I’ve been reading about a psychological notion called “inoculation theory.” The idea is that just as people can gain immunity to a disease by being exposed to a weakened pathogen, they may develop resistance to a point of view as a result of hearing weak arguments for it. Most discussions of the idea that I’ve seen focus on doing this intentionally, but it also works when people hear bad attempts to convince them.

Suppose there’s some position for which you’ve heard only ridiculous arguments. After a while, you’ll stop paying attention to any arguments for it, even if one of them actually presents a good case. If someone claims to have solid evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, Trump won the 2020 election, or the Moon landings were faked, are you going to spend much time listening? Probably not. Usually that’s a rational response; if there were good arguments for these claims, you’d have heard them before. But if you get all your information from your social media bubble, genuinely good arguments can be drowned out by the ridiculous ones. People love to repost bad arguments to expose them to ridicule. Others repost whatever favors their cause without verifying it, and readers stop paying attention.

A bad argument can be worse than silence. In a well-known story, the townspeople are “inoculated” against the boy’s cries of “Wolf!” When you offer weak or invalid claims to a skeptical audience, they’ll assume you have nothing better to offer.

Returning, inevitably, to Donald Trump, I’d like to give two examples I’ve often seen. One is the claim that he’s a “pedophile.” While there have been accusations, he hasn’t been charged with a crime, and I haven’t seen strong supporting evidence. If that’s the worst you can say about him, you’ll only convince his supporters that you don’t have a good case against him.

A second example is the statement that’s he’s a “felon.” He has been convicted of a felony, but it’s not one that gets most people excited. He didn’t report hush money as a campaign expense. It isn’t obvious to non-lawyers and non-accountants that he was required to, and some lawyers without an axe to grind have called the case dubious. These two claims are far weaker than the undisputed facts that he ordered civilian boats sunk without a legal process, started a war, pardoned everyone who broke into the Capitol to support his election claim, and threatened to destroy a civilization.

It’s also possible to inoculate people against words and concepts. Some people toss “Communist!” around as an all-purpose comeback; others use “Racist!” After a while, listeners treat the words as noise, whether they apply or not.

Some people say that more arguments are always better. They aren’t, if the arguments are weak. People have limits on their attention span and patience. If you strain both, you lose your audience, and you’ll have a hard time getting it back.