There is a small genre of data-visualization writing whose whole purpose is to give readers vocabulary for the moves bad-faith presenters make. Nathan Yau’s “Defense Against Dishonest Charts” is a must-read. It is interactive, taxonomic, and names its villains: the Damper, the Cherrypicker, the Base Stealer, the Storyteller. Read it once and you start seeing the moves everywhere.

Then watch Hank Green take apart a Reason video that argues climate change is real but not worth doing anything about. Green opens with the diagnosis:

This video is a master class in like very subtle manipulations. A lot of a lot of the internet is really brute force here. But this video is like just appears to be a calm, collected guy helping you understand the world better. […] But if you look closely, if you follow this closely, you see the subtle manipulations in a way that makes it so clear that this is bad faith and that he is making an argument, not because he believes it, but because he has an agenda.

For Green, calmness is the manipulation. Yau is mostly cataloguing chart geometry: axes truncated, scales squeezed, slices reordered. Green is cataloguing the verbal layer that wraps around the geometry. A steady tone primes you to trust a graph that’s doing the lying. He spends a long beat on how the Reason presenter introduces his experts:

We have Michael Mann who is a climate activist. And then we have Steven [Koonin] who is a theoretical physicist. […] Like you could say former oil industry executive Steven [Koonin]. You could say lead climate contrarian Steven [Koonin]. Like you could call Steven [Koonin] a lot of things and theoretical physicist is certainly one of those things, but you’ve picked which one you’re going to call him whereas you’ve picked what you’re going to call Michael Mann. Honestly, if you didn’t do these little things, I would believe that you believe your BS. But you do these little things and it makes it very clear that you don’t believe your BS. You’re trying to manipulate me.

Same person, two truthful titles, picked to do opposite work on the viewer’s belief. Yau’s taxonomy doesn’t cover that one. The dishonesty lives in the labels around the chart, in the small choices nobody flags because each one, on its own, is technically true. Same kind of move as a Cherrypicker, though, in a different layer of the presentation. The ratio-graph segment is closer to Yau’s home turf:

How would you correct for that? Well, you just take a ratio every year and see how that changes year-over-year. Oh my god, what an elegant solution. But apparently the only reason you could possibly do that is cuz you wanted to SHOW A SCARY GRAPH. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, GUY? HAVE YOU NEVER BEEN AROUND A GRAPH?

The dishonest move there is the inversion: a valid statistical adjustment, presented to the audience as proof of motive. The graph is fine. The taxonomy of the attack on the graph is what’s missing.

Read Yau first, then watch Green. You will have names for almost every trick the Reason presenter pulls, and a clearer view of the ones the field still needs to name.