Purchasing Truth Using The Straw Man Argument
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In this day and age, the government and any powerful organization have the ability to purchase the truth using language and certain mindset techniques. Showing that into play, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss a straw man narrative on having a gun and how the truth is being hijacked and proportionalized. They also provide other great examples of a straw man argument on George W. Bush’s administration, 9/11, and marriage and divorce. They then share insights about the narrative effects of The Mueller Report on Donald Trump. Join Bill Stierle and Tom as they further explain and discuss the true meaning of straw man and help you understand how this card is being played.
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We’re going to talk about a concept that took me a while to grasp. We call it the Straw Man. We’re not talking about The Wizard of Oz character. We’re talking about a technique that is used daily to try to purchase truth. Isn’t that right, Bill?
That’s right. When we look at Purchasing Truth and the straw man, even though the metaphor of the Wizard of Oz is a funny one to put in here, it is if I only had a brain.
That was not intentional.
I know it wasn’t intentional, but you brought it. That was close. You’re starting to channel the ability to get a hold of the truth a bit and the difficulty in truth and how truth can be purchased the way by using language and certain mindset techniques to take a look at. How easy can it be to put an understanding around this metaphor of a straw man? How easy can it be as is to defeat something that is little and saying, “I have defeated this thing,” instead of talking about the real issue? That’s like, “I’m going to set up this thing I can defeat. I’m going to take and convolute their message, bring it to something I can defeat, defeat it, and then I’ve defeated them.” When somebody is looking to meet their need for respect at the expense of others, to meet their need for acknowledgment or self-worth or identity at the expense of others, straw man is a great way to hijack truth because all I’ve got to do is set up a version of a belief, hit an image or message and say, “I want to be like that.”
The reason why the American brain is so soft on this is because of our saturation of branding and marketing using various kinds of straw man images. This is the systemic part of it. Our brain is used to seeing stuff and knowing it’s not fully true, but believes it could be possible. Tom, wouldn’t it be great if you and I were on a boat and then landed on a beach with a bunch of women? We had the beer, the fish and the fun, we’re walking with our wives and girlfriends across this beach and we’re having this wonderful romantic thing. Tom, is that something that’s possible for you and I?
Yes, it’s possible.
Is that probable?
No, but I probably liked that beer more with that image in my head.
At least, I could get the beer then. That’s the trick.
It’s a Jedi mind trick when you think about it.
At least, I could buy the bear. I’m not going to get on the beach. I’m not going to have the cookout. I’m not going to have sex on the sand but I can have the beer. It’s good to be the same with things like gun control and conservatives. We’ll get into some of these different things so that our readers can get a sense, “That’s how it gets hijacked.” It’s easier to create a fantasy that I can defeat or grow to hijack a truth. There’s a caravan heading in our direction. A caravan of immigrants. A caravan is a label. Tom, tell me where caravans are usually described as a word. Tom, please tell me, when you think about the word caravan across what?
It’d be across the desert.
Who are on this caravan? Camels. Who’s on those caravans? Muslims.
That label, while it obviously blows up in terms of amplifying conceptually the number of people that may be on this caravan, that’s the literal part of it. The implication is terrorists or bad people or whatever connotation you associate with. That’s very unfortunate.
These people are trying to survive. Economies that collapse that was partly a part of something that happened in the world market and something that Americans did. We brought it on. They don’t want to come here. Why would they want to come here? They want to live in their own homes and make their own living. They’re living collapsed. They’ve got to survive. They’re dealing with what we would do if our economy collapses. We would add to whatever the economy was that was going to help us survive. That’s what we would do. For us, survival is an important thing.
When somebody is looking to meet their need for respect at the expense of others, straw man is a great way to hijack truth.
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It’s instinctive.
I’m going to say a straw man example. That is so disturbing, but it cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives around under a million, but close to a million Iraqi lives. All I’ve got to do is hold my hand out and say this thing, “You know this yellow cake?”
Uranium.
Did you see how I got your brain to go right there?
I remember it.
That is an example of this thing that can be put into a bomb and be put into an American city. That’s what they said too. They could come into it and we don’t want them to have that thing. It could be this big and they have one of those things there. We need to go get rid of that thing they have there. The inspectors don’t know what they’re talking about. We’ve got to go there and find it. We’ve got to look under every rock. There wasn’t anything that they found.
I remember at the time, speaking with someone who was the opposite political spectrum ideologically from me, but we’re having a rational, calm conversation about the whole thing. There’s no proof of WMD. We’re going in and fighting this war, but we don’t have evidence of it. He says to me, “We’ll find it.” That was the attitude. You’ve talked about in past episodes, if our leader is your guy, if you’re on his team, you’re going to go there, you’re going to support him because he’s your guy. We’re all susceptible to that, regardless of our ideology or political persuasions. How blindly we trusted that or followed it? You’re right. How many millions of lives were lost on both sides and all the money spent?
There’s another phrase on both sides.
That’s unfortunate.
It is moved into the lexicon. It’s moved into our conscious. That’s what it also does, a straw man also penetrates the narrative so it becomes a reoccurring language in a person’s language use. How do you get your kid to stop saying junky language? You can punish them, scare them, and they’re going to let you have it when they’re thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen because they bring it all out to things. You suppressed it, but see what you can do with this because they let you have it, or you can pull it out. That’s the solution for the straw man. You pull the straw man out and you re-proportionalize the straw man to its correct proportion, “I can see how you have the thought that these gun advocates are these types of people that are more racists or lunatics and they’re conspiracy theorists. They want to own their own nuclear warheads.” Proportionally, how many people are like that?
I don’t think any of them have a nuclear warhead. Maybe some of them want to have one but very few.
They’d like to own one and gun. If we have gun control, we can stop them from getting all the way to owning a nuclear warhead like they want to because that’s their right to bear arms. If one person has arms, where on the scale do we have the right to bear arms, then? It’s one thing to own an assault rifle. It’s another thing to use an assault rifle on a school, in a church, in a public area, at a concert or a movie theater. The right to bear arms is different. It has to work contrary to protecting people’s lives. The framing needs to be proportional. We want people to own guns because that’s a part of our identity. We also would like people to be safe. How can we get gun usage and safety to work together? That’s a true narrative. A straw man narrative is, “If they take your gun or if they register your gun, then the government will know where to come get you.” If they track data, then you won’t have privacy. Privacy is a different need. We’ve got a choice of using gun safety. Privacy, how can we get this in a short news clip? We can’t.
This is why that particular issue of gun control is a hard one to get anybody to move on and make any progress on one way or the other. This is a complicated issue. You brought out three different ways that the straw man is used either way. I want to go back briefly before we get too far away when I sit on both sides in reference to the lives lost. I got to tell you, as the words are coming out of my mouth, I’m feeling guilty saying that word because I realized what I was doing. Unintentionally, I would like to say it could have been a straw man technique because there I was making it seem like the thousands of American lives lost were equal to the millions of Iraqi lives lost. That’s not the case. Clearly, the people of that country lost a lot more than we did. All the lives are valuable. This is not us versus them argument. I did not mean to belittle the hundreds of thousands or millions of lives lost on the other side.
Your brain did the most wonderful thing ever. You proportionalized it and then go, “My integrity is not quite in alignment here. My truth-telling went off. I got caught invaded by my own brain.”
I shot myself in the foot so to speak to label it.
This is one of the biggest challenges that we have is the perception that it’s hijacked and it’s proportionalized. When it gets that perception and that our perspective gets adjusted, that is proportionalized up and down, whether it’s marketing or branding, a straw man or somebody trying to make their point, then we’ll dribble in a reward. The reward is we’re good enough that we’ll find the nuclear material there. Won’t it be great when our soldiers come up and find that reward that we’re looking for? We’re not sure exactly where we’re going to find it, but by then the enrollment has taken place. It’s hard when we look at the way the government is set up and the amount of money that we spend towards the military, what democrats go to vote against that? There’s no way they all have to be on the same thing. The international community did not get on board. There was not a full coalition. There were all these countries that wanted a favor from the United States, “We’ll be on it. We can’t offer much but we’ll be there.”
We will join the coalition, we will send one airplane and ten people. Maybe that’s proportionalizing it too low for some countries. There was a disproportionate amount of participation to window-dress this, “There’s this massive coalition behind it.” It can’t be wrong.
I have all these flashbacks from back then about different marketing and promotional things that took place. America has claimed air superiority over Afghanistan. I go, “What they do, shoot down the three planes that they had?” That was a newspaper article. It misled, “This is what happened.” It’s like, “That’s a reward and now we’re going to get something done because we need to get something done there.” There’s nothing to get done. They have nothing to fight back with. All of a sudden, we’re on a skirmish in an area that we have all these different factions all against each other. What did we do? We stirred the pot.
I want to ask you, one more straw man argument example that I’m thinking of, and we should maybe find an example or two that’s not piling on the conservative side of our history because it happens all over the place. I want to see if you would agree if it was a straw man argument. It’s back in the second Iraq war and in George W. Bush administration where he gives a speech on the aircraft carrier with this major 100-foot wide banner at the top of the aircraft carrier that says, “Mission accomplished.” I think that was an attempt to blow it up or to minimalize what was going to come after. It seemed to be a premature declaration that mission accomplished, but everyone wanted everyone to feel like, “We’ve done our job. The hard work is over.” Was that a straw man argument?
The argument is not going to be how many millions of dollars need to be spent in order to occupy a foreign country in order to keep it stable. If everybody knew that every $2 is going to be of their income tax or whatever the amount was going to be spent to maintain a sustained base and operations in that country to have a presence there to stabilize it, is the nice way to say, “We’re occupying it in order to do whatever capitalist thing we want to do.” We don’t go to places that won’t bring us any money. We will not go into Rwanda to stop a civil war, no matter the bloodshed because there’s no money there. We won’t do it unless there’s money there.
In this case, calling it mission accomplished was trying to have everybody feel good about what had taken place. To accept it, be on board with it, and not focus on all of the consequences that would come thereafter of the money, the personnel and the number of years we’re going to be there and all the rest of it.
We’re going to go into Iraq because the French were setting up contracts to buy Iraqi oil and buy it from Saddam Hussein and go around American oil interests. In order to keep that from taking place, we were going to invade instead. We have the oil contracts and the French don’t get the oil contracts. We know why they didn’t join us.
It was Saddam Hussein who’s responsible for 9/11. That’s why we went on there.
There’s a good reason why we have a 9/11 thing. We can hijack that and push that over here. Is that really true? No, it was all these Saudi guys. Let’s go after the liberal narratives that are a junkie. Do you know what they say about capitalist, Tom? Capitalists literally worshiped the bottom line and they would sell their own kids if they could. A capitalist person would do that because it was bad.
When you hear about it, especially all the executive compensation at big corporations are on Wall Street. They make it easy to label them and portray them as valuing their own compensation over everything else.
If I don’t offer that talented person, that amount of money, another company is going to offer them. That is capitalism, right there. Talent is going to go to the highest dollar sign that’s there because this person supposedly has a big enough brain or smart enough talent or has done this before. I want that person on board because they can handle this. Let’s get on the other side of it. What do they say about liberals? They’re all secret communists and they’re aiming to destroy morality and personal choice. They don’t respect life all that much. They are wild, they’re risk-takers and they’re not conservative because they’re communists. How did you put those together? There’s a part of our brain that has an agreement because there are certain morality things that one person thinks is okay and another person thinks it’s not okay. Is it okay that somebody is married and divorced three times?
They needed to get married and divorced to discover that this was not the right person. They’re a good person while the first wife wasn’t that good because she was crazy. The second wife was not good because she had this thing. The third one wasn’t good. They’re not even looking at the person that’s marrying and divorcing the person. They’re looking at the other person that’s wrong because he was clearly a good guy. Look how wealthy he is. Why didn’t you stick with him? Why did you submit to it? Why did you had no place else to go? Just divorce him. No, it’s not until that person says, “No.” Who’s going to make the person wrong? Who’s going to make Rudy Giuliani wrong for his choices? He’s on my team. Who’s going to make Donald Trump wrong for his choices? I have plenty of people in my family that have got divorced. You don’t know the problems of what the person is bringing to the table or the limitations that the person is bringing to the table.
I think divorce is a good middle of the road, a nonpartisan example of how people might make strong man arguments about one or the other. You minimalize the one that you’re close to or friends with, that it’s not their fault, and you’re going to inflate the problems to the other spouse who you’re not friends with had. That’s a good way to think about how this can be done and that is not along the political lines.
It will put the liberal mindset and the conservative mindset and all you’ve got to do is polarize those folks. If I’m going to polarize the conservative folks, then I would say, “What about those conservatives?” They’re constantly outrage and tolerant bigots who want nothing more than to oppress minorities. That’s quite a stretch. Oppress minorities is different than, “I’d like people to be self-sufficient and me not paying money because they haven’t figured out how to be self-sufficient.” That’s the conservative mindset. The straw man mindset is going to proportionalize it all the way into oppressing minorities. We’re not talking about how minorities are getting oppressed, how they’re suffering and how they get stuck.
If I’m looking at five resumes and this person has this college on it and this person doesn’t have a college piece on them, I’m taking that guy or that gal. If we’re talking about if I want to polarize, let’s say between scientists and religious people, I’ll carry a straw man around religious people and say, “They’re wide-eyed, superstitious, evangelistic people that are believing in an imaginary friend.” “They’ve got an imaginary friend. Those religious people.” “They prayed to them all the time. You can have one team that prays for them and the other team that prays for them, but whose prayer they’re going to listen to?” “I guess God was with us this time.” Here’s the weird part about it, the religious people get to look at the scientist and say, “Those educated scientists, they look down their nose on us. They don’t believe in God the way we do. They are godless. They’re heathens.” How did I get that far? They’re plotting to suppress God. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re trying to get rid of God as what scientists are doing. Does that make some sense that oppression and tension between the two of them?
Our brain is used to seeing stuff and knowing it's not fully true but believes it could be possible.
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I like how you are showing and helping us understand how playing this straw man card. It is how you can polarize the opposite sides of the brain.
The brain once an easy black and white experience. Feminists want to kill all men. Instead of empowered women would like fairness, skilled women would like fairness. How about that? If Hillary Clinton wants to run on being the first woman to have the skillset to run this show, be a part of history. “I’ve been in this environment, and here’s the skillset that I have.” She was expecting people to know her resume instead of selling your resume, sell it. “That reminds me of the time. Donald Trump, what have you done anything like that?” He would never have anything there. She didn’t sell her resume. Here’s a woman with a resume and here’s a guy that doesn’t have a resume. He had a dressing room. He had a name, the name he made represented something. They bought the belief that he was and who false validated him.
They had a belief that he was a skilled businessman and that’s what the country needed. Did you see how I did the straw man thing there and I belittled what he had said, “He had a dressing room?”
It was very nice. This is a reality star. How does it take to walk into a dressing room? He’s getting makeup and his tan. You could jump on this side and minimalize what a person has done. It’s easy to defeat mentally. It’s like, “Nice perspective, nice perception. I love to proportionalize it.” He had to have high-level discussions with people, but he would nod. It does take skill to get people to do things. It does take skill to language and forcefully fight for things. It does take a very strong skill to sit there and go, “I hear your argument, but it’s not the truth that there are more birds that are killed by electrical wires than there are by wind farms.” There are more birds that are killed by their current status than you’re going to see the dead birds at the bottom of these windmills. It’s like a cemetery for birds. It’s like, “He’s proportionalizing but the truth is all the electrical lines kill more birds.”
As we’ve said in a past episode, if you argue the facts, that is almost never going to be a winning path.
You have to blow up. Would you like us to hear that these wind turbines kill a lot of birds and you care about the birds? Is that correct?
Yes.
You’d like to work on how to protect the birds from flying that way. Is that what you’d like to work on, so we can have the electricity we need?
I don’t want the birds so we can’t have the windmills.
You don’t like windmill so much, is that right?
They’re the problem with the birds.
You really want to protect birds.
That’s right.
Let’s see if we can protect birds and still have the windmills we’d like.
I thought maybe you’re going to flip it on and try to tell me how you’re wanting to solve the problem of electrical wires that we have all over this country too, because they’re killing more birds than anywhere else.
What you’re trying to do is re-proportionalize. You want to stay on their side. You want to reduce their argument to the straw man size that it is. You can’t pivot to the truth until this is so flat and so unarguable. Donald Trump did not want the wind turbines off of his golf course in Scotland. They put all these wind turbines off the course. He came in there and advocated for, they’re terrible, they’re noisy, you’re going to see your economy go down if you used them. All the Europeans go like, “No, we’re not doing it. We’re putting the turbines out there and you can’t stop us.” Golfers are going to have to deal with the turbines and the little bit of noise they make. Most of the time the golfers aren’t on the course because it’s very cold and we’re not going to pick your needs over the needs of our economy. It’s not going that way. He’s been pissed about turbines ever since.
He’s going to come back and his brain literally links to that, “I’m fighting this battle. I’m going to win this turbine battle.” He does have a little bit of Don Quixote fight the windmill. He’s fighting various straw man, a great New Yorker cartoon or something. The straw man character is slumped at the end of it. If you fight with the straw man, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re trying to deflate the narrative that they’re trying to pump up and only stay there so that truth does not get hijacked. Truthful have another window a little bit later to come in to say something along the line and saying, “I’d like to do a research project. Let’s set up some wind farms and see what the real death is so we can validate what you’re saying.”
You’re saying you want to make it seem like when they’re saying a problem, it requires an open-heart surgery to fix and you want to argue that down to the point it’s clear to everybody that it needed a Band-Aid.
Let’s go ahead and put a Band-Aid on this one. The number of birds that die is very small. We took a look at it. The information wasn’t there. It’s the latest straw man that they’ve got. Let’s look at the origins of this investigation to see if it should have been started at the beginning. All the Democrats, whether it’s Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, all of those different people, what they need to do is step into that straw man and say, “Let’s see about the origins. I’m interested in seeing this.
It seems like we did look at some of the origins already. Let’s bring out the origins that we did look at. We did, we spent about a year and those people did get fired because of the thing that you were talking about. I don’t think there’s any cake uranium over there.” It’s a cake uranium shift. There’s some uranium inside the FBI. The damage that’s being done is like, “I’ve got a bunch of boy scouts that I’m picking on and these boy scouts can get pissed.” You may want to take a look at this because if this is where you’re going to play, we’ve been overlooking a lot of things that we could have run up the flagpole. Do you want us to start taking a look at this stuff?
It’s diminishing our belief and our trust in these people. It doesn’t mean that there’s not one, two or three of them that have a fanatical piece to them that there aren’t pushing it too much to the extreme. That’s the same thing about the bigoted hillbilly that wants to own a nuclear weapon, to do the second amendment. You’re looking at a spot that’s not there and we’re not doing that because that’s not worth our time and energy. We have to get back to the problem. We’ve got to get back to the issue. We can’t keep stalling things, whether getting all the tea party people that were in there and advocating, shut down and stall. All that noise that they did because they’re saying, “No, we’re not getting our way and there’s enough of us that makes a difference here.” We voted, we got put in the fringes in here, we’ve gunked it up. All it does is let the good-looking criminals get away with things. If you disable, “That person looks like a good person.” Paul Manafort looks like a great looking guy. Roger Stone is a great good-looking guy. He’s a language person that learns how to pick and come up with a very creative branding or marketing image that a political party can use. That’s what he’s good at.
Isn’t he the guy that has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back?
He is. It’s a little unsettling. The victory guy and how could you hire somebody to break into a thing and do that? This is one of the problems that happens and can happen in government. We expose things, grow things or proportionalize things to a larger extent. As Robert Mueller when he did his speech, “Here are the indictments that we got from this. Here’s the value that we were able to pull out of it. Here is as far as I could go with what my mandates were. Here’s what the truth is. This was the last time I’m going to do this because this is what I need to stand here. I’m very thorough. It’s right there on paper. Read it and do your next step.” It can’t be a criminal piece. It’s got to be a constitution. It’s got to be a political piece.
To me, the scary piece of that entire press conference by Robert Mueller was that the real news out of that was that “America, the Russians have been systematically trying to influence our election and they succeeded.” Every American should be concerned about that. Nobody’s talking about that after the speech. It’s all about impeachment or not. Are they going to do it? Are they not? Donald Trump trying to proportionalize The Mueller Report as nothing case closed. Everybody else said, “There is a there-there.”
All that Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would need to be doing is to stay on point. Robert Mueller has shown us that the Russian systematically done that. What has Donald Trump done since he knew it and what has this narrative been because of it? Whoever stays on that point moves up fifteen points in the pulse.
That’s totally brilliant because the more Donald Trump argues that The Mueller Report was a waste of time, the more he aligns himself with Russia and that got him elected. That’s a narrative.
You’ve got to stay on the narrative that’s going to get you there and proportionalize it because The Mueller Report is a perception of peace. You’ve got to take that and move it to a broader perspective. The Democrats particularly struggle with this detail. Here’s the perception and there’s truth in the perception. How much truth? 70%, 80%, 90% truth systematically, they can use those words and start the narrative of, what has he done about this problem that Mueller discovered? We spent money on this problem. Who’s going to do it? Is it going to be Cory Booker? Is it going to be Kamala Harris? Is it going to be Elizabeth Warren? Is it going to be Bernie Sanders?
Is it going to be Pete Buttigieg?
If Pete Buttigieg was reading this, he would go like, “Smart idea.” He would move it.
Honestly, all of them should do it because it completely would take the other side off of their narrative message in that. All they care about is no collusion, no obstruction. All they care about is that. If the Democrats take the bait and go down the impeachment road, then that may play right into the other side’s hands, too.
Don’t worry about the impeachment piece. Nancy Pelosi needs to move. There’s a timing thing here when strategically it needs to be done, that’s a whole different thing.
The biggest challenge that we have is the perception is hijacked and proportionalized.
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It may end up happening or having to happen.
What this focus is, that how do we take the information we have and make that the issue that they need to respond to? We’ve been spending so much time responding to his tweets that we’re not cultivating a truth narrative around scary honesty that is impactful as his tweets are. When somebody says something that is not honest, that doesn’t meet the need for truth, most people jump into, “It’s a lie.” As soon as you jump into that, they get to say, “No, it’s not.” The reason why “no, it’s not,” is because they’ve hijacked the sequence already, Tom. They’ve already set the perception down. They’ve adjusted the perspective. They proportionalized it.
They gave a reward, “You’re on my team and it’d be great to be on my team.” That’s the anticipation but those Democrats. You’re fighting the battle and you are inflaming them, but their belief is that they are not going to go over the line. You guys have partly went over the line to mobilize all kinds of different people on the other side. Do you think your crazy people are going to outnumber the passionate people that sit on the liberal side of the fence? Try to rob a woman of choice, as if that works in a marriage, as if that works in the country. That’s suppressing women. We have done that. It’s like, “What are you going to do? Take away their right to vote?” Notice that I’m straw-manning it. I literally moved it.
You inflated this choice issue to be about losing your vote.
You want to lose your ability to make choice and lose your vote between you and your doctor and your body. Any politician could take what I have said and move in a place that gets people’s perception to say, “This is where the value is.” The value is that the government is robbing somebody of choice. That’s robbing somebody of their vote. The perception has changed. The perspective has changed. I’m not saying straw men are bad. I’m saying, they help us and they can be used to hijack us. That’s what the Russians have done. They’ve created all these different straw men through social media. We’re saying, “The straw man can be used for positive and negative?”
That’s so eliminating. You have to promise me and all of our readers that when you make it to the big leagues and these politicians hire you to get them on the messages, you’re still going to do this show because this is fascinating. I’m enjoying it.
With a lot of joy, this has been fun, Tom. More to come, I’m looking for the next one. What we’ll do is we’ll take out for a spin. Maybe we’ll take a look at how confirmation bias or this straw man can get hijacked to confirm what this fallacy is and reinforce that. We can take a look at what that would look like and we would be linking these two things together. The straw man and then the confirmation bias talks about how the beliefs get reinforced and get entrenched. That’s where the identity politics come in. We’ve got a lot of work to do there.
I look forward to it. Thank you so much, Bill.
Thanks, Tom.
