Observers of the current chaos in the US, UK, Brazil and elsewhere often ask why the populist leaders, Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro, behave so ineptly. Why do so many people follow leaders with no discernible plan or competence? The reason, as the journalist Jay Rosen has explained, is that the plan is to have no plan. Rather, the leaders promote massive confusion about who is responsible for Covid-19 and the economic and social situation, fixing blame on ‘leftists’, the press, China, or some other foreign element; imposing tariffs that will disadvantage their own populations; withdrawing from the World Health Organisation … and so on. The aim, in the words of Steve Bannon, is to ‘flood the zone with shit’, overwhelming the media and the population with disinformation, distraction, and denial. Out of this chaos will step the saviour strong man, as Trump stepped out of the clouds of tear gas released on his own people to hold up a bible in front of the White House church.

[2017] HOW WHITE NATIONALISM BECAME NORMAL ONLINE

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Source: HOW WHITE NATIONALISM BECAME NORMAL ONLINE

Steve Bannon, Trump’s recently deposed chief strategist, consciously attempted to forge a bond to the underbelly of 4chan and similar sites. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster powers,” Bannon discovered, while working at a failed startup designed to monetize virtual currency mining in the online game, World of Warcraft, according to the book, “Devil’s Bargain,” by journalist Joshua Green. When Bannon took the reins at Breitbart News, he moved quickly to harness the online troll army by overtly tapping into the outrage machine sites like 4chan generated. “The reality is, Fox News’s audience was geriatric and no one was connecting with this younger group,” Bannon said. The decision to hire a technology editor named Milo Yiannopoulos, whose specialty at Breitbart was intentionally offensive content, was a deliberate attempt to harness the high-traffic horde of 4chan readers for political gain.