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Think It Through: the Clearer Thinking Podcast
Think It Through: the Clearer Thinking Podcast
Episode 35: Fallacy Watch: the Gish Gallop
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In this episode, April discusses an unfair and unethical debate tactic used by many politicians, conspiracy theorists, and anyone else who insists on "winning" arguments. She also revisits Brandolini's Law, which means she gets to say "bullshit" more than a few times.
Episode 35 Show Notes
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/gish-gallop.html
A good basic description of the Gish Gallop.
https://effectiviology.com/gish-gallop/
Itamar Schatz's website, Effectiviology, is one of my go-to places for everything fallacy-related.
“On the Trail With RFK Jr." On the Media. Podcast. June 30, 2023.
Um, not sure how to link to this, but you can certainly search for it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. RFK Jr. is well-known for using the Gish Gallop in his speeches and interviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=murvOaHB66A
Wanna see some really fast talkers? These student debaters can speak at 500 words per minute, which is twice as fast as Congressman Jim Jordan. But unlike him, they have to make sense and provide evidence for their claims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-FGKxaCdS0
I took Congressman Jordan's Gish Gallop example from this succinct YouTube video about how to counter the Gish Gallop technique.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/11/readout-of-president-bidens-video-call-with-transatlantic-leaders/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/02/17/readout-of-president-bidens-call-with-president-zelenskyy-of-ukraine-13/
Here are two readouts of diplomatic calls President Biden has made.
https://qz.com/905252/donald-trumps-lies-are-all-part-of-a-debate-tactic-called-the-gish-gallop
Carl Alvioni's excellent article on Gish Gallops.
Everything below has to do with the Trump-Ukraine call:
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/09/25/donald-trump-ukraine-call-analysis-000039
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/14/pelosi-trump-impeachment-ukraine-00061649
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-ukraine-transcript-moved_n_5dba4ec5e4b0bb1ea37476e5
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/politics/nsc-ukraine-call.html
Episode 35—Fallacy Watch: the Gish Gallop
Hello and welcome to episode 35 of Think It Through. In this episode, we’ll be talking about a tactic that you’ve probably witnessed when watching a political debate or a talk show about a polarizing topic. One of the people involved starts talking very fast and making claim after claim, to the point that the other person simply sits there unable to respond, or tries to respond, but really can’t possibly even begin to address what the first person said. And you might think that the first person won that argument just based on the large number of words that came out of their mouth, and the inability of the other person to adequately refute them. You’ve just witnessed a Gish Gallop; certainly the other person in the argument was a victim of this tactic, but so were you, if you believed the person using the Gish Gallop actually “won” that debate. Today I’ll look at this tactic, find out why it’s so very effective, and then I’ll talk about a few things that you might do to reduce its effectiveness and maybe even counteract it. So let’s…gallop…into this episode…oh I can’t believe I just said that…anyway, let’s get started.
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The term “Gish Gallop” was coined by Anthropologist Eugenie Scott in 1994, when she was the executive director of the National Center for Science Education. It was named after Duane Gish, a young-earth creationist who used the technique often during debates with scientists. It was Scott’s belief that debating creationists would often do more harm than good to the cause of real science, in part because of this technique. So what is a Gish Gallop? It’s considered a fallacy, but it really isn’t, it’s a rhetorical style and a debate tactic that uses fallacies and rhetorical language in a particular way to crush an opponent. The website “Logically Fallacious” describes a Gish Gallop as (quote) “Overwhelming the other person in the debate with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. This is especially disingenuous when the other person is not allowed to interrupt and address the arguments, as in formal debate or in writing. To the spectator unfamiliar with this strategy, the other person’s inability to accurately respond to all the claims…is fallaciously seen as a “win” for the Gish Galloper or appears to lend credibility to the arguments made when in fact it does not.” It’s actually similar to a tactic used by some high school and college competitive debating teams called “spreading,” a somewhat controversial technique in which a debater speaks very quickly in order to advance more of their arguments within the allotted time. Now of course those debaters have to speak clearly, be precise, and have evidence to back up their claims in order to score points with the judges; but that’s not what’s happening if someone is employing a Gish Gallop.
Dr. Itamar Schatz of the website Effectiviology describes it as someone attempting to support their stance “by bringing up, very quickly, a large number of vague claims, anecdotal statements, misinterpreted facts, and irrelevant comments.” And in an “On The Media” podcast episode about Robert F Kennedy Jr, vaccine denier and 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful, the hosts describe his penchant for using this tactic as “making claim upon claim upon claim, bad argument after bad argument, very very very quickly, making it hard for the person he’s speaking to to respond to all of those claims effectively and in real time.”
Just in case you’re still not sure what a gish gallop is, here’s a clip from a CNN interview with Congressman Jim Jordan, he’s talking about the call Trump made to newly-elected Ukranian president Zelensky back in 2019, asking him to find evidence that Biden did something illegal and insinuating that continued US support was dependent on his cooperation in the matter. In this clip, Jordan has already been going on for several minutes, the interviewer tries to ask a question, and here’s what happens: (play clip)
“Let me finish my statement, a bureaucrat who didn’t like the president files a claim saying the president did something wrong in a call, this guy wasn’t on the call, someone else told him about the call, so the White House does something that’s never been done before, they actually released the transcript, we see the transcript, there’s nothing there but the Democrats say we don’t care we’re gonna move toward impeachment, they don’t care about the facts, they don’t care about the truth and you know why we know that? Because Nancy Pelosi did a press conference the day before and said she was gonna move towards impeachment the day before she even saw the transcript, that just shows you these folks are bound and determined to gut this president no matter what they did they put the country through five years of this false traffic policing issue all the way through and if Michael Cohen….”
Well, that’s about all that I can take of that. It’s making my brain hurt. Ok so… when Jordan has to finally stop and take a breath, the interviewer says “Sir, there’s a lot you said there.” Yeah no kidding. This is a perfect example of a gish gallop, so let’s find out why:
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· In a gish gallop the person tends to speak very quickly, because the faster they speak the more claims they can make. This clip is about 40 seconds long, and in that time Congressman Jordan says around 170 words, which works out to about 255 words per minute. People generally talk at an average rate of about 120 to 130 words per minute (obviously that’s context dependent), Jordan, however, is consistently speaking at a very rapid pace for that entire time. So that’s the first thing I notice.
· Next, he immediately starts with an ad hominem fallacy by referring to “a bureaucrat who didn’t like the president—” he’s using the term bureaucrat here as an insult to the whistleblower who reported their misgivings about what was said on that call to the National Security Council. Jordan also says this person wasn’t even on the call, that somebody else told them about it, but on the day of this interview, nobody knew who that whistleblower was, so he’s just throwing some bullshit in there. In fact, Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman was later revealed as the whistleblower, and he WAS listening in on the call as part of his duties as the top Ukraine expert for the NSC. So, Jordan didn’t know if what he said was true or not, but it didn’t matter to him because his claim served his purpose in that moment; which, if you remember back to Episode 9, is the very definition of bullshit.
· Then Jordan says the White House releasing the transcript was something that had never been done before, but the White House does release information about what was said on diplomatic calls such as this one, although generally not entire conversations. I’ve posted a link to the readout of a diplomatic call made by Biden to a number of transatlantic leaders so you can see that it’s not unusual. What Jordan’s leaving out here is that the Trump Ukraine call transcript ended up being moved to a high-security server reserved for state secrets, a move that former national security officials said was unheard of. So that was the part that had never been done before; obviously the conversation was problematic enough for Trump to have it moved somewhere it would be more difficult to access. Now, because it is unusual for things that are kept on a high-security server to be released to the public, Jordan’s guilty of a kind of misleading half-truth here; yes it was out of the ordinary, but not in the way he's claiming.
· His next claim is that there was “nothing there” in the transcript that would impugn the President’s statements about it. Which kind of begs the question, why was it on a hidden server if it was so innocent? Anyway, while he’s claiming this, he holds up a copy of what appears to be the transcript and waves it around, to show that he’s got the evidence right there that the whole thing was just fine. But waving papers around doesn’t qualify as evidence; I think he’s pretty confident that many people going to just agree with him and not bother to check it out for themselves. I’ll link to a close read of the transcript in the show notes; so you can see for yourself that it wasn’t, as Trump insisted, a “perfect” call.
· So once Jordan’s claimed Trump didn’t say anything problematic on the call, he then goes on to accuse the Democrats in Congress of “not caring” about what he calls the “facts” and pushing for impeachment anyway. Jordan claims that Democrats don’t care about the truth, but I’ve already showed you that what he is referring to as the truth actually isn’t; he’s made three claims in quick succession—the first one was bullshit, the second one is a half-truth, and the third one has him waving papers around as his evidence, but it’s just not true.
· Finally, it IS true that Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against Trump the day before the transcript was released (so yes, he says something with some basis in fact). However, Jordan making such a big deal out of it was very likely a calculated move designed to make the public believe that there must not have been anything wrong with the call, otherwise why would Trump release the transcript? That plays into Jordan’s claim that the democrats in Congress don’t care about the truth and were bound and determined to take down Trump, as he says “no matter what.” Well, the matter WAS that there was already plenty of evidence about Trump’s dealings surrounding Ukraine; one of the most damning pieces of evidence, uncovered and reported by the Washington Post, was the fact that earlier in the week before the call was made, Trump had placed a hold on $400 billion worth of aid to Ukraine, that had already been appropriated by Congress and been scheduled to be released. Despite the administration’s plan to defuse the impeachment proceedings by releasing the transcript and claiming the call wasn’t problematic, the transcript release only gave Congress more reason to follow through--by that point the transcript was just the icing on the impeachment cake, so the timing of its release was irrelevant. Of course we all know that ultimately Trump was acquitted by the Senate on the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, almost entirely along party lines. I’ll link to some helpful articles in the show notes (actually, a lot of helpful articles) in case you had forgotten all of that insanity and need a refresher.
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So, now I ask you—how long did that refutation just take me? Well, let’s see, it probably took me about 5 minutes, which is 7 and a half times as long as it took Jordan to throw all those claims out there. I think I did a pretty good job bringing up and refuting what he said, but honestly, this interview took place over four years ago, so of course time and hindsight is on my side now. But if I had been the interviewer in that moment, even if I could tell that some of what Jordan said was questionable, and even if I wanted to push back on it, I probably wouldn’t have known exactly where to start, nor would I have had the time to do so during that interview. And that, my friends, is why the Gish Gallop technique is so effective. Here’s where Brandolini’s Law comes in, yet again. If you recall from several of my earlier podcasts, Brandolini’s Law, aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, states that “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Dr. Itamar Shatz says that bullshit purveyors aren’t concerned with things like truth, evidence, and logic, but the person attempting to refute the bullshitter needs to be totally concerned with those things—and it often takes time and careful thought to craft an effective response to bullshit. Also, claims like those made by Congressman Jordan are by their very nature vague and confusing, which can make them even harder to refute because they could mean more than one thing. And Gish Gallops tend to employ a LOT of bullshit; refuting one piece of bullshit is hard enough, but when a flurry of vague, confusing, and incorrect claims are thrown out there all at once, refuting them seems like an impossible task. But is it? Well, refuting the Gish Gallop is indeed difficult, which of course is why it’s a tactic of choice for many politicians, conspiracy theorists, and other people who like to win arguments. Carl Alvioni, a writer who often takes on topics like this, says in a 2017 Quartz article that you have to want to recognize a Gish Gallop, so it does take some focus. Most people don’t even realize when someone is employing it, but if you’re paying attention during a debate or argument you might be able to spot it. How? By noticing two things—pace and number of claims. Is the other person speaking at a rapid pace, or at least more quickly than they would during a normal conversation, and are they making not just one claim, but several in rapid succession? If you can see that happening, then ask yourself--Are they providing any substantive evidence to support those claims or are they just making a series of assertions that they hope you’ll simply agree with? If that’s what’s happening, it’s very likely they are Gish Galloping.
One potentially effective way to counter a Gish Gallop is to focus on a single claim, and ask the person to provide clarification and evidence for it. In the Jordan clip, for instance, the interviewer might focus on something easily refutable, like the claim that the whistleblower wasn’t present during the phone call. He could have said something like, “Congressman Jordan, nobody knows who this whistleblower is, so how do you know that they weren’t there during the phone call?” Anything besides Jordan admitting that he really doesn’t know (which is the truth here) is just more bullshit. Now Jordan might try to deflect away from that by saying it’s not important or throwing out yet another claim, but the interviewer could bring it back by saying something like, “You also claim that the President didn’t say anything problematic in that call, but from what we’ve seen in the transcript he made several statements that sound very much like quid pro quo. You’ve already made one claim that you can’t prove, so what makes you think we would believe this one?” Jordan would very likely keep trying to deflect away from that as well, but the idea that he said things that he really couldn’t prove would still be out there.
Another technique that could be used is to call out the Gish Gallop technique itself. A lot of people that employ this technique really don’t know that they’re doing it, they just know that whatever they’re doing works for them because they always end up “winning” arguments. Once you’ve figured out what’s happening, you could let that person and anyone else listening know that they are using this tactic, explain what they’re doing and why it’s unfair and unethical to overwhelm an opponent with sheer volume. Keep your cool and let them know you’d be glad to have a slower, more thoughtful exchange of ideas that are grounded in evidence-based reasoning. No matter what happens next, they know that you’re on to them, and that further attempts to try this tactic, at least with you, have a reduced chance of succeeding. Once Gish Galloping becomes ineffective, there isn’t much use in continuing it if it doesn’t get them what they want.
If you happen to be very good at debate, you could try something that one of Duane Gish’s opponents did during one of his creationism vs evolution debate. Kenneth Miller, a Brown University cell biologist and someone who was very well aware of the Gish Gallop technique, turned the tables on Gish and used his opening statement to very quickly lay out all the reasons why creationism was not scientifically supported, one after the other after the other. Miller recalled that Gish was extremely upset and demanded from the moderator, who was himself a creationist, that he should have more time to respond to this unfair tactic. But the moderator refused, and Gish was so mad that he jumped up and almost knocked the table over. Apparently Gish could dish it out, but couldn’t take it. I mean, I don’t necessarily recommend using the very tactic I’m warning you about against someone, but in this case It was done to Gish himself, who had no problem using it regularly, so if you find yourself in a circumstance like that, and you’re prepared to use it…then, use it, if for no other reason than to give that person a taste of what it’s like to be blindsided in that way.
Seriously, though, probably the best way to deal with it is to avoid playing that game at all. If someone starts in with their laundry list of claims, do your best to stop them as soon as it becomes clear what they’re doing, and insist on taking those claims one at a time. Ask for clarity, justification, and evidence for a claim; put the burden of proof on them instead of immediately jumping in to refute them. They might only have a superficial understanding of what they’re claiming, and are just depending on a prepared list of arguments that they always have ready to go. It’s a different thing altogether to have a calm, thoughtful debate, and they may balk at that because they have no advantage in that situation. But if you remain composed and stick to the core issues at hand, keep asking for clarification and evidence, you might find yourself having a much more productive dialog.
And that’s it for this episode.