L11: Flooding the zone with shit for Jesus

disinformation and playful conspiracism as strategies to world a white Christian US

What is flooding the zone with shit

• overproducing media content, both true and false, in forms of memes, etc. to keep “real” information from being seen and keeping your narrative on the front line

  • Ex. ASMR deportation video: people can find this funny, entertaining, etc. it takes away from the actual political

What is the effect of flooding the zone with shit?

• Not denial of truth

• But more people are tired to figure out what the truth is

  • Truth games

  • People abandoned the idea that the truth is knowable

How did this start in the US?

• This is manufactured —> a deliberate strategy

  • Steve Bannon: “the democrats don’t matter; the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”

    • Chief strategist for Trump

Was flooding the zone with shit a US strategy? 

• Has been done since the 90s: Putin pioneered this in post soviet Russia

Does this strategy work?

• Trump rambles a lot in his speeches, this tends to be what people focus when talking about trump but in reality he does have some concrete arguments/ideas that get missed due to this

• Works, works pretty well

Flooding the zone with shit: goals

• It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stores —> leads to people giving up at finding the truth

  • People no longer trust what they read in the press

• Ex. Remix song of trump saying “they are eating the cats/dogs in Springfield”

  • Removes focus from what is being said and makes it a joke, so the joke is what people remember

  • People don’t remember that it was targeted at Haitians and how they have endured many years of ridicule for them doing voodoo and being cannibals they only remember him saying this crazy statement and it being turned into a joke

  • Can disinformation be fought with humor? There’s a thin line

what do we see when we look at the following topics through this lens?

• 2024 election through lens of disinformation

  • Becoming desensitized to a lot of the information coming out of the US since Trumps second term

    • Mass deportation

    • Alligator Alcatraz

  • He said he was going to do “x” so why are we surprised?

• The Heritage foundation

• Project Esther

• The embodied consequences

Evangelicals in US right now

• have a lot of money and power 

  • Have had a large effect on policy in the recent years

    • Ex. Trans rights taken away, 10 commandments in all classrooms

Televangelism

• started in the 60s

  • 70s started international broadcasts

Flat earth convention video

• Flat earth conspiracy is an easy gate to get into more conspiracy theories —> they all connect in some way, they get introduced to new conspiracies

  • Video shows: ex. discussion of Jews

US exports CT

• The US is very potent with conspiracy theories and they get exported to other counties

  • Netherlands is a US centered country

    • Most UFO sightings are in the US, next country is NL

Conspiracy triangle 

• No conspiracy theory ends up alone —> once you believe in one, you start believing more and more

What type of people get into CT?

• People who believe in CT see themselves as victim warriors fighting against the corrupt and powerful elite

CT note

• Not a CT if it turns out to be true

  • Ex watergate

• Subversion myths and memetic baggage are key to CT

  • Ex. Jewish CT that reoccur

  • Them vs us

• The influence of the US white evangelical media empires

• Playful nature of CT amplifies their success

Qanon: overlap with evangelical Americans

QAnon found support among some evangelical Christians because it uses apocalyptic language, good vs. evil narratives, and appeals to moral panic, echoing themes familiar in certain strands of American evangelical culture. Some pastors and online ministries unintentionally (or intentionally) amplified Q ideas by integrating conspiracy themes into sermons, prophecy culture, or spiritual warfare rhetoric.

Text intro from article

• Last page: there is a lot of cross over between Q (which the article is about) and evangelicals beliefs (connection to bible —> mainly book of revelations)

  • The plagues coming back

  • What needs to happen in order for Jesus to come back

    • One of them being all Jews in Israel, to then die

      • Paradoxical antisemitism → supporting Israel in current conflict in order to later have them all die

      • (Need to get rid of everyone who isn’t Christian, starting with Muslims ig)

Qanon definition

baseless conspiracy theory movement that began online in 2017. It centers around anonymous posts from “Q,” who claimed—without evidence—to have insider government knowledge. Followers believe in a variety of unfounded political conspiracies, many involving secret plots and elite wrongdoing. It has been widely discredited by journalists, researchers, and government agencies.

Are CT’s usually connected to political parties?

• The conspiracy thinking is more independent from party politics —> more and more people are not identifying as democrat or republican

  • Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places

  • Although we live in a democracy, a small group of people run everything, but we don’t know who they are

  • When big event occur, pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks, it is because that secretive group is working against the rest of us

Q + white American evangelicalism

• Propelled by paranoia and populism

• But also propelled by religious faith

• Preordained future

QAnon: why the crossover between Q and EAs happened

• Shared distrust of government and mainstream media

• Belief in hidden spiritual or political battles

• Social media echo chambers

• 2020 pandemic anxiety and political polarization

QAnon: global spread

• QAnon spread worldwide through Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, and TikTok, evolving to fit local political issues. It gained traction in Europe, Latin America, Australia, and Japan, often merging with existing conspiracy theories (e.g., anti-vaccine movements, anti-government protests, anti-5G beliefs).

  • Some beliefs are inherently American and don’t translate well