Advantage: Liars

Writing a long-format political blog with the hope/intent of providing reasoned, fact-based, and logically coherent arguments sometimes feels like sweeping back the tide. With a toothbrush.

This is a general and forever phenomenon, thanks to Brandolini’s Law,

but we are getting into the political silly season, with political primaries happening, the mid-terms lurking, and all the rest, so, the feeling grows stronger every day.

What makes it worse is the increasingly obvious agitprop campaigns being waged on social media by a variety of actors, domestic and foreign. Actors who have absolutely zero compunction about baldly lying in order to achieve their goals. Goals that should scare the bejeezus out of anyone who prioritizes liberty, because they are about moving America toward socialism even as formerly socialist nations continue moving away from it.

China, one of the big agitprop players, has been migrating toward a form of “state capitalism,” a variant of economic fascism where the government allows some of the benefits of market competition to occur while still puppet-mastering things from on high. This form is inferior to actual free markets, of course, as are all forms of central planning (Japan’s stagnation after its 80s boom is another testament to that reality), but when you’re climbing out of the mess that is communism, you can climb a long way before hitting a new ceiling.

As I recently blogged, it’s apparent that China’s leaders are abetting that climb by working to get America to tear herself down from within. They are doing so by offering appealing lies to malleable young minds - minds made* malleable and receptive to those lies by a disaster of a public education system and an academic elite that continues to believe socialism can be made to work despite a century of disastrous history and hundreds of millions of deaths as stark evidence to the contrary.

Those lies are legion, and include the assertion that, under capitalism, employers “steal” wealth from workers by underpaying them; that data centers are a terrible menace that must be resisted at all costs; that capitalism is anarchy, with no laws to protect people from bad actors; that police and fire trucks and ambulances and garbage trucks are socialism; that NYC Mayor Mamdani is already proving that socialism works by balancing the budget (he needed a bailout from the state and raided future pension payments); that billionaires are all thieves who got rich by ripping off the working classes, and who deserve to have their billions taken from them; and much, much more.

These lies work because they are appealing.

This makes countering them very difficult.

Thirty-odd years ago, a creationist named Duane Gish would debate people by rapid-firing a long list of falsehoods, half-truths, and deliberate misinterpretations of facts. By flooding a conversation or debate, Gish overwhelmed the opposition and made it difficult to rebut all his points, especially if time was constrained. As Brandolini noted, it takes more effort (and thus more time) to refute bullshit than to fling it. It also relies on what’s called the Anchoring Bias or Primacy Effect, where we are inclined to believe the first thing we hear, even if the contrary position is presented with more evidence.

This tactic was named the Gish Gallop after he became notorious for it and it proved effective against the unprepared.

Related to the Gish Gallop is the Firehose of Falsehood, where a disinformer floods multiple sources at once with the same message. Since people are susceptible to “argumentum ad populum,” the notion that “if lots of people are saying it, there must be some truth to it, flooding the zone is a great way to plant seeds that are tough to dislodge. And that propagate like dandelions in a strong wind, or like kudzu in a southern garden.

How do we fight this?

We can’t use the same tactics. While we have the truth on our side, it’s not as appealing as the lies they tell. Envy sells a lot better than self-reliance, even though the latter is ultimately far more self-fulfilling and satisfying. Stealing from someone else is a lot easier than working and earning, even though the latter is the only honest and moral choice. Lying to yourself that it’s not stealing is a lot easier than admitting you’ve been conned by politicians and working to fix the system you helped break.

So, the liars have a huge advantage.

This makes liberty the underdog. As it always has been.

Every so often, revisiting tactics is a good idea. With agitprop in full swing, with Gish Gallops and fire-hosing and bots and Orwellian sheep and arrogant ignoramuses sneering at us from inside every basement and under every rock, the normal “rebut their stupidity” is a waste of time. By the time you’re done banging out a cogent rebuttal of their canned garbage, the third parties who are inclined to believe the garbage have already had their biases confirmed and the garbage spouters have moved on to their next target.

A better approach is a pro-active one. Make the case for liberty and capitalism, over and over again, and point out how every innovation it has brought has created more than it has destroyed. Make the case against socialism, over and over again, and point out how there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to that failed ideology. Don’t waste your time with long-form rebuttals of the spambots - you’re not going to win hearts and minds that way. If you find a real human who’s on the fence on a topic, engage that person one-on-one, and try to win that one mind. You don’t have to do it in real time. Just plant a good seed, then let it do its thing. I’ve had far more “converts” that have come around after months than in the moment.

The hardest part lies in ignoring the gallopers and fire-hosers. If it helps, realize that they want* you to react. When you react, you waste your own time, and in wasting your own time, advance their agendas. Or, more accurately, the agendas of their puppet masters.