* * *
Joe manifested
this slowing down during the debate on June 27 when he apparently did not
remember, for example, Charlottesville as being the site of the 2017 right-wing
demonstration after which Donald Trump had remarked that it involved ‘good
people on both sides.’ Biden, after a
short pause, settled on referring to it as taking place in Virginia, where
of course Charlottesville is. I know
the feeling and I am sure Charlottsville as the more precise location popped
into Biden’s mind a minute or so later, but by then the ‘debate’ had moved on. But more importantly, the President recognized
that what he was talking about was solid evidence of Donald Trump’s legitimizing
of bigotry and racism.
Similarly, when
the President said that ‘we beat Medicare,’ all knew he meant that ‘we
beat the foes of Medicare,’ or perhaps that ‘we saved Medicare,’ but
the hurried format of the debate didn’t give him the opportunity to go back and
make the obvious corrections.
Most
importantly, bear in mind that on Election Day, we are not judges in a debating
contest, but rather, picking who is best to manage the nation, executing the laws
passed by Congress.
Which leads me
to a more detailed commentary on the debate.
Let’s start with
Tom Friedman’s New York Times column in which he recommends that the President
withdraw from the 2024 election. It is
representative of other similar views and even that of the editorial board of
the New York Times itself.
Friedman wrote
that ‘I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt
up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him
up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to
have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate
for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, it’s
time for him to keep the dignity he deserves and leave the stage at the end of
this term.’
I agree that the
President’s ‘prepping’ for the debate was at fault in concentrating on facts and
issues rather than on the nature of his opponent. While calling him a liar and referring to
much of what he was saying as ‘malarky,’ was accurate, it wasn’t the far stronger
responses the occasion demanded. You
don’t divert a firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth (as pointed
out further on in this posting) or combat a howitzer with a pistol.
I think
Friedman’s comments are premature, but worth considering. We
must wait to see how President Biden and his family react to sincere advice
like Friedman’s.
Read his column in full by visiting https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/opinion/joe-biden-tom-friedman.html or by CLICKING HERE.
* *
A more thorough
summary of the debate was provided by Professor Heather Cox Richardson in the
‘Letter from an American’ dated June 27, 2024.
Read it by visiting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2024 or by CLICKING HERE. Of course, a pro like HCR was able to filter
out the garbage that Trump spread throughout the ninety minutes, telling lies, avoiding
answering the moderators’ questions and beclouding the issues. She thought the President eventually made his
points better than Tom Friedman apparently thought he did. But most of the debate’s viewers were not as
discerning as Professor Richardson.
In her
summary, Professor Richardson attributes President Biden’s less than ideal
performance to the ‘Gish Gallop,’ a recognized tactic in debate whereby a debater
overwhelms an opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, and
idiotic arguments along with many supposed facts, charges, allegations, and
insults, rapidly piled one on top of another, leaving the opponent momentarily bewildered
and unable to sort them out and coherently respond to them in the short time a
debate provides for rebuttals. That should sound familiar to those who
watched the debate.
There is a
lot about the ‘Gish Gallop’ on the internet.
Do a ‘google’ (or similar) search to learn about it (Gish was actually a
person.) A brief article describing what
amounted to Donald Trump’s historic use of the ‘Gish Gallop’ appeared in the
Atlantic magazine in February of 2023. Please
take the time to read it. IT FOLLOWS IN ITS ENTIRETY, without
your having to click on a link to see it! (It was an excerpt from a book the author was working on at
the time.)
It
is inexcusable that those ‘prepping’ President Biden at Camp David for the
debate did not seem to have paid any attention to this and how it might affect
President Biden’s responses to Trump’s ravings.
Here’s the
article I am sure they did not read:
‘How to Beat Trump in a Debate’
Unprepared and weak-willed
opponents continue to play right into his hands.
FEBRUARY 16, 2023 – Atlantic magazine
“Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner
of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish
Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s
opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic
arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the
fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has
been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in
the coming months.
Let’s take as an
example the first televised presidential debate of the 2020 election campaign.
The Fox News host Chris Wallace invited Trump to deliver a two-minute
statement. And he was off:
… So when I
listen to Joe [Biden] talking about a transition, there has been no transition
from when I won. I won that election. And if you look at crooked Hillary
Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition,
because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my
campaign … We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught ’em all. And by the way, you
gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You better take a look
at that, because we caught you in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in
the office. He knew about it, too. So don’t tell me about a free transition. As
far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. A solicited ballot, okay,
solicited, is okay. You’re soliciting. You’re asking. They send it back. You
send it back. I did that. If you have an unsolicited—they’re sending millions
of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found ’em in creeks …
And so on, until the
end of the second minute, when Wallace attempted to break in and end the
monologue. He tried five times before regaining temporary control.
Trump’s statement was
the oratorical equivalent of the media-management approach famously summed up
by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon—“flood the zone with shit.” This is exactly what the Gish Gallop is designed to do:
drown you in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions.
As one pithy tweet—now known as
“Brandolini’s law”—put it, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of
magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The
Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage. By the time
you’ve begun preparing your rebuttal of the Galloper’s first lie, they’ve
rattled off another dozen. They want to trick the audience into believing that
the facts and the evidence are on their side. (They have so many examples!) The
technique is based on delivery over depth. Some call it “proof by verbosity.”
Trump may be the grand
master of the Gish Gallop, but he is not its originator. That honor goes to the
person who gave the method its name: Duane Tolbert Gish.
Gish was a biochemist
at the Institute for Creation Research, a pseudo-scientific group that
maintains all life on Earth was created in six days by the God of the Old
Testament at some point in the past 10,000 years, with evolution playing no
part. Gish publicized the ICR and its creed—and himself—by winning debates
against evolutionists across the country. The writer John Grant explained the
key to Gish’s approach in his 2014 book, Debunk It! Fake News Edition:
Gish would insist his opponent go first. After his
opponent was finished with his or her argument, Gish would begin talking very
quickly for perhaps an hour, reeling off a long string of “facts.” His debating
opponent, of course, didn’t have the chance even to note down all those
“facts,” let alone work out whether or not they were correct. In his or her
rebuttal, the opponent could either ignore Gish’s tirade altogether, which
would look like dodging the issue, or try to answer as many of the points as
possible, which meant looking as if he or she were floundering.
In 1994, after
watching Gish run rings around scholars and scientists, a frustrated Eugenie
Scott, then the executive director of the National Center for Science
Education, coined the phrase Gish Gallop. In these debates, Scott
noted, “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along,
spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
The “nonsense” is an
integral part of the Gish Gallop. Gish’s claims were repeatedly debunked, yet
he regurgitated them again and again, at the same speed, in the same order, in
debate after debate. As Skeptic magazine pointed out in 1996,
“with a new audience and a new scientist to debate, who’s to know that his
argument got shot down, with evidence, by that other evolutionist last week?”
Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have
been publicly discredited. In theory, rebutting these falsehoods point by point
is the best way to stop a Gish Gallop. But in the real world, you rarely have
the opportunity to do this.
So what do you do?
From my days as a student debater at Oxford University to my decade as a TV
interviewer, I’ve come across my fair share of Gish Gallopers. Here’s what I’ve
learned about how to handle them.
1. Pick your battle.
Perhaps the first time
I encountered a Gish Galloper in person was in 2013, during a debate on Islam
and peace at the Oxford Union. One of my opponents, the far-right activist Anne
Marie Waters, began her remarks with this word salad of an attack on my faith
and my co-religionists:
‘Let me tell you what actually whips up fears of
Islam. Let me take it from the top: 9/11; the London Underground bombings;
Madrid; Mumbai; Mali; Bali; northern Nigeria; Sudan; Afghanistan; Saudi Arabia;
Iran; Yemen; Pakistan; death for apostasy; death for blasphemy; death for
adultery; death for homosexuality; gender segregation; gender discrimination;
unequal testimony between men and women in legal proceedings; child marriage;
amputations; beheadings; imprisonment for being raped; anti-Semitism; burqas; execution
for this, that, and the other … This is what causes fear of Islam. It is not
me; it is not my colleagues on this side … It is the actions of Muslims that
are causing fear of Islam. That is the real world. That is where we actually
live. Then we’ll be told this is just the extreme fringe of Islam. Well, let me
have a look at Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam …’
She Galloped on in
this vein for several more minutes, piling one “example” of evil Muslims upon
the next, and not stopping to expand or elaborate.
There was no way I
could address all of the supposed examples she cited to justify “fear of
Islam”; she listed 33 items in less than two minutes—about one every four
seconds.
This was no nuanced
discussion about the problems of Islamist extremism. No, this was a screed that
sought to taint all of Islam, and all Muslims—presumably myself included—as
aiders and abetters of terrorism. Any effort I might make to draw distinctions
and unpick some complex realities from this fabric of bigotry would be doomed.
It would have taken several minutes, if not my entire allotted time. It also
would have put me on the defensive, when the key to winning any argument is to
put your opponent on the back foot. So, instead, I chose to zero in on the most
ludicrous assertion: that Saudi Arabia was
the “birthplace of Islam.”
“Just on a factual
point,” I responded, “you said that Islam
was born in Saudi Arabia. Islam was born in 610 A.D. Saudi Arabia was born in
1932 A.D. So you were only 1,322 years off! Not bad.”
By mocking and
debunking that particular claim, I poured doubt on the rest of them—and made my
opponent look foolish in the process.
When facing a Gish Galloper, going line by line is impractical,
if not impossible. Instead, single out their weakest claim or argument.
Highlight and mock it.
This sort of rebuttal
isn’t always going to work, and I don’t recommend it when your opponent has put
together a cohesive argument. But it works well against a common tactic for
Gallopers: surrounding their central, wrongheaded argument with an array of irrelevant
facts. Pick on the core claim and ignore the others.
2. Call them out.
Don’t let your
audience be fooled into assuming that your opponent has special command of the
subject because of all the “facts” they’ve just spouted. Explain to them what
your opponent is doing, and that the Gallop is really just a sleight of hand.
Another devotee of the
Gish Gallop is Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the former
KGB agent and his acolytes in state-run media have perfected what a Rand Corporation study
dubbed “the firehose of falsehood.” Whether justifying the illegal invasion of
Ukraine or interfering in U.S. elections, the Russian government—to quote from
the study—uses “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless
willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
But the RAND study
also offers—albeit at risk of overextending its metaphor—this piece of handy
advice for fighting disinformation: “Don’t expect to counter Russia’s firehose
of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those
at whom the firehose is aimed.”
Putting “raincoats” on
your audience means making them aware of what a Gish Galloper is subjecting
them to. Point out, for example, that the speed at which they’re speaking is a
sign of deceit, not intelligence. Or even that they’re relying on a favorite
tactic of the Kremlin’s.
3. Don’t budge.
Above all, make sure
you stop Gish Gallopers midstream. And then don’t let them move on to the next
falsehood. Keep pounding at them with a well-prepared rebuttal. They may not
concede the point, but they’ve been derailed and are now forced to argue on your
terms, not theirs.
For years, Trump ‘Gish
Galloped’ unchecked, disorienting opponents and audiences alike. Unprepared,
time-limited, or weak-willed interviewers and moderators would fail to
interject, correct, or take a pause to respond to his nonsense. That is, until
August 2020, when my friend Jonathan Swan, then a national political
correspondent for Axios, sat down with the then-president for a televised
interview.
Trump tried to recite
a bunch of dodgy stats on COVID-19, to pretend he had the pandemic under
control. But Swan wouldn’t let him. When Trump started waving a bunch of
printouts of graphs and tables, Swan inspected them and debunked the president’s
claims in real time. Throughout, Swan gave Trump plenty of openings to speak,
but he never let him get up to Galloping speed.
As soon as it aired,
Swan’s interview went viral. This was the rare moment that revealed Trump’s
Gish Gallop for exactly what it was: a deliberate strategy to deflect and
distract.
So when you’re faced with someone like Trump, who’s spouting lie
after lie, pick your
battle, call them out, and don’t budge. Beyond
their bumbling and bullshitting, they actually do have a strategy—so you
should, too.”
* *
My Bottom Line Recommendation: Don’t leap to jump on any bandwagon
suggesting that Joe Biden withdraw from the race. I don’t think he would do that anyway unless
his family pressured him to do so.
1. Give
him a chance to continue to articulate his vision of government’s role in
serving the people of this country, all of the people, as he did in his State
of the Union address. 2. Give him a chance to use the weapon of truth to
take the offensive against the deluge of distortions, deflections, and
distractions, and outright lies, that his opponent daily uses as the basis of
his candidacy.
President Biden did quite well in meeting both of these challenges
at a rally the day after the debate in Raleigh, NC, where he wasn’t
straight-jacketed into a debate’s format, something his opponent chose to ignore at will. A debate, like the one on Thursday evening, is
not the best environment in which President Biden can pursue these two avenues
because the format of a debate unfairly elevates
liars to the same platform which truth speakers occupy. President Biden should avoid future
debates, and depend on the presidential ‘bully pulpit,’ (a term coined by
Theodore Roosevelt) to reach the public through avenues of communication open
to him in his role as president. Think of FDR’s ‘fireside chats.’
I
expect President Biden to continue to speak forcefully on these two points, as
he did in Raleigh yesterday. If he fails to do
so, perhaps Tom Friedman’s words should be considered carefully. And those following in the footsteps of Duane
Gish should be called out as the charlatans they are and kept out of politics.
The greatest risk in following this recommendation is that sometime between now and November 5, the marbles referred to in the opening paragraph of this posting might crack or stop rolling entirely. That would be bad news. That’s why those frequently mentioned as possible Democratic 'alternatives' to President Biden’s candidacy should take an increasing and more visible role in supporting him, knowing that one of them might be called on to come out of the bullpen to relieve him, even before Election Day.
Included
in that ‘bullpen’ should be Governors Gretchen Widmer (MI), Andy Beshear (KY)
and Gavin Newsom (CA), Cabinet member Pete Buttigieg, Vice President Kamala
Harris, as well as numerous Senators including Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Cory
Booker (NJ). But if those
marbles still continue to roll, albeit more slowly than in the past, there will be no need for a call to the bullpen. Of course then, President Biden’s vice-president for the next four years should be chosen
from this list.
JL
* * *
June Ends
One of the things that bug me about months like June that have only thirty days is that old fashioned calendar watches, like the two I possess, require an adjustment from the thirty-one dates they display, in deference to the eight months with that many days, June not being among them. Another thing about the end of June is that we finally are given a vacation from professional basketball and hockey, whose winter seasons should have ended months ago but seem to go on, and on, and on.
JL
* * *
(If you want a copy of this on a flyer to mount on a piece of sturdy cardboard and display in you car’s rear window, as I do in mine, just ask me for one!)
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Strange “Hits’! The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong! I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter. This is an election year. Spread the word.
JL
* * *
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