1. The Zone is Overflowing
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Steve Bannon infamously said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Every authoritarian in the world knows this trick. Putin is the master. When there’s something you don’t want people to notice, you churn out insane proposals and wild lies by the metric tonne and shoot them from a thundering shit-cannon that makes great puffs of culture-war smoke. Journalists dutifully sit down to work on a pros-and-cons column about your claim that there’s no down side to nuking Canada, and when they come up for air, they discover you’ve done so many illegal and immoral things, so quickly, that no single thing really registers—even though any one of them would once have been described as the worst scandal in the history of the American presidency. In the time it takes your enemies to convene a meeting to argue about how they should respond to your latest lawless action, you’ve decapita…
