The Chaos Agents

The Art and Practice of Flooding the Zone with S***

Part 2 of the special Halloween series “Fearmongers and Chaos Agents.”

The American economy grew more than twice as fast in July, August and September as in the previous quarter, but nearly half the people that Gallup surveyed last month rate the economy as poor. In August the U.S. unemployment rate hit a a 50-year low. But polls find that more than half of all Americans wrongly believe unemployment is nearing a 50-year high.

This disconnect from fact-based reality is certainly not new in our politics, but the degree of distrust and confusion we’ve arrived at is among the finer achievements of the very long game played by the right: Things can’t be going well. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Welcome to the era of the chaos agent ascendant. A year into the Trump presidency that he was credited with helping achieve, failed Hollywood filmmaker Steve Bannon explained the method. A-list American journalists were regularly making the pilgrimage to his DC office to drink Scotch, smoke cigars and scribe down his fascist, racist revolutionary wisdom. In 2018, the lupine freak in his triple preppy shirts famously told author Michael Lewis: “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.”

Bannon didn’t invent that, really. For decades, the right, financed by conservative corporate and donor money, and through its doughy avatars of regression Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes, had farmed and then silo’ed off white, low information voter aggrievement, creating a growing zombie voter bloc that did not believe the “liberal media”could possibly be operating on principles of objectively reporting both sides.

The chaos game entered a new level when its greatest practitioner was narrowly elected to the White House. A day after he was inaugurated, Trump, from the White House press briefing room, introduced the notion of “#fakenews” while trying to persuade people that his small and listless inauguration crowd had been bigger than Obama’s. At the time, I found this hard to take seriously, since I was at both events. The Capitol mall in 2009 was so packed it was hard to breathe, while the only crowds and energy on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2017 came from the pens of protesters with amusing signs, barricaded behind riot guardrails at 100 yard intervals.

The President’s assertions struck many as ridiculous. What news consumer could possibly miss the difference between the drone images of the two mall crowds, placed side by side on screens and newspapers?

We were wrong. Here, IRL, was George Orwell’s fictional totalitarianism: 'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

We have come to understand that it doesn’t take much to “flood the zone with shit.” Spreading misinformation and sowing distrust is surprisingly easy: just grab a megaphone, a TV camera, or a social media platform with lots of followers, and tell a big lie. It’s like injecting a single drop of ink into a glass of water. Once in, you can’t remove it. There’s always someone, over in a corner at the laundromat, the bar, the office, saying “yeh, but I heard,” or “people are saying … “

Sometime in the ensuing years, we started calling these shit-spreaders “chaos agents.” I don’t know who came up with it. “Chaos Agent” is a Fortnite video game villain who is both mad scientist and secret agent. But such characters have existed in politics probably since human beings first started trying to organize themselves. Unhappy with the rules, which aren’t benefiting their cause, they operate from behind the scenes to collapse order, with the ultimate goal of reorganizing the system for their benefit.

Sometimes such breakdowns are good: think of the partisans who created disorder for the Nazis behind enemy lines in Europe, or courageous revolutionaries whose efforts ultimately overthrow dictators and oppressors. And no one can say that the American government isn’t due for a revolution of some sort, as it pours money into distant wars and other geopolitical stratagems while failing to serve the basic education and health care needs of its own citizens.

Unfortunately the energy for this revolution is coming almost entirely from the right. The American political landscape is creepy-crawly with tens of thousands of these crypto-fascist chaos agents, many human, some bot.

It is impossible to catalog all of them in a single space. I’ll just mention a few. Trump is chaos agent-in-chief, lesser players are Alex Jones, the Murdoch family, Fox anchors, and certainly Tucker Carlson as a launderer of fringe extremism, prominent anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. There is also an army of paid online influencers and fake journalists, many enabled by Elon Musk’s increasingly right wing X-former-Twitter platform.

The chaos agents operate independently, but within the same general ideological frame: they push the notion that progressive and liberal culture and policies are not just wrong but evil, even Satanic, and that conservative Americans should assume threat to their property and way of life is at hand.

It’s a lucrative game. They vie with each other for audiences, sensationalize events, grasp and disseminate the same memes. Sleepy Joe. The Deep State. Deadly big pharma vaccines. Globalists. Gay groomers coming for the kiddies. Maniacal gun nuts as liberal false flag operations.

What they always have in common is that they both serve and can’t exist without big money. Elon Musk may help humanity get to Mars, but on earth he is a well-funded social menace. Since taking over Twitter, Musk has targeted for abuse and algorithmic demotion political and scientific experts, and elevated chaos agents including conspiracy-spewingm fact-free “citizen journalists.”

After a year in charge, a typical Musk X star now is influencer Mindy Robinson. Musk retweets the former reality TV with more than 300,000 followers. Her bio, beside the American flag and airbrushed profile selfie on her IheartMindyprofile, reads: “Independent Journalist, Hidden History Buff, Anti-Government Libertarian, and Host of “Conspiracy Truths” on America Happens.”

One of Mindy’s Tweets today is about the death of Matthew Perry: “Matthew Perry is dead after first responders, called it in as cardiac arrest. He was 54. He was also fully vaccinated.” Never mind that he was overweight and admittedly struggled with a lifetime of addiction, it has to be the otherwise lifesaving mRNA covid vaccine that did him in.

IheartMindy occupies the lower tier of chaos agentry.n Here practitioners vie for attention and pools of money available from the donor class that supports and enables their operations. Besides Musk, they are financed by actual political donors, whose money is managed and directed by people like Catholic fanatic and Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta Leonard Leo and his associate Ginni Thomas, a lifetime member of the American Wingnut Club, who has been outrageously enabled by her husband’s Supreme Court position to access huge pools of right wing donor cash.

This dynamic duo do the bidding of rich, conservative and almost always anonymous donors. Their fingerprints are all over shady chaos operations. One is called Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty, formed in 2019 as an “informal … incubator for ideas across a network of conservative leaders, cultural entrepreneurs, and cultural influences,” for which she funneled some $600,000 in anonymous donor money between 2019 and 2021. According to the Washington Post, the payments were funneled through the Leonard Leo’s Capital Research Center (CRC) as a “fiscal sponsorship,” meaning Crowdsourcers did not have to disclose donors behind the payment.

Ginni Thomas is mobbed up with Moms for Liberty (M4L), a national chaos operation that leveraged parental anger about covid school closings and mask mandates into an out and out fascist group that, besides harassing school boards across the country, helped organize the January 6 insurrection. (I wrote about these rich white ladies as Trojan horse of the insurrection for The New Republic, linked below). M4L has about 103,000 members across 278 chapters in 45 states who stoke anti-LGBTQ fear, and push book-banning.

And of course, this little army of chaos agents is enabled by a quiet donor, in this case Florida grocery chain heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli.

Trump still stands at the top of the pyramid of chaos agents. He remains the leader of the Republicans and the role model for all other chaos agents. His example of audacious lying and conspiracy-spreading inspires imitators who have less skin in the game. He must discredit the legal system, charged with 91 criminal offenses over four cases. So far the legal system has been unable to curb him: what other defendant walks free while threatening judges and doxxing their staff?

Trump’s grip on the right remains intact. As vulgar and criminal as he is, the movement needs its greatest chaos agent. After the Gaetz of Hell swung open in the U.S. House leading to three weeks of chaos, Trump crushed the candidacies of potential moderates for Speaker. Republicans finally lined up unanimously behind a sleeper, an architect of the greatest chaos operations in American history, the 2020 election Big Lie.

Much has been written about Mike Johnson, the obscure Louisiana Bible-banger who now leads the lower chamber of Congress, so I won’t go over all the details. He certainly acted as a chaos agent for the coup attempt. But as House Speaker, Johnson is not a chaos agent. On the contrary, he is the ghost of a very dark possibility in America’s political future.

In his first speech from the speaker’s podium this week, Johnson issued a last-century spew of a Christofascist fantasia about God, communists and Marxism: “It was in 1962, in 1962, our national motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ was adorned above this rostrum. If you look at the little guide that they give tourists and constituents and visitors to the House, if you turn to page 14, in the middle of that guide, it tells you the history of this. It says very simply, ‘These words were placed above us, this motto was placed here as a rebuke of the Cold War-era philosophy of the Soviet Union. That philosophy was Marxism and Communism, which begins with the premise that there is no God.’

Later, when Sean Hannity on Fox asked Johnson to describe his views, the new House Speaker replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview, that’s what I believe.”

This is a national embarrassment of course, this Talibanesque crap, this blurring of the line between church and state.

Secular government that respects all creeds (and none) is one of the founding principles of American democracy, and the basis for whatever is great about our system.

Theocratic fascism is the end game here. After sowing fear and distrust in everything from the law, to journalists, to scientists and the American medical system, and driving wedges between Americans of different ideologies, religions, genders and races, only a supernatural being can make us whole. Let God and his authorized agents on Earth sort out the confusion, and make us safe again. After the chaos, it will all be okay, as long as we pray, follow their rules, and submit to our God-ordained places in a divinely inspired patriarchal and racial hierarchy.

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