Death comes calling. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Weaponizing Distraction: Spectacle as Governance

Under the Trump administration, the politics of diversion has hardened into a governing strategy and been normalized by a compliant mainstream media ecosystem. As James Oliphant observes in Reuters, “Donald Trump is a human hurricane,” generating so many simultaneous controversies that tracking any single event becomes nearly impossible. Oliphant is only partly right, because what he describes as chaos is in fact method. Trump is more than a whirlwind of chaos and distraction. He is an unchecked authoritarian who poses a grave threat to democracy and the planet—he is a modern day avatar of domestic terrorism. What masquerades as spectacle and turbulence is, in fact, the calculated exercise of power, a form of governance that weaponizes confusion, accelerates cruelty, and functions as a domestic analogue of terrorism, designed to intimidate, disorient, and exhaust the public into submission. It is through this machinery of distraction and shock that state terrorism now takes shape, not as a single event, but as a continuous sequence of calculated ruptures and relentless acts of violence.

Aftershocks of Power: Kinetic Action and State Terror

State terrorism unfolds through what the........

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