In March 2026, the most important political book of the last several years will be published. It’s called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet. The release is going to be a seminal moment in American political life. 

To distill an incredibly complex topic to its essence: Freaked out by the arrival of President Donald Trump, American government officials, the media, and the technology titans erected a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. It was one of the greatest threats to democracy that the United States has ever seen.

No one has managed to paint the full picture and do so with such clarity until The Information State. Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.”

After Trump’s election, several public-private organizations sprang up to ostensibly combat “disinformation.” As Seigel, a veteran of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, notes, these organizations were involved in spying, censorship, peddling false stories, and attempting to ruin lives. The media was essential to the effort. Behind the Byzantine departments erected to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malformation,” that last one meaning any opinion elites disagreed with, there was a simple effort. Control what Americans could read, say, and think.

“One of the most disorienting aspects of the conspiratorial mania that overtook America’s elites in response to the rise of Donald Trump was the sheer scale of expert consensus behind views that were, on their merits, utterly deranged,” Siegel writes. “What an ordinary person saw in 2016 was the country’s most venerated institutions all promoting the same claims about a

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