Two days ago I posted about the White House’s remarkably successful amplification of Bannon’s flood the zone strategy. Today Luke Winkie references that strategy in Slate and quotes Jesse Watters (from last month) describing how the thing works. Acyn has the video:
Transcript:
…
Dana, we are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the Left. And they are using tactics from the 1990s.
They are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies. They’re screaming into the ether on MSNBC.
This is what you call top-down command and control. You get your talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and then it disappears.
What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare.
Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.
It’s free money, and we’re actually talking about expressing information.
They are suppressing information.
That sums things up crisply and clearly, though it works only because — contrary to Watters — FNC, Musk, and other actors on the right suppress the truth — that’s key to making the strategy so successful. The big, beautiful bubble offers such reassuring certitude that folks inside it aren’t tempted to burst out into a wider, more disparate, less black and white world. MAGA media is alluring because it has so many channels, themes weaved together, and modes of engagement — it’s great entertainment — but it persuades because it ruthlessly suppresses views of truth and doubt and humility that clash with the party line.
Winkie describes sealing himself off from the mainstream media and immersing himself in MAGA via X: “I created a brand new Twitter—well, X—feed that followed, exclusively, White House agencies and their associated MAGA partisans. For the next 24 hours, it would be my only source of news.”
He observes: “It has never been easier for an American voter to elide mainstream airwaves and yet still think they know exactly what is going on.” And being sealed in a bubble encourages an unwavering perspective, unchallenged by whispers of doubt or dissent.
The MAGA worldview is “completely purged of a single contrasting viewpoint.” MAGA “is a place where the president is always right, and nothing is going wrong.”
When the nation is split more or less in half, with each side imbibing cues about what’s happening that the other side rejects (or blocks out altogether), this makes communication across the divide difficult. It renders the give and take of politics within democratic institutions virtually impossible.
We don’t hear or see the same dispatches. The stories we rely on to make sense of things are diametrically opposed. Our impressions, convictions, judgments hardly overlap. Small-d democrats and the Democratic Party have failed to communicate convincingly to half the nation.
What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
This must change or our slide into authoritarian rule will continue apace.
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