The Information State Book Review: Jacob Siegel on Russiagate and Elite Power

Few speak of Russiagate now. Acrimony about the alleged Russian subversion of the 2016 U.S. presidential election consumed four years of news coverage. The Steele dossier — opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign, conducted by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele — was supposed to prove decisively that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. CIA Director John Brennan’s declassified intelligence-community assessment was supposed to demonstrate Vladimir Putin’s desire for a Trump victory and the tools — including a supposed private video of Trump — that the Kremlin used to achieve it. None of these claims was substantiated. The Steele dossier amounted to a collection of rumors. Brennan’s assessment had involved only handpicked analysts.

So Russiagate and its lies are behind us, and America can move on. Not so, says Jacob Siegel. In his new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, which builds on an essay he published in Tablet in 2023, he argues that Russiagate was not an isolated instance of partisan deception. Rather, it was the “hoax of the century”: the most consequential public falsity since Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy declared that he had a list of names of communist subversives who worked within the United States government. More important, Russiagate is the product of a century-long development in state information control. The Information State charts this development.

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About the Author

Elan Kluger

Elan Kluger is a founding editor of the New Critic.

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Few speak of Russiagate now. Acrimony about the alleged Russian subversion of the 2016 U.S. presidential election consumed four years of news coverage. The Steele dossier — opposition research for the Hillary Clinton campaign, conducted by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele — was supposed to prove decisively that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. CIA Director John Brennan’s declassified intelligence-community assessment was supposed to demonstrate Vladimir Putin’s desire for a Trump victory and the tools — including a supposed private video of Trump — that the Kremlin used to achieve it. None of these claims was substantiated. The Steele dossier amounted to a collection of rumors. Brennan’s assessment had involved only handpicked analysts.

So Russiagate and its lies are behind us, and America can move on. Not so, says Jacob Siegel. In his new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, which builds on an essay he published in Tablet in 2023, he argues that Russiagate was not an isolated instance of partisan deception. Rather, it was the “hoax of the century”: the most consequential public falsity since Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy declared that he had a list of names of communist subversives who worked within the United States government. More important, Russiagate is the product of a century-long development in state information control. The Information State charts this development.