Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, was right when she said that “sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.” Other times, the point is, in the immortal words of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit”—to overwhelm the press and the public with so much misinformation and disinformation that democracy can’t function.
