flooding the zone with shit

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Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz  · 3 May 2021  · 412pp  · 115,048 words

#.upw3jdyR8. The executive later said this statement did not reflect his true views. 7. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971). 8. Sean Illing, “‘Flood the Zone with Shit’: How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy,” Vox, February 6, 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang  · 12 Jul 2021  · 372pp  · 100,947 words

in February 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Sandberg wasn’t taking part in Kaplan’s dinners. Her focus was on improving relations with other critics. In September 2019, one week after Zuckerberg

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch  · 21 Jun 2021  · 446pp  · 109,157 words

the reality-based community 5   Disinformation Technology: The Challenge of Digital Media Making the online world truth-friendly is difficult but doable 6   Troll Epistemology: “Flood the Zone with Shit” Disinformation is an old enemy with new weapons and powerful friends 7   Canceling: Despotism of the Few Coercive conformity is corrupting the reality-based community

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life

by Ian Dunt  · 15 Oct 2020

eventually drowned out. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon said. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ By the summer of 2020, Trump had made over 18,000 false or misleading claims. During 2018, he averaged 15 erroneous claims a day. He

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

by Alan Rusbridger  · 26 Nov 2020  · 371pp  · 109,320 words

grainy, contested image launched online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right onto the pages of a newspaper that has recently sacked all its journalists.’ ‘FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT’ The phrase is attributed to the former head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, who briefly had a role in the inner circle of the Trump

When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

by Jordan Thomas  · 27 May 2025  · 347pp  · 105,327 words

, to use the words of Steve Bannon—who worked with Ben Shapiro at Breitbart and is a former Republican White House political tactician—is to “flood the zone with shit.” By inundating the public with a constant stream of misinformation, fossil fuel operatives make scientific facts appear unknowable, which paralyzes action and deflects legitimate debate

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World

by Philip Coggan  · 1 Jul 2025  · 96pp  · 36,083 words

moves to cut civil service jobs and deport immigrants. Simultaneous action on several fronts is a way of wrongfooting opponents and distracting the media, or ‘flooding the zone with shit’, as Steve Bannon, an adviser to Trump in his first term, describes it. But this is surely a moment for using Occam’s razor, which

his ambition of being immortalised on Mount Rushmore. This aggression is weakening the US’s considerable soft power, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’ may confuse the media but it also confuses the US’s allies. No one knows what Mr Trump will announce next and he simply can

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

by Mehdi Hasan  · 27 Feb 2023  · 307pp  · 93,073 words

as representative of their overall strategy. Doing so will put them on the defensive. 2. Don’t budge Referring to Steve Bannon’s quote about “flooding the zone with shit,” the writer and author Jonathan Rauch once remarked: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.” He’s right. When the likes of Trump

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford  · 2 Feb 2021  · 428pp  · 103,544 words

told the writer Michael Lewis: “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.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker  · 14 Oct 2021  · 533pp  · 125,495 words

by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling: his game plan, in the admiring words of onetime strategist Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit.”74 With Trump’s defeat, rational heads on the right should seek to restore American politics to a system with two parties that differ over