Free preview: The Disinformation Hoax of the Century
“For more than half a century,” Jacob Siegel writes in his new article at Tablet, “McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.”
And then the twist: “Until 2017.”
In the last six years, the looming threat of Disinformation, mainly syringed into American minds by Putin and his swarms of agents, has replaced Communist as the new swear word, the perfectly vague weapon to take out political enemies.
And what’s scarier, Siegel explains, is how US security officials have tightened their grip since the 1950s: “The [disinformation] episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who ...