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SATIRE, SORT OF
What’s It Called When The Government Comes Up With One Distraction After Another?
Chaos? True, but there’s another term not widely known — and it has nothing to do with horse racing.
During one of our far-reaching phone conversations —from cooking to politics to possible destinations for our next meet up, house training her new puppy then back to politics — my California friend Kit mentioned the term, Gish Gallop.
“It’s a debating technique,” she explained when I said I’d never heard of it. “I’ll send you a link.”
Before I looked it up — and while I was still thinking horses, I asked my partner, who once trained horses, if he’d ever heard of the Gish Gallop. He hadn’t. Then I looked it up.
The Gish Gallop is a rhetorical strategy of overwhelming an opponent with false or incoherent information — with no regard for accuracy or strength. The sheer quantity of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies makes it impossible for the opponent to address everything. The Gish Gallop prioritises quantity over quality because its sole aim is to distract the opposition with enough garbage that they’re unable to effectively respond.
