Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign the rise of the dangerously bright alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the Racial Holy War to come and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth the absence of a shared reality the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class the death of the political establishment and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. The 2016 presidential contest as told by Matt Taibbi, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion, is in fact the story of Western civilization s very own train wreck. An urgent book for our times, Information Wars stresses that we must find a way to combat this ever growing threat to democracy.ĭispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy s uncertain future, by the country s most perceptive and fearless political journalist. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea - a scheme that became the model for their interference with the 2016 presidential election. Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Mohamed bin Salman to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle.

In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again Putin tried to make Russia great again and we all know about Trump. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt left out by modernism. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.ĭuring the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of this new global information war. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. We've censored the most explicit parts, but they're still graphic.Disinformation is as old as humanity. (Note: The tweets below contain violent and explicit content. Here are some of the threats Wu received. The Twitter account also posted Wu's home address publicly. Wu tweeted out the blog post and cited it as an accurate description of her experience.īut the more gruesome threats came from Twitter account Death To Brianna, which pushed Wu to call the police and has since been suspended. I am terrified of the #gamergate blame-the-victim witch hunt.Īfter Wu, head of development at games studio Giant Spacekat, created memes mocking 'gamergate,' users of the image board and forum 8chan began making memes that threatened Wu, according to blog We Hunted The Mammoth. I want to be crystal clear - I am scared of the death threats I've gotten. Many of the threats and explicit comments targeted Wu for being a feminist and showing her support for women in gaming. Check out Gawker's post for a full explanation of the 'gamergate' movement, how it started, and why people are bothered by it. It all started as one targeted attack on female game developer Zoe Quinn in August. 'Gamergate' is an online movement concerned with ethics in games, journalism, and protecting the 'gamer' identity, as Gawker explains it.

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