coup

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.

Some of this flooding was to occur at levels of highly emotive, if actually less substantive, things, in the hope of distracting you from truly substantive things that had, for the flooders, the added benefit of being boring and obscure.

Well, indeed, they are flooding the zone. The water levels of tyranny are rising over a country that once called itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even, we should note, as millions thirst for actual solutions to their actual problems. It can sometimes happen like that: a terrible flood, yet still great thirst.

But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.

Some of this flooding was to occur at levels of highly emotive, if actually less substantive, things, in the hope of distracting you from truly substantive things that had, for the flooders, the added benefit of being boring and obscure.

Well, indeed, they are flooding the zone. The water levels of tyranny are rising over a country that once called itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even, we should note, as millions thirst for actual solutions to their actual problems. It can sometimes happen like that: a terrible flood, yet still great thirst.

But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.

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