Glittery Objects and the Gish Gallop

We have come to a moment when not only have our moral foundations sunk into the quagmire of another forever war, but we must also repeatedly compare facts and alt-facts in trying to dig our way out.

How do Trump’s followers fall so easily and so loyally for his lies? It’s one of the mysteries that 33% of America will not take off their red ball caps. Donald Trump can shoot a man on 5th Avenue or destroy a 6000-year-old culture, and his fans remain his little sock puppets controlled by his little hands.

Trump’s empty promises are the carrot, his threats the stick. The glittery objects he throws out prevent our paying attention where attention is due: to his lies, and to our effort to uncover the truth.

But carrot and stick don’t fully explain Trump’s power. Another puzzle piece is related to those glittery objects: how he presents his alt-facts. Political scientists and rhetoricians, those who study devices of persuasion, have a name for the technique. They call it the Gish Gallop, named for a long-ago opponent of evolution, creationist Duane Tolbert Gish, founder of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Always spoiling for a fight with those who trusted in science, he’d flood the debate forum with falsehoods. He would throw out so many improvised lies—glittery objects—that his opponent, a fact-based evolutionist, had no time to rebut them. The lies left unrebutted, unanswered, must have been true, right? The earth is just 6000 years old, right? Adam and Eve used to pet mammoths and dinosaurs, right?

Right.

To this day the mission of Gish’s ICR is to “Oppose the deification of nature by exposing Darwinian selectionism as an idolatrous worldview.”

“Deification of nature?” That’s code for hard science. Facts.

“Darwinian selectionism?” That’s code for evolution. More facts.

These guys are retrying the Scopes Monkey Trial every day on their podcasts and publications.

The Scopes trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who believed evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who believed the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge, science be damned. And it was. Thomas Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution and fined $100 (equivalent to $1,850 in 2025).

Does the Gish Gallop sound familiar? Trump has been described as “the reigning world heavyweight champion of the Gish Gallop.” Steve Bannon explained the strategy years ago. “The way to deal with the media,” Bannon told Michael Lewis in 2018, “is to flood the zone with shit.” That’s what the Gish Gallop is: Bannon’s shitstorm.

What’s missing from Trump’s shitstorms? Mehdi Hasan, who writes about The Gish Gallop in Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, explains what’s missing: “Credible evidence. Verifiable facts. Scholarly arguments.”

It’s an old problem. In the 18th century Jonathan Swift explained it: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after.” The Roman poet Virgil had in nailed in 19 BCE. He personified Rumor (Fama) in his epic poem the Aeneid as a monstrous, swift goddess—the “swiftest of all evils”—who spreads gossip to cause destruction. Born of Earth, she is a huge, feathered creature with countless eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears, thriving on speed to turn half-truths into disaster.

Trump loves a good rumor. He often grounds his alt-facts by attributing them to the vaguest of sources: “plenty people are saying.” Social media today has operationalized rumor mongering. How many times have you forwarded some unfactual story before inspecting the source? I have. With social media we all seem one time or another to join in the Gish Gallop.

And so it goes that Trump, inhabiting Earth 2, gets what his whims demand, one after another, one more dire than the next, till he has led us, the inhabitants of both Earth 1 and 2, to the brink of World War 3, driving us by carrot and stick—and the Gish Gallop—toward the global nuclear winter that Jonathan Schell, one of the inspirations for the Ridenhour Prizes, warned about in 1982 in his book The Fate of the Earth. That book inspired the Nuclear Freeze movement.

With Trump at the helm, we are Gish Galloping toward global death.

How do we inspire a Gish Gallop freeze?

The Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling will be held next week at the National Press Club. Ron Ridenhour was the My Lai whistleblower. He became a journalist and investigative reporter. The Prizes memorialize his commitment to truth and transparency. An extraordinary roster of men and women have accepted this award, including Dan Ellsberg, Seymour Hersh, Bill Moyers, Jamie Raskin, Anita Hill, Howard Zinn, President Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, George Soros, Tarana Burke, Anna Deavere Smith, James Risen, James Hanson, and Representative John Lewis.

Our winners this year are Bill Owens and Sharyn Alfonsi of CBS’s 60 Minutes, and Erez Reuveni, former deputy acting director Department of Justice (DOJ), who was terminated after refusing to comply with directives he believed violated court orders and his ethical obligations as an attorney.

The Ridenhour Prizes are our little effort to inspire a Gish Gallop freeze.