If you feel like you’re being crushed by the unbearable weight of the chaotic news cycle and all you want to do is curl into a little ball and fall into a four-year coma, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wants you to know that it’s by design.
On Tuesday, the New York lawmaker took to Instagram Live for a roughly 90-minute chat about the current state of the United States government, and how everyday people who disagree with President Donald Trump’s administration can fight back in “tangible” ways.
“I want you all to understand that if you are watching the news right now and you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the constant headlines and developments and what is happening,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the beginning of her Instagram Live. “First of all, know that you are not alone. And second of all, know that that is exactly what this administration is trying to get you to feel.”
She continued, “What authoritarian regimes try to do is that they often try to, what is known as ‘flood the zone.’”
Ocasio-Cortez defined “flood the zone” as when a government does “so much at once … that you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed.”
“It’s important for you to understand that the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point,” she continued. “They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public.”
Later on in her video, she emphasized that burying one’s head in the sand at this moment isn’t exactly the best tactic.
“We need to try,” she said. “I don’t want to hear, ‘Oh, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ That’s called consenting in advance. So, when your mind says, ‘It’s all over, we might as well’ — no, no, no. … Do not be discouraged by temporary defeats. We keep going anyway. When we are relentless, they will fatigue. They can only hold this up for so long.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s belief that the Trump administration is trying to “flood the zone” with Trump’s nonsensical ramblingsand his administration introducing all kinds of bizarre and harmful policies to deflect from their real agenda has merit.
Former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon “introduced” the concept in 2018 — and he was pretty vocal about it.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said at the time, per Vox. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Bannon recently even boasted about how impressed he is by how well Trump’s current administration fine-tuned his blueprint.
“It’s working. It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system,” Bannon said on his online talk show last month, via The Washington Post.
Although Bannon would like to take full credit for this scheme, it’s been utilized throughout history.
In a June 2024 piece for Time magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michiko Kakutani wrote that Trump — whom she calls a “chaos monster” — is “like many dictators and would be autocrats before him.”
Kakutani pointed out that “autocratic regimes often employ the latest technology of the day” to “amplify their lies.”
She noted that Benito Mussolini used film “as a vector for spreading propaganda” and that Adolf Hitler utilized the radio — placing them in markets, workplaces and “subsidized affordable radio receivers to guarantee the widest possible audience.” Trump, much like Russian President Vladimir Putin, uses the internet in a similar way, she said.
“It’s meant to overwhelm audiences with a relentless flood of disinformation, partial truths, random facts and social media speculation, mixed in a toxic sludge that induces exhaustion and cynicism in people,” Kakutani said. “It tempts people to believe that all truths are relative, that all politicians are corrupt, and that they’d be better off focusing on their private lives instead of issues in the public square.”
During her Instagram Live Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez told her followers that if they’re feeling burnt out by the news right now, the first step is to unplug and touch some grass.
“It is of personal importance for you, and it is also of political importance, to take a breath,” she said. “That does not mean tune out. That does not mean get apathetic. It does not mean that you just have to forget, or whatever. It just means take a breath because we are about to lock in and focus.”
She then reminded viewers that, technically, the American people have the advantage in this situation.
“Understand that we outnumber them,” she said. “We outnumber them so dramatically that they have to try to control media and communication channels and apps etcetera because they want to — and need to — invoke docility, passivity in the masses in order for them to get away with what they’re doing.”
The lawmaker then suggested the American people who disagree with Trump should “divide and conquer.”
“Do what you can. And what you can do is enough,” she said.
In the Instagram Live, the progressive lawmaker made several suggestions of small and pragmatic ways people can fight back, which you can watch in the above video.
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Ocasio-Cortez reminded her followers several times that no deed of resistance is too small.
“What happens over millions of people is that you generate enough friction that they cannot go as fast as they want to go,” she said.
She added, “Make sure you’re slowing down this system. The slower they operate, the less they can break.”