“You couldn’t find a hundred people in Washington D.C. who could meaningfully talk to you about disinformation in 2014. Now, of course, there’s a dozen of them in every room that you enter, because there’s so much money and so much government power behind it.”
Jacob Siegel is senior editor at Tablet Magazine, where he published “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” which documents the brave new information world we find ourselves in today.
“They’re claiming the right to all of it—that anything that goes through your mind is now something that needs to be policed for public safety and national security reasons,” says Mr. Siegel.
In this comprehensive two-part interview, we discuss how the concept of “disinformation” became a tool of deception, in which technocratic officials manufacture consensus and wage a “counterinsurgency”-style war on truth that has, according to Mr. Siegel, deranged our public discourse.