Sam Seder and the Propagandist Nitpickers
The Art of Getting People to Believe Lies Without Lying
I don’t normally expose myself to Sam Seder willingly. The man has never had anything meaningful to say. Also I don’t like his face. Something about it ignites the urge to punch him, and I can’t do that without damaging my computer screen.
However, Sam has been making the rounds again recently due to a “debate” he had with a bunch of young members of the “MAGA right” and I wanted to do a brief writeup about it, because it’s an excellent guide to a form of propaganda that I see a little from the right but that is primarily deployed by the left currently. I call this technique, “propagandist nitpicking.”
It usually starts with the propagandist selecting his opponents who will represent the “wrong” side of the issue. Amateurs may debate organically, but if the propagandist is a professional, he or she will exercise control over debate field and gatekeep who is allowed in. The goal is to get people who broadly represent the stance of their opposition, but who aren’t well-informed on specifics, aren’t skilled at reframing topics when their opponent frames them in an uncharitable way, and/or aren’t particularly good at reorienting their thoughts quickly, an essential skill to performing well in a hostile debate.
The people Sam had on his show for this “debate” were overwhelmingly hipster looking 20-something guys in this mold. There have been many of these “We debate MAGA” circus shows in mainstream left wing media, and it always involves a selection of random people who are either young adults or old redneck boomers, and never anyone in a notable position.
Despite Sam stacking the deck like this, he showed off his mental mediocrity by floundering several times during these speed debates with his 20 hand-picked opposition members. At one point Sam got kicked around on the subject of Christian nationalism (and morality in general) with similar debate bro tactics to the kind Sam himself likes to employ. At another, a spicy blonde nationalist was able to expose just how lacking substance he is when he gave up even attempting to debate her on assimilation and the culture of America and was reduced to falling back on an appeal to his audience’s fear.
However, I’m not here to write about the parts of this debate where Sam was weak, but about the parts where he was “strong.” Where he was operating in his comfort zone. Specifically, when Sam debated a young man about DEI. The young man erroneously claimed that government agencies have been getting ‘tax cuts’ for pursuing DEI measures. This is, of course, not how it works, and Sam was eager to jump on it. Government agencies, he informed his young adversary, don’t pay taxes. Therefore, how could they get a tax cut for promoting DEI? *Cue Sam doing one of his put-upon camera mugging faces.*
Of course the specific example the young man made and Sam deboonked is really a stand-in for a much larger issue: discrimination against whites, men, and straight people in employment and benefits programs via the diversity industrial complex, which is enforced by a sprawling system that includes both federal agencies and private venture capitalists. One actual example is the overt efforts to recruit more black people into air traffic controlling during the Obama presidency via methods like disseminating a secret letter to black applicants telling them to put science as their worst subject in school, which functioned as a secret code to put their applications at the top of the pile, thus bipassing the normal race-blind methods of selection. Steve Sailer was very early onto reporting on this, but eventually the federal government lost a discrimination lawsuit over it. The press buried this story, but even centrist Kamala-supporter and occasional TDS-sufferer Tracing Woodgrains reported on it on his own popular substack.
Of course Sam doesn’t talk about examples like this during his debate, or really go into the broader argument at all. He simply debunks the claim that government agents were getting tax breaks via DEI, leaving his audience with the impression that any claims of discrimination by Trump supporters are false, which is his desired outcome.
This is propagandist nitpicking. Debunk a specific point, usually a cherry-picked bad argument, and use it as a stand-in for the broader issue, then treat the whole issue as “debunked.”
But what happens when the person the nitpicker is arguing against is actually well informed enough to counter the nitpicker and call them out? A very high profile example of this happened during the 2024 vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, although it would be more accurate to call it a debate between Vance and the moderators, with Walz being a non-entity and occasional embarrassment to his own side.
Vance was making a statement about illegal immigration and the controversial transplanting of 20,000 Haitian refugees to Springfield when the moderator “debunked” him by saying that the Haitians all came legally. This might seem like a valid point, but Vance set the record straight that due to the refugee loophole in our immigration system and the oversight of the Biden administration, Haitian legal immigration involved pushing a button on an app. There was no vetting to speak of, or any other part of the selection process normally associated with legal immigration. The only difference between these Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants is that the Biden administration had opted to grant them quick legal status with no input from the public. Considering Vance’s point was about the dangers of unvetted immigrants, the moderator’s “fact check” was propagandist nitpicking.
So how did the left wing disinformation ecosystem respond? With a Saturday Night Live sketch about the debate, in which they turned Vance’s “No fact checking!” into a catch phrase while not including anything resembling his rebuttal to the moderator (which the moderator had the gall to object to during the debate, claiming they “needed to move on,” the exact sort of hit-and-run tactic which was why Vance condemned their “fact checking”). The SNL sketch depicts Walz as a bumbling buffoon and Vance as a liar, striking a fraudulent ‘bipartisan’ tone while leaving millions of Americans who didn’t see that part of the debate (or were just too dumb to understand it) with a false impression of what happened.
So that about sums it up. I just wanted to raise awareness of propagandist nitpicking, since it’s such a common tactic. To simplify:
This technique works better the dumber a person watching a debate is, because past a certain point, people don’t actually understand the substance of what’s being said, and arguments simply become a points scoring game, with every correction equalling 1 point in the maker’s favor, regardless of how important it actually is to the political issue being discussed. Therefore someone can "win” a debate in the mind of the average nimrod by making a lot of minor technical corrections to their opponent, even if their overall stance is batshit insane. “It wasn’t a third, it was only 30%!”
Michael Malice described this tactic as the press using true facts to manipulate people into believing lies. This technique is so popular in the press because slander and libel laws exist, and leading the public to believe falsehoods without actually stating them protects from lawsuits. This is often used in tandem with the press’s other favorite disinformation technique, lying by omission, for the same reasons.
Hunter S. Thompson also described how this works:
Another example is how members of the press corp misled many people into believe that Kyle Rittenhouse had shot black people.
Such is life under the current left wing media Pravda ecosystem, which I’m not sure how we’ll ever extricate ourselves from in our lifetimes without a lot of nooses and guillotines.
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Goodbye for now.
I believe Lutherans (if not Martin himself) call this lying by misdirection.