Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by
Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023
term=Gish%20Gallop. “champion of the Gish Gallop”: William Rivers Pitt, “Trump and the Gish Gallop: A Million Lies and One Truth,” Truthout, January 30, 2017, accessed May 11, 2022, https://truthout.org/articles/trump-and-the-gish-gallop-a-million-lies-and-one-truth/. “flood the zone with shit”: Sean Illing, “‘Flood the Zone with Shit’”: How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy,” Vox.com, February 6, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation. “false claim”: Carl Alviani, “There’s a Name for Trump’s Technique to Overwhelm the Public with a Stream of Tiny Lies,” Quartz, February 8, 2017, https://qz.com/905252/donald-trumps-lies-are-all-part-of-a-debate-tactic-called-the-gish-gallop/.
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From the other end of the spectrum, Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, in an interview with journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, summed up the rationale behind the then president’s approach. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” That is exactly what the Gish Gallop is designed to do in any argument: to leave you gasping for air, sunk in a flood of falsehoods and fabrications; drowned in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions. All of which lands like a true load of bullshit: all at once, with a splat, in a way that’s impossible to clean up without getting dirty.
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It’s impractical, if not impossible, to go line by line. Instead, single out the weakest claim or argument made by the Galloper. Pick on that. Highlight and mock it, and present it as representative of their overall strategy. Doing so will put them on the defensive. 2. Don’t budge Referring to Steve Bannon’s quote about “flooding the zone with shit,” the writer and author Jonathan Rauch once remarked: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.” He’s right. When the likes of Trump and Gish engage in the Gallop, their purpose is often not to try to win people over but to muddy the argument for everyone involved. They can bewilder and confuse while hopping from one falsehood to the next.
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by
Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021
In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”19 Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about. All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true. People need to know whom they are talking to, whether that person is credible, which institutions confer credibility, and so on.
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Contents 1 “A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It” Chaos and conformity have caused an epistemic crisis 2 The State of Nature: Tribal Truth Bias, groupthink, and the epistemic war of all against all 3 Booting Reality: The Rise of Networked Knowledge Outsourcing reality to a social network is humankind’s greatest innovation 4 The Constitution of Knowledge The operating system of the reality-based community 5 Disinformation Technology: The Challenge of Digital Media Making the online world truth-friendly is difficult but doable 6 Troll Epistemology: “Flood the Zone with Shit” Disinformation is an old enemy with new weapons and powerful friends 7 Canceling: Despotism of the Few Coercive conformity is corrupting the reality-based community 8 Unmute Yourself: Pushing Back Defending the Constitution of Knowledge requires confidence and counter-mobilization Acknowledgments Notes Index 1 “A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It” Chaos and conformity have caused an epistemic crisis In the public square of Athens, a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed old man encounters a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed young man.
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Like Madison and Washington in the crisis of the 1780s, they had come to see the need for stronger, more capable institutions as an antidote to anarchy. They had applied for citizenship under the Constitution of Knowledge. Unfortunately, other innovators and organizations, also formidable, were bent on stymieing them. 6 Troll Epistemology: “Flood the Zone with Shit” Disinformation is an old enemy with new weapons and powerful friends On September, 11, 2014, social media erupted with reports of a toxic leak from the Columbian Chemicals plant in Centerville, Louisiana. Residents living nearby received text alerts; local journalists received tweets; YouTube lit up with CNN footage.
News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by
Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020
Otherwise, the next world war might begin with a grainy, contested image launched online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right onto the pages of a newspaper that has recently sacked all its journalists.’ ‘FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT’ The phrase is attributed to the former head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, who briefly had a role in the inner circle of the Trump White House. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon reportedly said in 2018. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ As explained by Vox’s Sean Illing: ‘The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices.
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A sceptical journalist will have corroborated those sources before those citations even reach the reader. Truth is checked up and down the information supply chain. Cynicism, on the other hand, has a hopelessness at its core. It is a feeling that no one is honest and nothing will turn out well: the truth is neither discoverable nor valuable (SEE: FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT). For communities who have been deceived in the past, it is certainly an understandable reaction. But here’s the problem: if you believe no one is honest, then you yourself probably won’t feel compelled to be honest either. And it’s more than likely that a cynic won’t participate in the efforts to remedy the issue about which they’re cynical: it’s not worth it.
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<https://www.snopes.com/2019/07/09/fake-news-why-snopes-prefers-not-to-say-it-anymore/> Hutt, David. ‘The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China’. The Diplomat, 23 December 2016. <https://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/> Illing, Sean. ‘“Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy’. Vox, 6 February 2020. <https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation> Ingelhart, Louis Edward. Press and Speech Freedoms in the World, from Antiquity until 1998: A Chronology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World
by
Philip Coggan
Published 1 Jul 2025
Among Trump’s supporters, it is often claimed that the president is playing three-dimensional chess while the rest of the world is playing checkers. It certainly seems that acting swiftly was part of the administration’s plan, since there have been similarly rapid moves to cut civil service jobs and deport immigrants. Simultaneous action on several fronts is a way of wrongfooting opponents and distracting the media, or ‘flooding the zone with shit’, as Steve Bannon, an adviser to Trump in his first term, describes it. But this is surely a moment for using Occam’s razor, which states that the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. The rapid changes of policy demonstrate not that there was a cunning master plan, but that the Trump administration was making it up as it went along.
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The same philosophy drives Mr Trump’s threats to seize control of the Panama Canal, annex Greenland (currently governed by Denmark, a NATO ally), to incorporate Canada (a threat that spurred a surge of Canadian patriotism) and even, most absurdly, to turn the devastated Gaza Strip into a Middle Eastern riviera. By expanding US territory, Mr Trump thinks he will enter the pantheon of America’s greatest presidents and satisfy his ambition of being immortalised on Mount Rushmore. This aggression is weakening the US’s considerable soft power, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’ may confuse the media but it also confuses the US’s allies. No one knows what Mr Trump will announce next and he simply can’t be relied on as a partner, whether the issue is trade, defence or anything else. Downmarket approach This unpredictable behaviour also confuses the markets.
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by
Jordan Thomas
Published 27 May 2025
The same industry front groups that once flooded the media with climate change denial simply shifted the target of their misinformation, inundating the public with claims that solar farms shed toxic chemicals into the water supply, that wind turbines caused cancer, and that the energy transition was a Trojan horse for communists intent on stealing individual liberties. The current strategy, to use the words of Steve Bannon—who worked with Ben Shapiro at Breitbart and is a former Republican White House political tactician—is to “flood the zone with shit.” By inundating the public with a constant stream of misinformation, fossil fuel operatives make scientific facts appear unknowable, which paralyzes action and deflects legitimate debate. Fossil fuel pundits now justify their opposition to offshore wind with a plea to save the whales. The government of Tennessee officially labeled methane gas, which produces planet-warming particles twenty-eight times more potent than CO2, as renewable energy.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT industry front groups: Bill McKibben, “From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution,” New Yorker, December 27, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/from-climate-exhortation-to-climate-execution. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “flood the zone with shit”: Paul Starr, “The Flooded Zone: How We Became More Vulnerable to Disinformation in the Digital Era,” in The Disinformation Age, Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 67–92, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914628.003. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Fossil fuel pundits: Christina Larson, Jennifer McDermott, Patrick Whittle, and Wayne Perry, “Contrary to Politicians’ Claims, Offshore Wind Farms Don’t Kill Whales.
How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by
Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020
By constantly churning out falsehoods, Trump could ensure that the media’s ability to focus on one story was severely diminished. There would be a debilitating wave of constant news, and constant misleading statements, so that everything was eventually drowned out. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon said. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ By the summer of 2020, Trump had made over 18,000 false or misleading claims. During 2018, he averaged 15 erroneous claims a day. He lied about big things and small things. He lied about damaging stories, like the payments his attorney said he authorised to silence women alleging affairs with him.
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It put together a bulging programme of executive orders: a wall between the US and Mexico, a ban on Muslims coming to the US, the deportation of non-US citizens who had been in America all their lives. These battles were not to be fought one by one. They had to be triggered all at once, in a great flurry of activity. Ideally they envisioned Trump signing five executive orders a day. This was Bannon’s ‘flood the zone with shit’ strategy – it would fill the airwaves with so much outrage that the media would be unable to focus on single items and the government bureaucracy would be too confused to block anything. ‘Shock and awe’ would replace scrutiny. He went for the Muslims first. On the campaign trail, Trump had demanded a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by
Sheera Frenkel
and
Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021
The Facebook ads were often responses to negative narratives about Trump in the mainstream media. His actual political rival was less important, Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon had explained in a Bloomberg interview in February 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Sandberg wasn’t taking part in Kaplan’s dinners. Her focus was on improving relations with other critics. In September 2019, one week after Zuckerberg’s Oval Office détente with Trump, she traveled to Atlanta as the featured speaker at the Civil Rights X Tech town hall, a daylong conference addressing discrimination in technology.7 For years, civil rights leaders had accused Facebook of bias in its ad targeting and had scolded the company for barely increasing its percentage of Black and Hispanic employees from the low single digits of the total workforce.
The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by
Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021
All politicians need to do is persuade us to doubt evidence that would challenge those instincts. As Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon infamously told the writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars. The iconic example was the claim that the pope endorsed Trump’s presidential bid.
Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by
Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021
Ryan Mac et al., “Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—And Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed,” BuzzFeed, last updated March 29, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data#.upw3jdyR8. The executive later said this statement did not reflect his true views. 7. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971). 8. Sean Illing, “‘Flood the Zone with Shit’: How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy,” Vox, February 6, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation. 9. Campaign for Free Speech, “Majority of Americans Want to Scrap First Amendment, Polling Finds,” October 23, 2019, https://campaignforfreespeech.org/free-speech-under-dire-threat-polling-finds; “Online Caravan Free Speech Survey,” September 3–5, 2019, 1–2. 10.
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by
Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021
Even before the Trumpian takeover, thoughtful Republican stalwarts had disparaged their own organization as “the party of stupid” for its anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.73 Since then, many others have been horrified by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling: his game plan, in the admiring words of onetime strategist Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit.”74 With Trump’s defeat, rational heads on the right should seek to restore American politics to a system with two parties that differ over policy rather than over the existence of facts and truth. We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation. Though lying is as old as language, so are defenses against being lied to; as Mercier points out, without those defenses language could never have evolved.75 Societies, too, protect themselves against being flooded with shit: barefaced liars are held responsible with legal and reputational sanctions.