“Flood the Zone with Shit”
In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News. In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:
“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That’s it. That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld. Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too. In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it. In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms. The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7. But that stopped working as 
the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media. Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable. In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin. Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.
The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds. He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream. There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times. They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.
The strategy works almost flawlessly. This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?” Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve. The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying. The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads. Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.
This is how democracy is destroyed. When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win. Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid. And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.
Trumpkin’s news can’t fool me about anything…are a rePUKEian’s lips moving? Is the trumpkin’s fingers twitting? Then it is all lies…by default!! Our any politician’s lips moving? Then it is probably lying. They are not lying when they show evidence that they are not!!! No evidence than lies!!!
1George Carlin – The big club… summarized long ago and NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUaqFzZLxU
2Steve Bannon didn’t invent a better mousetrap, but like a typical opportunist he’s taking credit for what guys like Frank Luntz and other Republicons started before FDR came around with the New Deal. Crumbling bites over decades like what was done to the Fairness Doctrine, policy changes to allow Rupert Murdoch to jump ahead of the citizenship line, and all the other bites to anti-trust law that have allowed control of the media to be effectively in the hands of 6 people. There’s a reason we don’t have Facebook accounts and cannot stand the Zuckerberg mentality that would turn the internet into the same hot mess that currently comprises the media.
Liz Warren gets it. Bernie Sanders gets it. Uncle Joe Biden is still licking stamps with peel off backs.
3It’s hard to believe that most people are that stupid. I guess we’ll find out in November if they are.
4Whenever someone from Trumplandia is moving their lips I remember Cicero’s question – cui bono? (Who benefits). Like Nancy said, all roads go back to Putin.
5Unless major media outlets (well, not Fox; they’re hopeless) grow spines and start differentiating the lies from the truth, that tactic stands a large chance of winning. Most people lead busy lives, and barely keep up with the news. The liars are clever, from Putin to Bannon to Miller–their lies are just plausible enough to confuse and convince people who don’t demand evidence. If we can’t do something about that, we’re in deep trouble.
6Given a choice between The Swamp, or a Zone With Shit, I believe I’d rather stick with The Swamp.
7thatotherjean:
8IMHO the most damaging, effective lies are mostly true.
That’s why they’re so effective.
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again.
Freedom of speech has been our greatest strength for centuries. And now it’s being weaponized against us. By Putin. And the right wing media.