 Remember this? It's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences. Clinton was just coming off her loss to Donald Trump. We didn't know it at the time, but this speech marked an important turning point in American politics. The political establishment and its sympathizers in the press sought to convince Americans that not only was democracy under attack, but so too was reality itself. And what was the enemy's superweapon? Disinformation. Journalist Jacob Siegel laid out the origins of this panic in a guide to understanding the hoax of the century, an essay and tablet. The hoax is the false claim, and I would argue the deliberately false claim, that the United States and indeed all liberal democracies are under a dire existential threat from disinformation that was so dangerous in the way it undermined the foundations of electoral legitimacy and liberal democracy itself, that it required a wartime response and a wartime mobilization, meaning the suspension of due process, of constitutional rights and protections, and the giving over of the political system itself to security agencies and their adjuncts within the administrative bureaucracy so that they could protect us from this disinformation threat, which was more dangerous than terrorism because it was everywhere at once coming in through our very screens and iPhones. Siegel says there's one big problem with all that. All of this constitutes the hoax because there was no grave threat from disinformation, let alone a existential threat that justified the state of exception that was used to fundamentally re-engineer the political system in the United States, which is what took place. Newspaper headlines warned Americans that Russian disinformation had cost Clinton the election. And CIA director turned NBC news analyst John Brennan theorized that Trump was being blackmailed by Russia. I think he's afraid of the president of Russia. Why? Well, I think one can speculate as to why that the Russians may have something on him personally. A two-year $32 million investigation turned up no evidence that Trump colluded with or was compromised by Russia. In terms of the 2016 outcome, a better explanation is that Clinton had been one of the least popular presidential candidates in American history. And Russian troll farms were responsible for a tiny fraction of the political content that appeared on social media during the election. So how did the notion of aggressively policing dis and misinformation catch on in the first place? Siegel says it comes down to a progressive, technocratic mindset that aims to treat individuals as empty vessels that need to be filled with the correct opinions. There's a sort of special synergy between progressivism, not liberalism, but progressivism and techno surveillance states. They do share certain important things in common that sort of enhance. Can you talk a little bit about them? I mean, what is that? Is it that individuals are stupid or prone to being, you know, gulled into the wrong decision? So they need to, you know, what else? Faith in the expert class, a faith in the idea that things converge towards singular, correct outcomes or decisions that can be discerned through technical processes. That technocratic attitude is on full display in a series of statements from the public intellectual and podcaster Sam Harris, who defended the idea that suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, though true, might have been justified. So my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of Big Tech and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a once in a lifetime moral emergency. And we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right? And so what should, well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways, you know, you're running The New York Times, you're running CNN, you're running Twitter, what should they conspire to do? The way I would frame it is, listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's, I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. Sam Harris has decided that it doesn't matter what's on Hunter Biden's laptops. It doesn't matter that Twitter and Facebook censored and repressed this. What matters is that he recognizes the grave danger of Donald Trump. So here we have a very important connection, which is the connection between the kind of underlying, let's call it the sort of metaphysical layer of the technocratic mind, which he is a supreme representative of on the one hand, and the oligarchic ruling party certainty that it is in the best position to decide whose votes should count, whose votes shouldn't count, what information can be seen, what information can't be seen. But the good news is that this total dominance of the information sphere is unlikely to be realized. Technology tends to be a double-edged sword, providing the means to control, and simultaneously the means to evade control. Current technologies are in the process of giving us a level of privacy we have never had before. Essentially, there are now well-known ways available in free software of encrypting messages so that only the intended recipient can read them. As mathematician Eric Hughes wrote in his 1993 Cypherpunks Manifesto, which would later become a foundational document in the cryptocurrency and decentralization movement, information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. His belief that cryptography could lead to more freedom has been borne out with the rise of stateless money like Bitcoin, private encrypted messaging platforms like Signal, and emerging decentralized social media projects like Nostra and Blue Sky. And it only takes a relatively small but devoted contingent of users to keep these potential escape hatches propped open for when they're needed most. It's a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly. Americans don't need Hillary Clinton or John Brennan to filter information for them to keep liberal democracy safe. What we need to keep liberal democracy safe is unfettered access to real information about how our government operates and the freedom to talk about that information amongst ourselves without state interference. So we could say broadly speaking that the old rule in America was one of self-government broadly speaking or of a liberal democracy that favored a pluralistic outlook in which the individual was the proper subject of state protections. Counter-disinformation and information regulation as a sort of foundational philosophical basis of government just replaces that wholesale because it declares that the function of the government is not to protect the rights of the individual, the function of the government is to protect the individual and the clients of the government from external threats in reality to protect their own institutional position and try and stay in power forever. Hey, thanks for watching. If you'd like to see our full conversation with Jacob Siegel about what he's termed the counter-disinformation complex, click here. For a clip from that conversation, click here.