Like his smirking partner in crime, right-wing con man Jacob Wohl, Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman loves to lie.

“Fake news is a weapon,” Burkman declares in After Truth, a disturbing, and occasionally enraging documentary—subtitled Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News—that premieres on HBO on Thursday at 9 p.m. “People believe it and reprint it,” Burkman elaborates. “It can be an effective tool…It’s become a tool of war… It’s like it’s World War I and it’s chemical weapons. People are using them, so you use them.”

Thus the square-jawed Burkman—coaxed into a rare instance of truth-telling by his interviewer, acclaimed documentary director Andrew Rossi—admits, or rather boasts, that he’s basically a war criminal in the battle of ideas.