Accused in 1952 of misusing 18,000 dollars in campaign funds, Richard Nixon went on national television and spent much of his time defending his right to keep a cocker spaniel named Checkers, a gift nobody had criticized. This episode uses that speech to dissect the straw man fallacy: refuting a different, weaker argument than the one on the table while pretending no switch occurred. The hosts break down the mechanics of proposition X versus proposition Y, the cognitive laziness that makes the trick work, a 1977 prosecutor telling appellate judges they might as well open the bank doors, and a 2001 Louisiana resolution that attacked a fictional version of Charles Darwin.

The episode then maps the modern mutations named by rhetorical scholars: the weak man that defeats the flimsiest piece of a position, the hollow man that argues against a gh ...