Media Matters is very upset with Steve Bannon's tactic

Personally i think he is on to something.

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/misinformer-year-steve-bannons-flood-zone-shit-approach-destroying-american-democracy


WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE (wring yo hands John, Cry us a river)

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JUSTIN HOROWITZ

PUBLISHED 12/28/21 10:37 AM EST


On November 15, shortly after being indicted on two counts of contempt of Congress over his refusal to provide evidence to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Steve Bannon broadcast the evening version of his podcast from a suite in the Willard Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C.

This was very publicly not his first time there -- it’s the same hotel where he had spent the days before January 6 plotting to overthrow the 2020 presidential election in a “command center” with other right-wing election deniers, including Rudy Giuliani, Bernie Kerik, and infamous coup memo author John Eastman. (Hours before the attack, then-President Donald Trump had even called in to discuss strategy.) Nearly a year later, Bannon was holed up there again, typically defiant and unapologetic.

He and his co-hosts recapped Bannon’s appearance with his attorney from earlier in the day in front of the federal courthouse. Multiple networks had broadcast live as he railed against the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland and instructed his supporters to “stand by” because “we’re going to go on the offense on this.” (These remarks recall Trump’s directive to the neofascist street gang the Proud Boys to “stand by” during a 2020 debate against Joe Biden.)

On the podcast that evening, Bannon's co-hosts bragged about media outlets running with his remarks. Bannon added that he was broadcasting from the same Willard Hotel suite that they had used to plan before January 6: “They can suck on that.”

“Flood the zone with shit”
In 2018, while watching Trump’s State of the Union speech, Bannon told author Michael Lewis that “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Since then, this has rightly been understood as the core of Bannon’s strategy and the threat of the larger Trumpist movement he represents. As Vox’s Sean Illing put it, “The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.”

Illing’s piece on Bannon’s flood-the-zone-with-shit approach was published shortly after Trump’s first impeachment trial. In the nearly two years since, the country has undergone a lot: a pandemic that’s officially killed nearly a million Americans, a grueling presidential race, a putsch on January 6, another impeachment trial, a moral panic over “critical race theory,” the ending of America’s longest war, and a return to the normal life-or-death politics that preceded Trump, to mention just a few things.

But what stands out is that Illing’s warning — that Bannon’s flood-the-zone-with-shit strategy was destroying democracy — is even more important today.

That’s because while some right-wing media are institutions in their own right (Fox Corp., Sinclair Broadcast Group, Salem Radio Network, etc.), Bannon’s approach is to essentially burn institutions to the ground, wherever they may be. As author Douglas Rushkoff put it in a recent essay about why he would not go on Bannon’s show, “Inflammation is the name of Bannon’s accelerationist game, after all: Get people on all sides angry, bring about the civil war or mega-conflict, let them burn it all down, and start fresh with something more local, human, and natural.”

When you continually find yourself in a room that is on fire, at some point you should figure out who is the arsonist. And now, with American democracy already smoldering, Steve Bannon’s podcast is where arsonists are being trained.

alls he's doin' is using the left media's tactics against them. LOLOL