I used to have an incapacitating stutter and disagree with Heather Cox Richardson that the Gish gallop is especially effective against stutterers. Stutterers aren’t more vulnerable.
This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them.
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has.
Let me explain. Stress or tension or being attacked doesn’t necessarily make stuttering worse. It may have no effect. It might actually lessen it. A speech therapist who had worked with stutterers for thirty years said, more than anything, a stutterer needs to be sure, they need to be confident. Being attacked or gaslit in a debate doesn’t automatically mean you’ll stutter more. You might already have your counterattack ready and be sure of yourself.
Back in my hippie days when I routinely carried drugs, I, at least once, talk myself out of being arrested. It was tense. Lemme tell you, I was eloquent, completely fluent – and quite confident I did not want to be arrested!
Like Biden, my stuttering is minor and manageable now. I’m a tax pro and at the end of tax season my stuttering gets a little worse because of the stress and pressure. Nonstutterers have other ways of showing stress.
There are multiple causes of stuttering including physical differences in the speech centers of the brain. We’ve just learned to route around it. Being attacked with a Gish gallop will not always make it worse.
…the two studies taken together demonstrate two critical points: A neuro-anatomic abnormality exists in the brains of people who stutter, yet they can learn to speak fluently in spite of it.
Finally, stuttering means nothing about what you are saying or your reasoning processes. It just that the circuitry gets scrambled sometimes!