When I was a kid in Brazil we had this prank:

We would wake someone up in panic and say "DUDE WAKE UP TO SPIT!"

The goal was to get the person to spit before they got awake enough to ask:

1-Is the world ending

2-How is my spit going to stop that

Point being that people do silly things if they are pressured into fear based, immediate decisions before they can actually think about it.

As seen in Thinking Fast and Slow. If you want people to stop thinking, trigger their survival mode.

This is the entire GOP strategy right now. They know if voters start thinking, they will jump the sinking ship