Fascism and the Firehose of Falsehoods

Know the difference between Soviet and Russian Propaganda: pic.twitter.com/Ma293iDNP9

— Vlad Vexler (@VladVexler) July 24, 2024

Not a coincidence that Climate Denial has gravitated to the same kind of techniques used historically by authoritarian dictators. Fossil fuel oligarchs are by nature authoritarians.
Many of the world’s most brutal dictatorships are propped up and fueled by fossil fuel extraction, and they have a natural alliance and affinity with globally integrated fossil fuel corporations.
And besides that, these techniques work.

Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic:

When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.

SkyWaterEarth:

“For the first time in its history, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has named the spread of climate misinformation as an obstruction to climate action, particularly in the United States.^[i]” The question becomes, how do we deal with this onslaught of misinformation and disinformation? The first step is to understand what we are dealing with.

Dr Eileen Culloty, co-author of Disinformation and Manipulation on Digital Media,^[ii] says “The distinction between misinformation and disinformation is about intention. Misinformation is false information that is shared without an intention to mislead. Disinformation is intentional.” We saw disinformation last Tuesday night from the Orange Monarch during the debate.

“Climate change is a Chinese hoax, windmills cause cancer, the oceans are going to rise 1/100 of an inch, every one of the signatories to the Paris climate accord lags behind America, the Green New Deal would cost $100 trillion, energy saving lights make me look orange,” are all lies he’s spoken at one time or another.

On Tuesday, he used something called the Gish gallop to overwhelm his opponent, President Biden. He also uses it in his rallies.

“The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy (lies) or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.

The technique wastes an opponent’s time and may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved or, if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.” [iii]

With respect to the problem of global overheating, we face a Gish gallop of disinformation from climate denialists and deceivers. Fossil fuel companies, their PR firms, and their think tanks pump out denial, delay, and greenwashing. Trying to counter all their disinformation is like playing whack-a-mole. Yet we fall into the same trap as Biden. Trying to refute all disinformation at once. That’s what they want us to do.

In climate communications, I first like to repeat Anat Shenker-Osorio’s saying, “Don’t feed what you fight.” By fighting it we give whatever the subject is a PR lift. I see this in social media posts saying how terrible the Right’s Project 2025 is. As a result, more people hear about Project 2025. Next when confronted with a lie or a frame, we have a tendency to refute it with facts or trying to negate it. This gives the lie life. “Windmills do not cause cancer,” only serves to strengthen the brains neural connections between wind turbines and cancer. It doesn’t work. (Again. it’s better to say Wind turbines are clean, healthy and the cheapest electricity we can generate.) Finally, we can’t argue with someone who didn’t use reason to arrive at their position the first place.

We’ve been stuck in the paradigm trying to prove climate change is real for 30+ years. It doesn’t work. It’s also clear the media doesn’t challenge the absurdity of the Orange Monarch or call out the lies of fossil fuel firms and utilities. They would rather make their coverage about balance, giving equal weight to arguments as if there is a debate about climate, or they give sporadic lip service by using climate catastrophes to catch eyeballs and increase clicks.

Even when they do challenge or fact check, there is one other thing that prevents people from changing their minds when a falsehood is corrected. It is the discovery that misinformation stays in your head even though it has been corrected. Admit that there’s a tiny little tinge in your mind that windmills might cause cancer somewhere even though this has been debunked and there is no evidence for it at all. This is called the “continuing influence effect.” It’s a depressing little discovery of how our brains work.^[iv]

Add to this the law of propaganda, often attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” This is known as the “illusion of truth” effect among psychologists.[v]

While a debate is a formal process, all of these techniques have five characteristics wherever they are used:

1. The disinformation has the explicit purpose and intent of denial, delay, and deflection
2. The content is misleading or outright lies
3. The volume at which they are delivered is overwhelming and loud
4. The style in which they are delivered is confident and assured
5. They are repeated rapid fire and often

We’ve heard the Orange Monarch do all of these, indeed the NYT said he had “bluster,” during the debate. F’ bluster, he was f’ing lying and no one fact checked or challenged him.