Voters in Washington state narrowly passed a measure to preserve “energy choice” and block the state from discouraging natural gas—delivering a significant blow to climate efforts in one of the country’s greenest states. After days of counting, the measure, I-2066, passed Thursday with about 52 percent support, according to the Associated Press.
I-2066, as I reported earlier this month, fits into a growing, national backlash to progressive policies encouraging electrification across the United States, following lawsuits against Berkeley, California, New York State, and Washington, DC, places which moved to ban gas hookups in new construction in recent years. About half of US states have passed laws preemptively blocking state or local governments from banning gas.
Now, by passing a measure that prohibits local or state policies that “discourage” natural gas use or “promote electrification,” Washington State just went even further. As I wrote:
I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.
As Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, told me, I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state, which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”
I-2066 was one of two climate-related measures on the ballot in Washington. In a victory for climate advocates, voters shot down a sister measure, I-2117, that would have rolled back Washington’s cap-and-trade program, which has raised about $2 billion for environmental programs in the state.
And it’s not the end of the story for I-2066: “There will be a challenge to the constitutionality of the initiative in order to protect Washington’s action on climate and clean air,” Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Seattle-based environmental group Climate Solutions, said in a statement.
But to supporters of I-2066, the measure’s passage is a clear indication of Washingtonians’ desire to keep gas appliances around. As Greg Lane, the executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which sponsored I-2066, said in a statement, the results “sent a thunderous message to policy makers at every level of government that natural gas service must be maintained as we address the energy demands in Washington state.”
In the last five years, as the movement to ditch gas-fueled stoves and heaters has spread across the country—it’s also ignited a backlash.
In 2019, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to ban gas hookups in new buildings, a rule intended to reduce carbon emissions—and improve indoor air quality in light of growing evidence that gas stoves emit pollutants linked to asthma and cancer. Dozens more cities followed suit.
The California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and the city eventually backed down and repealed its policy.Places with similar laws, including New York state and Washington, DC, were slapped with lawsuits too. Conservatives at the highest levels of government warned the public, misleadingly, that liberals were coming for people’s gas stoves. About half of US states, mostly but not all red, have since passed laws preemptively barring local governments from regulating gas.
This slice of the culture wars is now on the ballot in Washington, one of the country’s most climate-forward states. I-2066, a measure funded by fossil fuel and construction groups to “protect energy choice,” wouldn’t merely prevent local governments from banning “natural” gas in new buildings—with its broad language, climate advocates say, the measure might also be used to block state incentives encouraging people to switch to energy-efficient electric appliances. If it passes, they worry, it could provide a blueprint for the fossil fuel industry to oppose similar policies nationwide.
“This is a national threat,” says Leah Missik, a researcher and policy developer at Climate Solutions, a Washington State environmental group opposing the initiative. “Washington is somewhat of a testing pool for them to see if they can go further in weaponizing the initiative process to threaten climate progress.”
I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says one advocate, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”
Experts told me I-2066 is largely a response to two progressive climate policies. First, there was a tweak to Washington’s building codes: About a quarter of the state’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. Last year, the State Building Code Council voted to require new buildings to meet certain energy efficiency standards, a policy that favored electric appliances like heat pumps over more wasteful, gas-powered ones. (Seattle went further, passing a policy requiring many large, existing buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050.)
Then, earlier this year, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a wonky, but impactful green energy law, House Bill 1589, which requires Washington’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to outline a plan for full electrification.
When that passed, the Building Industry Association of Washington, a major funder of I-2066, released a statement claiming the law “clears the path” for Puget Sound Energy to “force its 800,000 natural gas customers to convert their homes to all-electric,” at a cost of “$40,000 to $50,000 per household.”
According to Puget Sound Energy, the bill doesn’t “force” electrification—it is, primarily, a law to help the utility plan to go electric. Plus, climate advocates say, the switch to all-electric buildings is inevitable, given the climate and health dangers of gas. And helping utility companies prepare, they argue, will reduce costs for customers in the long run.
We can do the energy transition “in a chaotic and unmanaged way, or we can do it in a fair and managed way,” says Jan Hasselman, a Seattle-based senior attorney at Earthjustice, an organization that opposes I-2066. HB 1589 aimed to help ease the state into the transition, he says, but “this initiative is a chaos bomb thrown into the middle of that process that will make energy more expensive and the future more complicated.”
The notion that Washington was shoving clean energy down people’s throats gained traction nonetheless. Let’s Go Washington, a group run by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, and backed by the National Association of Home Builders and Koch Industries, which is heavily invested in fossil fuels, took up a signature drive and successfully got I-2066 on the ballot, along with three other measures. One of the others, I-2117, would roll back Washington’s cap-and-invest program, which has raised about $2 billion for state green energy programs, but also, critics say, pushed up the price of gasoline. (Heywood was unavailable for an interview with Mother Jones, and the Building Industry Association of Washington did not respond to an interview request.)
“It’s the perception that is important,” explains Aseem Prakash, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “And the perception is that these climate laws are imposing new costs that people are not willing to undertake.”
If passed—and polling suggests its odds are good—I-2066 would repeal key parts of HB 1589 and, as Axios reports, require the state to revise the new building codes next year to no longer disadvantage gas. To supporters, that would mean preserving consumers’ “energy choice.” To opponents, it’d be a major setback to the state’s ability to address the climate crisis.
I-2066 “would undo clean energy efforts in Washington state,” says Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, an affordable housing advocacy group, “which will make new homes dependent on polluting fossil fuels for decades to come.”
More broadly, the measure’s passage would serve as a symbolic rebuke to progressive electrification policies. “We had a lot of success,” Hasselman says. “We moved the ball forward quite a bit, and now we’re seeing a real pushback.”
“I do worry,” he adds, “if the billionaires and the fossil fuel companies pour enough money into these initiatives to be successful, it sends a terribly chilling message for the whole nation.”
In August, political science professor Ashley Moraguez started the fall semester at the University of North Carolina Asheville with “grand plans” for engaging students on electoral politics. As the director of UNC Asheville Votes, a nonpartisan student-run group, Moraguez planned for fall to be the “Semester of Civics”—including voter registration tabling events, meet-and-greets with local candidates, and a “Party at the Polls” in Reed Plaza with food and live music.
North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin; Trump leads Harris there by about 1 percentage point.
For students, an age group with historically low turnout, these efforts weren’t an abstract exercise: North Carolina is a crucial swing state that will likely be won by a razor-thin margin. Donald Trump won the state by less than 75,000 votes in 2020 and now leads Kamala Harris there by about 1 percentage point, according to recent polls. In other words, every vote in North Carolina matters.
Then in late September, Hurricane Helene hit. The storm dumped nearly 14 inches of rain on Asheville, causing roads and neighborhoods to flood and killing nearly 100 people statewide. UNC Asheville, a campus of 2,900 undergraduates, lost electricity and running water. Students and faculty relocated.Classes were canceled and will be held virtually for the rest of the semester.
Now, after Helene, getting to the polls—or getting a hold of an absentee ballot—got even harder for college students in western North Carolina.
This has made Moraguez’s work more challenging, and also much more important. With the campus closed, the university relocated its early voting site from the student union to the edge of campus, at a health center. Moraguez and UNC Asheville Votes pivoted to providing virtual resources—a website, Instagram page, and email address where students could ask voting-related questions. “I’m really heartened by how many students, amidst everything they’re dealing with, have been reaching out with questions so that they’re making sure that their ballots do count,” she says.
Still, she says, it’s hard to know who, or how many, the group is reaching. Parts of western North Carolina still don’t have utilities, electricity, or wifi. And many students, understandably, have more pressing issues than figuring out how to vote. “They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones,” Moraguez says. “And they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”
As a political science professor and voting leader in Asheville, Moraguez is uniquely positioned to explain the challenges this key demographic faces post-Helene. And she, at least in part, understands what they’re going through: When I spoke to her earlier this month, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, she had no reliable internet or potable water at her home in Asheville and had spent the previous weeks “bouncing around” and staying with family in other parts of North Carolina and Georgia.
Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation:
With the university on hiatus and then switching to remote classes, there’s almost an echo to what happened when Covid broke out. Did the pandemic help prepare you for this? Does it feel familiar?
Yes and no. In the 2020 election cycle, we had to completely rethink how we did voter engagement on campus. I’ve learned a lot since 2020 about how to engage people remotely.
Students taught me how to use social media more effectively. We figured out how to communicate better about complex electoral information over email through trial and error. We had the website ready to go. We had the Instagram page ready to go. We didn’t have to start those from scratch, as we did in 2020. So in that respect, despite these really unfortunate and tragic situations, we were ready to pivot our electoral engagement efforts much more quickly than in the past.
The challenge is that I still don’t have reliable internet at my home. I don’t have potable water at home. Will I be able to teach online? Do I go stay with family? My students are going to have utility and infrastructure issues. Those issues are more severe than I remember from 2020.
What do you mean when you say students helped you learn to navigate social media better?
When I was in college, Facebook was the social media of choice. I graduated from college in 2009. I wasn’t super familiar with Instagram Stories, and I don’t think I fully recognized the extent to which young people do get some of their information and news from social media.
Students really taught me how to more effectively convey useful information on social media in a way that’s palatable to young people, and how to make things more aesthetically pleasing, more likely to get attention. I don’t primarily get my news from social media, and so it was really helpful for me to have students leading this. I’ve learned just as much from them as they have from me.
What are your biggest challenges right now in getting-out-the-vote efforts?
It’s hard to know who we’re reaching. I fear that in our campus outreach efforts— since they all have been online—that we’re missing some potential voters in western North Carolina who are most affected by these storms.
Our State Board of Elections and our state legislature have adopted a slate of emergency measures to help voters in western North Carolina have better access to the polls, but those changes are only effective in so far as voters are aware of them.
“They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now.”
And there are some people who just have much more pressing issues on their plate right now than thinking about the election. They’ve lost their homes and their loved ones, and they’re just trying to figure out how to survive right now. And you know, their votes matter, their voices matter. And I think right now, especially, we want to hear from people who are having those experiences, but they might not be getting the information they need or have the capacity to vote right now.
I was in college during the 2016 election. I requested an absentee ballot from Florida, which is where I grew up and where I was hoping to vote. It never came. And I just never followed up on it and never voted. Is there a concern that, at the end of the day, these are teenagers or young adults in their early 20s and we’re asking a lot of them to stay on top of voting?
It’s undoubtedly true that young people—which I’m defining as 18 to 25, roughly—have lower voter turnout rates than other demographic groups. But I think there’s a couple reasons why that is and why it’s unfair to compare young voters to older groups.
Political science research shows us that voting is habitual. It’s a habit that you develop over time, and once you get into that habit, you are going to almost certainly be a reliable voter for the rest of your life. And so how can we expect first-time voters to have those habits when they haven’t been legally allowed to engage in those habits?
There’s also a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe in working with young people in or outside of the classroom. Instead, I tend to see it as an issue of access. It’s just hard to get involved. There’s a lot of rules and deadlines and barriers in place, regardless of where you live. There’s just a big startup cost to getting involved. And so if there isn’t someone there to help you navigate that, it can be really disincentivizing to vote or to get engaged in politics otherwise, because you just don’t know where to start.
For students who are studying at UNC Asheville from out of state, will they be able to access the absentee ballots sent from their home states?
Overwhelmingly, our students are North Carolina residents. I think this year, about 13 percent of our student body is an out-of-state US resident. So that would equate to about 300 to 400 students. Of those students, it’s hard to know how many of them would be registered in North Carolina versus in their home state.
“There’s a narrative out there about young people being really apathetic and not caring about issues, and that is just not what I observe.”
For those students who were on campus and had requested an absentee ballot before the storm hit, it is possible [they] had to evacuate before they received their ballot. It’s hard to know how many students this is affecting, but almost certainly, it is affecting some voters.
The advice we’ve been giving those voters is to contact their local or county elections office as soon as possible and request a reissuance of their ballot.
Historically, after severe hurricanes, you often see a decline in voting. Has disaster-related voter suppression come up in your classes at all?
I teach courses on US elections. We talk about barriers to voting, not just devices or laws in place that could make it easier or more difficult for people to vote, but also socioeconomic factors that can make it harder for some groups of people to vote than others. I’ve never spoken with my students specifically about how natural disasters and recovery efforts could affect the dynamics, but rest assured that we will be once our classes pick back up.
As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a weirdly specific vendetta: It’s not as if Trump has some sort of personal, financial stake in blocking this one form of renewable energy. (Oh wait, he does.)
But as president, Trump went full wind-spiracy. At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”
Following the event, several outlets fact-checked the president. For one, there’s no reason to think wind turbines would cause a decrease in property value anywhere near 75 percent. As FactCheck.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization, reported at the time, most studies on the issue “indicate small or no changes to property values.”
And, critically, there is no known link between wind turbines and cancer. The American Cancer Society said at the time it was “unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.” Nor is there any reason to think so, according to FactCheck.org:
Cancer, or what scientists think of as uncontrolled cell growth, is at heart a genetic disease because it starts when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that allows it to grow unchecked, as the National Cancer Institute explains…
Sound waves, however, aren’t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer, and they might even fight off the disease, researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research outside London have found.
The only plausible way wind turbines might contribute to even a small amount of cancer risk is by increasing stress or disrupting sleep. But it hasn’t yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer risk, or that they are caused by turbine noise. Trump’s claim is baseless.
“They are washing up ashore,” he said, adding, “You wouldn’t see that once a year—now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
Which is why, last week, I was eager to throw on a pair of sweatpants, pop some corn, melt into my couch, and binge the seventh season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, cocooned in blankets and romanticist fluff. This was my safe place. At least it was supposed to be.
Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.
If you haven’t seen the show, allow me to summarize: Around 30 heterosexual singles sign up to date in individual, single-room “pods” with the aim of getting engaged “sight unseen” after just 10 days. The couples that do get engaged meet face-to-face for the first time in a dramatic, red-carpet reveal. Producers then follow them as they vacation in a tropical locale, return to their jobs, and attempt to date in the “real world” until they split or get married 28 days later. With a few exceptions, most of the couples break up. Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.
And like most reality TV shows I watch (and I watch a lot), Love Is Blind normally exists in a political bubble: Aside from one relatively groundbreaking discussion of abortion in season three, any discussions of politics between the couples, if they are filmed at all, are left on the cutting room floor, and the cast members’ political affiliations are left a mystery. (This is your warning: spoilers ahead!)
But in a noticeable deviation from previous seasons, season seven, which takes place in the Washington, DC, area, puts politics front and center. The season includes topics like dating across the aisle, having a change of heart in voting for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and a whopping, 12-minute dinner-table conversation about religion, Barbie vs. Past Lives, and the role of the United States military in American imperialism. It was, as Time magazine described it, “easily the most substantive conversation Love Is Blind has ever aired.”
The conversation,between Ramses Prashad, a 35-year-old program associateat a justice reform nonprofit, and 32-year-old lawyer and former Navy service member Marissa George, begins in episode seven with the two discussing their wedding plans. Having both grown away from their Christian and Mormon upbringings, they agree to “anything but a cis-hetero” officiant—which in turn leads to a conversation about religion broadly.
After George says she believes in past lives, Prashad says they need to watch Past Lives, referring to the 2023 film starring Greta Lee. George agrees—but only after the two watch the 2023 box-office hit Barbie. “Barbie made me realize I’m not accepting any man who supports [the] patriarchy,” George says. “It took Barbie to make you realize that?” Prashad jokes.
“I was working my way up there. I had to leave the military behind,” George says. “People do not realize the, like, brainwashing that [the] military does.”
Prashad, who grew up in Venezuela, notes the US military has “destabilized entire countries.” He references James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, saying that to love a country is to critique it. George responds that while she doesn’t support “half the shit the military does in other countries,” she supports the individual members within it. “I am proud of my service,” she says. “I support the troops, babe.”
“I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism.”
In episode eight, Prashad elaborates, saying that if George were to reenter the military, it would be a deal breaker. “We talk about things like Palestine right now,” he explains to three of George’s friends. “I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism. I feel for those people and so it’s hard for me to see myself in the future with someone who is actively involved in the military.”
As someone who has dated across the aisle, this sort of discussion felt authentic—and refreshing. It’s not often producers letsocial commentary slip into the final cut, let alone devote more than a few minutes to it.
Take ABC’s Bachelor franchise, where conversations about religion or politics primarily occur in the “fantasy suites”—the only time the contestants aren’t filmed: In Season 16 of The Bachelorette, which aired in 2020, for instance, Tayshia Adams reportedly ends her relationship with contestant Ivan Hall due to religious differences discussed behind closed doors. (ABC did air a conversation between the two about Black Lives Matter, but only after the franchise was criticized for having a race problem. More on reality TV’s botched attempts to diversify here.)
Two seasons earlier, after Huffington Post first reported that Bachelorette finalist Garrett Yrigoyen had liked transphobic memes, and memes mocking “leftist women” and immigrants, he apologized on-air, without addressing specifics. “Some stuff came out about my social media,” he said on the live, After the Final Rose special, “and I didn’t realize the effect behind a double-tap or a like on Instagram…I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings or do anything like that.”
On the most recent season of Love Island USA, the only conversation I can recall that remotely references a world outside the islander’s plush, colorful villa is when 22-year-old contestant Kaylor Martin asks, after seeing her UK-based love interest, Aaron Evans, in short shorts, “The UK isn’t Europe, right?“
To be sure, Love Is Blind doesn’t deserve any major awards for airing a conversation about the military. As Time put it, “The conversation doesn’t settle their conflict, which they continue to hash out in subsequent episodes.” (I flipped through the newest episodes, which aired Wednesday—things aren’t looking good for Ramses and Marissa.) “Nor does it have the specificity or factual rigor to genuinely educate viewers on the issue at hand.” And it certainly doesn’t excuse legitimate criticisms of the show, like its platforming of outdated beauty standards and allegedly exploitative labor practices.
But the plotline does inch reality TV closer to an acknowledgment that relationships, love, and marriage are political. Whatever promise of neutralitydrew me to Love Is Blind in the first place is broken, my safe space momentarily disrupted. And you know what? I’m okay with that, because reality television is a little more real for it.
On Monday afternoon, Miami meteorologist John Morales went viral. In a video that’s been shared thousands of times on social media, Morales gave an emotional briefing on the status of then-Category 5 Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now barreling toward Central Florida. “It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible, hurricane,” Morales said on the air for NBC 6 South Florida. Then, getting visibly choked up, he added, “It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours,” a sign the storm had rapidly strengthened. “I apologize,” he said after a beat. “This is just horrific.”
Morales initially debated whether to share the video on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me over the phone Monday night. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”
But after he did, the moment seems to have struckachord. Morales, a meteorologist with 40 years of experience and the founder of weather forecasting company Climadata, said the feeling was a long time coming—a mixture of anxiety about increasing extreme weather, “frustration for lack of action on climate,” and concern for the people in Milton’s path.
For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. But as climate change increasingly fuels storms like Milton, he says, it’s been harder to stay calm and collected. Climate change, in essence, has changed him. As he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after Helene hit the Southeast last month, “I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently.”
Below, in his own words, Morales reflect on how the climate crisis has changed his relationship with meteorology. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:
I grew up in Puerto Rico. So, for years I had been tracking tropical storms and hurricanes. In 1979, there was a big hurricane that passed south of Puerto Rico, and then slammed into the Dominican Republic, a category five hurricane named David. And I think it was the clincher for me in terms of, Hey, this is a field of science that I want to pursue.
[On Monday,] I was at the home office, just as we were about to go on air for the noon newscast, and an urgent bulletin came out from the National Hurricane Center indicating that Milton had become a Category 5 hurricane. I had a chart in front of me, and I looked at the barometric pressure they were reporting at noon, and I compared it to just what had been reported in the pre-dawn hours. And I go, Oh, my goodness.
“The propensity for hurricanes to become extremely intense is just increasing tremendously.”
It’s funny how millibars can get a nerd to lose it. Millibars is a way of measuring barometric pressure. It just absolutely dropped like a rock. I couldn’t believe it dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours, which is an indication of rapid intensification.
People have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist guy. I’ve always been very calm. It’s been very few hurricanes in which I’ve become anxious for. So this was certainly a departure. I think it really shocked a lot of the people that have known me as a weathercaster for 33 years.
So it was a mixture of angst about increasing extremes, frustration for lack of action on climate knowing where we’re going, and just empathy for the victims or future victims in Milton’s path. I was just feeling anxiety about what’s going to happen to them and how nervous they must be.
It was just yet another example, like Helene, Milton, Otis, Dorian, Harvey, Katrina, Irma—I mean, it’s just a whole laundry list of extreme weather fueled by the warming climate. I can tell you right now that the temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico—sea surface temperatures—are record hot, a condition that climate change made anywhere from 400 to 800 times more likely. The number of Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes over the last 20 years is significantly more than over the previous 20 years. The propensity for hurricanes to become extremely intense is just increasing tremendously.
[Climate change] is here, and it’s happening already, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I hope it gets better, if we take the action that we need to take.
I feel different. I have a hard time staying cool when I know what’s about to unfold. Everybody and their brother, every meteorologist I know, knew what this hurricane was going to do. And then suddenly, it does it. And you still can’t help yourself from being astounded that it did happen.
After 40 years in a career, hopefully, I get a little leeway from the folks who are accustomed to seeing me cool as a cucumber. But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected. It’s a level of agitation and dismay when you know what’s about to unfold and the type of damage and suffering it’s going to cause.
In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.
Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.
Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.
Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)
As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”
On the campaign trail, Gov. Tim Walz is having a hell of a good time—at least rhetorically speaking. In his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, the vice presidential candidate said “hell” three times, including that his former students could teach Donald Trump “a hell of a lot” about leadership. And, in one of the biggest applause lines of the night, he praised Minnesotans for minding their “own damn business” about their neighbors’ reproductive choices.
Two weeks earlier, in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia that Trump would “damn sure” take the country backward and referred to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as “just weird as hell.” In other words, Walz likes to swear, albeit in a fairly wholesome way. As University of Memphis psychology professor Roger Kreuz wrote in the Conversation in August after uncovering dozens of uses of the word “damn” in Walz’s speaking engagements, “Clearly, this term is part of the candidate’s normal speaking style and has been for many years.”
Viewers interpreted swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.”
Harris hasn’t shied away from swearing either. In a viral social media video from NowThis, Harris reveals her favorite swear word “starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘ah, not ‘er'”—suggesting she meant motherf*cka. On the debate stage in mid-September, Harris pointed to Trump as “that…” before trailing off, “former president.” Some viewers speculated she intended the audience to fill in the pause with their curse word of choice.
Among those speculators is UK-based science writer Emma Byrne, author of the book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. Whether or not Harris’ pause was deliberate, Byrne told me, it was effective because “there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.”
Of course, profanity is nothing new in presidential politics. As Rolling Stone tabulated back in 2012—after then-president Barack Obama referred to then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a “bullshitter“—presidential swearing dates back at least as far back Abraham Lincoln, with reported pottymouths including Lyndon Johnson and Richard “[Expletive Deleted]” Nixon. In 2010, Joe Biden referred to the passing of the Affordable Care Act as “a big fucking deal” and George W. Bush, caught on a hot mic, called a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Trump, too, is a frequent swearer. (See: “shithole countries,” Sen. Ted Cruz being a “pussy,” and “I’m f*cked.”).
There’s a good chance these politicos knew what they were doing. As Byrne told me, some studies have shown that viewers may interpret swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.” When used the right way by a politician, it can help them come across as authentic and relatable. For politicians like Walz, that’s partofthe brand.
To get a better understand how swearing operates in politics, I spoke with Byrne over Zoom. You can read an edited and condensed version of our call below:
Why might a politician or public figure choose to use a swear word—or not? What does it signal to the audience?
It used to be thought that swearing showed a loss of emotional regulation, a lack of vocabulary. But actually, people with larger vocabularies also tend to have larger swearing vocabularies, and swearing is quite often used as a way of conveying everything from excitement to sympathy as well as frustration or anger. I think we’ve gotten over the idea that swearing is just rhetorically a failure.
At the time I wrote the book, there was some research that had come out from law departments, particularly in places like the Netherlands, that looked at swearing and the effect on the perceived credibility of the speaker. Particularly in legal or courtroom settings, some degree of swearing was rated as being more emotionally realistic than measured speech. So I wondered whether or not swearing would become like hand gestures in the 1990s, when politicians learned how to do body language. Some research in the late 90s suggested that certain gestures showed openness or decisiveness, and you found politicians consciously doing these gestures.
I wonder if now some of this swearing isn’t quite as spontaneously emotional as it’s played out. Or whether some of it is that just people are more relaxed about using that side of their vocabulary. But I do think it’s pretty instrumental as a way of connecting.
There is a viral clip of Kamala Harris at an [Asian American and Pacific Islander] event where she says, “Sometimes people will open the door for you…sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f*cking door down.” Why do you think this line worked—or didn’t?
It certainly worked for me. One of the reasons why I thought it looked authentic was that it seemed like there was a degree of conflict before she said it. It didn’t come out completely fluently. It wasn’t a line that looked well-rehearsed—although very good politicians are great at saying everything as if they’re saying it for the first time.
Also, this was before she was campaigning to be president. When she said it, it was to a very specific audience. The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to choose the right kind of swearing, because you know the kind of cultural references that are allowable. When you’re now speaking to an entire nation, hoping that they will elect you as president, that immediately becomes more of a gamble.
Your book would suggest that it might be more of a gamble for women than for men. How might the calculus be different for women who swear?
There is definitely a higher social risk for women to swear. There is a [2001]study, it’s a couple of decades old now, and I would love for it to be repeated. But [researchers] distributed a whole bunch of questionnaires with sentences that were allegedly quotes from people. Half of these quotes were randomly labeled as coming from women, and half as coming from men.
People were asked to rate how offensive, how upsetting, how much the swearing made them think that the person speaking was dislikeable or that they wouldn’t want to spend time with them.Whenever a swearing sentence was labeled as coming from a woman, those judgments became considerably harsher. But for men, [participants tended to think] I’d work with this guy.
I hope that things are changing. I think that idea that women swearing was somehow surprising or unusual may have faded away a bit.
In your book, you point out that not all swear words are created equal. In the context of politics, it feels like there’s a difference between a politician using “damn” versus “f*ck”—I feel weird even saying that on a call in a professional setting. How are these words perceived differently and why?
One of the ways we know how intensely a swear word is experienced is by wiring people up to what’s called a Galvanic skin response monitor. Basically, it’s measuring how sweaty your palms get. You can also look at how fast your heart rate goes. The stronger swear words tend to have a stronger physiological reaction. So it’s not just a matter of taste or decorum. It’s a matter of how your brain and your body are responding to those swear words.
“You have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.”
There are some swear words—particularly there’s one that we used in the UK in the 90s, begins with a “c.” There was a kind of reclamation of it on this side of the Atlantic, and particularly women would call their male friends this word. But as I started to do talks about the book, I realized that younger millennials would just go, “No, that’s an atrocious word.” In the States, it never lost its misogynistic overtones. So it’s something I’ve dropped from my vocabulary because I know that for a lot of people, both older and younger than me, it doesn’t hit the way that it did with my exact contemporaries. It’s one of those things that you have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.
I’m thinking way back to 2016 and the time that Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” There’s no swear word used there, but it was clearly derogatory, and there was an awful lot of misogyny in the way that he used that. During the most recent debate, Harris’ [use of] “that…former President” left so much space for people to put in whatever swear word they felt comfortable with, if they wanted to put one in there.
You’re talking about the moment when Harris kind of pauses in referring to Trump as “that [pause] former president”—
Yeah. Yep.
So even the suggestion that she might have used the curse word there was effective?
Yes, and I’m not sure that it was deliberate. I don’t know whether she wanted to just say, “that man” or “that person.” And of course, she didn’t swear. I have no reason to believe she intended to swear, but there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.
As the election race tightens, how should we think about swearing in politics generally?
Swearing is emotive. Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on. And as with every other message from a politician, asking yourself, Does that emotion fit with my values?Does it fit with what I want from my country?
“Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on.”
Rather than just going, Oh, strong word, what does this emotional message say about this candidate’s values and because of their values, their likely behavior?
Don’t let that little spike in adrenaline stop you from applying the same deliberative reasoning that you’d do in deciding how to cast your ballot.
In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.
Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.
Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.
Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)
As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”
On the campaign trail, Gov. Tim Walz is having a hell of a good time—at least rhetorically speaking. In his Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, the vice presidential candidate said “hell” three times, including that his former students could teach Donald Trump “a hell of a lot” about leadership. And, in one of the biggest applause lines of the night, he praised Minnesotans for minding their “own damn business” about their neighbors’ reproductive choices.
Two weeks earlier, in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate, Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia that Trump would “damn sure” take the country backward and referred to Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as “just weird as hell.” In other words, Walz likes to swear, albeit in a fairly wholesome way. As University of Memphis psychology professor Roger Kreuz wrote in the Conversation in August after uncovering dozens of uses of the word “damn” in Walz’s speaking engagements, “Clearly, this term is part of the candidate’s normal speaking style and has been for many years.”
Viewers interpreted swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.”
Harris hasn’t shied away from swearing either. In a viral social media video from NowThis, Harris reveals her favorite swear word “starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘ah, not ‘er'”—suggesting she meant motherf*cka. On the debate stage in mid-September, Harris pointed to Trump as “that…” before trailing off, “former president.” Some viewers speculated she intended the audience to fill in the pause with their curse word of choice.
Among those speculators is UK-based science writer Emma Byrne, author of the book, Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language. Whether or not Harris’ pause was deliberate, Byrne told me, it was effective because “there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.”
Of course, profanity is nothing new in presidential politics. As Rolling Stone tabulated back in 2012—after then-president Barack Obama referred to then-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a “bullshitter“—presidential swearing dates back at least as far back Abraham Lincoln, with reported pottymouths including Lyndon Johnson and Richard “[Expletive Deleted]” Nixon. In 2010, Joe Biden referred to the passing of the Affordable Care Act as “a big fucking deal” and George W. Bush, caught on a hot mic, called a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Trump, too, is a frequent swearer. (See: “shithole countries,” Sen. Ted Cruz being a “pussy,” and “I’m f*cked.”).
There’s a good chance these politicos knew what they were doing. As Byrne told me, some studies have shown that viewers may interpret swearing to be “more emotionally realistic than measured speech.” When used the right way by a politician, it can help them come across as authentic and relatable. For politicians like Walz, that’s partofthe brand.
To get a better understand how swearing operates in politics, I spoke with Byrne over Zoom. You can read an edited and condensed version of our call below:
Why might a politician or public figure choose to use a swear word—or not? What does it signal to the audience?
It used to be thought that swearing showed a loss of emotional regulation, a lack of vocabulary. But actually, people with larger vocabularies also tend to have larger swearing vocabularies, and swearing is quite often used as a way of conveying everything from excitement to sympathy as well as frustration or anger. I think we’ve gotten over the idea that swearing is just rhetorically a failure.
At the time I wrote the book, there was some research that had come out from law departments, particularly in places like the Netherlands, that looked at swearing and the effect on the perceived credibility of the speaker. Particularly in legal or courtroom settings, some degree of swearing was rated as being more emotionally realistic than measured speech. So I wondered whether or not swearing would become like hand gestures in the 1990s, when politicians learned how to do body language. Some research in the late 90s suggested that certain gestures showed openness or decisiveness, and you found politicians consciously doing these gestures.
I wonder if now some of this swearing isn’t quite as spontaneously emotional as it’s played out. Or whether some of it is that just people are more relaxed about using that side of their vocabulary. But I do think it’s pretty instrumental as a way of connecting.
There is a viral clip of Kamala Harris at an [Asian American and Pacific Islander] event where she says, “Sometimes people will open the door for you…sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f*cking door down.” Why do you think this line worked—or didn’t?
It certainly worked for me. One of the reasons why I thought it looked authentic was that it seemed like there was a degree of conflict before she said it. It didn’t come out completely fluently. It wasn’t a line that looked well-rehearsed—although very good politicians are great at saying everything as if they’re saying it for the first time.
Also, this was before she was campaigning to be president. When she said it, it was to a very specific audience. The more specific your audience is, the easier it is to choose the right kind of swearing, because you know the kind of cultural references that are allowable. When you’re now speaking to an entire nation, hoping that they will elect you as president, that immediately becomes more of a gamble.
Your book would suggest that it might be more of a gamble for women than for men. How might the calculus be different for women who swear?
There is definitely a higher social risk for women to swear. There is a [2001]study, it’s a couple of decades old now, and I would love for it to be repeated. But [researchers] distributed a whole bunch of questionnaires with sentences that were allegedly quotes from people. Half of these quotes were randomly labeled as coming from women, and half as coming from men.
People were asked to rate how offensive, how upsetting, how much the swearing made them think that the person speaking was dislikeable or that they wouldn’t want to spend time with them.Whenever a swearing sentence was labeled as coming from a woman, those judgments became considerably harsher. But for men, [participants tended to think] I’d work with this guy.
I hope that things are changing. I think that idea that women swearing was somehow surprising or unusual may have faded away a bit.
In your book, you point out that not all swear words are created equal. In the context of politics, it feels like there’s a difference between a politician using “damn” versus “f*ck”—I feel weird even saying that on a call in a professional setting. How are these words perceived differently and why?
One of the ways we know how intensely a swear word is experienced is by wiring people up to what’s called a Galvanic skin response monitor. Basically, it’s measuring how sweaty your palms get. You can also look at how fast your heart rate goes. The stronger swear words tend to have a stronger physiological reaction. So it’s not just a matter of taste or decorum. It’s a matter of how your brain and your body are responding to those swear words.
“You have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.”
There are some swear words—particularly there’s one that we used in the UK in the 90s, begins with a “c.” There was a kind of reclamation of it on this side of the Atlantic, and particularly women would call their male friends this word. But as I started to do talks about the book, I realized that younger millennials would just go, “No, that’s an atrocious word.” In the States, it never lost its misogynistic overtones. So it’s something I’ve dropped from my vocabulary because I know that for a lot of people, both older and younger than me, it doesn’t hit the way that it did with my exact contemporaries. It’s one of those things that you have to be incredibly aware of your audience when swearing if you’re going to do it effectively.
I’m thinking way back to 2016 and the time that Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” There’s no swear word used there, but it was clearly derogatory, and there was an awful lot of misogyny in the way that he used that. During the most recent debate, Harris’ [use of] “that…former President” left so much space for people to put in whatever swear word they felt comfortable with, if they wanted to put one in there.
You’re talking about the moment when Harris kind of pauses in referring to Trump as “that [pause] former president”—
Yeah. Yep.
So even the suggestion that she might have used the curse word there was effective?
Yes, and I’m not sure that it was deliberate. I don’t know whether she wanted to just say, “that man” or “that person.” And of course, she didn’t swear. I have no reason to believe she intended to swear, but there were a lot of people who put their own swear word in there.
As the election race tightens, how should we think about swearing in politics generally?
Swearing is emotive. Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on. And as with every other message from a politician, asking yourself, Does that emotion fit with my values?Does it fit with what I want from my country?
“Whether it’s spontaneous or deliberate, there is something emotional going on.”
Rather than just going, Oh, strong word, what does this emotional message say about this candidate’s values and because of their values, their likely behavior?
Don’t let that little spike in adrenaline stop you from applying the same deliberative reasoning that you’d do in deciding how to cast your ballot.
As he took a seat on stage at a climate conference in New York City on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted that even he was surprised he had been invited to speak.
Heritage, after all, is the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a controversial policy wish listto reshape the federal government, including gutting many environmental regulations. The event, “Climate Forward,” hosted by the New York Times, was dedicated to “understanding our rapidly warming world,” with speakers including EPA Administrator Michael Regan, conservationist Jane Goodall, and the President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali.
“That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” Roberts said.
Roberts, who penned the forward to Project 2025, seemed an unlikely guest, but as he put it, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.” He seized the speaking opportunity to dismiss climate science and argue that it was the climate agenda—not climate change itself—that should most concern people.
At the start of the panel, moderator and Times reporter David Gelles promised the audience an “open, respectful dialogue.” Aside from the occasional hiss from the crowd (and one audience member who left early, holding a middle finger in the air in protest), it was.
Project 2025, Gelles began by reminding the audience, proposes drastically cutting funding for climate research, weakening bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, undoing key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and more—all at a time when climate-fueled extreme heat, wildfires, and storms increasingly threaten people’s lives. “I’d like to start this conversation,” Gelles said, turning to Roberts, “by asking you not what you would undo, but what is your proactive proposal to deal with climate change?”
To Roberts, however, climate wasn’t the real issue. Progressive climate policies were. The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, was imposing the will of “elites” on the American people by forcing a transition to clean energy and electric vehicles. (“I’m very happy, by the way, in my diesel F-150,” Roberts later joked, “because I enjoy my high carbon lifestyle.”)
The energy transition, he argued,“has been so artificial, it has been so accelerated,” he said, “that [it] is actually harming people far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.” By “harms,” Robert seemed to mean that electrification has brought with it higher energy bills (the switch to renewables is one of many factors that can affect prices) and more frequent electricity shut-offs.
As for the harms of climate change? Roberts pointed to studies, including those by Heritage, that show a reduction in climate-related deaths in the last century. As Reuters notes, while disaster-related deaths have indeed decreased in the last 100 years, that’s in part because prediction tools and preparedness have gotten better. But in the meantime, the number of disasters—and the associated cost of them—has only continued to increase. By 2050, as the Times writes, climate change may be to blame for an estimated 14.5 million deaths.
When asked about Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, despite the majority of its authors being former Trump appointees, Roberts said that the Trump campaign and Heritage were currently operating in separate “lanes.” “They exist in a political lane in a political season,” he said. “We exist in a policy lane and are waiting for the policy-making season.”
Later, Gelles again pushed Roberts to acknowledge the risk posed by climate change, noting that last year was the hottest in recorded history. “Is there any degree of warming that you think the United States or the world should stay below?” he asked. “Is there any level at which it becomes too dangerous?”
Roberts declined to give a direct answer, instead downplaying the science—again. “That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” he said. “A hot year.”
As he took a seat on stage at a climate conference in New York City on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts admitted that even he was surprised he had been invited to speak.
Heritage, after all, is the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a controversial policy wish listto reshape the federal government, including gutting many environmental regulations. The event, “Climate Forward,” hosted by the New York Times, was dedicated to “understanding our rapidly warming world,” with speakers including EPA Administrator Michael Regan, conservationist Jane Goodall, and the President of Guyana, Mohamed Irfaan Ali.
“That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” Roberts said.
Roberts, who penned the forward to Project 2025, seemed an unlikely guest, but as he put it, “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.” He seized the speaking opportunity to dismiss climate science and argue that it was the climate agenda—not climate change itself—that should most concern people.
At the start of the panel, moderator and Times reporter David Gelles promised the audience an “open, respectful dialogue.” Aside from the occasional hiss from the crowd (and one audience member who left early, holding a middle finger in the air in protest), it was.
Project 2025, Gelles began by reminding the audience, proposes drastically cutting funding for climate research, weakening bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act, undoing key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and more—all at a time when climate-fueled extreme heat, wildfires, and storms increasingly threaten people’s lives. “I’d like to start this conversation,” Gelles said, turning to Roberts, “by asking you not what you would undo, but what is your proactive proposal to deal with climate change?”
To Roberts, however, climate wasn’t the real issue. Progressive climate policies were. The Inflation Reduction Act, he said, was imposing the will of “elites” on the American people by forcing a transition to clean energy and electric vehicles. (“I’m very happy, by the way, in my diesel F-150,” Roberts later joked, “because I enjoy my high carbon lifestyle.”)
The energy transition, he argued,“has been so artificial, it has been so accelerated,” he said, “that [it] is actually harming people far more than any of the harms that you would cite from so-called climate change.” By “harms,” Robert seemed to mean that electrification has brought with it higher energy bills (the switch to renewables is one of many factors that can affect prices) and more frequent electricity shut-offs.
As for the harms of climate change? Roberts pointed to studies, including those by Heritage, that show a reduction in climate-related deaths in the last century. As Reuters notes, while disaster-related deaths have indeed decreased in the last 100 years, that’s in part because prediction tools and preparedness have gotten better. But in the meantime, the number of disasters—and the associated cost of them—has only continued to increase. By 2050, as the Times writes, climate change may be to blame for an estimated 14.5 million deaths.
When asked about Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, despite the majority of its authors being former Trump appointees, Roberts said that the Trump campaign and Heritage were currently operating in separate “lanes.” “They exist in a political lane in a political season,” he said. “We exist in a policy lane and are waiting for the policy-making season.”
Later, Gelles again pushed Roberts to acknowledge the risk posed by climate change, noting that last year was the hottest in recorded history. “Is there any degree of warming that you think the United States or the world should stay below?” he asked. “Is there any level at which it becomes too dangerous?”
Roberts declined to give a direct answer, instead downplaying the science—again. “That sounds like weather to me, not climate,” he said. “A hot year.”
After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.
In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.
The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:
Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”
To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.
Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:
Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?
When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.
And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.
It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.
So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—
Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.
—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.
Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?
One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.
If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?
I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.
“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”
So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].
But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?
Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.
If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]
For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?
I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.
After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.
In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.
The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:
Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”
To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.
Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:
Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?
When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.
And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.
It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.
So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—
Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.
—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.
Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?
One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.
If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?
I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.
“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”
So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].
But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?
Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.
If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]
For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?
I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.
Last year, in one of her first interviews with the international press, Rachel Goldberg-Polin told the New York Times that she hadn’t been able to go “one hour” without thinking that her son was dead.
Her son, 23-year-old Israeli-American dual citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was among the more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on October 7 in an attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis and sparked a counter-attack by Israel that has since killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
On Saturday, the Israeli military said it had retrieved the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in southern Gaza, including that of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. According to the military, Hamas killed the six hostages shortly before their bodies were found. The others reportedly include Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi.
Since Oct. 7, Goldberg-Polin’s parents have been outspoken advocates for the release of their son and the other hostages, even traveling to Chicago to deliver a speech at last month’s Democratic National Convention.
They’ve had to grapple with the possibility of their son’s death for months. Here’s part of the Times‘ interview—which aired on “The Daily” podcast on October 20—in which Rachel described attending the funeral of a victim of the terrorist attack, and the tragic pragmatism of having a child taken hostage:
Sabrina Tavernise: What did it feel like to come home after the funeral, Rachel? Was any part of you worried that you could be in those shoes as well?
Rachel Goldberg-Polin: Oh, there’s not been one day—I don’t think there’s been one hour that I haven’t thought he’s dead. You know, we have to keep going forward until we know that’s not true. But Hersh may have died 13 days ago, and I don’t know about it. He may have died an hour ago. He may have died five days ago. He may have died on my birthday last week. I don’t know.
Sabrina Tavernise: Right.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin: So it’s really—it’s just a twilight zone of an existence that is so unfamiliar. It’s like walking on another planet.
Sabrina Tavernise: What is that planet?
Rachel Goldberg-Polin: It’s like living in a completely parallel universe because I feel so close in proximity to this place I knew, you know, and I see these people and these friends. And I’m hugging people and I’m very, very close to them and I can smell them and I can see their pores and their skin, but I’m different. I’m—there’s like a film between us because I’m not in their world. Like I’m super close, but I’m not in their world. And the only time that I feel that I’m in a world that’s familiar to me is when I’m with—you know, last night I went to an event that a few different families of American hostages were meeting at. And when I’m with those people, we all know that parallel universe. We’re all in that place. And this one woman and I, every time we see each other, we hug each other and we feel such a closeness, which is this, like, sick, grotesque, perverse closeness. But it’s that we’re both in this same devastating and unknown and unfamiliar universe.
Overnight, the family released a statement: “With broken hearts, the Goldberg-Polin family is devastated to announce the death of their beloved son and brother, Hersh. The family thanks you all for your love and support and asks for privacy at this time.”
President Joe Biden said he was “devastated and outraged” by the news of Goldberg-Polin’s death. “It is as tragic as it is reprehensible,” he said in a statement released by the White House. “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes. And we will keep working around the clock for a deal to secure the release of the remaining hostages.”
In a personal, wide-ranging speech to close out the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Thursday night, Vice President Kamala Harris briefly touched on climate change, but largely avoided the topic.
Many “fundamental freedoms are at stake” in this election, Harris said, including the “freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” That was it.
For an issue that scientists warn is a major, global threat to our species and thousands of others, you’d think it’d get a little more airtime.
For an issue that scientists warn is a major, global threat to our species, you’d think it’d get a little more airtime.
To be sure, over the four-day convention, climate change had a few, brief moments in the spotlight: In his opening night speech, President Joe Biden highlighted his climate record, including signing into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as “the most significant climate law in the history of mankind,” and launching the Climate Corps, a climate jobs program which he compared to similar programs like the Peace Corps. On Thursday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland made the case for Harris, saying she and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz would “fight for a future where we all have clean air, clean water and healthy communities.” In an impassioned, short speech, Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, said that “fighting the climate crisis is patriotic.” (Watch our interview with Frost here.) And throughout the week, trainings, council meetings, and panels centered on climate.
But in some of the event’s biggest speeches, including Harris’, climate change was absent or scantly mentioned. Walz, who spoke on Wednesday night, made almost no mention of environmental issues during his 15-minute speech. Even as he listed his achievements as Minnesota’s governor, including paid family and medical leave and free meals in schools, he left out any climate-related wins, like signing a law last year requiring his state to reach 100 percent renewable-fueled electricity by 2040. Now, as a science journalist, I might be biased, but that’s a pretty major item for Walz to leave out of the biggest speech of his career so far.
Some environmental advocates took notice of the lack of climate talk at the convention. “It’s a bit of a bummer that it hasn’t gotten more time,” Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay Campaign, a climate accountability organization, told the Guardian ahead of Thursday’s programming.
But others seem less bothered by climate’s absence at the convention—or on the campaign trail. Although Democrats’ climate goals feature prominently in the party’s official platform, approved this week at the DNC, Harris has yet to release a detailed plan for fighting the crisis. “I am not concerned,” Washington’s Democratic governor Jay Inslee, a vocal climate advocate, told theNew York Times, saying his bigger concern is electing Harris to office. “I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.”
“This is an issue where it’s absolutely stark.”
Despite its absence in Harris’ campaign, Democratic organizers say they see climate as an issue she can win on. Pollingshared at the DNC this week by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, revealed that a majority of voters are at least somewhat familiar with climate change and environmental justice. And for about a third of voters polled, climate change was more important to them this year than in 2020. “It’s become an absolutely kitchen table issue,” Michelle Deatrick, chair of the DNC’s climate council told me. “People are very aware of it and concerned.” Particularly in contrast to former President Donald Trump, she says, who has referred to climate change as a “hoax” and rolled back more than 100 environmental protections, Democrats, she believes, have a winning case. “This is an issue where it’s absolutely stark,” she says.
The trouble is, many Americans aren’t aware of either Biden’s or Harris’ climate record. As Grist reported earlier this month, shortly ahead of the Inflation Reduction Act’s second anniversary, polling suggests as many as four in 10 voters have heard “nothing at all” about Biden’s signature climate law, for which Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Deatrick sees this gap in knowledge as an “opportunity” for Democrats to get the word out about the Biden-Harris administration’s “huge wins”—from investments in electric vehicle infrastructure to lead pipe removal and land protections. “That is the work that is being done and needs to be done,” she said.
By all accounts, Harris has a part in the most climate-active administration in American history. So, if she wants more voters to understand her record, it might help to start talking about it.
When it comes to campaign messaging, Kamala Harris’ past as a prosecutor has served as both a strength and a liability. As a first-term senator from California, her rigorous cross-examination during the confirmation hearings of several Trump appointees—including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt—raised her profile and put her on the political map.
At the same time, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, criminal justice advocates criticizedher prosecutorial past. Memes declaring “Kamala is a cop” circulated on social media and were picked up by bad-faith detractorswho Harris saw as attempting to “distort” her record. Throughout her campaign, she struggled to reframe her résumé until, finally, she shut down operations in late 2019.
Video
Watch our 2019 interview with Kamala Harris:
But all that changed last month, shortly after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection campaign and endorsed her as his heir apparent. At that point, the vice president wasted no time leaning into the “prosecutor” label she earned as a lawyer in the courtroom, district attorney, and California’s attorney general to position herself in opposition to the former president, GOP presidential candidate, and convicted felon Donald Trump, who last May was found guilty on 34 counts related to hush-money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
His “type,” notably, included climate sellouts. She described that during her stint as district attorney, she created “one of the first environmental justice units in our nation” to prosecute polluters. “Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago,” she continued, “and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution.” She, Harris argued, was the anti-Trump.
It was a noticeable shift in tone from just five years ago, when Harris fought to stand out in a crowded Democratic primary. Of the more than 20 candidates vying to take on Trump in 2020, including Harris, most supported achieving net-zero carbon emissions, a carbon tax, and the newly introduced Green New Deal, a resolution to slash greenhouse gas emissions that has yet to pass in a divided Congress.
“Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.”
At the time, with no climate debate on the books, Harris joined Mother Jones, the Weather Channel, and Climate Desk for a series of conversations with 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls that became part of a one-hour Weather Channel special, “2020: Race to Save the Planet.” She said that she planned to use the Department of Justice to prosecute “crime[s] against the environment” and go after fossil fuel polluters. “Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook,” Harris said at the time, “but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.” (The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether this is still part of her platform, or what “serious penalties” meant, specifically.)
As my former colleague Rebecca Leber wrote in 2019, when Harris was head of California’s Department of Justice, she did indeed sue major oil and gas companies. But the environmental justice unit at the San Francisco DA’s office—one of the first in the country, Harrisoftennotes—might not have been all that she claimed it to be. As Gristreported last month, under Harris’ leadership, the unit prosecuted some companies including U-Haul for unlawfully disposing of hazardous waste, among other charges, and brought a few lawsuits against low-level offenders. In terms of the major polluters in the region, her office reportedly failed to pursue them.
As vice president, however, she served in the most climate-forward administration to date. In 2021, the White House announced plans to target at least a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, part of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement, which former President Donald Trump famously backed out of during his tenure.
In 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in fighting climate change ever passed by Congress. And, as Grist noted, Harris represented the Biden administration at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where she promised a $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund to support developing countries in the fight against climate change. The administration’s list of climate achievements is so long, Harris said in March at a conference of climate activists, that her husband, Doug Emhoff, jokingly describes it as a “CVS receipt.” “We could just go on and on,” she said. As of this week, more than 350 environmental justice advocates and politicians—including former presidential climate envoy John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy—have signed a letter endorsing Harris.
Now, with Trump as her primary opponent, Harris’ prosecutor brand might land differently. “In 2020, her past made it hard for her to break through,” my colleague Jamilah King wrote in early July. But now, “it could be exactly what’s needed.” On climate change, Trump has vowed to undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act and use fossil fuels, which he described as the “liquid gold” just sitting “under our feet,” and promised to “drill, baby drill.” When asked on the debate stage last June whether he’d take “any action” to slow the climate crisis, he dodged. If Harris is the anti-Trump, her momentum among environmental voters could suggest that a climate prosecutor might be exactly what they’re looking for.
Login
driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand 