From Vance’s penchant to ‘create stories’ to Trump’s false claims, lies are brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win support
JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”
But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.
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The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
Gish gallup is about the volume, and was about arguing in good faith but presented in a malicious way. Often the points could be tangentslly related and imply more meaning that the opponent wouldn’t have time to explain away. It is not predicated on lies.
Trump and Vance have combined the gish gallup with bullshitting, which to your point makes them harder to disprove before the next one comes along.
It is not predicated on lies.
What Trump and Vance are doing is more like a firehose of falsehoods because a Gish gallop is more of a debating technique, but nonetheless, this point is wrong.
The Gish gallop is predicated on the inclusion of (as both Wikipedia and the RationalWiki similarly describe) “a devious hodgepodge of half-truths, outright lies, red herrings, and straw men — which, if not rebutted as the fallacies they are, pile up into egregious problems for the refuter.”
