What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: What Is a Firehose of Lies?
If this were a normal election season, I would look at the most controversial claims from each side, examine where they come from, and separate the lies and half-truths from the reality – I would go out there and thoroughly check those facts. . But now it is much more difficult. In this election (and the last one, and the one before that), one candidate pumps out so many lies so quickly that fact-checking has become tedious and pointless. It’s a political technique called the firehose of lies, and we’re all doused with it.
What is a fire hose of lies?
The term “firehose of lies” was coined in 2016 by the RAND Corporation. According to RAND, the propaganda style is often used by Russian intelligence and is characterized by using as many channels as possible to send as many messages as possible, as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter whether what you say can be easily debunked, whether it’s funny on the surface, whether it contradicts each other, or whether it even makes sense in reality – the point is not to convince anyone of anything. This is done to make them stop caring – to fill the discussion with so much nonsense that no one bothers to check the facts anymore because it’s too tedious.
Trump turns on the fire hose
According to NPR , in his last press conference, Donald Trump made 162 false statements in 60 minutes—that’s 2.7 lies per minute. He predicted a new Great Depression and a third world war. He said foreign countries were emptying out their mental hospitals in the United States. He said Kamala Harris was “a radical leftist on a level that no one has seen,” that her candidacy was unconstitutional, that everyone, Republicans and Democrats, wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. With more than 100,000 people at one of his rallies, he said that vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “has a position that is impossible to even believe exists.” He strives for things that no one has even heard of” and that “he doesn’t want to have a wall, he doesn’t want to have any form of security for our country.”
The ultimate goal of this kind of flood is to create disinterest in the truth so that objective reality doesn’t matter much to voters. And it worked in 2016 when people voted for Trump because they believed Clinton was a witch running a child kidnapping ring so she could harvest the brains of children and stay forever young. Or they just didn’t trust her.
Limits of the fire hose of lies
Experts say traditional counter-propaganda techniques don’t work against the tide of nonsense. Instead, they recommend “repeating counterinformation,” “cutting off the flow by enlisting the help of Internet service providers and social media,” and “warning people about propaganda.” To me, it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight, but every movement has a counter, and I believe the Harris campaign has found a real solution: use their own guns against them.
“Strange” and the art of political judo
Analyzing and exposing the lies Trump tells is not only tedious and boring, but it also gives these statements more attention than they deserve. So Harris isn’t doing that yet. Instead, the message is: “That’s a weird thing to say.” Her campaign offers meta-commentary on the act of lying rather than engaging with the lies themselves, using the post-truth environment that Trump has created to define him and what he says. The definition comes down to one word: weird. Democrats are welcoming “vibration” elections in a way that an old-school (and old) politician like Joe Biden could not. Just look at her choice for vice president: There has never been a more “vibrant” guy than Tim Walz. Harris invites voters to compare the feelings you get from her and Walz to the feelings you get from Trump and Vance.
So far it seems to be working. Harris is ahead of Biden in the polls and is currently the (slight) favorite to win the presidency in the betting markets . But more importantly, you can say it’s effective because Republicans are backing down. They get defensive, and as all 12-year-olds and political consultants know, when you get defensive, you lose: Trump insists : “We’re not weird. We’re very solid people… we’re the opposite of weird. They’re weird,” of course, doesn’t make him normal.
Trump’s usual strategy of hurling insults at his opponents doesn’t seem to be working either. Everything he says to her: “She’s not really black,” “she laughs funny,” “ she’s a bitch ,” only makes him look even weirder.
Looking for good vibes
However, anything can happen between now and November as we begin to see the next chapter. The latest strategy to attack Harris is to point out that she doesn’t hold press conferences or voice her public policy positions. In other words, she does not define herself. That’s not an odd thing to say about a political opponent, and it points to the next test for Harris: whether she can reconcile her hopeful, energetic, anti-Trump persona with the fundamentals of presidential governance.