It’s been less than a week since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, but it feels like a lifetime of change has taken place.
Something like a great curtain has been lifted off the eyes of millions of people, and they’re seeing things clearly that they didn’t see before.
Social media has always been a minefield of shallow arguments and logical traps, where most people aren’t searching for truth or even interested in hearing the other side. For a really long time now, people who act in good faith and who believe in discourse and thoughtful exchange of ideas have spent countless hours of their lives engaged in back-and-forths with opponents they can’t figure out.
They use careful, truthful arguments, they supply facts that are irrefutable, but no matter what they say, the points they make never seem to have any impact.
Eventually, they throw their hands up in frustration when the person they’ve spent the last hour trying to teach simply calls them a racist or a nazi and then blocks them.
They walk away with the feeling that all their time was wasted; like the other side wasn’t even trying to understand what they were saying at all; like their only actual interest was in distracting, deflecting, and defeating.
And yes. That’s exactly what was happening.
And there’s a whole toolbox of tricks for doing it. They’re called logical fallacies.
We’ve all experienced it: you respond carefully to someone’s accusation with facts, sources, and a clear explanation. You think you’ve settled it because, after all, any reasonable person can see the truth in what you’ve presented. But instead of acknowledging your point, they just pivot to something else entirely without ever acknowledging that their original claim has fallen apart.
It’s like trying to play chess with someone who keeps swiping the pieces off the board, and it's why online dialogue often feels so exhausting.
It isn’t a battle of ideas; it’s a carousel of fallacies.
Straw men. Red herrings. Ad hominems. Moving the goalposts. Every trick in the book—except honest engagement. And the moment you refute one, another takes its place. The cycle never ends, because the cycle is the point.
Charlie Kirk knew this better than most.
He spent his life trying to break through that noise and plant seeds of truth with young people. He treated even his fiercest opponents with respect and dignity, but he also knew that you can’t reason someone out of something they were never reasoned into in the first place.
That’s why it’s so critical for us as parents, grandparents, and teachers to equip the kids we love with the tools to spot these tricks for what they are.
Logical fallacies aren’t just abstract philosophy—they’re weapons of distraction (and ultimately destruction). The good news is, they’re also really easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for.
If we can teach kids to recognize logical fallacies, we inoculate them against their power.
We wrote The Tuttle Twins Guide to Logical Fallacies to do just that. It’s actually one of the books that parents write to us about the most because so many adults haven’t learned this stuff either.
But there’s a great awakening happening right now. People might not know the name of the fallacy they're engaging with, but they’ve realized that there is a clear and identifiable tactic at play.
What I’m seeing is a mass refusal to participate.
“You’re a racist,” they say, and the response is something like, “Cool story bro. That doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.”
Of course it doesn’t mean that this person is admitting that they’re a racist. It means that they’re seeing everything clearly for the first time. A lot of people have spent all their inflammatory word-capital, and normal people are fatigued. They just no longer feel any interest in defending against accusations that have lost all meaning.
And that’s actually a really great thing.
It reminds me a lot of the two kids in the back seat of a car on a long road trip:
“Mom! He’s touching me!”
“I’m not touching you!”
“Mom! He’s touching me!”
“I’m not touching you!”
The mom tells the kid in distress to just ignore the sibling with his finger a quarter of a millimeter away from her.
“Just ignore him. He’ll stop.”
And, seeing that his “not touching” fails to get a reaction, the almost-toucher loses interest and finds something else to do.
The truth is, you won’t ever win an argument with someone employing a logical fallacy. And that’s okay, because learning isn’t their goal anyway. It’s okay to simply see it for what it is, and say, “Oh. That doesn’t work anymore,” and move on happily with your life.
It’s what millions of people are doing right now. And I’m thrilled to see it because it works.
We’ve spent the last decade creating resources for parents to help prepare their kids for the world they’re growing up in. A world that looks a whole lot different than the one we grew up in.
If you’ve been meaning to stock up on our books, today is the final day of our Back to School Sale.
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Look, I don’t know where things go from here. But I do know we're at a turning point now.
Something big has shifted, and the people who argue with logical fallacies, malice, and hate have lost a tremendous amount of footing.
I don’t think they’re going to be able to get it back.
— Connor
