Impeachment Today: White House Breaks Out the Firehoses as Evidence Mounts
CNN reporter Daniel Dale was hired after gaining a reputation at the Toronto Star for fact checking claims made by Donald Trump. He is part of a growing cottage industry getting paid to sort out misstatements, false claims, and outright lies by the President of the United States, traveling with a spreadsheet of previous falsehoods, making fact checking in real time possible. Most of the time.
So it was of some significance when, while covering a Trump rally in Louisiana on Wednesday night, Dale confessed to not being able to keep up with what was coming from the stage, Tweeting “He is saying false/misleading/bizarre things in rapid succession, faster than I can type.”
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1192260766424031232?s=20
Welcome to the latest iteration of the White House defense strategy aimed at repelling those nasty facts coming out of the House impeachment investigation. Chairman Adam Schiff is taking the inquiry public on November 13, putting faces to the depositions that have painted a picture of an elected official using his position for personal gain.
There’s a word for this rapid-fire sequence of deceptive talk: Firehosing.
The term was coined in 2016 by Rand researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews’ research on the propaganda tactics used by Russian authorities to control the political landscape. The label has subsequently been applied to describe authoritarian behavior by leaders in the US, Brazil and the Philippines.
Trump’s speeches and Tweets, along with supportive statements from sycophants, are just the tip of the iceberg. U.S. Attorney General William Barr is busily preparing a bushel full of untruths, disguised as a report, designed to conflate facts, corroborate conspiracy theories, and discredit those deemed to be enemies of the President.
Here’s analysis from Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:
Attorney General William Barr is racing to complete a new “report” before Thanksgiving. And if Barr’s very poor summary of the Mueller report threw Trump a lifeline by distorting the real findings of the special counsel investigation, this new report looks to be more like an atom bomb, designed to incinerate Washington by putting the whole Justice Department behind a conspiracy theory that rewrites history and declares open warfare on political opponents. And Republicans are already meeting with Barr to plan a “roll out” for this supposedly classified report in order to maximize its impact.
Barr appears to have taken the results of an inspector general report that was expected to end weeks ago, rolled it together with the investigation-into-the-investigation that he launched under the nominal control of prosecutor John Durham, and capped it all with the “findings” of a world tour that included attempts to get the Australian government, the Italian government, and the U.K. government to participate in attacks on U.S. intelligence agencies. What’s going to come out the other end could be a dud, but it could launch an effort to derail the impeachment process—and more.
Barr’s effort to create a comprehensive, all-conspiracy-theories-combined report seems to have delayed delivery of the long-expected findings from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
Firehosing is also a tactic being increasingly used by anti-vax types when cornered by facts. Scientist Lucky Tran’s op-ed in the Guardian on the topic gives valuable insight on how to cope with the proliferation of political bs coming from the White House:
Firehosing relies on pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible. That’s typical for propaganda, but the aspect that makes firehosing a unique strategy is that it doesn’t require the propagandist to make the lies believable. That seems counterintuitive, but as Carlos Maza of Vox explains, firehosing is effective because its goal isn’t to persuade. It’s to rob facts of their power.
Firehosing inundates us with so many wild opinions that it becomes exhausting to continually disprove them. In this scenario, reality is reduced to positioning and who can sell their position best.
How do we combat firehosing? There is no silver bullet, and we are still learning about this new phenomenon, but the researchers at Rand do make several suggestions. They emphasize that factchecking alone is ineffective: “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.” Instead, it is better to forewarn audiences about the methods that propagandists use to manipulate public opinion.
Consider yourself warned.
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Another jaw-dropping bit of testimony you might have missed:
The 324-page transcript of closed-door testimony of Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, revealed that a meeting to convince the President to release aid to the Ukraine was difficult to arrange partly because the president's national security advisers were busy dealing with his fantasy about buying Greenland.
“I think this was also about the time of the Greenland question, about purchasing Greenland, which took up a lot of energy" in the National Security Council, Taylor told the lawmakers.
“That’s disturbing for a whole different reason,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., responded to Taylor, according to the transcript.
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https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/1192252620951437312?s=20
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