Jacob Siegel (Part 1): 'Disinformation' Warfare: A New Weapon of Mass Destruction

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2 "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. "Whatever you think of Donald Trump, it's not democratic, by any stretch of the imagination, to lead a bureaucratic, ruling-class coup against a legitimately elected president. That may be many things, but democracy it is not," says Mr. Siegel. We also discuss "cognitive infrastructure" and "predictive analysis"—Orwellian concepts that have now become standard articles of speech in the American official class. "The illusion was that if only you could give the machines enough information, they could tell you what was coming next. But of course, that only works if you get rid of these silly privacy laws and these silly constitutional protections that would prevent you from feeding all the data in," says Mr. Siegel.