A 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent turned Soviet defector, has circulated widely in recent years for its description of a four-stage process of ideological subversion — demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization — that Bezmenov warned the Soviets were systematically deploying against the United States.
Jacob Siegel, editor at Tablet Magazine, co-host of the Manifesto podcast, and author of the new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to argue that what Bezmenov described as a slow external threat has been radically accelerated and partially internalized through the architecture of the modern internet.
Siegel said the resonance between Bezmenov’s framework and the present moment is strong, but that the critical difference is scale and speed. What previously required years of patient capacity-building to manufacture a crisis or run a propaganda operation can now be mass-produced through digital infrastructure in days or hours. The same infrastructure that accelerates the production of crises also enables the rapid censorship of anyone attempting to identify those crises as manufactured, creating a closed loop that Siegel said represents a more radical threat than anything Bezmenov was describing, even if the underlying logic is recognizable.
The watershed moment, in Siegel’s account, came after September 11, 2001. The internet, originally developed as a Pentagon technology before being spun off into the commercial environment that defined the 1990s, was partially reabsorbed back under state control in the aftermath of the attacks. The rationale was national security, and Siegel said some of that rationale was understandable. The consequence, however, was the creation of what he describes as a quasi-private surveillance empire in which activities the government could not constitutionally perform itself were outsourced to nominally private entities, the telecoms and social media companies, that operated in a gray zone between public and private authority.
That infrastructure, Siegel argues, was then transformed during the Obama years from a tool of foreign counterterrorism into a routine instrument of domestic governance. Obama’s administration, he said, inherited the post-9/11 digital surveillance and opinion-formation apparatus and began deploying it for civilian purposes, including the enforcement of civil rights law, equity determinations, and most notably the promotion of the Iran nuclear deal. He pointed to Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor and chief foreign policy speechwriter, who described in a profile the deliberate construction of what he called an echo chamber online to manufacture the appearance of consensus around the Iran deal. Siegel said that disclosure, widely noted at the time, was not recognized as the beta test it actually was for applying the same technique across any policy area where the administration wanted to compel public agreement.
When Trump’s 2016 campaign proved successful, Siegel said the existing infrastructure was redirected again, this time toward the suppression of domestic political dissent under the pretext of fighting disinformation. New agencies and offices were established primarily within the Department of Homeland Security to serve as what he calls domestic counter-disinformation censorship operations, and those are the offices that were ultimately constrained, though in Siegel’s view insufficiently, by the settlement in Missouri v. Biden, which now prohibits federal agencies from dictating content moderation policies to private social media companies. The decision, which was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was in Siegel’s assessment purposefully naive in its reading of government intent.
Proft raised the question of the censorship industrial complex as described by former Trump administration cybersecurity official Mike Benz, including organizations like NewsGuard staffed by former intelligence and military officials, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which played a role in content moderation decisions during the COVID pandemic and around the 2020 election. Siegel said the characterization is accurate and that the more pressing concern is how quickly that infrastructure could reconstitute itself if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. The underlying digital architecture, he argued, remains largely opaque to ordinary users, and the basic structures that make algorithmic manipulation possible have not been meaningfully reformed. The social media companies are still the same companies. The dependency of daily life on digital connectivity is deeper than ever. And the template for running large-scale opinion-formation operations, from Russiagate through COVID, has been demonstrated and refined.
On the question of how conservatives should respond, Siegel offered a practical argument alongside a principled one. As a matter of self-interest, he said, conservatives are far more likely to be on the receiving end of censorship and algorithmic suppression than to be administering it, which means protecting the broadest possible arena for free speech is not merely a philosophical commitment but a survival strategy for the political right. He added a caveat that he said is often missing from the anti-censorship conversation: the protection of free expression has to be balanced against the protection of national sovereignty in the digital space. If the internet is treated as a borderless global commons into which anyone from anywhere can inject themselves into conversations among American citizens, it undermines the very national citizenship that makes constitutional rights meaningful. Digital borders, he argued, are not an infringement on free speech but a precondition for its genuine exercise.