Steve Bannon for the win.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024?publication_id=20533&post_id=149903287&isFreemail=true&r=dwey&triedRedirect=true

Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 campaign. He then served as chief strategist and senior counselor for the first eight months of Trump’s term, during which he worked to put MAGAs in power across the administration and across the country.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Trump’s administration began with a foundational lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. Recent challenges to that assertion from Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama rankled as badly as they did for Trump because that lie allowed Trump to define the public conversation. Forcing his supporters to commit to a lie that was demonstrably untrue locked them into accepting others throughout his presidency, for backing away would become harder and harder with each lie they accepted.

hmm. this is like the biggest political problem we face. it undergirds Trump's support and will distort our politics long after he's gone.

and no one cares?

drummerboy said:

hmm. this is like the biggest political problem we face. it undergirds Trump's support and will distort our politics long after he's gone.

and no one cares?

It's not that no one cares, it's just that current participants on the MOL are in one of two groups -

1. Those who recognize the technique, and see it put into action right here on this discussion board.
2. Those who are "flooding the zone" on behalf of their "strongman" of choice, whether in the Rose Garden, Putin Whatabout, or Elon's Twitter threads.

Those of us in Group 1 have seen the futility of pointing out the game being played to those in Group 2.

I’m not sure what to say. I do care, but it’s like the weather. Not sure what I can do about it. 

It’s especially frustrating because many media outlets seem to think they have to be impartial which means giving equal weight to misstatements and inaccuracies from the Harris campaign as the mountain of hot steaming horse manure that issues forth from Trump on a daily basis. They don’t want to seem biased, which I think is a defensive reaction to decades of accusations of liberal bias in the media. It stretches back at least to the George W Bush administration when any criticism was met with accusations of “the liberal media” even when they were simply reporting events. 

Also, there’s a huge swath of voters who just don’t care. They pay for $3 gas and $6 eggs and they want someone to make their personal troubles go away. They don’t care that the Dow is at record levels. They don’t care that in the aggregate, wages are up more than inflation. 

They don’t even care that Trump is a convicted felon and indicted in some very serious crimes. They don’t care that he incited a riot at the Capitol and completely abandoned his duty to do anything to try and stop it.  It’s all about how they feel about their own personal struggles and wanting to blame someone. 

The funny thing is I think a more mainstream Republican candidate would be polling much better against Harris right now because of inflation, as well as the instability in the Middle East and a few other things that people can pin on the Biden administration. It speaks to how crappy a candidate the GOP is stuck with.

Fortunately it’s just talk, right?  No actual real world harm. 

Oh wait. 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/us/fema-helene-north-carolina-reported-threats/index.html

The digest version is FEMA aid workers in North Carolina are dealing with threats from armed militias. No doubt all fired up by Trump’s lies about the FEMA efforts post-hurricane. The workers were ordered to leave Rutherford County, which has been badly hit, for their own safety. 

Another link: https://www.newsweek.com/fema-responds-armed-militia-threat-north-carolina-hurricane-helene-milton-1968590

mrincredible said:

Fortunately it’s just talk, right?  No actual real world harm. 

Oh wait. 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/us/fema-helene-north-carolina-reported-threats/index.html

The digest version is FEMA aid workers in North Carolina are dealing with threats from armed militias. No doubt all fired up by Trump’s lies about the FEMA efforts post-hurricane. The workers were ordered to leave Rutherford County, which has been badly hit, for their own safety. 

Another link: https://www.newsweek.com/fema-responds-armed-militia-threat-north-carolina-hurricane-helene-milton-1968590

and in MAGA world, Harris will get the blame for this.

Vivid memory of reading a quote from a GWB staffer/official in the Times mag way back when GWB was in office.  He said (close to quote) Facts don't matter now.

Chilling, made such an impression that i still remember where it was on the page.

Who knew how bad it would get, though.  Could argue that it's our biggest problem (maybe other than climate).  Sadly, Bannon seems to be correct about just shoveling it out there, at least for now.

Taken from “to kill a mockingbird” …

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ...

Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

"I wanted you to see what real courage is ...

It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for."

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another ... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

Publisher: HarperCollins

another aspect of this is the fact that the disinformation is not limited to Trumpers or right-wingers. We can see examples right here on MOL. Some posters here, while certainly not Trumpers and who you would think of as leftists, or at least not right-wingers, still manage to repeat what is clearly b.s. whose origin is MAGA. I doubt these posters listen to what we would consider rw media. So clearly this disinfo is also being spread by what I guess you would call "alternative" news sources and mostly found on social media. Sources that most of are probably barely aware of, yet exert considerable influence.