It’s easy to find people (especially on Twitter) who seem to be paid to just sit around and pretend to know what they’re talking about. Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Ken Ham… the list goes on and on.
I used to find this very frustrating, especially since so many of these liars are actively hurting people in the name of my religion, and since I’ve seen so many people I care about get drawn into their web.
But perhaps, I’ve realized, I should just give up and embrace nihilism, become a grifter, and (hopefully) make a whole lot of money selling out every principle I’ve ever had.
In this article, I’ll show you how to do this step-by-step, learning from a true artist of the form: Matt Walsh and his brilliant climate-change-denying article “Climate Change Deniers are Completely Insane”.
(If you’re a Christian, you may come across bible verses depicting violent divine judgment against people doing exactly the sort of thing we’re about to do. It’s probably safe to ignore those.)
Table of Contents:
Pick your topic
Draw them in
Lie with the Truth
Appeal to “Common Sense”
Accuse Everybody Else of Lying
Stay Confident
Step One: Pick your topic
This is important: you aren’t going to get famous sitting around and making up nonsense about fifteenth-century art. If you want to make money, you need to find something more profitable.
Ideally, you want to maximize revenue by ensuring you always have multiple streams of income. To make sure you’re making the most of your grift, you can use the easy-to-remember acronym BAD: you want to monetize believers, angry people, and donations.
To attract believers, your topic needs to be hard to independently fact-check. Climate change and evolution are great for this — after all, who in your audience is going to read the thousands of scientific papers that establish these as some of the most certain facts in human history?
As long as clicks make you money, you also want to attract angry people.
This means you want a topic where the people who disagree with you are angry enough to share your work in their circles. The best way to do this is to make sure your position is actively evil: you want to position yourself as closely as possible to the side of nazis, of climate change, of being in favor of a global pandemic as you can without losing your believers. Remember: hate clicks get you just as much money as love clicks.
Finally, if your position aligns with that of wealthy and powerful people, you can collect donations directly. Turning Point USA makes millions from (semi-)anonymous donors to lie to college students, while Tucker Carlson’s show at one point made 40% of its ad money from the MyPillow guy alone.
As long as your nonsense can benefit the rich and powerful, you might be able to find someone willing to pay you directly for it. If you’re a climate change denier, try to get oil company funding. If you’re xenophobic, find a racist millionaire to pay you. The more you can diversify your income stream, the more money you can rake in.
If you’re having trouble picking a topic, consider some hot ones right now:
Critical Race Theory
COVID-19 and the vaccines
The biology of sex and/or gender
The security of the 2020 election
No worries if you don’t know anything about your topic. For the rest of the article, I’ll show you how you can write post after post without accidentally amassing any actual knowledge.
Step Two: Draw them in
A classic rookie mistake is to start your article by saying exactly what you mean. For instance, you might open your COVID-19 post with “I’m willing to let people die rather than wear a mask” or your anti-minimum wage take with “I don’t understand economics”.
But this misses a huge opportunity to attract both believers and hate clicks. Let’s see how Walsh does it:
Walsh opens by pushing back on his opponent’s charge that he is a “climate denier” by pointing out that:
Actually, he isn’t a “climate” denier because he believes there is, in fact, a climate.
He isn’t even a “climate change” denier, because he believes the climate can change over time. He just doesn’t think there’s evidence that humans are involved.
This tedious pedantry spans four paragraphs of the article including multiple dictionary definitions.
But before you roll your eyes and call Walsh a hack, look at what he’s accomplished. Any reader familiar with climate science will find themselves instantly frustrated by the sheer bad faith of Walsh pretending not to understand the phrase “climate denier”, and perhaps send copies of the article to their friends with comments like “can you believe this guy?” and “this is the worst piece of garbage I have ever read.”
To somebody inclined to agree with him, or simply not that scientifically informed, however, Walsh is setting up his persona as “a reasonable guy getting attacked for no reason.” Look how emotional the message Walsh received was, and watch how carefully and logically he’s proving these accusations to be false!
If one side has angry vitriol, and the other side has dictionary definitions, who comes across as more educated on this issues? (If you’re still worried about this opening, you can throw in a “facts don’t care about your feelings” to make sure your audience makes the right connections.)
To really double down, you should pick your “calm rational language” to contain as much emotionally charged nonsense as possible. Look closely at Walsh’s language: basic science is described as “environmental dogma”, adjectives like “left wing” and “liberal” are everywhere, and Walsh even manages to describe someone who isn’t himself as “reflexively disingenuous about everything.”
Lean into this. Manipulate your audience’s emotions while making clear that you are above emotional manipulation.
Don’t say “I am a grown man throwing a temper tantrum about wearing a mask”. Instead, say “They’re trying to muzzle our children like dogs!”
Don’t say “I disagree with basic observable facts because they don’t match the way I feel.” Say “This is the very definition of an unscientific attitude. It's religious zealotry. Nothing more, nothing less”
And definitely don’t say “I don’t like the restrictions the government placed last year in an attempt to stop the COVID spread in religious settings” when you can say “liberals would rather have your children go to strip clubs than church!”
Here are some example lies. Try to use some of these tricks to prime the audience yourself, and then click on the footnote to see sample answers!
The earth is flat1
Smoking cigarettes is totally fine and doesn’t cause cancer2
The United States has primarily been a force for good in the world, particularly in Latin America.3
Step Three: Lie with the Truth
This one is really fun, because it gives you the chance to exercise your creativity.
The world is extremely messy. While the broad strokes of things can be figured out with effort and careful analysis, there’s always a little bit of randomness to make things confusing.
If you’re writing in bad faith, you can use this to your advantage. For example, here’s a graph of the amount of summer Arctic sea ice over time:
If you honestly care about the truth, you might notice the clear downward trend and worry that maybe something is happening.
But if you’re a grifter, you should pay attention to how much this graph gives you. Yes, the trend is down. But look how many times it goes up! You can write articles with claims like “liberals pretend arctic sea ice is retreating, but they don’t want to tell you the amount of ice actually increased in 2003, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2013, and 2014.”
If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. Here’s Walsh:
If you can recall the year 2007, way back in the distant past, you might remember when Al Gore received a Nobel Peace prize for narrating a science fiction documentary and mentioned in his acceptance speech that the North Polar ice cap would completely melt by the year 2013. But then the year 2013 rolled around, and the Arctic had actually increased in mass by about 60 percent. Man, that's embarrassing.
(Notice the use of the emotionally-charged-but-nonsensical phrase “science fiction documentary” to describe what is of course a genuine scientific documentary. If you’re not familiar with science, Walsh is priming you to distrust Gore. And if you are, Walsh is just trying to piss you off. Win-win!)
Here’s one you can try yourself. Below is a graph of global temperatures from 1970 through 2015, relative to a long-term average baseline. See if you can extract a “fact” from this graph you can use to pretend the earth isn’t getting warmer. When you’re done, click the footnote at the end of this sentence to compare your answer with Walsh’s!4
Once you’ve mastered this technique, you’ll be able to use it in all sorts of situations. For example, you might use a study that classifies “lung failure after getting COVID” as a comorbidity to say that “94% of COVID deaths are in people with pre-existing conditions.” Or you might respond to concerns about school transmission of COVID by saying that “COVID has a low death rate in children”. Any fact, however devoid of context or relevance, will make you look like you’ve done your research and make your opponents look like hysterical liberals.
And remember: you only have to do this once. If you say it convincingly enough, people who don’t realize what you’ve done will write their own articles, citing this as a fact, and unwittingly join your nihilistic death cult!
(If anybody tries to expose you as the lying liar you are by giving the facts more context, you can always accuse them of “shifting the goal posts.”)
Step Four: Appeal to “Common Sense”
As a graduate student whose main job is to do research, I can confirm that the world is extremely complicated and really figuring out what’s true and false is really hard and a lot of work.
Worse, the answers usually aren’t obvious. Stars aren’t just tiny lights in the sky — they’re actually far bigger than anything you could possibly imagine and also much further aware than you could possibly dream. You can’t ask for an particle’s exact momentum and position at the same time — in a very real sense, it doesn’t even have a specific momentum and position at the same time. Time literally slows down if you go really fast.
These are all hard-won, rigorously proven results that we know (or at least, we know the math that my words are approximating) with more certainty than almost anything else humans have ever known.
But none of this matters. Because to understand why these results are true, to understand in detail how we know them and how we’ve ruled out all the possible ways they might be false, takes literally years of hard work.
And luckily for you as a grifter, while a scientist might be able to tell your mark what they know and how certain they are of it, expressing their level of certainty does nothing to pass along the expertise this certainty is grounded on.
For example, any biologist will tell you that evolution is a fact. There’ve been laboratory experiments, computer simulations, multiple lines of independent evidence, and literally hundreds of thousands of studies all showing, beyond any reasonable doubt, that humans and every other known form of life evolved from simple organisms.
But to convey why I’m so certain would require me to show you all the experiments, all the basic statistics, all the papers I’ve read, and to carefully explain why each of the creationist objections betrays the speaker’s lack of knowledge more than any “flaw” in evolutionary theory. It would take months and years of careful work on both of our parts, and if you don’t particularly care about evolution there is no good reason for you to go through this effort.
So in practice, what we end up with is a genuine expert saying “look, this is just a fact” and somebody playing dress-up as as scientist saying “no, there’s a controversy” and “use your common sense, how could a monkey turn into a person?”
You can use this to move an argument you’re losing into he-said, she-said territory.
(Trust me, your opponents will hate this. Get those anger clicks.)
You can do this with basically any field. If a critical race theorist brings up any of the literally overwhelming evidence of subconscious and system racism, don’t respond to the evidence at all — this will just expose how weak your position is. Instead, just say something like “come on, I’m not racist” or “what you’re saying is racist”.
Here are some “common sense” lies you can use. Each of them is false, but will require too much effort for your audience to familiarize themselves with the actual research:
Biological sex is binary
Immigration always hurts the poorest workers
Benford’s law proves that there was fraud in the 2020 election.
The less your marks can familiarize themselves with the actual evidence, the more they focus on trusting you personally. And we’re about to see how to hack into the trust system.
Step Five: Accuse Everybody Else of Lying
One of the boldest moments of the 2020 debate cycle was Mike Pence’s repurposing of the classic “you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts” line.
If you’re still stuck in a mindset of approaching conversations in good faith, you might be somewhat confused — a ridiculous fraction of what Mike Pence said during the debate was demonstrably false, and so you might expect him to attempt to draw the conversation away from the veracity of either candidate’s statements.
But you’d be missing one of the most wildly successful discoveries in modern professional grifting.
See, if I were to say “biologically, there are only two sexes” an actual biologist could come in and tell me about the actual science of sex and/or gender and expose me as having no idea what I was talking about.
But if I were to reply by saying she had no idea what she was talking about — well, now who are you going to trust? Now it’s just a he-said she-said situation, and the people I’ve primed not to trust “scientists” or “elites” or “liberals” are going to take my side (while the people with actual expertise get even angrier, proving that my facts have defeated their feelings.)
You see, a while ago scientists realized that the term “global warming” was being misinterpreted — global warming leads to extreme weather of various sorts, including storms like hurricanes that aren’t typically thought of as “warm”. So, reasonably, they switched to the term “climate change”, which avoids this kind of misunderstanding.
Walsh, cleverly, rephrases this as “a marketing trick”:
What happened next? Well, the same thing that always happens. Progressives repackaged, rebranded, renamed, and came up with a few new marketing tricks. Suddenly, global warming became climate change, and man made climate change is as undeniable as man made global warming, even though global warming didn't exist.
This not only creates an aura of suspicion around a completely normal event, but also obscures the role Walsh and others like him played in forcing this change via misinformation.
If you’re looking for inspiration, people use this trick all the time. Remember when the 1619 Project was revealed to have a handful of factual errors and people who insist the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery called the whole thing “historical revisionism?” Or when President Trump tried to cover up his mishandling of COVID-19 by convincing his followers that the pandemic was somehow fake? Or the treatment we give every woman who comes forwards with a story of sexual assault?
If you want to spice things up a bit, you can “catch your opponents in a contradiction.” The easiest way to do this is to take two things that don’t contradict one another, and simply assert that they do.
For example, remember when Democrats were unhappy with the results of the 2016 election? And how some of them accurately pointed out that voter suppression and the electoral college played undemocratic roles in the way that turned out?
And do you remember, four years later, how many of those Democrats called out Donald Trump for straight-up lying about the results of a federal election (and then later staging a failed coup?)
If you frame this as “Democrats complain about how election went in 2016 and then hypocritically try to silence Republicans doing the same in 2020” — well, you’ve got yourself an article, and you can put out hot take after hot take without having to say anything at all.
If you want to dig a little bit deeper, you can of course find two people who disagree and say their disagreement is “a contradiction”.
But maybe you don’t want to put in this much effort. That’s fine, just pick two things you don’t understand very well, and just assert that they contradict one another. Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics? The Discovery Institute will tell you they’re contradictory. Feminism and the idea that gender isn’t binary? I’ve heard more than one sermon on how of course you can’t have both.
If you’re Matt Walsh, you can just pretend to be flummoxed by the idea that a theory might predict an increase in both heat waves and (in the short run) winter storms, because the major prediction of the climate change is that extreme weather events become more extreme.
To be fair, “flummoxed” isn’t quite the right vibe. If you sound confused, then perhaps a well-meaning expert might mistake you for a person who actually cares about truth and ethics and might help you to understand what you’ve missed. You wouldn’t want your followers to hear that, so you need an argument so extreme that nobody with expertise could mistake your position for a good-faith one:
They came up with a theory that can be validated by any turn of events, which means it can't be validated by any turn of events. They've formulated not that one plus one equals two, or even that one plus one equals four, but that one plus one equals infinity.
Want to see something funny? Here's a National Geographic headline from September of 2014:Human-Caused Climate Change Worsened Heat Waves in 2013
Now, here's one from yesterday:
Blizzard of Nor'Easters No Surprise, Thanks to Climate Change
One theory, two opposite results, both proof of the theory. Does that make sense, JM? Can you, at a minimum, understand why some of us look at that and think "hmmmm"?
The more dismissive you sound, the more your followers will believe you and the angrier your opponents will become. Win-win!
Step Six: Stay Confident
Here’s the last key: as long as you sound confident, you can get away with just straight-up lying about things.
For example, here’s a graph of atmospheric CO2 levels over time:
You can’t really get away with “lying with the truth” here — the graph is too stark, and the spike caused by is both nearly vertical and entirely unlike anything that’s been seen over the past eight hundred thousand years.
But that’s no matter. As long as you come across as calm, collected, and “the only person in the argument interested in facts”, you can just straight-up lie with no consequences:
We can also know that our CO2 emmissions [sic] are dwarfed by the immense amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by natural (and evil, likely Republican) sources like oceans and vegetation.
Now that’s just common sense.
So there you have it: all the knowledge you need to get out there and wreak havoc! Best of luck grifting, and best of luck facing the God of Truth on Judgement Day!
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Sample Answer: People are out here talking about how “the science is settled” that “the earth is round”. That’s a straw man. They’re literally attacking a straw man and they think you’re too dumb to notice. Look, everybody agrees that the earth is round, nobody’s disputing this — the real question is “is the world round like a flat disk, or round like a sphere?” And when you ask people that, they don’t know how to answer you. They’ve pinholed you as an idiot who thinks the earth is a square, and when they realize you’ve done your research they don’t know what to say.
You’ll want to start with something about east-coast elites looking down on real Americans who’ve always smoked cigarettes. And you’ll definitely want to find anybody with the term “scientist” in their job description who agrees with you to show that this is about “politics, not science”— you can actually reuse one of the conspiracy theorists Walsh cites in his article! (To use a tool we’ll see a bit later, you can also catch liberals in “a contradiction” by comparing opinions on whether smoking is healthy to opinions on whether marijuana should be legal.)
As you may know, the United States has overthrown functioning democracies in a whole bunch of Latin American countries and replaced them with brutal dictatorships. To be an expert-level pedant, you should find somebody who’s described one of these events as “a war crime”, and then spend a series of paragraphs pointing out that we never actually declared war so it can’t be a war crime! If you say this confidently enough, I guarantee the people who disagree with you will be too frustrated to have any sort of real comeback.
Walsh uses the fact that 1998 was an unusually hot year to hide the obvious trend: “Indeed, you wouldn't expect global warming to melt the ice caps considering the globe hasn't warmed since about 1997. In other words, by the time Gore jumped on the global warming gravy train, global warming hadn't been a thing for about a decade. Today, we're about 219 months and counting since the last time the aggregate temperatures on Earth rose by any statistically significant amount.”