They Don’t Need Us to Agree. They Only Need Us Exhausted.
It’s their strategy. Here’s how to fight it.
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Summary
Over the last two weeks, the Trump administration has simultaneously escalated attacks on transgender Americans, launched a war in the Middle East, pushed legislation that could strip 69 million women of their right to vote, and told us despite documented evidence to the contrary that ICE operations in Minnesota is over and that our soldiers are safe.
Paying attention might be part of the problem. We’ve been made to pay attention to everything at once, and that’s to keep us distracted and overwhelmed.
Regarding “Operation Epic Fury,” a military strike campaign on Iran that had been diplomatically within reach of a resolution just hours before the first bomb fell, as of this morning, six American service members are confirmed dead, and the U.S. Central Command, which initially stated it had suffered no casualties is now warning the public to expect more. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s casualty tracker puts the death toll in Iran at over 555, including the strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab that killed an estimated 148 to 180 children, according to Iranian health officials. The gap between what our government tells us and what international outlets are reporting is becoming a credibility crisis.
We are still keeping our eyes on the SAVE America Act (House Voted 218-213.) The bill, now heading to the Senate, would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, demanding documents like passports or birth certificates that must match current legal names. An estimated 69 million American women who changed their surnames after marriage do not have documents that align. Election workers who register a citizen without the exact required paperwork could face five years in prison. The National Organization for Women has called it the Stop Act. It limits women from voting.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons adopted a policy sharply restricting gender-affirming medical care for most transgender people in federal custody denying access to hormones and other medically necessary treatments and mandating psychiatric therapy and other non-gender-affirming interventions instead, according to reporting from The Marshall Project. (The Marshall Project reporting on BOP policy)
In Kansas, following a state change in how gender markers are handled, some transgender residents began receiving official letters reflecting altered classifications in government systems.
National legislative trackers show hundreds of anti-trans bills introduced across state legislatures and Congress in recent sessions, targeting healthcare access, identity documentation, school policies, and nondiscrimination protections prompting lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey and Representative Pramila Jayapal to reintroduce a federal Transgender Bill of Rights resolution in response to what they described as ongoing attacks on the transgender community. (Markey press release on Transgender Bill of Rights)
And also because we are not done, the administration told us ICE operations in Minnesota was over. It’s not.
What They Said vs. What People on the Ground Are Reporting
On February 12th, Tom Homan announced Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota was winding down. Governor Walz said he expected the operation to end “over the next few days.” The media largely moved on.
But according to a sworn court filing by ICE’s own St. Paul Field Office Director, roughly 400 federal agents remain assigned to Minnesota with authorization to stay through March. For context: before the surge, 150 agents covered all of Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas. That “drawdown” leaves behind more than twice the normal staffing level for the entire region.
DFL State Rep. Brad Tabke told Axios that agents in Shakopee are being “equally as aggressive as they have been,” now using disguises, including, according to the Sahan Journal, posing as environmental canvassers going door-to-door. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said at a press conference that ICE “continues to terrorize” community members. Many children in Fridley still aren’t back in classrooms because their families don’t feel safe.
The administration said the operation was over. The federal court record says otherwise.
And on the detention facilities, the administration calls this “deportation.” But DHS has already spent over $690 million purchasing warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan with plans to spend $38 to 45 billion total converting more than two dozen additional facilities, some designed to hold up to 10,000 people at a time. A Navy contract originally valued at $10 billion has reportedly expanded to a $55 billion ceiling, routed through a military procurement system normally used to rapidly build infrastructure in war zones. The contract is called TITUS “Territorial Integrity of the United States.”
Three out of four people currently in ICE detention have no criminal conviction. Judges have already ruled more than 4,000 ICE detentions illegal. Reuters reports at least eight deaths in ICE detention centers since the start of 2026
This Has a Name and It Has a History.
What we are living through is a governing methodology.
Autocratic flooding: the deliberate generation of overlapping crises to prevent sustained resistance to any one of them.
Steve Bannon described his version of the strategy in 2018: “flood the zone with shit.” But the technique is far older than Bannon, and understanding its history is protective.
When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his government didn’t immediately build death camps. It built a cascading architecture of smaller violations, laws stripping Jews of citizenship, banning them from professions, requiring identifying markers, each absorbed before the next arrived.
Historians note that the pace was as important as the content. Citizens who might have organized against any single measure found themselves perpetually behind, perpetually reacting, and perpetually exhausted.
The Soviet Union under Stalin was a master of the manufactured crisis. Purges, show trials, territorial provocations, events timed and layered so that the population never had a moment to coordinate memory, let alone resistance. The goal was disorientation.
In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, military crackdowns in Santiago coincided precisely with economic dislocations in the provinces. Neither story got the attention it deserved. Scattered outrage is no outrage.
This is not to draw a direct historical equivalence to any specific outcome but to see a reoccurring pattern that’s appeared, in different forms, in every authoritarian drift of the modern era… when a government wants to move faster than the public can process, it generates a lot of noise, all at once.
The Media Can’t Save Us From This
Not all mainstream media is uniformly corrupt or captured. There are reporters at the Washington Post, NPR, Reuters, and the AP doing genuinely important work right now. But the structural incentives of corporate media, the 24-hour cycle, the revenue model built on engagement, the addiction to novelty make it almost perfectly designed to be exploited by zone-flooding.
When CENTCOM holds a briefing, it gets broadcast live. When a community in Shakopee reports that ICE agents are still at their doors dressed as environmental canvassers, it takes days for that to surface in a local outlet, if it surfaces at all. When the official death toll in an overseas military operation is announced, it becomes the headline. When international outlets publish substantially different numbers, it gets labeled “conflict” and buried in a sidebar. We can’t outsource our information environment to institutions whose economic model rewards speed over depth.
What History Tells Us Works
This strategy has a failure condition. Zone-flooding fails when communities build their own information structures and it fails when we maintain institutional memory like tracking what officials said on what date, documenting the gap between the announcement and the ground truth. It fails when resistance is local and durable rather than just national and reactive.
The Danish resistance during World War II is instructive. When the Nazi occupation ordered the deportation of Danish Jews in 1943, the response was not a national march. It was a network… neighbors telling neighbors, fishermen arranging boats, people acting in coordinated local cells faster than the bureaucracy could follow. Roughly 7,000 people were evacuated in a matter of days. The network worked because it had already been built. It didn’t need to be assembled in the moment of a crisis.
The Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s survived years of martial law not because it had a charismatic national figurehead, though it did, but because it had distributed, local infrastructure such as underground newspapers, neighborhood committees, mutual aid networks that continued functioning even when the central organization was suppressed.
The lesson is that structure and organizing is required.
Share your thoughts in the comments:
What We Can Do
These are tactics with historical precedent.
1. Build a local accountability file on ONE story. Choose one issue such as Minnesota, the SAVE Act, the detention warehouses, Iran casualties and track it regularly. Create a document, date every official claim and note every contradiction. Share it to your social media, to friends or family or your local community. Governments rely on short attention spans.
2. Start or join a local information circle. You don’t need a lot of people. One weekly check-in. Divide the work, one person tracks federal claims, one tracks local enforcement activity, one monitors state legislation, one documents credibility gaps, one identifies one concrete action step.
3. Map the detention infrastructure in your region. Search your state’s federal contracting database for ICE facility contracts. Look for large warehouse purchases. If ICE is building or converting a facility near you, your city council can vote to refuse to cooperate with it. Kansas City already did. Your community can too. Document what’s being built. Attend local government meetings. Put the receipts in public view.
4. Help women in your life check their voting documentation NOW. The SAVE Act has not passed the Senate yet, but state-level versions are advancing. Sit down with your mother, sister, neighbor, community group. Walk them through what documents they have, whether names match, what to do if they don’t. If you have legal knowledge, offer a free documentation session. If you don’t, find someone who does. Don’t wait for the bill to become law.
5. Contact your international news sources and amplify them. When Al Jazeera’s casualty tracker shows 555 dead in Iran and U.S. outlets are reporting 6, that is not a reason for conspiracy. It is a reason to read internationally and to share what you find. Cite sources. Include dates. Be precise. Your credibility as an amplifier of information is one of your most powerful tools. Make sure to verify, do not uplift fake or AI-generated news sources.
6. Write a public comment on the nearest proposed ICE facility. ICE is legally required to publish solicitations and accept public comment on proposed facilities. Find your nearest proposed site. New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and others are listed in public contracting documents. Submit a formal comment. Attend the local planning meeting. Bring your neighbors.
7. Support local outlets that are doing on-the-ground reporting. Find outlets telling you what federal briefings aren’t. Subscribe. Share. Thank them specifically. The information ecosystem that serves you is the one you invest in.
We are overwhelmed because our attention is under deliberate assault by people who understand, with precision, that scattered people can’t coordinate.
The response to that is not to stop being angry, your anger is appropriate.
It is calibrated correctly to what is actually happening.
A war was started when diplomacy was within reach.
Children are in detention facilities.
Women are being systematically removed from the voter rolls.
Transgender Americans are having their medical care stripped by executive order. Citizens in Minnesota are still being arrested by agents dressed as canvassers.
Disciplined anger builds structures and panicked anger burns out.
We need the kind that is still here in six months, tracking, organizing, and still remembering what was said and what was done.
They need you exhausted and alone. Let’s make sure that never happens.
Sources + Additional Reading
NPR | Oman’s Foreign Minister said a deal was “within reach” hours before strikes began. U.S. casualty reporting, Operation Epic Fury
CBS News | Live updates: U.S. death toll rises to six, Trump says campaign could last five weeks
Al Jazeera | Death toll and injury tracker; 555+ confirmed killed in Iran, Minab school strike
The 19th | House passes SAVE America Act 218-213 impact on married women and name-change documentation
National Women’s Law Center | 69 million women without matching documentation; SAVE Act voter suppression analysis
National Organization for Women | “The SAVE Act is the Stop Act” statement from NOW President Kim Villanueva
Feminist Majority Foundation | Senate version S.128 analysis; documentation barriers and disproportionate impact
Campaign Legal Center | Voter purge mandates, mail registration elimination, criminal penalties for election workers
Wikipedia | Persecution of Transgender People Under the Second Trump Administration | Timeline of executive orders, Kansas government letters, FBP conversion therapy policy
Wikipedia | Executive Order 14168 | Federal Bureau of Prisons conversion therapy policy adopted February 2026
Axios Twin Cities | Sworn court filing: 400 agents remain through March; Rep. Tabke on continued Shakopee activity
Minnesota Reformer | ICE agents using disguises including posing as environmental canvassers; data on post-surge activity
Wikipedia | Operation Metro Surge | Full timeline; 96 court-order violations; two U.S. citizens killed; perjury probe into ICE agents
The Intercept | DHS buying and converting 24+ warehouses; network of facilities holding up to 10,000 people
Common Dreams | $38.3 billion detention plan. GEO Group profits; community resistance city by city
Common Dreams | Navy WEXMAC contract expanded to $55 billion ceiling; “TITUS” program; ghost network of detention sites
Common Dreams | 4,000+ ICE detentions ruled illegal by judges; three out of four detainees have no criminal conviction
NBC News | $45 billion expansion; warehouse purchases in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona; community opposition
Truthout | $690 million already spent on eight warehouses, six deaths in ICE custody in January 2026
Slate / Amicus Podcast | Historian Andrea Pitzer on warehouse detention and historical parallels
Washington Post | Four U.S. troops killed, five seriously wounded; air defense concerns
Bloomberg | U.S. first war fatalities confirmed. Iran counterstrikes widen across region
In America, we have No Kings.
We are showing up together again on March 28.
When our families are under attack and costs are pushing people to the brink, silence is not an option. We will defend ourselves and our communities against this administration’s unjust and cruel acts of violence. America does not belong to strongmen, greedy billionaires, or those who rule through fear. It belongs to us, the people.
Exhausted. Irritated. Waiting for it to be over. Willing to sit through a root canal without anesthesia. Would love to sleep again. Wishing the US would have a regime change. Hoping for a legitimate election. It’s a never ending story with this corrupt asswipe.
Great post! Taking local action within community networks and splitting up tasks is key to getting the work done and keeping ourselves buoyant!