Welcome back. I'm with Jacob Siegel again, everybody. Welcome back to Walkins. Welcome.

It's a pleasure to have you back.

It's amazing to be here. Thanks for having.

Talking about, yay, your book, which the last time you were on, I believe I was excited for you to write a book about the topic, which was your original article.

Tell people who have never read your

article, which they should absolutely first. And then let's talk about your book. But my first

question, I do want to start. It's like such a dark topic. I'm like, so is this, are we just going to be blackpilled? But I do,

I actually want to start with the, um, how, how are we not demoralized by this? Let's start

there. Amazing. After you tell people. Okay, amazing. I'm a very anti-black pill nihilism, despair. So I'm happy to get to that.

So the original article was written for Tablet in March of 2023. It was called A Guide to Understanding the Hokes of the Century, 13 ways of looking at disinformation.

And it was a kind of critical history examination, deconstruction of the war on disinformation. And it was really looking at where did this concept of disinformation come

from? What purpose did it serve?

And how had it become the single catch-all concept license for every government action overreach, censorship, propaganda campaign of a really intense five-year period.

And essentially, what I started to sketch out in that essay for Tablet was that, you know,

this was a continuation of the global war on terror, that the war on disinformation was picking

up tools that had been developed during the global war on terror, that the war on disinformation was picking up tools that had been

developed during the global war on terror, which I had served in as U.S. Army officer in Afghanistan

and also in Iraq, so I had some experience with this.

And it was repurposing those tools for use in a domestic campaign aimed at mass opinion formation and at controlling the political environment

in the U.S.

My new book, The Information State, Politics in the Age of Total Control, which is coming out

from Henry Holt, is, thank you.

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