THE GISH GALLOP, RAT-FUCKING, DIRTY TRICKS & TROLLS

            Joe Biden’s poor performance on the presidential debate stage revealed something more than his resounding failure to marshal persuasive structured arguments to win the night. It revealed that the feeble-appearing President was a victim of a far more powerful opponent, though this opponent’s power did not derive from a successful debater’s savvy combination of skillful techniques.

            But one. Experienced debaters have pointed to a single rhetorical technique called the “Gish Gallup” which involves completely overwhelming one’s competitor with a flood of non-sequiturs, fake-relevant distractions, weak and fallacious arguments and out-and-out lies. This technique is harmful and vicious – but is still in questionable use, as it was the other night by Donald J. Trump, who deployed it like a weapon as deadly as an assault rifle used to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.

            Whether it is Trump’s seemingly innate but unconscious capacity to dissemble, distract and foil logical argument with his tsunami of bombast and falsehoods - or his strategic awareness of deployment of flying untruths – he K.O.’d Joe Biden, who showed little sign of having been coached for a week, to prep for any kind of Trump onslaught. Whether Biden should step down has become a further debate. Unfortunately, while that (necessary!) charged exchange sucks all the oxygen from the atmosphere, Trump’s stockpile of lies is overlooked. Though they are weapons of mass destruction.

            I’d like to make a leap here. This unhinged “technique” – the Gish Gallop - appears to be the weapon of choice by every Trump supporter from Fox News to Kelly Ann Conway to every basement-dwelling adolescent troll. When did the mad planet of trolling, doxing, swatting, and character assassination by raining nasty lies on one’s “target” become familiar as a pre-debate handshake? Was it via the Trump take-over in general – or specifically the Wild West of social media of incel unhappy toxic guy culture? Or the GOP ‘s total capitulation to the Far Right? Or to Christian nationalism which tailor-makes Trump’s misogyny into its new theocracy, where hatred, distrust and dismissal of women rub up against his grab-whatever style?

            Trump takes quite naturally to the Gish Gallup, given his tutelage under the notorious Roy Cohn, who lived by the short version of his M.O. which would be “Lie, lie, deflect, deflect”: the essence of the attack on reason and truth and its useful tools – the troll, the dox, and manipulation of media.

            There is a version of Gish Galloping tearing our country apart. But what are some of its roots in purposeful mis-communication, even before social media?

            There is a scene in the film “All the President’s Men” where Dustin Hoffman, as Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Robert Walden as Donald Segretti, an “operative” for Nixon’s CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President) spar about the run-up to the Watergate break-in. Then Dustin/Carl puts a question to Robert/Segretti – about how all the “dirty tricks” got underway? Segretti grins and recalls his time at the forever Republican “USC”.

            “Segretti”, as he crows to “Bernstein” earned his stripes way back in his “SC mafia” (or as a member of “Trojans for Representative Government”) working at stuffing student election ballot boxes and stream-lined signature brand of low-jinks called rat-fucking.

            Members of. USC’s Trojans for Representative Government entered national history as future Watergate scandal participants, including Ron Zeigler, Dwight Chapin, and Gordon C. Strachan who carried on the tradition of “R. F. ing” for the Republican cause. Purposeful mis-communication first – followed by history-making horror.

            Nixon, who had close ties to USC, didn’t mind discrediting political opposition by any means available just like Trump’s galloping untrue trash, Roy Cohn’s “Lie, lie, deflect, deflect” and Rat-fucking all coalesce.

            Segretti and crew employed this combination of rat fucking tactics attacking then-Presidential candidate, Edmund Muskie, by writing a “Canuck letter” attributed to Muskie, which smeared the French Canadian language and culture and intensified a false accusation which “stuck”, ultimately leading to Muskie’s withdrawal from the campaign.

            Muskie’s letterhead was also used to float the phony allegation that U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Dem) had fathered an illegitimate child with a teen-age girl. Another letter accused Senator Hubert Humphrey of inappropriate sexual behavior.

            Then there was Watergate – brought to you by the RF’s using GG. Segretti pled guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing “illegal campaign literature” in 1974, served time and ended up in Orange County. But the manufacture of career-torching “truths” about personal conduct thrived as a political weapon and became the M.O. of twisted social media.

            Later the Bush campaign generated the rumor that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child (in fact, McCain’s daughter Bridget had been adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh.) McCain lost the 2000 South Carolina primary and Bush won.

            “Dirty tricks” et al morphed into social media’s anonymous tsunami of hate, aspersion and accusations that blew up into ongoing behind- the-scenes calculated techniques like Gish riding algorithms and deep fake A.I. The attack on honesty and civility looks to have won. The death of newspapers and standards of “objectivity” in reporting – along with the lack of interest in careful fact-checking -- all totter like Biden in the blast.

            The two elderly men on a debate stage looked like aged Muppets. But the puppet-master pulling the strings of one of them is the ghost of Roy Cohn and rat-fucker consciousness. Maybe the other one is too old, too “off teleprompter” – but his defense is that he always “speaks the truth”.

            Still the debate goes on, the Gish Gallop gallops and we wait for the polls to tell us what’s next in what we talk about when we talk about truth. This can’t be Real Life, as Jon Stewart wails. But what’s the real defense against the Unreal?

-       Carol Muske-Dukes