Bannon, conspiracy and why you are playing into their game.
BLUF: Treating conspiracy theories as “possibly true” without evidence is not skepticism. It is the exact confusion Bannon’s strategy depends on.
In 2018 Steve Bannon infamously stated:
>“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."
In a 2021 interview, Jonathan Rauch describes this kind of tactic:
>“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
He connects it to trolling and attention-capture tactics, saying:
>“One of them is what we call trolling, but this was perfected by Hitler and Goebbels who said, ‘We don’t care if they laugh at us. We don’t care if they say things about us. The point is we want them to think about us all the time.’”
Rauch then explains the effect of this kind of information strategy:
>“You’re disorienting people. You’re flooding the zone. That’s why Steve Bannon says we’ve got to flood the zone with shit. So people hear so much from so many sources, they just become, you know, they no longer know what to believe. So, they become cynical and confused.”
That fits closely with the RAND Corporation’s description of the “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model:
>“We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as ‘the firehose of falsehood’ because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
So the common thread is this: the goal is not simply to make people believe one specific claim. The goal is to overwhelm attention, create confusion, and make people unsure what can be trusted. The reaction to this latest assassination attempt looks like further evidence that they are achieving their goal.
When you have otherwise intelligent people noncommittally giving credence to conspiracy theories, with no evidence beyond the claim that everything else is already under suspicion of falsehood, then Bannon wins.