ROGER KIMBALL: The Surveillance State Is On The March.
Siegel’s brilliant if melancholy overview shows in exhaustive detail how the U.S. government, abetted by the mainstream media and what has come to be called “elite” or “ruling class” opinion generally, has repurposed surveillance tools developed to combat terrorism and turned them against the American people.
I know that sounds dramatic.
It’s actually an understatement.
We have been vouchsafed glimpses of life behind the curtain for a while now.
Siegel focuses mostly on developments in the United States.
But it’s worth noting that the story he unravels is an international concession, proceeding, for example, with initiatives such as the Davos-inspired “Great Reset.”
I have written about various aspects of the phenomena that Siegel aggregates in his sinewy and alarming essay.
For example, I wrote about Matt Taibbi’s exposé of “Hamilton 68,” a shadowy group of anti-Trump activists who succeeded in publicly branding anyone or anything they didn’t like as emanating from “Russian disinformation.”
“Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes,” Taibbi notes, “Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.”
Simply in terms of volume, Taibbi estimates that Hamilton 68 “may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.”
Virtually every major news organization in America was involved: NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Even fact-checking sites such as Politifact and Snopes, Taibbi notes, “cited Hamilton 68 as a source.”
The people at Hamilton 68 simply targeted individuals they didn’t like, individuals such as Devin Nunes, Mike Flynn, Tulsi Gabbard, or Donald Trump—and then smeared them as witting or unwitting stooges of Vladimir Putin.
The whole scheme, Taibbi shows, was a splendid example of “digital McCarthyism, taking people with dissident or unconventional opinions and mass-accusing them of ‘Un-American activities.’”
But Siegel shows this was the but the tip of the censorship iceberg.
They mean to rule unchallenged.