Our society is obsessed with arguing. It didn’t always use to be this way – remember when we all agreed that Russia was our enemy and that polio vaccinations were a good thing?

Today we’re energized and consumed by confrontation wherever we find it. Next time someone raises their voice in public, look around to see how many cell phone cameras are recording.

We cherish every flashpoint with an intensity that reminds me of my Middle School years where friendships and feuds developed and unraveled in the blink of an eye.

The problem is that, like Middle Schoolers, we’re struggling to contain our emotions. Our arguments lack logic and reasoning. We start with a conclusion and work backward to justify the underlying emotions.

Like any boy who made it through middle school, I’ve had my own arm manipulated to unexpectedly slap myself in the face, oftentimes repeatedly in a very humbling way. It’s a classic move.

But when the friend or tormentor mockingly asked, “Why do you keep slapping yourself?,” I knew enough not to argue the point. Rather than trying to convince the person that I wasn’t, in fact, slapping myself, I would parry with a “yo mama” joke or something that made the offending party look more ridiculous than me.

A modern example might be: “Yo Mama so fat she uses the Trump wall as a belt.”

This is an example of a red herring argument. They’re everywhere in Middle School and in 2019, they’re back with a vengeance.

A rising tide of red herring arguments is floating through our social waters suffocating new growth and leaving its putrid scent upon our shores.

Our normal tools seem powerless to wash it away; all we can do is wait for the currents to shift and hope the red tide floats away without eroding too much of our once-pristine coast.

I’ll now poorly define “red herring arguments” to serve my own agenda and continue the conversation with my own definition substituting for the generally agreed upon definition. That seems to be a popular move.

Red herring arguments are a tool that intellectually lazy people use to deflect from an argument that’s making them look foolish while scoring cheap points tangentially related to the original point.

This is how a viral campaign about manufactured outrage over the lyrics to Baby It’s Cold Outside can drag a societal conversation about gender equality into the mud and smother the progress that genuine heroes have made over the course of a year.

Several people asked my opinion about the Baby It’s Cold Outside lyrics this Christmas. It was weird, almost as if they were reading from a script burned into their consciousness.

Not a single person who raised the issue had actually met anyone who was outraged by the lyrics, but they all assumed the outrage both existed and was widespread. Why? Because a few op-ed teams used the publicity to garner attention.

PETA (the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is particularly good at manufacturing this sort of outrage in a way that is irresistible to morning zoo radio stations and clickbait farms.

Of course your local weatherman (who is exhausted after waking up at 3 AM) is going to use a hand-picked vegetable pun if you feed it to him. Then, that early-morning exposure allows PETA to dominate the talk around the water cooler in offices all over the country.

Last month PETA had an absurdly effective promotion to ban “anti-animal sayings,” such as “kill two birds with one stone,” “take the bull by the horns,” or “beat a dead horse.”

It raises eyebrows to suggest alternatives like, “feed two birds with one scone,” “take the flower by the thorns,” and, “feed a fed horse.” The purpose of getting exposure worked. They played us like an all-natural, locally-sourced fiddle.

It’s easy to manufacture outrage over seemingly innocuous things. Watch me play the intellectually-lazy devil’s advocate role by asking PETA one question:

Why, for a group that’s dedicated to animal rights, does your name differentiate between people and the rest of the animal species?

Please don’t answer. We don’t have to take the bait every time. Unlike our arguments, we aren’t all herrings.

How many times must we slap ourselves in the face before recognizing we’re not the ones swinging the arm?

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