THE IVY EXILE: The Decline and Fall of the Information State (For Now).

In the waning weeks of his administration, Obama conspired with senior Democrats to kneecap the Trump administration before it even entered office, and Obama personally ordered a bogus intelligence community assessment to advance the false narrative that Trump was working for the Russians. That it wasn’t true didn’t mean that control of both the social and legacy media echo chambers couldn’t generate enough hype to make it feel true to many millions for many years. “Russiagate was not a tragedy but a crime against the country,” Siegel writes. “Disinformation was both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up, a weapon that doubled as a disguise … 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.”

And yet that effrontery sowed the seeds of the regime’s downfall. Supercharging paranoia and undermining Americans’ shared sense of reality ultimately only undermined elite technocrats’ credibility and legitimacy. The dirty tricks only ensured the populists’ return. Trump wasted no time smashing the centralized information apparatus when he returned to office, but the technological capacity for control advances day by day, along with the temptation to use it. Siegel leaves readers with a warning: “From the rubble of the old information state, the outline of a new one takes shape.”

Well, good.