Over the weekend, in addition to finishing up a house/cat-sitting gig with fur-nephews Charlie and Ollie, I had a chance to peruse historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Sunday post on the headaches being caused for local, state and federal authorities because of disinformation being spread in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Fact-checker Daniel Dale has noted that former president Donald Trump has been one of the chief sources of this disinformation, including that victims in Republican areas are being ignored, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration is out of money because it spent all its funds on Ukraine and undocumented immigrants, and that only $750 will be handed out to victims.

“Trump’s lies are not errors,” Richardson wrote. “They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.”

Richardson is hardly the first to sound an alarm over these tactics. In her first major work, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” in 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Ooooh … flashback to all the people claiming Donald Trump is playing three- or five-dimensional chess. 🤦‍♀️

In her “Truth and Politics” essay in 1967, Arendt wrote: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”

So when a candidate for public office complains during a debate, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” after his narrative was brought up about Springfield, Ohio, which has been thoroughly debunked by reality, well, that’s just another example of what Arendt warned us about. (And it wasn’t even a fact-check, but a clarification. Sigh.)

But both sides lie, I hear some of you say. True (though as PolitiFact founder Bill Adair notes, they don’t do so equally), and responsible fact-checkers like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, which link to primary sources in their fact-checks, have been holding them to account. In the debates, it’s the big lies that tend to get fact-checked on the spot, usually claims that have already been proved false (hey, at least come up with new lies if you’re gonna lie in a debate). However, the big difference in this particular case and that of FEMA response to Helene is that government, local, state and federal, has to waste time and resources to counteract the lies, which slows down response to victims.

PBS Newshour reported: “’If everyone could maybe please put aside the hate for a bit and pitch in to help, that would be great,’ posted Glenn Jacobs, the retired professional wrestler known as Kane, who is now the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. Jacobs’ post was intended to rebut rumors that workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were seizing relief supplies from private citizens. …

“State and local officials from both parties have condemned the conspiracy theories as rumors, saying the focus should be on recovery, not political division and hearsay. Responding to the hoaxes is taking up time that should go toward assisting victims, said North Carolina state Sen. Kevin Corbin, a Republican who urged his constituents not to give into hoaxes. ‘Friends can I ask a small favor?’ Corbin posted Thursday on Facebook. “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the Internet … Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you.’”

But … but … without all that, what do these guys have? Do you really think that before the last decade or so there’d be a chance of anyone but a few assorted wackadoodles believing that the Democrats were controlling the weather?

I’ve talked before about the Gish Gallop rhetorical device in which someone in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by using an excessive number of arguments regardless of veracity, the point being that unanswered arguments are considered a win, and if you pour them on, the opponent will be unable to rebut them all in the time available.

In a post Friday, Richardson wrote: “The firehose of lies is designed to make it impossible for voters to figure out the truth. The technique is designed so that eventually voters give up trying to engage, conclude everyone is lying, throw up their hands, and stop voting.”

I am seriously considering lobbying for “firehose of lies” to replace “Gish Gallop” as the name of that particular rhetorical device since in practice the technique seems to employ far more falsehoods than facts.

So if you can’t win people over with facts, you clobber them with so many lies that they no longer know or care what is true anymore. I know what it feels like to be overwhelmed. (Every. Damn. Day.) You get to a point where you can’t even move because efforts to change the status quo seem too hard and it just feels easier to do nothing, regardless of how much pain and stress doing nothing causes.

That’s the point here. If you’re not going to vote the way some people want you to, they don’t want you to vote, and convincing you that your vote won’t matter anyway is depressingly easy. With the Electoral College and most states (like mine, Arkansas) choosing the winner-takes-all approach instead of Maine and Nebraska’s proportional allotment of votes, it’s a cakewalk in small states. As a recent letter-writer pointed out, Arkansas forever has the stain, along with four other Southern states, of having given all their Electoral College votes to George Wallace in 1968, who only won a plurality of votes in the state. (C’mon, at minimum, make a federal law concerning apportionment of Electoral College the same in every state: proportional, with the two at-large votes going to the overall winner of the state vote. It would at least make the EC vote more closely resemble the popular vote, and thus make fewer voters feel disenfranchised.)

I spent most of my adult life not registered to vote. Because I worked in news, I felt a compulsion not to show any partisan loyalty. When I finally did register after the 2016 election (I learned my lesson in that election, and by then I had been working on the opinion side for five years), I didn’t declare for a party as I feel neither major party really represents me, and I’ve voted in both Republican and Democratic primaries (sometimes depending on whether a worthy friend is running for office, and sometimes based on preventing the craziest candidate from advancing). For me, facts and people mean more than party, and always have. As Richardson said in that Friday post, “Holding on to facts combats the effects of the storm of lies.”

Here’s hoping that more people this year choose to hold onto facts rather than lies meant to divide and confuse us. Your vote is yours and yours alone (no, you don’t have to tell anyone, not even family or a significant other, how you voted, and they don’t have the right to command you to vote a certain way), and it does matter. Use it wisely.