# Steve Bannon — "flood the zone with shit" > [!quote] "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." > — Steve Bannon, to author Michael Lewis, 2018 ## Context Said to author Michael Lewis in 2018, after Bannon's exit from the White House, and widely circulated since. It is the candid statement of method behind the Trump-era information environment: the opposition is not the other party but the press, and the press is defeated not by argument but by saturation. ## Why this matters The single most-cited articulation of the modern right's information-warfare doctrine — see the term page [[Flood the Zone]]. Bannon names the strategy of overwhelming fact-checking capacity with sheer volume, collapsing the shared epistemic baseline so that audiences default to tribal cues. It is the operating logic that connects the firehose-of-falsehood model, the second-term "muzzle velocity" tactic, and the broader disinformation apparatus. A foundational receipt for any analysis of why fact-checking alone fails against this style of politics. ## Verification - **Provenance:** Reported by Michael Lewis; aggregated and analyzed by [Media Matters](https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/misinformer-year-steve-bannons-flood-zone-shit-approach-destroying-american-democracy); [Flood the zone — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed, repeatedly reaffirmed in spirit by Bannon. ## Related quotes - [[Karl Rove - reality-based community]] — the earlier articulation of manufacturing reality rather than reporting it.