The Braindead Megaphone

In George Saunders' essay The Braindead Megaphone, he writes of a person who is not necessarily intelligent but manages to gain the attention of even the most successful people in a room. Slowly but surely, the party goers begin to agree and the speaker and manages to get them to agree with him because he possesses a megaphone. What makes the story scarier as it goes along is that the speaker does not think through their words before they speak them so the audience is potentially being fed the wrong information. After a while, I came to realize that George Saunders was not just speaking of a random guy with a megaphone but the megaphone stood for much more than that. In the end, I started seeing the person with the megaphone as a politician trying to convince their citizens that their stance on an issue was the right one. And whether the people wanted to listen or not, they were always bombarded with news of the latest stance the politician took. Many people would understand this especially after the recent presidential election we had where a person could not change to a random television channel without hearing something about the ongoing campaign.