Big lie
A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique. The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.
According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they describedand that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged nation striking back at "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held outsized and secret power in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It further spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and used these to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews in self-defense.
In the 21st century, the term has been applied to Donald Trump's and his allies' attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, specifically the false claim that the election was stolen through massive voter and electoral fraud. The scale of the claims resulted in Trump supporters attacking the United States Capitol. Later reports indicate that Trump knew he had genuinely lost the election while promoting the narrative. Scholars say that constant repetition across many different forms of media is necessary for the success of the big lie technique, as is a psychological motivation for the public to believe the extreme assertions.
Nazi Germany
Hitler's description
Hitler's definition is given in Chapter 10 of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf :In 1943, The New York Times contributor Edwin James asserted that Hitler's biggest lie was his revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in war in 1918, but rather was betrayed by internal groups. This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by right-wing groups, including the Nazis.
In enacting the Holocaust
According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they describedand that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at international Jewry, which the Nazis blamed for starting. Nazi propaganda repeatedly claimed that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It further spread claims that the Jews had begun a war of extermination against Germany, and used these to assert that Germany had a right to annihilate the Jews in self-defense.The Cold War historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson describes its use:
Goebbels's description
Joseph Goebbels also put forth a theory which has come to be commonly associated with the expression "big lie". Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, sixteen years after Hitler first used the phrase. The article, titled "Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik" was published in ''Die Zeit ohne Beispiel:''Alleged quotation
The following supposed quotation of Joseph Goebbels has been repeated in numerous books and articles and on thousands of web pages, yet none of them has cited a primary source. According to the research and reasoning of Randall Bytwerk, it is an unlikely thing for Goebbels to have said:U.S. psychological profile of Hitler
The phrase "big lie" was used in a report prepared around 1943 by Walter C. Langer for the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile. The report was later published in book form as The Mind of Adolf Hitler in 1972. Langer stated of the dictator:His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
A somewhat similar quote appears in the 1943 Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behaviour and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender, by Henry A. Murray:
... never to admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame that enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.
Hitler's death
A 1947 U.S. book on the death of Adolf Hitler describes the infectious Soviet disinformation concerning his purported survival as an example of the technique, nodding to German philosopher Hans Vaihinger's 1911 book The Philosophy of 'As if', which ponders the acceptance of lies for utilitarian purposes. The U.S. book asserts that Soviet leadership, "realizing that Communist totalitarian systems and secret police methods require a continuing menace as justification for their existence, decided to keep the ghost of Hitler alive... as a means of dramatizing the continuing menace of Fascism", bolstering their military.In his controversial 1968 book, Soviet historian Lev Bezymenski cites the initial announcement of Hitler's death by Nazi Germany as an example of the big lie, as it claimed him to have died while acting as a soldier in the line of duty.
United States
Cold War
A 1964 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated antisemitic text first published in Russia in 1903, stated that continued circulation of the Protocols could be attributed in part to utilization of "the Hitler technique of the 'big lie'".By Republicans
The term has been used by prominent American right-wing figures to describe allegations that Trump's victory in the 2016 elections was the result of collusion between his campaign and Russia. Former Attorney General William Barr described those allegations as "a very damaging, big lie" that inhibited the administration's ability to properly deal with Vladimir Putin, a sentiment also echoed by Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.By early 2021, Trump and several prominent Republicans started to use the term "the big lie", claiming that it refers to other electoral issues. Trump stated that the term refers to the "Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020". An opinion piece in the typically center-right Wall Street Journal, as well as Republican politicians Mitch McConnell and Newt Gingrich, referred to "the big lie" as Democratic opposition to what were new and more restrictive voter identification requirements. McConnell's office referred to a Democratic attempt to abolish the filibuster to enact voting rights legislation as "the left's Big Lie there is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping America". Timothy Snyder describes attempts to invert the narrative:
The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf.
By January 2022, Republicans were taking actions to impose new voting restrictions and to take complete control of voting and the administrative management of elections, all while a large majority of Republicans continued to believe that the 2020 election had been stolen from them and asserted that democracy was at risk of failing. Extensive press coverage indicated the Republican efforts themselves appeared to present a threat to democracy.
2020 stolen election claims
During his political career, U.S. president Donald Trump has employed what have been characterized as the firehose of falsehood and big lie propaganda techniques. To support his attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election, he and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed that there had been massive election fraud and that Trump was the true winner of the election. By 2023, major news outlets characterized Trump's claims as not merely falsehoods, but as lies.U.S. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas subsequently contested the election results in the Senate. Their effort was characterized as "the big lie" by then President-elect Joe Biden: "I think the American public has a real good, clear look at who they are. They're part of the big lie, the big lie." Republican senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, scholars of fascism Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Russian affairs expert Fiona Hill, and others also used the term "big lie" to refer to Trump's false claims about massive election fraud. By May 2021, many Republicans had come to embrace the false claim and use it as justification to impose new voting restrictions and attempt to take control of the administrative management of elections. Republicans who opposed the claims faced backlash.
In early 2021, The New York Times examined Trump's promotion of "the big lie" for political purposes to subvert the 2020 election, and concluded that the lie encouraged the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The attack was cited in a resolution to impeach Trump for a second time. During Trump's second impeachment trial, the house managers Jamie Raskin, Joe Neguse, Joaquin Castro, Stacey Plaskett and Madeleine Dean discussed how Trump used "the big lie" to repeatedly make the false claim the election was stolen from him. On October 7, a Senate Judiciary Committee report said that Trump attempted to use the Department of Justice to "lay the foundation of the 'Big Lie'" before the general election and remain in power regardless of election results.
In early 2022, The New York Times presented a detailed analysis of the continuing efforts by Trump and his allies to further promote "the big lie" and related lies in their attempts to overturn and influence future elections, including those in 2022 and 2024. On June 13, 2022, the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack presented testimony that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but nevertheless promoted the false claim to exploit donors, and, as a result, raked in "half a billion" dollars. In the days following his first indictment on March 30, 2023, he repeatedly posted similar election-related commentary to social media.
Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to many jurisdictions in the 2020 U.S. elections, filed four major lawsuits related to the big lie that Dominion fixed the election. From Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Dominion seeks in damages, alleging that "he and his allies manufactured and disseminated the 'Big Lie', which foreseeably went viral and deceived millions of people into believing that Dominion had stolen their votes and fixed the election." Separately, in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network it sought $1.6 billion from Fox News. During discovery, Fox News' internal communications were released, indicating that prominent hosts and top executives were aware the network was reporting false statements but continued doing so to retain viewers for financial reasons. On April 18, 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion a $788 million settlement, described by CNN as the "big price" of telling "the Big Lie". Dominion is also suing two other TV networks, Newsmax and One America News Network, for $1.6 billion each, as well as My Pillow and its CEO Mike Lindell for $1.2 billion.
On April 25, 2023, CNN reported that Trump had told a new lie about the 2020 election: "Trump pointedly noted that Biden got more votes than Trump in fewer than a fifth of US counties in 2020. Trump then said, 'Nothing like this has ever happened before. Usually, it's very equal, orbut the winner always had the most counties.'" The statement was described as "complete bunk". Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama carried "a minority of counties in each of their victories". William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained:
On July 28, 2023, a federal district court judge dismissed an October 2022 Trump lawsuit against CNN, stating that CNN's multiple uses of the term "big lie" about Trump's claims of election fraud did not constitute actionable defamation. The judge wrote that CNN's statements were opinion, not factually verifiable statements, and that "no reasonable viewer" would infer that "Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people". The suit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning Trump could not sue again on the same basis.
On December 13, 2024, just over a month after the 2024 United States presidential election, the Public Religion Research Institute published the results of a survey conducted shortly after that election, between November 8 and December 2. The survey focused primarily on the 2024 election but included questions about the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump: 63 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of voters overall still agreed that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump.