$50 Million to Buy Condoms for Hamas: How to Craft Sensational Political Lies
Learn from President Trump how to create more exciting political disinformation
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is such a refreshing change from the previous administration that almost never produced any exciting political disinformation, instead resorting to the usual boring political spin and low-key misrepresentation. Now there is finally again someone in office who really knows how to captivate the public with sensational political lies.
Donald Trump also shows one indispensable use of sensational lies - delegitimizing and destroying institutions you don’t like.
Let’s say you want to destroy a 50-billion-dollar agency responsible for managing foreign aid and development. There can be several reasons why you’d want to destroy it.
One reason could be that you don’t like that institution’s radical agenda, such as preventing HIV, building schools and hospitals, reducing pollution, or protecting indigenous people’s lands. Or maybe you want to get your hands on its funding so you could put it to better use, such as creating a sovereign wealth fund which would invest in good people, like friendly oligarchs and their various ventures for which they can’t find enough suckers on their own and they therefore would appreciate some infusion of taxpayer money. Or maybe that agency simply ran afoul of your chief broligarch by investigating one of his companies abroad.
In any case, there are two basic ways you could go about attacking such an institution. You could try to come up with a factual case demonstrating all the ways how it has engaged in wasteful spending and in other ways acted inappropriately. Or you can save yourself a lot of time and instead simply come up with one sensational political lie that brilliantly vilifies that institution. Here is how nicely Donald Trump used this approach last week to cast aspersions on USAID [5 min. 30]:
We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse. In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. 50 million. And do you know what's happened to them? They've used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?
Yes, how about that?! You can really appreciate the great skill that this great man and his people demonstrate in producing sensational political disinformation.
Whatever institution you want to delegitimize, you can use the same approach. First, you obviously want to tie it to something nefarious. Muslim terrorists are always a great start.
It would be even better if you could come up with something of sexual nature to tie that institution to the Muslim terrorists. You might find, for example, that the institution funds family planning services, including contraception, in places renowned for their Islamic terrorists. Obviously then you’d want to claim that the institution is supplying condoms to terrorists.
The important thing is not to tie yourself down to objective, demonstrable facts. And also try to pull some bigly number out of thin air to make your claim even more dazzling — tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is a good number.
The great thing of creating such sensational alternative facts is that they produce an emotional response that persists even if fact-checkers extensively debunk such alternative facts.
For example, after Trump revealed that USAID tried to send $50 million to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas, fact-checkers were showing that no US government funding was used to buy condoms or provide family-planning services more generally in Gaza. And furthermore according to the fact-checkers, for $50 million USAID would buy one billion condoms. One billion condoms sounds a little excessive, even for very virile terrorists, but of course if you’re a terrorist who makes bombs out of condoms, as Donald Trump revealed, then you will be grateful for such a generous supply of raw material for making bombs.
Yet, even if people believed fact-checkers, such sensational lies would still often produce certain psychological effects favorable to their creator. Most importantly, they create negative emotional feelings that often persist even if the information that initially led to those negative feelings is later shown to be false. (In psychology, this phenomenon is known as affective perseverance.)
And that’s the whole point of spreading outrageous political disinformation such as that — not to convince of particular facts but to create negative feelings towards some target.
So, even if people believe the fact-checkers that USAID didn’t try to buy condoms for Hamas for $50 million, people will still have negative feelings towards USAID. And then they won’t mind very much when that institution is destroyed and replaced with something more tremendous.