Gaslighting the American Mind

 

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. It meant that the 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. Either the president was a Manchurian candidate, or his opponents had lost their minds. Simply contemplating the options was enough to induce a sense of nihilism. First Trump drove the elites mad, then their madness spread.

They waged on us. That’s the simplest way to summarize what the government, technocratic elite, security state, and media did to the American people in 2016. It’s also the premise behind what is sure to be the most important and explosive book of 2026. That book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel, explores the ways the crazed reactions of these parts of society to the arrival of Donald Trump drove them to label him “a threat to American democracy” and take actions that, ironically, turned them into the very threat they tried to warn us against.

Worse, that justification for their actions turned this elite class not just against Trump but against the people who supported him. 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. With Russian active measures having supposedly penetrated the Internet, anything said online could be attributed to Moscow.

The great value of The Information State is how well it is organized, brilliantly it is written, and carefully it marshals the evidence that makes its case. There were agencies, within agencies, within agencies who were involved in spying, censorship, peddling false stories, and attempting to ruin lives. The media was essential to the effort and is unlikely, ever, to regain the public trust. Yet behind these Byzantine departments erected to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation”—that last just meaning any opinion with which our elites disagreed—there is one simple truth: With the arrival of Trump, America’s elite institutions waged war against their own people.

Siegel, a writer for Tablet and a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, lays it out well:

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. It meant that the 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. Either the president was a Manchurian candidate, or his opponents had lost their minds. Simply contemplating the options was enough to induce a sense of nihilism. First Trump drove the elites mad, then their madness spread.

That madness began with people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama. Government officials were practicing the new art “hybrid warfare,” which consisted not only of physical maneuvers but 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.”

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, run out of the Department of Homeland Security, and whose job it 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 who, after all, stood accused of being the primary beneficiary and spreader of disinformation. Thus countering disinformation, while nominally concerned with foreign threats, marshaled the federal bureaucracies against the incoming administration. The government was not only divided but at war with itself.

Obama’s actions had come in the wake of Trump’s election, which the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies had tried to stop. A central figure was the CIA’s John Brennan, who used a ridiculous, fake piece of opposition research called the Steele dossier in his attempt to destroy Trump. FBI Director James Comey leaked the dossier to The New York Times. “Even for intelligence agencies with a long record of abuses,” Siegel writes,

spying on a presidential campaign represented an extraordinary breach. It moved the US a step closer to becoming the kind of dime-a-dozen autocracy where spy chiefs determine the outcomes of elections and voting is only ceremonial.

Obama also forced people like Mark Zuckerberg and platforms like Twitter to abet the new hysteria. Zuckerberg at first resisted, but quickly caved when Obama demanded that they combat “disinformation.” So did Yoel Roth, a Twitter executive who initially opposed the new information war but was quickly intimidated into silence. The new leviathan, Siegel observes, was just too huge.

The “whole-of-society apparatus” intent on “fighting disinformation”  was just 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.

Two weeks after the GEC announcement, the Obama administration released a declassified version of an intelligence community assessment (ICA), on “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” It asserted that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The ICA was presented as the consensus view reached by the entire intelligence community, free of any agency’s biases. In fact, Siegel writes, “the ICA was just the opposite: a selectively curated political document that deliberately omitted contrary evidence to create the false impression that the Russian collusion narrative was an objective fact.”

On the same day that the declassified intelligence report was released, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security head, Jeh Johnson, moved to unilaterally designate U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure” in response to what he called Russian “orchestrated cyberattacks.” Johnson placed 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the federal government. “It was a coup he had been angling to accomplish for months,” writes Siegel.

Soon the censorship leviathan had grown out of control. In 2018 Congress created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Sold to the public by the Department of Homeland Security as a department that would protect things like pipelines and electrical grids, CISA soon claimed its job was also to monitor communications passing over computer networks.

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 had run an information operation called Project Birmingham. This operation was intended to determine the outcome of the 2017 Alabama senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones. An internal report revealed the truth: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

Just as the FBI was setting up its task force inside Twitter, a government-backed organization called Hamilton 68 inundated the social media network with a propaganda campaign. Technically justified as 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 (ASD), which was itself a subsidiary of the U.S. government–funded German Marshall Fund. Hamilton 68 claimed it had a secret list of 600 Twitter accounts linked to the Russian government.

Siegel sums up the new reality:

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.”

Through it all, the media refused to do its job. Consider the example of its coverage of Renee DiResta who worked for tech companies in San Francisco before coming to work at New Knowledge. In 2019 she took a position at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that had been create to “study the abuse in information technologies.” There DiResta led the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative. Siegel reports that all the leaders of the EIP “had long-standing relationships with the top content moderation executives in all of the major social media platforms.” The EIP director, Alex Stamos, had been the chief security officer for Facebook before going to the Stanford Internet Observatory. It was eventually revealed that DiResta had worked for the CIA. The mainstream media reported on none of it. Instead, it was contributing to the Russiagate hysteria and the suppression of facts. Readers will not get to the end of The State of Information without developing a deep sense of loathing for the media. Cowards all, it is difficult to think of a group more deserving of the public’s contempt.

Of course, the most obvious example of media malpractice and the deep state carrying water for Democrats is Hunter Biden. When the news broke in October 2020 that the president’s son had left a computer in a repair shop, and that the computer held ample evidence of the corruption of both Hunter and his father, the intelligence agencies, media, the American Stasi flipped out. The New York Post, which reported the news, was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. It’s still hard to believe that this happened in America.

Towards the end of The Information State, Siegel offers some small hope. Elon Musk bought Twitter—now X—and thanks to reporters like Siegel, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger, the truth about the attempted coup against Trump is slowly coming to light. Someone may go to jail. Still, the words of Siegel are chilling:

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.

by Mark Judge at chroniclesmagazine.org on December 17, 2025