They’re Not Incompetent: They Want You Exhausted.
There’s a term for what’s happening. It’s called “flooding the zone” and it was designed specifically to break you.
Steve Bannon articulated it plainly back in 2018: overwhelm the media, the opposition, and the public with such a relentless torrent of actions, outrages, and controversies that no single one can be properly scrutinised, resisted, or remembered. Don’t just control the narrative. Drown it.
We are living inside that strategy right now.
In the opening weeks of the second Trump administration, 54 executive orders were signed. Deportations. DEI abolition. Withdrawal from the WHO. Tariffs on allies. Suggestions of annexing Canada. Threats to Greenland. Gutting of federal agencies. Each one, on its own, would have consumed months of news cycles, congressional hearings, public debate. Stacked on top of each other, at speed, they consumed nothing. They just consumed us.
There is strategy in this architecture and here’s what it does to your brain.
When you’re hit with too much information, too fast, your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for critical thinking, moral reasoning, and decision-making, starts to shut down. Your mind defaults to shortcuts. Emotional reactivity replaces analysis. You stop asking why is this happening and start just trying to survive the next headline.
The psychological term is cognitive overload. The political result is apathy.
And apathy is not a side effect of this strategy. It is the strategy. An exhausted public doesn’t organise themselves in response to this strategy. It doesn’t sustain outrage long enough to hold anyone accountable. It scrolls, sighs, and moves on, which is precisely what those in power are banking on.
There’s a reason each new announcement lands before the last one has been processed. There’s a reason the stories are relentless and contradictory and often outrageous enough to feel unreal. Disbelief is a feature, not a bug. When something feels too absurd to be true, people disengage. When people disengage, accountability dies.
Let’s be clear about what’s being buried.
The volume of announcements isn’t just overwhelming, its strategic cover. While everyone is arguing about the latest inflammatory statement, the quieter, more permanent work gets done: institutional dismantling, legal precedent-setting, appointment of loyalists, redirection of public funds. The outrageous thing you’re screaming about on social media may well be the distraction. The thing you didn’t notice is the one that will matter in five years.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory- actually, it’s a well documented, named, openly admitted political technique. The question isn’t whether it’s happening, it’s whether you’re going to let it work on you.
Apathy is, ultimately, a choice. And so is the alternative.
I’m not going to tell you to doomscroll harder. I’m not going to tell you to be outraged about everything, because that’s another trap - rage fatigue is just as useful to power as indifference.
That’s a much stronger and more original perspective — and honestly more honest too. The “pick your lane” framing is a bit of a civic duty cliché. What you’re describing is something deeper: presence over performance, action over outrage.
The antidote isn’t more vigilance. It’s rootedness.
Dip in. Dip out. You don’t need to be a full-time witness to the collapse of democratic norms to be useful. In fact, the people running this strategy want you glued to it: reactive, scrolling, performing your outrage online while nothing in your immediate world changes.
The more subversive act is to ask a different question entirely: where can I actually create change?
Not at the federal level. Not in the abstract. In your neighbourhood. In your community. With the people immediately around you.
That requires a kind of radical reorientation: away from the dopamine loop of the news cycle and toward something quieter and more demanding: deep listening. Ritual. Stillness. Asking yourself, honestly, how can I best serve right now, not from a place of panic or reactivity, but from grounded neutrality.
Because grounded people are the thing this machine cannot manufacture and cannot break. You can’t flood the zone of someone who isn’t living in the zone.
The work isn’t always online. It’s local, it’s relational, and it starts with getting quiet enough to hear what’s actually needed.
And don’t confuse stillness with surrender. Taking a deliberate break from the news is not the same as giving up. Protecting your capacity to think clearly IS resistance.
Because their game is exhaustion.
And so the counter-move is endurance and preservation: do what you need to stay with yourself during these times.
They’re counting on you to burn out, tune out, and give up. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
Stay in it. Stay sharp. And stop pretending this is normal: naming the abnormal is the first act of refusing it.
If this resonated, share it with someone who’s feeling the overwhelm. That feeling is real, and it isn’t weakness- it’s the intended effect. Knowing that changes everything.
