The Headline Overload Assault on America
We had paused in Pittsburgh, opening the Ikea boxes, playing the infuriating jenga game of furniture assembly in a room without air conditioning. Half the house was still in boxes. The kitchen smelled of cardboard and tacos and leftover Chinese food. I was supposed to be helping my son sort his new apartment.
I sat on the chair I had just built and opened the New York Times app.
The scroll began.
The Kennedy Center fires its dance director. Trump invokes ten emergency declarations. Powell signals rate cuts. The FBI raids John Bolton’s house. Pete Hegseth arms troops in D.C. Trump threatens to fire a Federal Reserve governor.
That was one scroll. One minute. One news cycle.
The boxes in Pittsburgh could wait. What I felt in that moment was vertigo. The ground shifted. The headlines fired like strobe lights too close to the eyes.
This is not governance. This is assault.
It is shock-and-awe politics. A strategy of saturation. The firehose turned inward, aimed at the body politic, meant to overwhelm.
Authoritarian power rarely arrives in a single blow. It seeps in by routine. A blizzard of decrees, raids, firings, threats, “emergency” measures. Each outrage lasts an hour before the next one detonates. Each new violation buries the last. Until the extraordinary feels ordinary. Until the outrageous becomes wallpaper.
History has seen this tactic before. Mussolini. Putin. Orbán. But in the internet age, brute censorship is no longer required. The torrent itself does the silencing. Distraction becomes repression.
In America, the overload comes wrapped in headlines. The New York Times app is not propaganda. It is the record. And that is the danger. The truth itself, delivered at this velocity, feels like chaos.
Chaos is the point. Chaos is the weapon.
It convinces you not to bother parsing the pattern. It trains you to believe nothing matters because everything happens at once. By the time the public debates whether Trump can fire a Federal Reserve governor, he has already armed federal troops in the capital. By the time we process the FBI raid on Bolton, the Justice Department has dumped an Epstein document and the White House has seized a stake in a private company.
I remember sitting there in Pittsburgh, sweat on my back, half-buried in packing paper, trying to follow it all. Every ping of a headline felt like another box dumped at my feet. Another demand to sort what could not be sorted. The overload wasn’t just on the screen. It was in my chest. Pulse racing. Breath short. That was the tactic, working in real time.
The overload is the assault. The regime doesn’t need to hide its actions. They’re right there in the headlines. It only needs to bury them under the weight of one another, until Americans cannot tell which fire is most dangerous, which alarm to answer, which breach to stop.
Democracy does not die in darkness. It dies in glare.
Too much light. Too many signals. Too many sirens.
I turned off the phone and looked at the half-built apartment. My son returned with two water bottles, we were building his bed. A tower of boxes leaned against the wall, waiting for order. I thought: this is the choice. Either let the clutter bury us, or keep building anyway.
Coda
Writing on my phone today, but I wrote this chamber piece a few months ago. I think it captures the moment.
The Republic Falls
https://on.soundcloud.com/5nTC04EL5KTiUYyWgQ
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
- Freidrich Nietzsche
Pick one thing. One thing that you are most passionate about saving from the whirlwind. Do everything you can to keep it safe. The advancing holocaust forces us to make tough choices--what to save; what to lose.