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.”
Why Trump and Vance’s strategy is ‘say anything, make up anything’
Because their supporters don’t fact check anything and hear only what they want. That’s it. It’s that simple.
As demonstrated by the same kind of barrage of insane shit Trump and his administration did when they were in power. It was just rapid for crazy shit to drown out whatever bad story they wanted attention away from, constantly.
It amazing that half the voting population wants that back.
Republicans are more authoritarian on average, and authoritarians tend to value in-group cohesion more than anything else. They are, by some reasonable metrics, bad people.
If I remember correctly, there was a study where they did like a model UN, and they secretly put all the people who scored high on authoritarian personality tests in group A, and everyone else in group B. Group B did fine- no wars, dealt with climate change and what not. Group A, with the authoritarians, caused a nuclear apocalypse. And after they got a do-over (after they had to sit in silence for a few minutes to think about what they’d done), they still fucked it up. edit: I found it: https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TheAuthoritarians.pdf , page 30
We’re all at least a little susceptible to authoritarian, in-group-above-all thinking. But some people have it bad, and those people suck. They’re really ruining it for the rest of us.
Their strategy is:
Step 1: Lie bigly
Step 2: double down
Step 3: triple down
Step 4: move on to a new lie, back to step 1
Bonus: insult more and more people with every repeated cycle
The answer is twofold: both like to bath in the media attention, and a crazy invented story simply draws more of that than simple facts. And both have no real arguments speaking for them. This election is about Trump, not about any political issues or problems that need to be solved.
