when you have a good argument ("elegiac artwork celebrating the greatest existential threat the US has ever faced is bad") people who disagree will try to force you into having a bad argument. it& #39;s a reverse motte-bailey -- they want to make your position harder to defend.

relatedly, here& #39;s a sequence of events:

june 21: matt schlapp, a trump supporter, tweeted that activists opposing confederate statues would come for "statues of Jesus" next

june 22: prominent left-leaning persons on this website took schlapp up on this and agreed

evening of june 22: multiple news stories appeared across right-leaning media conflating the proposed destruction of Christian iconography with Black Lives Matter

right-wing politicians, like Hawley, have also picked this up, and are propagating the notion that the destruction of Christian icons and properties is the next target of & #39;the left.& #39; i suspect it will get quite a hearing on right-leaning cable, too.

the point of this is i would not let an ideological opponent force me to bite bad a bullet that doesn& #39;t remotely have to be bitten to defend my good argument! "we are discussing confederate monuments" is an adequate response to a provocation like schlapp& #39;s.