If you ever start to think people are too smart to fall for government propaganda, just remember that in 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah stood before Congress and delivered a tearful testimony that gripped the nation. She said she’d witnessed Iraqi soldiers storming a hospital, pulling premature babies out of incubators, and leaving them to die on the cold floor.
It was horrifying.
Within days, her story was splashed across every major news outlet with members of Congress quoting it in speeches, and President George H.W. Bush talking about it on repeat.
Of course, none of it was true, but that didn’t matter.
Nayirah wasn’t some random witness to Saddam’s atrocities; she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her entire performance had been carefully staged by an American PR firm hired by the Kuwaiti government. All of it! The tears, the story itself, the testimony, it was all part of a marketing campaign to drum up outrage and sympathy, and it worked exactly as intended.
Before her testimony, only 17% of Americans supported U.S. involvement in the Iraq-Kuwait conflict. Two months later, nearly half the country did, and by January 1991, Congress voted to send troops into combat.
“Mission Accomplished!”
And that, my friends, is the power of fear.
Fear is one of the government's favorite tools because it shuts down critical thought.
When people are afraid or horrified, when they are emotionally manipulated, they stop asking hard questions. They stop thinking for themselves. They look to the very same people who frightened them for protection, and in that time of fear, they’re willing to surrender almost anything to feel safe again.
You can see this pattern repeat itself over and over again throughout history.
Fear has been used to justify wars, lockdowns, censorship, and economic control. It’s how entire populations are herded into compliance one emotional story, one terrifying image, and one “emergency” at a time.
That’s why it’s so important to teach kids to recognize emotion-based manipulation when they see it. If they can understand how and why it works, they won’t fall for it easily.
The story of Nayirah’s testimony—and the PR machine that helped sell a war—is one of twenty we cover in The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies. Each one is a real historical event that shows how governments, corporations, and media outlets have conspired to deceive the public for power or profit.
We also talk about fear-based manipulation in The Tuttle Twins and the Leviathan Crisis which is based on Robert Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan. It’s about how governments always use fear to manipulate people into accepting laws and restrictions that they’d never accept under normal circumstances. Of course once the “crisis” is over, the “emergency” measures never get ratcheted back down—they become permanent fixtures of the system.
And what could be scarier than the biggest government monster of all, The Creature from Jekyll Island?!
That monster is responsible for the destruction of countless lives and has a direct impact on the well-being of nearly every person in the world—and yet most people don’t even know it exists!
Now that’s spooky.
We figured there’s no better time than Halloween to help families fight back against the real monsters out there. The ones we’re all guaranteed to encounter in real life. The ones who dress in suits and spend their days in conference rooms, dreaming up new ways to manipulate us into handing over our liberty for a false sense of security.
So while everyone else is stocking up on candy this week, we’re handing out something a little sweeter.
Get some of our best deals of the year on our best-selling resources at half (or more!) off their regular price! Plus, all of our awesome freedom merch is on sale for a whopping 50% off!
Parents like us know that the scariest stories aren’t about ghosts or goblins.
They’re the ones powerful people tell to make everyone else afraid.
And we’re not going to let our kids fall for it.
— Connor
