“If the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim,” writes author Jacob Siegel in his 13,000-word treatise on the subject, “it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”

That’s the animating principle of what Siegel rightly calls “The Hoax of the Century,” namely, the Trump-Russia collusion scam. Siegel then goes on to explore the subject of disinformation from 13 angles, “with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.”

It’s not an easy read, but it’s a rewarding one. As independent journalist and free-speech pit bull Matt Taibbi writes, “Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.”

Siegel is a former Army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest. His article, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: 13 Ways of Looking at Disinformation,” was published last March but is every bit as relevant today — perhaps more so, given that we’re in an election year — as it was last year.

As Siegel writes: “Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a ‘whole of society’ effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.”

The first step in this massive undertaking would be to connect our national security and intelligence services to Big Tech and social media — Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, for example — where this borderless war would ultimately be waged.

This is how one of those deep-deep-deep-state agencies — The Global Engagement Center, founded in 2016 and nestled within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs at the State Department — spelled out the so-called war against disinformation in a 2018 memo: “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

Consider the enormity of the enterprise and ask yourself: How could no one have ratted out the entire scam?

Answer: Because no one believed it was a scam. On the contrary, as Siegel writes: “This is how the government-created ‘war against disinformation’ became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation ‘a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.’”

And what of the mainstream media — the, uh, guardians of our democracy? It was, as Siegel says, “hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.”

Thus, as Siegel brilliantly puts it, “Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.”

Speaking on a podcast with Taibbi about what Siegel calls “the anti-disinformation complex,” Taibbi asked him about the catalyzing role that California Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff played in his awakening to the idea of disinformation. Siegel, who’d begun to notice that Schiff seemed to be consistently near the center of the storm regarding the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, had this to say: “Really, on a very fundamental level, in terms of my unquestioned premises, I was not capable of believing that an American national elected official could lie that brazenly, or that the intelligence agencies, which I knew to be corrupt and inefficient in a billion different ways, could be involved in a grand sort of conspiracy. It seemed too farfetched. Adam Schiff is a weird guy to be responsible for lifting the veil because he’s such a schmuck. But realizing that he just kept lying over and over, something clicked for me.”

Siegel laments that while the public reaction to his massive essay on disinformation has been “overall very positive,” it’s also been somewhat siloed. “Broadly speaking, it’s gotten a great response, but it certainly hasn’t penetrated the liberal intelligentsia yet. It hasn’t penetrated the liberal mainstream at all.”

Asked by Taibbi why the disinformation wars have been turned into a partisan issue, Siegel paused, then waded in fully:

There’s no political explanation; no strictly rational explanation. One of the most damaging and dangerous things about this kind of runaway government secrecy — and this is something that people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan were warning about 50 years ago — is that it fosters a kind of derangement in the public. When the government is generating pseudo-events and operating through a convoluted and byzantine secrecy apparatus, it leads people to become suspicious of reality and, therefore, vulnerable to top-down narrative control. They’ve been spun around and are dizzy and, therefore, more susceptible because they’re desperate for something to orient them. At an even deeper and an even more fundamental level, once you involve people in a conspiracy — once you get them to go along with it — they will go along with it. Not because they want to be conspirators but because they’re convinced that they’re on the side of good. If you convince them that Donald Trump is a Russian agent, the reason why they then attack Trump is because they think they’re doing good. … Once you involve them in that, you’ve now made them co-conspirators. To get them to abandon that is to get them to admit that they’ve been made fools of; that they themselves were involved in an enormous deception. And I think that’s very difficult for people.

The 13 chapters of Siegel’s disinformation deep dive are as follows:

I. Russophobia Returns, Unexpectedly: The Origins of Contemporary “Disinformation”
II. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”
III. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?
IV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon
V. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!
VI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended
VII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”
VIII. The NGO Borg
IX. COVID-19
X. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule
XI. The New One-Party State
XII. The End of Censorship
XIII. After Democracy

At the very end of his tome is a note which indicates that Siegel isn’t done digging: “If you work in the ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’ fields for the government or in the private sector, and are interested in discussing your experiences, you can contact me securely. … Source confidentiality is guaranteed.”

And, indeed, Siegel isn’t done. He plans to further build on his magnum opus and turn it into a book.

As Taibbi writes of Siegel’s effort: “Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions. If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like ‘hoax,’ but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.”

Taibbi is right that we’re years away — if ever — from being ready to talk about it. But at least those of us who’ve read Siegel’s piece will be well prepared to do so.