→2024→09→09→Comic Strip of the Day→Editorial cartooning→CSotD: The Will Rogers Effect
Comic Strip of the Day Editorial cartooning

CSotD: The Will Rogers Effect

1 minute 12 comments

We have met the enemy, and he is Will Rogers.

Constant Readers know I dislike the Will Rogers approach, in which everything and everyone is corrupt and true wisdom comes in condemning it all.

In this case, and at this moment, I’m disinclined to criticize Michael Ramirez (Creators) because I’m not sure he is promoting that point of view so much as suggesting it exists.

If the latter, I’m sure he’s right, and I would further say that it didn’t “just happen.” There will always be a segment of the population that believes it is clever to be skeptical of everything, just as there will always be a type of commentator who says, “If they’re all mad at you, you must have gotten it right!”

That’s nonsense. If everyone is mad at you, you got it all wrong. You can make a lot of mistakes and still have a few people agree with you. Offending everyone is a remarkable achievement and nothing of which to be proud.

There is such a thing as truth. There are such things as facts.

Right and wrong may be a little harder to parse. The people who defended slavery in the runup to the Civil War were not lying or being dishonest: They genuinely believed that slavery was perfectly moral, which required them to genuinely believe that Black people were inferior.

Obviously — well, it seems obvious now — this required them to remain in a cocoon of ignorance, but that was no problem: Their racist assumptions made it unlikely that they would ever encounter Black people on a level that would challenge their opinions.

The fact that people like Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass existed didn’t matter, because they either ignored them completely or wrote them off as exceptions.

People still work hard to preserve their comfortable ignorance, and, at the moment, there is a substantial amount of effort going into helping them do so.

Steve Bannon’s tactic of “flooding the zone with sh*t” has been effective, because there is so much out there that clearly isn’t true that the Will Rogers types have no trouble assuming that nothing is valid.

As Bart van Leeuwen depicts it, we’ve had a major exposure of Russia’s attempt to influence our elections in favor of Donald Trump.

This comes as little surprise to people who looked into the Mueller Report before it was gelded by Bill Barr and people who had read reports of troll factories operating out of Russia, though DOJ’s revelations may have surprised them with the extent and blatancy of the efforts.

In a sane world, it would have the impact of the Church Report in the 1970s, which revealed the extent of FBI and CIA monitoring of and interference with American citizens.

It was merely confirmation for people who knew their phones were tapped, their mail opened and their lives disrupted, but it was a thunderbolt for the people who had dismissed those claims as paranoia and political nonsense.

Instead, Russia having poured $10 million into spreading disinformation is countered by those who have already embraced the “Russia Hoax” counter-story, and the people who took the money are being portrayed as helpless victims.

The other day, Donald Trump slipped up on a podcast and admitted that he lost the 2020 election. Gary Markstein (Creators) suggests that this must surely have come as a shock to those jailed for actions based on his previous claims of fraud.

I doubt it.

First of all, there have been so many examinations and investigations of the 2020 election and so little “voter fraud” exposed that the integrity of the election should be obvious.

Anyone who still believed that Biden stole the election had had to make a genuine effort to maintain that stance.

And Trump admitting he lost is not going to get to people who, in our siloed media world, only consume media in which the statement will never be reported.

That’s aside from the delusional True Believers who embrace QAnon idiocy, and it’s aside from those who don’t mind the way Holocaust Denial has now entered the conversation on Trump’s side.

Genuine screwballs have been with us forever, but it’s the Will Rogers moderates who provide them with traction, the people who didn’t believe what was happening around them in Nazi Germany and had to be led through the death camps in order for them to grasp what they had permitted to happen.

And their grandchildren now deny it, Patrick Chappatte contends: “I found this cool vintage stuff in grandpa’s trunk” the young man says, as voters in portions of Germany vote to empower a rightwing party in what threatens to be the first of several such extremist victories.

Our issue, Clay Jones says in his essay, is how much, if any, of Donald Trump’s lunacy is intentional?

And if he talks about gender-transformation surgery in schools and post-birth baby murders tomorrow, what good will it do for Kamala Harris to point out that none of it is true?

We’ve already got cartoonists and commentators making false claims about the rate of inflation, about crime statistics and about illegal border crossings.

Citing numbers to refute their false assertions simply confirms paranoid theories that the government is covering up the truth, while the Will Rogers crowd shrugs it all off because “both sides do it,” which proves they’re smarter than everybody else.

While if Trump does go off the rails, the mainstream media will sanewash it and edit his words into responsible sounding statements, in the interest of being completely fair and purposely avoiding the suggestion that he’s no more mentally capable than was Joe Biden.

That linked article is the best analysis I’ve read in weeks, but let me add this: The press jumped on Biden and hounded him into withdrawal because he froze up. Had he, instead, gone off into some bizarre verbal fantasyland, they’d have sanewashed it in the name of “fairness.”

So anyway.

So anyway, it’s hard to predict what will happen tomorrow night, but I doubt that Trump will freeze up.

His True Believers will embrace whatever he says, while the Will Rogers genius crowd will declare both sides wrong, assuming they don’t, as Ramirez suggests they might, simply mute their televisions, content to know that there’s nothing anyone can teach them.

Previous Post
Rosebuds Gets Into Print This Weekend
Next Post
The Monday Muster

Comments 12

  1. Might it be important for me to actually watch this debate and not listen to “analysis” of it? I skipped the last one (and all of them, lately) because it’s a stupid way to judge who to vote for. Vote in your self-interest, not against it. It seems so simple.

  2. I learned this week that there’s a term for the tactic Bannon employs.
    It’s called, “Gish Gallop”.

    The Gish gallop (/???? ??æl?p/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.

    Strategy
    During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. 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.[3]

    The difference in effort between making claims and refuting them is known online as Brandolini’s law[4] and is sometimes referred to as “the bullshit asymmetry principle”. The element of the technique also is referred to as spewing a firehose of falsehoods.

    1. Named, BTW, after a real person. A creationist named Duane Gish. He’d spew so much BS in such a short span of time, that and scientist he was “debating” couldn’t refute every point, so Gish could claim victory!

      https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

      1. Sorry WM. I didn’t mean to repeat what you wrote. I just wanted to add the fact that it’s named after a real person.

      2. After I posted, I thought I should have added to it where the term came from. But I’m easily distracted.

  3. I hope that ABC’s quizmasters find room to ask Trump about his promise over this weekend to arrest every Kamala donor, campaigner, and (I guess) everyone who votes against him. Seems a bit pertinent to the situation. They could also ask him to define “tariff,” since he seems not to know what the word means. Or that we’ll not only have to pay more for imports, but it will also mean the countries he imposes tariffs on will raise THEIR tariff on our exports. Which is ALSO quite inflationary. I’m sure his advisors have explained it to him, but he’s got his fingers in his bulletproof ears when they do.

  4. There’s no value IMO in Harris attempting to even respond directly to any gibberish that Hair Furor might produce. I hope, instead, that she uses his sputterings to address the moderators and their employers, and point out their failures to hold him accountable while he uses their networks to lie to the public.

  5. If you want both mics muted during the debate, then you should know about this new feature on TV remotes called the “mute” button. Or even better yet, don’t watch the debate if you don’t want to hear either candidate.

    1. And if you’re smarter than everyone else, you don’t need to.

  6. Does Bart van Leeuwen specify that they used an AI image generator to create the image? Like was it some sort of commentary?

    1. He’d be the wrong guy to try to make that point, given that his cartoons have looked like that since before anyone was using AI for illustration.

      1. Thanks for the correction. I’ll trust you on this.

        I thought it was since it looked very much like AI to me and when I went to the AI detection websites they all flagged his stuff as artificial with ~85% certainty.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.

^ Top