In March 2026, the most important political book of the last several years will be published. It’s called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet. The release is going to be a seminal moment in American political life.
To distill an incredibly complex topic to its essence: Freaked out by the arrival of President Donald Trump, American government officials, the media, and the technology titans erected a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. It was one of the greatest threats to democracy that the United States has ever seen.
No one has managed to paint the full picture and do so with such clarity until The Information State. 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.”
After Trump’s election, several public-private organizations sprang up to ostensibly combat “disinformation.” As Seigel, a veteran of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, notes, these organizations were involved in spying, censorship, peddling false stories, and attempting to ruin lives. The media was essential to the effort. Behind the Byzantine departments erected to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malformation,” that last one meaning any opinion elites disagreed with, there was a simple effort. Control what Americans could read, say, and think.
“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,” Siegel writes. “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 it 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.”
That madness involved people like former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and former President Barack Obama. 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.”
They created governmental agencies to combat what they considered disinformation. On Dec. 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, which is run out of the Department of Homeland Security and whose job is 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.”
Obama also forced people like Mark Zuckerberg and platforms like Twitter to knuckle under to the new hysteria. Zuckerberg at first resisted but quickly caved when Obama demanded that they combat “disinformation.” The new Leviathan, Siegel observes, 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.”
In 2018, Congress created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Sold to the public by the DHS as a department that would protect things like pipelines and electrical grids, CISA soon claimed its job was also to monitor communications passing over a computer network. A month after CISA was created, a cybersecurity firm called New Knowledge launched. Ostensibly created to prevent the spread of disinformation, it was soon revealed that New Knowledge ran an information operation called Project Birmingham. The intent was to swing the 2017 Alabama Senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones.
Just as the FBI was setting up its task force inside Twitter in 2017, a government-backed organization called Hamilton 68 inundated the social media platform with a propaganda campaign. Technically a “dashboard” exposing networks of Russian influence on social media, Hamilton 68 launched as an initiative of another recently formed group called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which was a subsidiary of the U.S. government–funded German Marshall Fund. Hamilton 68 said it had a secret list of 600 Twitter accounts linked to the Russian government.
Particularly disgracing themselves was the media, which has never recovered. In October 2020, the New York Post broke a story about Hunter Biden’s computer and the incriminating information within. The story was removed from Facebook and other social media.
Siegel sums up the new reality well: “Groups like the Anti-Defamation League, counterterrorism veterans, trust and safety officials, countering violent extremism experts, social scientists, political operatives, FBI agents, millennial journalists, and CIA officers all rubbed shoulders on the counter-disinformation party bus housed inside the social media companies. This information war was more than just a policy mandate; it was a sociological phenomenon with its own professional mores and cultural impetus.” The aim was “not to appeal to public opinion, but to control it.”
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The Information State does what few have been able to do in the last several years — it makes a dizzyingly complex subject, full of governmental agencies, media lackeys, and tech activists, into a streamlined narrative. This is a book that is going to explode in 2026.
Siegel’s conclusion is damning: “Russiagate was not a tragedy but a crime against the country. Disinformation was both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up, a weapon that doubled as a disguise. The crime was the information war launched under false pretenses that by its nature destroyed the essential boundaries between public and private, foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning tools of war against American citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life takes place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime was the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who tried to secretly control what individuals could think and say.”