You can’t beat a royal flush.
That’s not the case with other hands in poker.
Full house… Straight… Four of a kind…
Given the right combination of cards, each of those hands is beatable.
Just as beatable as certain ideas are beatable.
So for example, I once read (in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick) that during WWII in the US, there were widespread race-baiting rumors that were hurting the war effort.
Some of these rumors said American Jews were profiteering from the national war effort.
Other rumors claimed that black soldiers were stockpiling weapons in advance of massive race riots.
Still other rumors claimed that Japanese Americans being held in internment camps were living high and consuming meat, sugar, and other restricted items.
Trouble is, these kinds of rumors were eating away at the national effort to actually go to Europe and fight in the war.
So how would you combat those rumors?
Well, here’s how you don’t do it:
You don’t try to argue…
You don’t present the facts…
And you don’t harp on about “reality” and “truth” back of it all.
Instead, you come up with a better rumor, and you start spreading that yourself.
So, during WWII, the government agencies in charge of rumor control started publishing posters which depicted Nazi agents going around the country and spreading misinformation about racial minorities.
The campaign was successful. America got united enough to fight in the war. And we now remember that time as a unique moment of righteousness in world history.
Anyways, point being, if you want to fight sticky ideas, come up with more sticky ideas.
Of course, sometimes that’s not possible.
Sometimes you come across a royal flush.
As you’ve probably heard, billionaire pedo Jeffrey Epstein was successfully suicided in his prison cell yesterday.
Epstein was supposed to have info on the sexual perversions of all the powerful people in the world, including Trump, Clinton, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and maybe even Jonah Hill.
This information was too explosive…
The people involved too influential…
And now, Epstein is dead.
How predictable. We will never know the truth. At least that’s the current feeling, even in the mainstream, in spite of the best efforts of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to dismiss this as “rampant conspiracy theories.”
Whatever you think actually happened to Epstein, I think you will have to agree with me:
“Billionaire pedophile murdered because of his secrets” is the kind of story that is an absolute royal flush in terms of stickiness.
No other rumor, including that Jeffrey Epstein was actually a female lizard alien funded by the Illuminati so they can make America a new Islamic state, can dislodge this in the public mind right now.
And that’s why the development of this story is worth watching.
Assuming, of course, that idea spreading is the kind of thing that gets you turned on.
Which it certainly does for me.
And so, if you need help spreading some ideas, which I hope are more positive and less explosive than the whole Epstein drama, then consider the following, non-mainstream guide: