Posted on 02/25/2026 12:18:28 PM PST by MtnClimber
Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet.
To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover.
Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.” He goes on: “One of the most disorienting aspects of the conspiratorial mania that overtook America’s elites in response to the rise of Donald Trump was the sheer scale of expert consensus behind views that were, on their merits, utterly deranged. What an ordinary person saw in 2016 was the country’s most venerated institutions all promoting the same claims about a Russian takeover of the American political system. Any given charge about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin might fall apart under scrutiny, but there were so many, coming from seemingly authoritative sources, that their totality seemed to outweigh their individual merits. The alternative—that it might all be so much propaganda—was difficult to face.”
To face the truth means to face the fact that “legions of Harvard professors, senators, senior national security officials, and respected journalists touting Trump’s sinister connections to Vladimir Putin had allowed themselves to become credulous bullhorns for a cynical and destructive information operation. If that was true it suggested that institutions and individuals with hundreds of years of built-up trust behind them were not only capable of getting big questions wrong but could, at any moment, decide to join hands and break out in song while they led the entire country off a cliff.”
One of the things that is going to make The Information State so powerful is that it will challenge the media’s greatest power - the power to ignore. Siegel, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is not MAGA, even if he is not liberal. He will be interviewed at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 16. His book will get reviewed - unlike others that the media chooses to ignore.
Siegel explores how reporters became more pliant and stupid, even as the digital revolution exploded with access and new voices. A key moment came in 2015 when White House aide Ben Rhodes tried to sell Obama’s deal with Iran. Rhodes observed, “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.” Siegel: “Without reporters on the ground, journalists simply retailed the narratives fed to them by their political contacts….Rhodes seemed to enjoy boasting about his power over people he considered beneath him. That did not make his assessment of the media landscape wrong. ‘The average reporter we talk to is twenty-seven years old,’ he noted. ‘Their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.’ The depth of reporting and institutional experience built into the twentieth-century print model was dead. Something else that was easier to manipulate had taken its place.”
When asked about the “onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal,” Rhodes explained how the White House had manufactured a consensus: “We created an echo chamber.” The legions of experts were apparatchiks. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes acknowledged. The echo chamber effect relied on the twin revolutions in social media and the smartphone. It worked because great masses of people had already been herded into the vast, unbroken wholeness of the digital networks, where a message could reverberate from one end to the other without hitting any structural walls. Twitter, the social media platform favored by journalists and DC insiders, played a crucial role by synchronizing the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber.”
On December 23, 2016, Obama signed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. The Act directed the State Department to expand the mission of the recently formed Global Engagement Center, run out of the Department of Homeland Security, and whose job was to counter the effects of foreign propaganda and disinformation. Siegel notes that “by creating a mechanism to enforce a party line on matters related to fighting disinformation and defending ‘US interests,’ the agency effectively created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump.”
Then came Russiagate. Terrible people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama created a false story and sold it to the American people. Government officials were practicing the new art of “hybrid warfare,” which involved manipulating information itself. “Hybrid warfare,” Siegel writes, “provided the framework for reclassifying populist parties as security threats and shoving them outside the protection of the law.”
Obama also forced people like Mark Zuckerberg and platforms like Twitter to go along. Zuckerberg at first resisted, but quickly caved when Obama demanded that they combat “disinformation.” The new Leviathan, observes Siegel, was huge. The “whole-of-society apparatus” intent on “fighting disinformation” was in reality a group that “fused the political goals of the Obama-led ruling party with the institutional agenda of the intelligence agencies, funding from the financial elite, the narrative power and activist fervor of the media and NGOs, and the tech companies’ technological control of the public arena. The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.”........SNIP.........
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I wonder what the history books will say about the left today. Will they tell the truth?
The mainstream media will not survive because rational people have rightly concluded that it is biased and dishonest.
A heck of a lot of people — both Conservative and Liberal — feel that “something changed” over the past 5 - 10 years. Everything is different. Things don’t feel real.
People who pay attention probably have a pretty good idea about what happened. But even the people who have no curiosity and who don’t pay any attention to anything — they also know something weird happened. They just don’t have any idea what it was.
The internet was supposed to make the free flow of information easier, making it easier to circumvent censorship. Instead it’s done the opposite, it’s made it easier for government agencies and giant corporations to control virtually all information flow, it’s brought big brother to life.
.
Longer than that. “Something changed” after the 2004 election, when MoveOn.org took over the hapless Kerry democrat party. In 2008, 7 years after 9/11, they ran a moslem nobody knew much about, named Hussein, but we were told that mentioning his name was not permissible; and the media meekly complied. You never again heard of Barak Hussein Obama in the news.
That was followed in a few years by the “Occupy Wallstreet” operation in 2011, which seemed quite peculiar, almost whimsical at the time, but in retrospect was a test run for all the sedition which has followed ever since. Undermining a consensus of basic day to day reality has been, for a legion of indoctrinated minions, a major objective in virtually every adverse event since.
A basic principle of totalitarianism holds that the truth is secondary to the cause, and the cause requires the imposition of belief in a narrative independent of any ties to the truth. As Orwell predicted, 2+2 must come to be accepted to equal 5. Woke versions include, ‘men can get pregnant, ‘the ice caps are melting and the oceans are boiling,’ ‘closing churches (but leaving liquor stores open) will help flatten the curve.’ . So the existential fight today is to remain grounded in reality, against concerted efforts to destroy that grounding.
The perpetrators of this campaign didn’t count on one thing: a black swan event, i.e. Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Trump is far more important than most will ever realize— the essential man, if a free nation is to survive the onslaught of the last 20 years and counting, with our collective sanity at stake.
The Government (World) has never regulated the Internet - because it’s always controlled it.
The Internet has actually done both at the same time..
—Increased the temptation and the reality for government/Big Tech censorship/banning/demonitizing/pushing selective narratives and...
—Increased the availability of lower volume/less regulated outlets with wide open discussions of any and all topics. These are often harder to find. Search engines try to bury them. But—word of mouth among those interested gets the job done. For those interested an in depth study of almost any subject is possible—without the “approved” propaganda. It takes a little skill and effort.
Imho this has created a “two tier” knowledge situation:
—the NPCs who do as they are told and are clueless
—the new experts who dig and study and learn for themselves
The difference is, the new media makes no pretense of being objective. They express opinions, some make an attempt at showing multiple sides of issues, some don’t. But they are genuine, honest, real. People find those sources that they want to hear, either those that echo their own opinions or from various viewpoints, but they know what they’re getting. Unlike the legacy media that has claimed to be objective for decades while spinning the news to support their own agenda.
No one seems to be going to jail. So, so what?
Agreed.
In the 1700s and 1800s that was how newspapers worked.
They represented the views of political parties and openly stated that on their masthead.
Everybody knew what they were getting.
There were no sleazy claims of “objectivity” when there were axes to grind.
I appreciate podcasters/videocasters who have published at least one book.
“If you want to know where I stand here is a book on it.”
Then you know exactly what you are getting.
The mainstream media - the world’s largest aggregation of twisted knickers and wadded panties.
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