June’s fateful Biden vs. Trump debate led not just to the sudden ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Donald Trump’s performance also saw the return of a familiar tactic in American public discourse, the “Gish gallop”—an avalanche of nonsense presented as fact—on the debate stage. A favorite of creationists, the gallop’s trot into the political arena needs calling out as we head into the home stretch of the 2024 election.
Coined by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director Eugenie Scott in 1994, the Gish gallop takes its name from the creationist Duane Gish, who frequently challenged biologists to debates about evolution. His tactic consisted of talking fast and with confidence, bombarding opponents with falsehoods, non-sequiturs and enough cherry-picked factoids to confuse the audience. Scientists debating him faced the challenge of sifting half-truths from outright lies and finding the right evidence to refute them systematically, all within the few minutes allowed in response. Which effectively meant that when the bell went off, the Gish gallop left the scientist “stumped” and Gish declaring victory for creationism. Such a spectacle leaves the audience less informed than they were before the debate, all at the hands of a debater whose only goal is to discredit their opponent and “win” the debate.
The migration of the Gish gallop from creationist’s patter onto the presidential debate stage, and increasingly onto news opinion pages nationwide, exemplifies a dangerous debasement of honest dialogue in American life. That both the public and its leaders pass over, or applaud, this kind of dishonesty on the highest political stage shows how integrity has taken a back seat to “winning” power in politics, business and the so-called “culture wars,” and now shrouding us in a fog of disinformation.
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The notion of “scientific debate” misrepresents how science actually works. Scientific conclusions come only through painstaking collection of data to test hypotheses over and over until the evidence is reviewed by other scientists and becomes irrefutable enough to solidify expert opinion. Anything that might be characterized as a “debate” in science thus occurs in the pages of peer-reviewed journals and can last for years or even decades or centuries. You can’t sell tickets to this contest. Participation requires informed engagement with the scientific literature. Which is rather different from what Americans grow up seeing in their high-school debate clubs or what plays out on their television screens between candidates vying for their votes. The best advice for scientists, honed after years of fighting creationist and climate-denial drivel, is to eschew fake debates on stages as simply lending megaphones to liars.
In politics, the Gish gallop is precisely what Trump deployed in the June debate, putting Joe Biden at a significant disadvantage in attempting to refute even some of the falsehoods in the torrent of lies. Trump, as anyone even half paying attention to his speeches knows, is an expert at the Gish gallop. He projects the utmost confidence while bombastically repeating lie after lie until it overwhelms his audience into either accepting every word he says as the truth, or walking off in disgust because there is no way to get him to acknowledge any truth. At this point, everyone knows this so well that news reports scarcely cover it.
But wait, doesn’t that suggest his past debate performances helped him win the nomination and get elected? Not necessarily, because polling data showed no measurable effect a few weeks after the recent debate, as has been the trend historically. His previous electoral wins came from a variety of other factors that had little to do with the debates. Indeed his hulking performance stalking Hillary Clinton in 2016 on stage made him look unstable.
Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, the next debate, scheduled for September 10, will likely feature Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who better be prepared to counter Trump’s Gish gallop more forcefully. She will face a well-practiced con artist and loud dissembler who will flood the zone with enough falsehoods to outshout the former prosecutor and senator. (Speaking as an evolutionary scientist, there are no prizes for guessing which side of the evolution-creation debate these two candidates fall on, either.) When it’s her turn to respond, Harris should turn the tables on Trump by calling him out as a liar without bothering to refute each lie and refocus the audience on her own message. When asked how she might respond if Trump started stalking her on stage, Harris said she would turn around and ask “Why are you being so weird?” Indeed, her campaign has already leaned into this strategy to highlight and mock just how extreme the Republican agenda has become. It just might see her win the next debate as well.
Veterans of the evolution wars have been alarmed at how some of the figures driving the antiscience and anti-intellectual agenda of the modern Republican Party emerged from the creationist movement. A prime example is Manhattan Institute’ Christopher Rufo, who rose from Seattle’s Discovery Institute (birthplace of “intelligent design”) to become a leading conservative intellectual; his attacks on universities have taken on dangerous proportions, linked to attacks on academic freedom in states like Florida. Such mastery of the Gish gallop manifests not just on the debate stage these days, but in the op-ed pages of major newspapers falsely demonizing “critical race theory,” decrying DEI and getting prominent university presidents fired. Rufo and like-minded advocates know how to flood the zone with a steady barrage of disinformation until, as the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt noted, “people no longer can believe anything”, losing their “capacity to act” or “to think and to judge”, and “with such a people, you can then do what you please.”
With help from a political press hungry for spectacle and trained to normalize dishonesty, Trump might once again Gish gallop his way into the White House. That is not a healthy prospect for American science.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.