From Vanceās penchant to ācreate storiesā to Trumpās false claims, lies are brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win support
JD Vance was holding court on CNNās State of the Union programme. āThe American media totally ignored this stuff,ā he complained last Sunday, āuntil Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.ā
But it wasnāt just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: āIf I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then thatās what Iām going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.ā
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 ā rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vanceās willingness to ācreate storiesā to grab attention before the Novemberās 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.
š³ļø Register to vote: https://vote.gov/
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) āa devious hodgepodge of half-truths, outright lies, red herrings, and straw men ā which, if not rebutted as the fallacies they are, pile up into egregious problems for the refuter.ā
Steve Bannon simply referred to it as āflooding the zone with shitā iirc