Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique that involves overwhelming your opponent with as many arguments as possible, with no regard for the accuracy, validity, or relevance of those arguments. For example, a person using the Gish gallop might attempt to support their stance by bringing up, in rapid succession, a large number of vague claims, anecdotal statements, misinterpreted facts, and irrelevant comments.

I know this is completely random but once again it fits into the title of this Blog ‘Esoteric Meanderings’. I want to discuss this technique because many have never heard of it and  have no idea what it is.

In recent history the republican party enthusiastically uses this practice to spew so many random claims at an opponent that their opponent, either a democrat or the press, that a cogent response is impossible. If their adversary can only respond to one or two of the unfounded claims the underinformed public will assume that everything not responded to must be factual.

Here is an example for Trump using this from ‘The Atlantic’.

 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 …”

You can see that there are so many anti-factual claims made in that rant it nearly impossible to rebuff everything and even when the moderator tries the multitude of invalid statements continue to be hurled.

If you study debate techniques, they advise that you point out that a great number of constructs had been thrown out and then try to efficiently rebuff  or disprove that one particular item. While this is great in theory in an actual debate it is rather inefficient when trying to counter lies being hurled in rapid succession with little or no time to respond much less wrap your head around every twisted ‘fact’ that has been vomited.

I would probably use a John Stewart styled response and throw their crap right back at them and wait for their inevitable implosion from the mistruths that they just uttered. It always fun to watch someone crumble under their own argument.