Lyndon Johnson was in a close political race in Texas, so he instructed his campaign manager to circulate "a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows."
His campaign manager objected, saying that no one would be believe it, but LBJ replied "let's make that sonofab***h deny it", as his opponent's engagement with the rumor would make them look bad and only fan the flames higher.
History of Lies, Rumors, and Propaganda:
Throughout history, rumors and propaganda have been employed for political advantage.
If you consult the Wikipedia “Atrocity Propaganda” page you will see that people often need to be told lies to justify their support of politicians, policies, and wars.
“In the middle ages, there were rumors that Jews “ kidnapp[ed] and murder[ed] Christian children to consume their blood during Passover. [This] became known as blood libel.”[14]. (Wikipedia)
Simon of Trent depicted as being killed and tortured by Jews. Ink drawing by LB Thompson, Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0
Blood libel leads to listeners justificating persecution and atrocities against the libeled.
How does one justify the creation of ill-intentioned rumors?
Wood engraving depicting Governor Endicott (l. c. 1600-1665 CE) landing on Block Island, by Alfred R. Waud and A. V. S. Anthony, 1876-1881 CE. New York Public LibraryCC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In 1782, Benjamin Franklin wrote and published an article purporting to reveal a letter between a British agent and the governor of Canada, listing atrocities supposedly perpetrated by Native American allies of Britain against colonists, including detailed accounts of the scalping of women and children. The account was a fabrication, published in the expectation that it would be reprinted by British newspapers and therefore sway British public opinion in favor of peace with the United States.[16]
4) World War I: Widespread propaganda creates
distrust and cynicism
A cartoon from the 25 July 1915 edition of Life, depicting a German soldier parading with children impaled on his bayone, by MB Walker(?) Public domain
In World War I, Atrocity propaganda was widespread with the British being the worst offender.
One such story was that German soldiers were deliberately mutilating Belgian babies by cutting off their hands, in some versions even eating them ..
Other reports circulated of Belgian women, often nuns, who had their breasts cut off by the Germans.[24] A story about German corpse factories, where bodies of German soldiers were supposedly turned into glycerine for weapons, or food for hogs and poultry, was published in aTimes article on April 17, 1917.[25] In the postwar years, investigations in Britain and France revealed that these stories were false.[21]
Concentration Camp Victims, 1945 National Archives(HD-SN-99-02762 DOD/NARA) Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose in concentration camp in Ebensee, Austria. The camp was reputedly used for "scientific" experiments. It was liberated by the 80th Division. May 7, 1945. Lt. A. E. Samuelson. (Army)
During World War II, atrocity propaganda was less used because it had been discredited in the prior world war. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t real atrocities to be reported:
[T]he Germans often claimed that largely accurate descriptions of German atrocities were just "atrocity propaganda" and a few Western leaders were thus hesitant to believe early reports of Nazi atrocities, especially the existence of concentration camps, death camps and the many massacres perpetrated by German troops and SS Einsatzgruppen during the war (Wikipedia)
The danger of false rumors is that they suppress or overwhelm the public’s immune system against real threats. We do so at all our peril.
Lyndon Johnson used this incident to get a Congressional Resolution authorizing the Vietnam War, even though, according to CIA Analyst Ray McGovern:
“President Lyndon Johnson,
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy,
.. allknew full well that the evidence of any armed attack on the evening of Aug. 4, 1964, the so-called 'second' Tonkin Gulf incident, was highly dubious” (Consortium News)
Deaths: 2 million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Viet Cong fighters, 200-200,000 South Vietnam soldiers, 58,300 US military, 4,000 South Korea, 350 Thailand, 500 Australia, 3 dozen New Zealand (Britannica)
Watch on YouTube: Kuwaiti 15-year old lies about “Baby incubators”, 60 minutes, January 19, 1992
Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. On October 10, 1990, a young Kuwaiti girl known only as "Nayirah" appeared in front of a congressional committee and testified that she witnessed the mass murdering of infants, when Iraqi soldiers had snatched them out of hospital incubators and threw them on the floor to die. Her testimony became a lead item in newspapers, radio and TV all over the US. The story was eventually exposed as a fabrication in December 1992, in a CBC-TV program calledTo Sell a War. Nayirah was revealed to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, and had not actually seen the "atrocities" she described take place; the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which had been hired by the Kuwaiti government to devise a PR campaign to increase American public support for a war against Iraq, had heavily promoted her testimony.[39]
Awareness of the disastrous and false Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction allegations is familiar to anyone who was alive at the time. Less remembered is the rumor of Iraq’s lurid technique of murder by wood chipper:
Last December, when public support for Israel’s response to October 7 was falling, the New York Times published a storyalleging that Hamas engaged in mass rape as a systematic weapon of war. Over 50 Journalism professors have called for an external review of the NYTimes article. (Washington Post)
After the Times published the story, relatives of Gal Abdush, the featured woman alleged to have been raped, denied the Times story. Subsequent video footage of two teenage sisters alleged as rape victims also contradicted the original NYTimes story. (more).
The Times Story, along with rumors of beheaded babies went viral, leading to President Joe Biden falsely claiming that he had personally seen pictures of beheaded babies.
Vice President Kamala Harris has repeated the Oct 7 mass rapes accusation, even incorporated the Oct 7 mass rape talking point into her political act
On July 15, shortly after Donald Trump announced JD Vance would be joining the ticket, user @rickrudescalves posted a joke on X: "can't say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181)."
Red couch in Georgetown University music department, Picurl
The creator of the rumor said he “was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s anecdote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 about former President Lyndon Johnson starting a rumor that his opponent had sex with his livestock.” (Business Insider)
“Some still speculated that perhaps the AP’s commitment to fact-checking is such that, despite the fact that Vance didn’t write about it in Hillbilly Elegy, there’s no definitive proof he didn’t try to have sex with a couch.” (Vox)
The result of such unconfirmed stories may seem justified because they bring needed attention to the problems of large-scale immigration, but the fallout of such stories can lead to riots, and foster enmity, distrust,and even more dysfunctional politics. | Proverbs 6:16-19
The danger of rumors like these is that they allow a bad-faith actor to bog an opponent down in a quagmire, at best ridicule, and at worst, blood libel. People may be incited to violence or become jaded spectators who disbelieve everything they hear, unable to listen to their political opponents who they perceive to be the caricatures their opponents created.
When people “cried wolf” in World War I, it motivated the war effort but ~25 years later false allegations gave the Germans the ability to dismiss real reports of “death camps” as previously discredited cases of “crying wolf”.
Given that so many wars start with lies, what would happen if the truth was widely known?
