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.”
Steve Bannon simply referred to it as “flooding the zone with shit” iirc
So, galloping bullshit then. Got it.
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.
I call those people “electoral cicadas.”
They stay buried underground for four years, then poke their heads up two months before the election and try to figure out what’s going on.
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.
value in-group cohesion more than anything else
This is shown quite clearly in their belief that people get gender reassignment surgery just because of (liberal) peer pressure. It shows how important the opinions of others are to them.
The realization that there is nothing we, as individuals, can really do about it hits like a brick 🧱 But, yet, we keep fighting. Because to give in is defeatist, and frankly, boring.
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.
Why? Because their loyalist devoted followers are dumb as fucking bricks and believe everthing they say.
At this point I feel bricks are more useful than these people
Fascism, the answer is fascism
As soon as Bill Clinton took office the GOP was on him 24/7 with all kinds of ridiculous accusations. “Travelgate” was supposed to be an important problem, as was the death of Vince Foster. They actually shot themselves in the foot, because if they hadn’t been so blatant they might have managed to make the Monica scandal stick. But impeachment aside, I realize now that what they were doing was muddying the waters to make other people less likely to want to run, and to make regular voters sick of politics.
What was travelgate?
The funny thing is that the Clintons could have turned it around and accused the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations of keeping a bunch of crooks on the payroll.
We were so innocent back then.
Because that’s how Hitler did it
After reading some of Hitler’s speeches, to me, Trump is worse. Hitler at least tried to give historical context and statistical evidence. Trump just spews word salad immigrant xenophobia. It’s actually frightening how little he has to try.
Looking like Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee in their matching outfits.
Because they’re ethically and morally bankrupt?
They could both shit in each other’s mouths on live TV and it wouldn’t sway a single one of their base.
They don’t really know any other way. Its not like they are smart enough to learn anything other than the bare minimum.
This is their strategy because these are the pieces of human crap they are.
i’m convince that liberals and conservatives alike only go by what their in-group says and they become leftists and independents once they spend more than the average amount of effort to scratch beyond the surface.
Everyone is susceptible to social adaptation. Like how some people from poor backgrounds become classist once they’ve made it and have golf buddies to talk to about real estate. The real test of a person’s principles is if they’re willing to go against their peers opinions. It can be very isolating.
agreed and i’d like to think that my autism induced isolation enables me to have these views as a sort of silver lining to being on the spectrum.
