2012 political cartoon depicting candidate Mitt Romney engaging in a Gish gallop during a presidential debate
29 June 2024
A Gish gallop is a rhetorical tactic in which a debater quickly runs through an extended series of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and shoddy arguments that are impossible to refute in the context of the debate format. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, then the director of the National Center for Science Education, and named after young-Earth creationist Duane Gish, who was fond of using the technique in debates with scientists over evolution. Gish did not invent the technique, which is as old as debate itself. Scott wrote in 1994:
Now, there are ways to have a formal debate that actually teaches the audience something about science, or evolution, and that has the potential to expose creation science for the junk it is. This is to have a narrowly-focused exchange in which the debaters deal with a limited number of topics. Instead of the “Gish Gallop” format of most debates where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate, the debaters have limited topics and limited time.
Use of the term was mainly restricted to creationist debates about evolution until around 2010, when it started to be used in other contexts. The following is from a 9 August 2010 blog post by physicist Greg Gbur about the website Conservapedia using the tactic in an attempt to discredit Einstein’s theories of relativity:
Over the past day, Twitter has been abuzz with tweets on the Conservapedia page on “Counterexamples to relativity”, provides a list of 24 “points” that attempt to show the weakness of Einstein’s crazy ideas!
In my mind, perhaps the most despicable sort of denialism or crankery, however, is that which is based on some sort of political or religious ideology. This is clearly what is going on here, and the author relies on a familiar form of rhetorical trickery known as the “Gish Gallop”: throw as many claims out there as possible, regardless of their validity, with the realization that most people will be swayed by the amount of “evidence”, and not look too closely at the details.
Looking at the “evidence”, it is clear that there isn’t a single point made that isn’t misleading, incoherent, or simply dishonest. A person reading the Conservapedia post will be measurably more ignorant afterwards, and I get the distinct impression that this is what the author intended.
And by 2012 the term was being applied to electoral politics in the context of Republican Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency in that year. From the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun of 14 October 2012:
What I didn't realize until just this week was that lying was the strategy from the start by Republicans, not merely, as I had assumed, the usual blunderbuss and hyperbole employed by both parties in campaigns past.
It's called the “Gish Gallop,” and it is a brilliant creation in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, where rumors and stories come and go in a single day, never to be fully analyzed for validity or vetted for accuracy.
There is a similar debate tactic known as squid ink, but in that tactic the torrent consists of factual, accurate, and on-point information rather than lies.
Sources:
Gbur, Greg. “Right-Wing Refutations of Relativity Really, Really Wrong!” Skulls in the Stars (blog), 9 August 2010.
Goldman, Michael. “‘Gish Gallop’ Delivers Unique View of Reality.” Sun (Lowell, Massachusetts), 14 October 2012. ProQuest Newspapers.
Scott, Eugenie. “Debates and the Globetrotters,” 7 July 1994. TalkOrigins Archive.
Image credit: Pat Bagley / Cagle Cartoons, 2012. Duluth News Tribune, 6 October 2012. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image used to illustrate the topic under discussion.