Okay, so the question “has anyone ever used accusations of racism/sexism/bigotry to dodge/win a debate?” is fucking trivial. Of course they have. It’s a thing, just like saying “Well, you’re a woman, so obviously I win this debate” is a thing. My problem is that people blow it way the fuck out of proportion. There is an entire cottage industry on the right acting like political correctness is strangling public discourse. As if the biggest concern for anyone who is worried about free speech absolutely must be the people who use accusations of racism/sexism/bigotry to shut down speech they don’t like.
And it works. It’s the core of Trump’s message. The list of right-wing shitheads who have made a career on youtube by complaining these people - often just one or two shitheads on twitter - is staggering. Most of the republican message these days, to the degree that it’s effective, is either about guns, abortion, or “sticking it to the SJWs”.
(Seriously, this is a really instructive case - one or two people on Twitter said they were a bit uncomfortable about the jokes in the Doom Eternal trailer, and there are dozens of videos taking the piss out of those handful of tweets. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of views. This sort of intentional exaggeration is, in my experience, far more common than actual cases of people shutting down debate by shouting “bigot”.)
This shit works. It allows reactionary right-wing douchebags to effectively turn free speech into a wedge issue, acting as though anyone who supports social justice is anti-free-speech, or supports the actions of any given idiot who says something stupid on twitter. And in doing so, they amplify the voices who do inappropriately yell “sexist/racist/bigot” far beyond their normal reach. They nutpick, which leads to people believing this is a common problem, rather than a very rare one.
This is why I have a problem with the way this debate is framed.