Stories shape how we understand our world, turning chaos into clarity and connecting us with others. But their power is a double-edged sword. Journalist and writer Annalee Newitz, author of “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind,” explains that while stories can foster connection and help us contextualize seemingly random events, they can also be wielded destructively. 

“We’ve all heard of this idea of a feel-good story, but there are also feel-bad stories, and that’s what we’re talking about when we get into the realm of propaganda and stories that exploit people,” Newitz says. “Stories have always been used to consolidate community, but they can also be used to paint our adversaries as more monstrous than they are.”

Newitz explains that stories are powerful not just for their emotional pull but for their ability to manipulate context and shape perception. They can demoralize, confuse, or threaten, as seen in historical propaganda or modern disinformation campaigns. From British psyops in World War I — wafting bacon smells to undermine German morale — to today’s digital “flood the zone” tactics, stories have long been tools of psychological warfare. By reframing facts or fabricating enemies, they exploit our trust in narratives to divide and control. 

In this interview with Bioneers, Newitz delves into the dual nature of storytelling — exploring how narratives have been weaponized throughout history and offering insights into how we can reclaim their power for positive change. Read an excerpt from “Stories Are Weapons,” where Newitz explores the story of Wonder Woman, detailing the conception of the character, the anti-comic movement and the character’s evolution in the decades since her creation.
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Bioneers: What are some of the ways stories can be exploited to manipulate or deceive people?

Annalee Newitz: These “feel-bad” stories take a grain of truth and re-contextualize it within a narrative about something bigger. For instance, you might take a fact about how people are suffering and then use that to say, “Well, actually, the reason you’re suffering is because of those bad guys over there.” We can weave a fictional story about how those “bad guys” are causing inflation, or causing the water to be polluted. From the first moments that we see writing about militaries, one of the big questions has been, “How can we use stories or pieces of information to harm our enemies and to help us win the war or conflict?” There are a couple of really basic ways that stories become weapons. One is that they can be used to undermine the morale of your adversaries. You can tell a story about how their government is actually a disorganized mess, or you can tell a story about how they are secretly being ripped off by a government organization or corporation. It can be extremely trivial. There’s a famous psyop from World War I where the British would cook bacon behind the lines, and the smell of the bacon would waft over to the German side and just make them feel bad about the fact that they didn’t have bacon. Well, of course, only a few people on the British side actually had bacon, but that was a way of demoralizing them. 

You can also use stories to confuse the enemy. Confusion, especially these days, is a really big weapon. You can recontextualize facts so that they are no longer true, or just use the model that was first popularized by Russia, which is to literally weaponize confusion itself and flood your adversary’s channels with tons of information that contradicts itself. The idea is to replicate this fog of war feeling, like when you’re in a war, smoke is everywhere, and you don’t know which way to turn or which side is winning. This flood the zone idea — which Steve Bannon, of course, picks up on with his idea of flooding the zone with shit — is to create that same sense of confusion at the information level, like, “I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong.” 

These “feel-bad” stories take a grain of truth and re-contextualize it within a narrative about something bigger.

The third way to weaponize stories is literally to use them as a violent threat. The main ways are threatening people with death, violence or losing their livelihood, which happens all the time, including in democratic regimes. That is extremely scary and demoralizing. Someone might say,  if you don’t confess to committing crimes, I’m going to kill your family. Or, if you don’t toe the line in this meeting, you’re going to lose your job. Now, of course, here in the States, a big characteristic of our culture wars involves violent threats. Anyone on the internet with more than a few followers has probably either seen or been attacked with phrases like “you should die” or “you should be raped.” That is a form of weaponized storytelling. It’s a very short story. It is still very effective, and it’s terrifying when it’s at scale. 

Bioneers: Is there an aspect regarding the historical roots of today’s culture wars that you think is especially relevant for us to bear in mind today?

Newitz: If you look back, at a very high level, what the United States is great at is combining official state propaganda with pop culture that echoes its messaging. The U.S. entertainment industry has always had a kind of soft power in the States, either deliberately or just stochastically, and during the 20th century, because it was so powerful in the world, it also became a form of international propaganda. I don’t want to make it sound like the government is going out there and pressuring entertainment companies into spreading its message, but the media industry is a big part of our propaganda. I think it’s why we have such powerful culture wars in this country, because we fight a lot of our battles in the realm of pop culture.

If you look back, at a very high level, what the United States is great at is combining official state propaganda with pop culture that echoes its messaging.

One of the really powerful examples is during the 19th century Indian Wars, a series of wars waged between the U.S. government and Indigenous tribes and nations that lasted over a century. One of the most popular books in the United States in the early 19th century was “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper. Lots of us read that book in school. It was a bestselling adventure story about the Indian Wars, basically, and certainly not produced by the government. Still, it carried the same message as the government at that time. It was about how there was only one Mohican left — which, all of the Mohicans on this continent right now are like, “Hello?” There’s never been a last Mohican. But the government was pushing this narrative that the United States deserved to take over all this land, some of which had belonged to the Mohicans, and, of course, many other tribes. Part of the government’s justification was that these groups were already fading out. Then you have a novel like this come out with this catchy title, “The Last of the Mohicans,” which makes it sound like the Mohicans are all dying out. There’s only one left. So there’s no harm in white settlers taking all that allegedly empty land. That’s a really powerful way that US pop culture justified what the government was trying to do with its military. 

Bioneers: What other persistent weaponized story has stood out to you recently? 

Newitz: Right now we’re in the midst of a huge moral panic around trans and LGBT folks. There’s been a ton of propaganda coming from various levels of government — state governments, municipal governments — about the threat of trans people playing sports or using bathrooms. These are all 100% propaganda, stories based on, in most cases, zero facts. They create a new enemy to be afraid of. At the same time, you see a bubbling up in pop culture, especially online, of this messaging about the evils of trans people that is not coming from the government. One of the most vocal anti-trans activists is fiction writer J.K. Rowling, who has used her platform as the author of the Harry Potter novels, everybody’s favorite thing, to broadcast misinformation and disinformation about trans people. That’s a great example of how you get this weird slide between pop culture and politics and culture war.

It’s interesting to see how deep that rabbit hole goes. I trace in the book how this idea of the groomer, which is very important to the moral panic around queerness, goes all the way back to the 1930s and the founding of the FBI. There was a very high profile kidnapping of a white boy, and when his body was found there was some debate over whether he had been sexually assaulted. People were very engaged with this crime, and J. Edgar Hoover’s nascent FBI decided to make a big show of going after people committing crimes like this, which the FBI defined as a sex crime. This was a new category of criminal, and in the end, it wasn’t applied to people who were actually committing crimes. Instead, it was a way of labeling people who were gay as being potential kidnapper-rapists, because the idea was this crime had happened because somebody out there was gay and wanted to have sex with kids. Of course, this is an era when there was very little open discussion of homosexuality, so there’s not a counter narrative in the media of, say, healthy, happy, married gay men. 

The groomer term comes much later, but there’s a clear path from sex criminal to groomer rooted in the same fear that gay people are bad guys who want to do terrible things to kids, which, again, is based on a myth.

This idea of the sex criminal gets written into law and becomes something that law enforcement focuses on, as well as a huge boogeyman in pop culture. This leads directly to the Lavender Scare during the 1950s, where a  government commission hunted down gay people working in the government with the idea that if you were gay and a government employee, you were vulnerable to blackmail, so those people needed to be weeded out and fired. It is a huge moment, like this current moment, where we’re seeing the targeting of trans and LGBT folks who have government jobs or jobs working with kids, and they’re being either pushed out of their jobs or humiliated into leaving. 

The groomer term comes much later, but there’s a clear path from sex criminal to groomer rooted in the same fear that gay people are bad guys who want to do terrible things to kids, which, again, is based on a myth. There’s no reality to that. This murder that sparked it all, we have no idea who that person was or why they did it, and it doesn’t even matter, because murder is not the same thing as being gay. That’s one pernicious story that we have to keep looking out for. Anytime you hear a term like groomer, child molester, sex criminal, being applied to a regular adult who’s gay or trans, you know immediately that you’re in the realm of propaganda. This is a myth that’s almost 100 years old now, and it keeps coming back up.

Bioneers: Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” way back in 2005. Nearly two decades later, it feels like we may have entered a “post-truthiness” world, where completely fabricated stories enter parts of the public consciousness as facts. What has changed since then?

Newitz: He created the term truthiness to characterize this moment, in a sense, when we don’t really have access to the truth, we only have things that have the vibes of truth. Truthiness is a thing that feels true but isn’t. I think what’s changed is there’s been an intensification of that, and there’s less public awareness of it because it’s so typical to see things that are completely fabricated coming out of the mouths of leadership. At the time of the Colbert Report, a lot of this was coming from pundits in the right wing mediasphere, and now it’s coming from inside the White House. So, partly, it’s become mainstream, but also you might say that these fringe beliefs have captured people’s imaginations, because they’re good storytelling. Conspiracy theories are always more fun than the truth, and that’s why people believe in them because it feels more like, “I’m living in a Star Wars movie.” “Wow, there’s Jewish space lasers.” That’s a reference to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fantasy that Jews were controlling lasers that were somehow targeting us. That’s a much more exciting and engaging vision of reality than having to balance a budget and build infrastructure. 

Instead of politics being about right wing or left wing policy recommendations, it’s my story versus their story — and which story is more fun, which story is more engaging, which story gets your emotions more intensely.

This is something that’s happened before in cultures veering into authoritarianism. Instead of politics being about right wing or left wing policy recommendations, it’s my story versus their story — and which story is more fun, which story is more engaging, which story gets your emotions more intensely. Politics have become storytelling, and it’s super dangerous when you can’t tell the difference between politics and fiction. Walter Benjamin, who’s a badass culture critic from the early 20th century, wrote a lot about this in the context of the rise of the Nazis. He talked about how fascists confuse politics and aesthetics, and we’re doing the same thing now. It’s Donald Trump’s aesthetic that is ruling the day. He has no particular policies other than weaponized stories: we’re gonna round up immigrants, we’re gonna prevent trans people from leaving their houses. These kinds of policies are more fantasies than reality.

Bioneers: What are the consequences of not recognizing such stories as propaganda? What policy or legislative changes from recent years serve as stark examples? 

Newitz: That’s such a good question because the problem isn’t having the propaganda, it’s not recognizing that it’s propaganda. That’s really important, because we have advertising, and we know that advertising is advertising. Sometimes I’m persuaded and sometimes I’m not, but at least I know it’s kind of bracketed as the moment when we try to control your mind and emotions and make you do things. But the problem is when that happens in the realm of political rhetoric. One really stark example is Jim Crow laws, which grew out of a concerted propaganda campaign on the part of Southern states to convince people that the newly liberated Black population was dangerous and needed to be contained and neutralized. The reason why this has a terrible consequence, and it isn’t just memes or ambient racism, is because it becomes law. You get laws that criminalize being Black, and those laws, of course, last for almost a century. The repercussions of those laws are still with us, and some of those actual laws are still with us, formally or informally, with redlining being a big consequence. That’s the danger, right? Is that the story becomes a law. 

The same thing is happening now with bathroom bills. If you have consistent laws preventing trans people from using public bathrooms, it’s just a way of preventing trans people from being in public. It’s very similar, in effect, to Jim Crow laws, which prevent you from being Black in public or prevent you from being Black in certain parts of the public sphere, usually the most important, powerful parts of the public sphere. Crackdowns on immigration are another example. Immigrants are often the object of propaganda, and we’re going to see dire consequences if we really do have this mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also even immigrants who are here legally. That’s going to have a tremendous impact on everyone in the United States.

Bioneers: What can be done to counteract these narratives once they become accepted as fact by some segments of the population?

Newitz: There’s one school of thought that there are ways of persuading people who already deeply believe in a piece of propaganda. There is some evidence that you can use strategies like pre-bunking, when you educate people about what kinds of stories tend to be propaganda. That way, when people encounter those pieces of propaganda in the wild, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I heard about that. It’s fake.” There’s some evidence that that can work. But I think that there’s also lots of evidence that it doesn’t really work to argue people out of their positions. 

We need public places where people can come together and learn about each other in a non-confrontational way, because right now we obtain a lot of our information in these highly polarized social media environments.

What I push for in my work is more about changing the subject. Instead of trying to meet people head on by telling them their myth is a myth, offer a different story. There are different ways to do that. Part of it could mean literally creating new kinds of stories, whether that’s a fictional story that allows people to see, say, a marginalized group in a benevolent way, as opposed to as a bad guy. That can be really helpful. But also, for example, we need to be thinking about how can we set up institutions in our local communities that allow people to stop atomizing and becoming so at odds with one another. One thing I talk about is the need to build and protect schools and libraries. We need public places where people can come together and learn about each other in a non-confrontational way, because right now we obtain a lot of our information in these highly polarized social media environments. The library is really the opposite of that, an environment where you choose your own adventure through the stacks. The books aren’t throwing themselves at your head and saying, “Hey, if you like that book, try this one.” It’s self-guided, and there are many different kinds of voices available, and they’re all at the same volume. No one book is out-screaming the other books. 

Another thing I talk about a lot in the book, based on other people’s scholarship, is the importance of keeping receipts about what’s happening in the present and preserving it to create a truthful historical record. So, one of the things that’s super important as we’re in this moment is that people keep records, even if it’s something small such as keeping local publications, a record of your vote or of your community. If you’re part of a marginalized community of drag queens who do readings to kids, keeping the flyers from that to show in 50 years, when we’re rediscovering this period, to say, “No, we were here, we were fighting back. It wasn’t all about not letting trans people use bathrooms. It was also about letting kids hang out with drag queens and read stories together, and it was really wholesome.”

Bioneers: We’ve focused mainly on how stories can be used for harm, but what is the flip side? How can they be used in positive ways?

Newitz: We need to return to stories about our commonalities. Imagine redesigning social media so that instead of promoting division and outrage, it highlights people’s commonalities or problems we can solve together. That’s changing the story, right? 

A pop culture story can also have a lot of power. In the book, I talk about Wonder Woman being this incredibly important icon for women. Instead of saying women should stay in the home, or that a woman outside the home is probably some kind of deviant, it’s an image of a woman who takes charge. Men report to her, so she’s an authority figure over not just the ladies on Themyscira, the island she comes from, but also men in the world. These days, there are lots of stories in the Wonder Woman universe that go beyond just, what if a white lady had power? For example, there’s a whole arc about how on Themyscira they abolish a prison thanks to Nubia, who’s a Black character. We’re still using Wonder Woman and her world to suggest alternatives to the unjust way the world works now. That can be really powerful. 

That’s what’s truly important, is to tell a different story.

At these moments, where there’s this incredible uncertainty about our future, and where the government is actively scapegoating women, queer people, immigrants, brown and Black people, you need counter-narratives. We’ve seen this incredible blossoming of art from trans men and women in books and film. We’ve recently had “I Saw the TV Glow” and “The People’s Joker,” two incredible films made by trans people about what it means to be trapped in someone else’s narrative about who you are and how you break out of that. They’re smart, funny, intense movies. They’re not mainstream, but people are paying attention to them. They are providing this counterweight. That’s what’s truly important, is to tell a different story. Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, whether it’s just a story you tell your kid at night or a story you tell your friends, or, if you have a platform, a story you spread to millions of people, it really makes a difference.

Annalee Newitz is a journalist and author of the national bestseller “Four Lost Cities.” They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and co-host the Hugo Award–winning podcast “Our Opinions Are Correct.” They live in San Francisco.