view and it struck many as odd that people would be protesting basic pandemic precautions.

One driving force behind this was what I have been calling the Two Sides Problem. While there are many manifestations of this problem, the idea is that when there are two polarized sides, this provides fuel and accelerant to rhetoric and fallacies—thus making them more likely to occur. Another aspect of having two sides is that it is much easier to exploit and manipulate people by appealing to their membership in one group and their opposition to another.

In the case of the protests, there was a weaponization of public health. Those who recommend the lockdown are expert and there is a anti-expert bias in the United States. The weaponization of the crisis to help the political right followed the usual tactics: disinformation about the crisis, claims of hoaxes, scapegoating, anti-expert rhetoric, conspiracy theories and such. Part of what drove this was in-group bias: the cognitive bias that inclines people to assign positive qualities to their own group while assigning negative qualities to others. This also applies to accepting or rejecting claims.

This weaponization was not new or unique to the COVID-19 pandemic. American politics has been marked by politicizing and weaponizing so that one side can claim a short-term advantage at the cost of long-term harm. Critical thinking requires us to be aware of this and to be honest about the cost of allowing this to be a standard tool of politics.

While there were many aspects to the lockdown protests, one of the core justifications was that the lockdown was a violation of Constitutional rights. The constitutional aspect is a matter of law, and I leave that to experts in law to debate. There is also the ethical aspect—whether the lockdown is morally acceptable, and this issue can be cast in terms of moral rights.  This discussion would take us far afield into the realm of moral philosophy, but I will close with an analogy that might be worth considering.

While the protesters were against the lockdown in general, opposition to wearing masks was the focus of the complaints. While there was rational debate about the efficacy of masks, the moral argument advanced was that the state does not have the right to compel people to wear masks. It can also be presented in terms of people having rights that the state must respect. One possibility is that people have the right to decide what parts of the body they wish to cover. If so, the obvious analogical argument is that if this right entitles people to go without masks, it also entitles people to go without any clothes they choose not to wear. If imposing masks is an act of oppression, then so is imposing clothing in general.

Another possible right is the right to endanger others or at least freely expose other people to bodily “ejections” they do not wish to encounter. If there is such a right, then it could be argued that people have a right to fire their guns and drive as they wish, even if doing so is likely to harm or kill others. If there is a right to expose other people to physical bodily ejections that they do not want to be exposed to, then this would entail that people have the right to spit and urinate on other people. This all seems absurd.

As a practical matter, people are incredibly inconsistent when it comes to rights and restrictions, so I would expect some people to simply dismiss these analogies because they did not want to wear masks but probably do not want people running around naked. But if masks were an act of oppression, so are clothes.

When the next pandemic arrives, we can expect similar protests against efforts to combat it. But this assumes that efforts will be taken, which will depend on who is running America during the next pandemic.