Trying to keep track of all the details of exactly how the current regime is violating the Constitution and various laws is frankly exhausting.
And that is exactly the goal.
It’s not like they’ve been coy about it.
The Trump, damn his name, crew’s approach was described by occasional-participant Steve Bannon by importing a term from sports: the aim is to “flood the zone” with crazy.
The idea is to overwhelm a defender with so much activity that they won’t be able to focus enough to stop any one thing and will waste their efforts trying to keep track of all the details.
As a strategy, it can be quite effective.
Responding to a flood of attacks becomes like trying to watch a hill of ants; crazy, dangerous biting ants.
There are just too many things happening at the same time; if you look for too long at any one detail, you’ll lose track of everything else and never actually notice the bigger picture.
And what really matters is the overall activity; the wide-angle view, the way you can only see the entire anthill and understand it as whole by not focusing on any particular detail.
It’s also really easy to implement.
The regime’s strategy has been simple:
- find a bunch of genuinely stupid and deranged people
- put them in charge of various bits of the government
- step back and let their freak flags fly high
This creates a flood of frankly insane activity that the media, and the citizens, are just not prepared to deal with.
We’re used to a world where the background is a boring level of business-as-usual politicking with an occasional foreground of scandal, not one where the background is a buzz of scandalous activity with an occasional foreground of State-sponsored kidnapping and murder.
Get enough stupid crazy people, and enough Congressional fellow-travellers to install them at the top of all the government agencies, and enough sympathizers on the Supreme Court to keep them there and you can topple the United States government with a few hundred people in a few hundred days.
It would be an impressive accomplishment it it weren’t so, just … stupid and insane.
It’s a strategy you can only use if you quite literally do not care about what will be left afterwards, just that whatever it is you will be in charge of it.
Because there won’t be much left functioning, and you can’t control exactly what will remain and what it will look like. You can try to guide it, and they are trying, but you can’t control it.
And so, yeah, just watching this nonsense is exhausting.
So this weekend, maybe just take a moment to let your eyes drift out of focus and try to see the whole fascist anthill instead of all the individual Nazi, Christian Nationalist, Zionist, Armageddonist, anti-vaccinationist, corporatist, anti-environmentalist, just-everything-else-ist ants.
Because while each boat-bombing, citizen-shooting, indiscriminately-kidnapping, city-invading ant is a problem, and every single one of them should be stopped now and then prosecuted when this is over, the swarm’s goal is to completely replace what this country was with a fascist dictatorship.
And we’ll have to boil the anthill to stop that.
