“Years later I learned the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in Verba—‘Nothing upon Another’s Word.’ ” Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

An old joke: How can you tell when lawyers are lying? Response: When their lips are moving. Now the joke has been changed to ask how can you tell when our president is lying.

Falsehoods and misinformation come so frequently from Trump that we are nearly inured to this behavior. This has emboldened his immediate acolytes to act similarly. Sometimes the lies seem plausible. Perhaps these are the most dangerous because they may be easy to accept. On the other hand, some assertions are so bizarre on their face that it is hard to believe that they are presented without detailed corroboration. The effrontery that such statements should be accepted simply “because I said so” is disturbing.

Recently the new press secretary brought effrontery to new heights when she said that the government’s freeze of foreign aid funds had prevented $50 million of our tax money going to Gaza to “fund condoms.” When she said that, the spouse said to me, “I don’t believe it.” Karoline Leavitt’s claim was so bizarre (and salacious) that any sensible person would pause before saying it to the public and check the sources, for surely people beside late-night comedians are going to make comments. And, of course, fact-checkers started to weigh in. They could find no support for the assertion. They reported that the U.S. pays 3.3 cents per condom in our AIDS prevention programs, none of which we have in Gaza. In other words, the administration was saying that we were sending 1.5 billion condoms to Gaza. That is a whole lot of fucking, but when I see pictures of the Gaza devastation, I can’t imagine where or why anyone feels romantic or horny enough to engage in the enterprise. The American bombs and missiles rained by the Israelis on Gaza have not only destroyed homes and hospitals, but also all the no-tell motels. It is offensive, especially when one should know how much attention this will draw, to make the Gazan condom claim without airtight documentation. Hey, but who cares?

On the one hand, this kind of falsehood is not scary because the bizarre assertion is sure to draw the attention of almost everyone with a shred of common sense. On the other hand, it is scary because even so, the administration announced it apparently expecting the public simply to accept it.

This effrontery is bad, but while I know that there are some Trumpistas who accept everything the ultra-processed-food-stuffed one says, I am guessing this is a minor fraction of those who voted for him. Few of them are repeating the billions and billions of Trojan Pleasure Pack “fact” seriously. Perhaps more of a concern, then, are the more plausible falsehoods. These get repeated as gospel, and in the repetition, the “facts” often take on a broader life.

My new residence has a weekly current events discussion group. As the leader of it recognizes, the views of the fifty attendees tend to be quite similar. He said recently that was why he was asking a new resident to give reasons why he had voted for Trump. The new guy gave a litany, some, at least to this ear, reasonable but some bonkers. The needle on my bonkers meter moved a bit over some of the things he said (energy independence, Black Lives Matter demonstrations), but it swung wildly over his assertion that no American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan when Trump was president. I had read a factcheck on that topic a while ago and went back to look at it. Trump did not make the claim that no American soldiers were killed there on his watch. That would have been a lie because at least forty-five of U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan while Trump was president. Instead, he said that none were killed for eighteen months while he was in office. Several fact-checkers said that was false. There was, indeed, an eighteen-month period without deaths, but it bridged Trump and Biden. Trump’s limited but still false claim had expanded into a broader one when it was presented to us. An assertion was presented to us as a fact. Presumably this was not a knowing falsehood but something the Trump supporter thought was true. But if so, it was presented without checking its veracity. It illustrates why we should be careful in accepting what people tell us and how falsehoods may not disappear over time but expand.

However, it is not just in the political realm that I have recently encountered easily checkable misinformation. A lecturer from a nearby college’s continuing education program on the effect of social media on society started well. He said that we were going to cover fifteen weeks of curriculum in a few hours. He, however, had not planned how to do this. Instead of a thought-out presentation he seemed to be free associating. This was not good, but along the way, there seemed to be interesting factoids that made it not a complete waste of time. Then, however, factoids started coming that I knew were wrong. One concerned the famous kiss of Sammy Davis, Jr. on Archie Bunker. I had seen that episode again recently, and the lecturer had it wrong. He said that Davis left Bunker’s house and came back and kissed him on the lips. I knew that, instead, Archie’s friend asked to take a picture, and Davis, who had remained in the Queens house, readily consented. On the count of three, Davis kissed Bunker on the cheek so that it would be captured in the picture, and Carroll O’Connor as Bunker delivered a great take while the audience gave one of the longest laughs in television history. Of course, in some ways the details the lecturer had wrong were not important, and we all make mistakes. But he appeared cocksure about what he said. That made me distrust him. And, as with the condoms in Gaza, the detail he presented should have given him pause. If he was an expert about the era he was talking about, he should have thought, “Can it really be right that network TV showed a kiss on the lips between two men in 1972?” Anybody with a semblance of let-me-check-that radar would have checked it.

No one would have left the lecture with any important misinformation because of a faulty description of the kiss. Another of his stories, however, was different. He told us that the sales of a vodka brand went up remarkably after a TV ad in the 50s or 60s. A subliminal image of a naked woman, he said, one too fleeting to be consciously registered, was in the ad. This was wrong on several fronts. Among other things liquor ads were removed from television in 1948 (and from radio in 1936). There were no vodka ads at all on TV in the period he was talking about. Even so, he continued.

There was concern about the power of subliminal ads in the period he was talking about. In 1957, James Vicary, a market researcher, announced that he had conducted a test during a showing of the movie Picnic at a theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Vicary said that he had flashed images for a fraction of second—too brief to be consciously registered–that urged drinking Coke and popcorn during the movie and that sales of popcorn and Coke went up 57.5% and 18.1% respectively. This report fit in with the zeitgeist. The best-selling Hidden Persuaders had just been published by Vance Packard, which warned about unscrupulous manipulation of consumers by corporations. Brainwashing of American soldiers during the Korean War was in the news, and a few years later, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon was published.

Vicary’s report caused enough of an outcry that the Federal Communications Commission held a hearing with a demonstration of subliminal advertising. No one seemed affected by it, and the FCC did not ban subliminal advertising, although some countries, including the UK, did.

Researchers could not repeat Vicary’s results. He could not replicate them. In 1962 he told Advertising Age that his study was a “gimmick” to drum up business for his unsuccessful marketing firm, and he had too little data to be meaningful. The theater manager where the experiment was supposedly held said no such test was ever done. But there is power in a falsehood. Wikipedia says that “Vicary’s results can be considered completely fraudulent. Vicary later retracted his claims in a television interview, but his original claims spread rapidly, and led to widespread and continuing belief that subliminal messaging is real.” The 1973 book Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key expanded the notion of subliminal advertising from the insertion of a frame into a movie or TV show to print ads containing not easily recognized images, such as the word “sex” on an ice cube in a gin ad. His book furthered the notion of the power of subliminal messaging. Key, without much documentation, claimed that such manipulative techniques were widespread and effective.

Does subliminal advertising work? My intensive half-hour of internet research confirms my reading from decades ago. It suggests that some, but not most, researchers have found some effect in the lab, but no reliable study has found that subliminal advertising works outside the lab. (Perhaps it only works on an audience of New Jersey residents.) Even so, my lecturer indicated that the myth continues. Nevertheless, while subliminal advertising may not manipulate people, it is the case that a credible unthinking audience can be manipulated by made-up “facts” that should have been checked out by the person delivering them.