Beware the Firehose of Falsehood
The firehose of falsehood is a Russian disinformation strategy that often involves overwhelming the information environment with massive amounts of conflicting, bizarre, or fabricated content.
Steve Bannon described Trump’s media strategy as “flood the zone.”
The latest Epstein files dump is truly disturbing. It appears to smear Trump as well as his allies and foes with the suggestion of wrongdoing, but also at the same time fails to produce actual evidence.
Coming more than a month after Trump’s DOJ missed the deadline set by Congress, they dumped more than 3 million pages and 180,000 images on Friday. They have not yet explained all of the redactions, either.
PBS’s Ali Rogin said of the newly released materials, “I think most notably what people are looking for is mentions of President Trump. And there are thousands of them in these documents. Many of them, we should note, are news clippings.
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“But there are some lists and summaries of unsubstantiated claims made against him from individuals alleging wrongdoing, including graphic depictions of alleged sexual abuse, including of underage girls. Some of those complaints date back to the ‘90s, others from more recently around when he was campaigning for president.
“What we don’t know, though, is whether any of these claims have been substantially investigated. But the Department of Justice says that they were required by law to release everything, including those documents that were fake or falsely submitted.”
Trump’s former attorney and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed they had not protected Donald Trump.
His comments sounded like he knew people would not be satisfied with the document dump, “We complied with the statute, we complied with the act, and there is no -- we did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect or not protect anybody. There’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s -- it’s not -- there’s nothing I can do about that.”
The administration did what has become its usual thing of dumping on a Friday and then taking the documents offline for a short time, only to come back later with presumably more redactions, thus creating chaos and sparking suspicion.
Some of the accusations included are outlandish, which I suspect is intentional.
We’re cautioning readers because confirmation bias is one hell of a drug. Yes, Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist. Yes, he has lusted after teenagers in public, including his own daughter. Accusations made in the 90s would hold more weight off the bat because they wouldn’t be dismissed as potentially political, however many women will come forward during a political campaign because they feel a duty to warn the public.
But importantly, accusations that have not been tested are not facts.
This is not meant as a defense for the big names mentioned in this dump, including Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Melania Trump’s “love” email to Ghislaine Maxwell, but rather a reminder of the pattern we have seen before from this administration.
The Trump administration briefly took down the portion of the Epstein files it published on January 30, 2026. By taking it offline, they created an even a bigger story about what could be red herrings. Was this deliberate or are they this incompetent?
Either way, it’s a very real Russian technique, referred to by nonpartisan policy researchers at RAND as the “firehose of falsehood”.
Disinformation
The firehose of falsehood is a Russian disinformation strategy that often involves overwhelming the information environment with massive amounts of conflicting, bizarre, or fabricated content to erode public trust.
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