In May 2017, Robert Mueller was tapped to lead an inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, coordination by foreign agents with Donald Trump's campaign, and obstruction of justice by the president. Mueller assembled a "dream team" of top prosecutors, and for the next twenty-two months, the investigation was a black box and the subject of endless anticipation and speculation--until April 2019, when the special counsel's report was released. In Where Law Ends, legendary prosecutor Andrew Weissmann--a key player in the Special Counsel's Office--finally pulls back the curtain to reveal exactly what went on inside the investigation, including the heated debates, painful deliberations, and mistakes of the team--not to mention the external efforts by the president and Attorney General William Barr to manipulate the investigation to their political ends. Weissmann puts the reader in the room as Mueller's team made their most consequential decisions, such as whether to subpoena the president, whether to conduct a full financial investigation of Trump, and whether to explicitly recommend obstruction charges against him. Weissmann also details for the first time the debilitating effects that President Trump himself had on the investigation, through his dangling of pardons and his constant threats to shut down the inquiry and fire Mueller, which left the team racing against the clock and essentially fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. In Where Law Ends, Weissmann conjures the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the investigative units led by the enigmatic Mueller, a distinguished public servant who is revealed here, in a way we have never seen him before, as a manager, a colleague, and a very human presence. Weissmann is as candid about the team's mistakes as he is about its successes, and is committed to accurately documenting the historic investigation for future generations to assess and learn from. Ultimately, Where Law Ends is a story about a team of public servants, dedicated to the rule of law, tasked with investigating a president who did everything he could to stand in their way.

"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times"--

Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analyzing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psychological operations, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We've lost not only our sense of peace and democracy - but our sense of what those words even mean. As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter evolutionaries and pop-up populists, 'behavioural change' salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are surprising. Part reportage, part intellectual adventure, This is Not Propaganda is a Pynchon-like exploration of how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves in a time where truth has been turned topsy-turvy

"For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers" -- the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly -- from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room -- and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape -- the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread -- from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?" --

What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to create echo chambers--to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the democratic benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating ever-smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions before 9/11, in Republic.com, and they have become even more urgent in the years since. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Web logs have emerged as a significant force in politics and where cyber-jihadists have embraced the Internet to thwart democracy and spread violence. Emphasizing the value of unplanned, unchosen encounters, the original Republic.com provoked a strong reaction from cyber-optimists. In Republic.com 2.0 Sunstein answers the critics and expands his argument to take account of new developments, including the blogosphere, and fresh evidence about how people are using the Internet. He demonstrates that the real question is how to avoid "information cocoons" and to ensure that the unrestricted choices made possible by technology do not undermine democracy. Sunstein also proposes new remedies and reforms--focusing far less on what government should do, and much more on what consumers and producers should do--to help democracy avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.

"As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism--and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed. #Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need. "--

Brooks takes on the new 'Intellectual Dark Web.' As the host of The Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, Brooks was a progressive fighter whose work brought people together from around the world. In this, his first book, he lets his understanding of the digital media environment direct his analysis of the "conservative rebels" who had taken YouTube by storm in 2018. Brooks provides a critique of the most prominent "renegades" including Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Brett Weinstein while also examining the social, political and media environment that such rebels thrive in. --From publisher description.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that "the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he's the patriot or the tyrant, he's definitely full of manure. The wildly popular Fox News host with three million daily viewers perfectly captures the vitriol of our time and the fact-free state of our political culture. The secret to his success is his willingness to traffic in the fringe conspiracies and Internet hearsay that others wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: death panels, government health insurance for dogs, FEMA concentration camps, an Obama security force like Hitler's SS. But Beck, who is, according to a recent Gallup poll, admired by more Americans than the Pope, has nothing in his background that identifies him as an ideologue, giving rise to the speculation that his right-wing shtick is just that--the act of a brilliant showman, known for both his over-the-top daily outrages and for weeping on the air. Milbank describes, with lacerating wit, just how the former shock jock without a college degree has managed to become the most recognizable leader of antigovernment conservatives and exposes him as the guy who is single-handedly giving patriotism a bad name.

See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. In all of the applause for this remarkable ascendance of personalized information, Cass Sunstein asks the questions, Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech? Republic.com exposes the drawbacks of egocentric Internet use, while showing us how to approach the Internet as responsible citizens, not just concerned consumers. Democracy, Sunstein maintains, depends on shared experiences and requires citizens to be exposed to topics and ideas that they would not have chosen in advance. Newspapers and broadcasters helped create a shared culture, but as their role diminishes and the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. In their place will arise only louder and ever more extreme echoes of our own voices, our own opinions. In evaluating the consequences of new communications technologies for democracy and free speech, Sunstein argues the question is not whether to regulate the Net (it's already regulated), but how; proves that freedom of speech is not an absolute; and underscores the enormous potential of the Internet to promote freedom as well as its potential to promote "cybercascades" of like-minded opinions that foster and enflame hate groups. The book ends by suggesting a range of potential reforms to correct current misconceptions and to improve deliberative democracy and the health of the American republic. Chat with Cass Sunstein in a Message Forum hosted beginning April 1, 2001.

In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the nation and the world. Here for the first time in print is revealed the quintessential Aaron Swartz: besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling, and cutting essayist. With a technical understanding of the Internet and of intellectual property law surpassing that of many seasoned professionals, he wrote thoughtfully and humorously about intellectual property, copyright, and the architecture of the Internet. He wrote as well about unexpected topics such as pop culture, politics both electoral and idealistic, dieting, and lifehacking. Including three in-depth and previously unpublished essays about education, governance, and cities, The Boy Who Could Change the World contains the life's work of one of the most original minds of our time.

"According to the media, Donald Trump could never become president. Now many are on a mission to prove he shouldn't be president. The Trump administration and the press are at war -- and as in any war, the first casualty has been truth. Bestselling author Howard Kurtz, host of Fox News's Media Buzz and former Washington Post columnist, offers a stunning exposé of how supposedly objective journalists, alarmed by Trump's success, have moved into the opposing camp. Kurtz's exclusive, in-depth, behind-the-scenes interviews with reporters, anchors, and insiders within the Trump White House reveal the unprecedented hostility between the media and the president they cover."--Jacket.

"Are rural white Christians the real Americans? Should teachers be armed or should the Second Amendment be repealed? Is abortion murder or an ethically sound choice for women? Should migrant babies be caged or should ICE be abolished? Should billionaires exist while children go hungry? These are some of the bitter ideological disputes that have turned social media into a political battlefield. In Digital Civil War, Peter Daou, a veteran digital-media adviser to presidential candidates, investigates the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties, arguing that democracy itself is under assault by an emboldened and empowered Far Right. Daou shows how the digital civil war is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. And he explains that the relentless toxicity of social media - often treated as an aberration - is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare."--Amazon.com.

The airwaves in America are being used by armed militias, conspiracy theorists, survivalists, the religious right, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other radical groups to reach millions with their messages of hate and fear. Waves of Rancor examines the origin, nature, and impact of right-wing electronic media, including radio, television, cable, the internet, and even music CDs.

Responding to what is perceived as the reemergence of worldwide antisemitism from 1998-99, and especially from 2000, surveys the new outbreak of this spiritual and psychological illness now thriving globally. After discussing the history of Christian antisemitism and modern racism, proceeds to illuminate aspects of antisemitism in America (on the political and religious Right, among Blacks, and in popular culture), as well as Islamic fundamentalism and antisemitism in the Arab press. Clarifies how racists, including antisemites, exploit the Internet. Foxman also relates his experiences as a hidden child during the Holocaust, and his activities as head of the Anti-Defamation League.

"War in 140 Characters examines the role of social media and other forms of 'new media' in changing the face of modern warfare. War is, more than ever, a clash of narratives--with each state/party fighting to control the spread of information and project their narrative to the outside world. Social media has shattered traditional hierarchies between the state and its citizens, enabling the individual or networks of individuals to influence the direction of conflict to a degree previously thought impossible. State militaries now employ official Social Media warriors to influence the narrative online; in Russia, paid trolls flood the internet with pro-Russian tweets, blog posts, and comments in order to create the sense of "authentic" support for the annexation of Crimea. Even private civilians can single-handedly alter the course of war. New media has expanded the arena of conflict into the virtual world, which is every bit as real and often more important than the fighting on the ground. Whether you are a president or a terrorist, if you don't understand how to deploy the power of media effectively you may win the odd battle but you will lose a twenty-first century war. War in 140 Characters provides a new narrative for modern warfare, exploring the way social media has transformed the way that we fight, win, and consume wars, and what that means for the world going forward."--Provided by publisher.

"In February of 2013, Richard Stengel, the former editor-in-chief of Time, joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Within days, two shocking events made world-wide headlines: ISIS executed American journalist James Foley on a graphic video seen by tens of millions, and Vladimir Putin's "little green men"-Russian special forces-invaded Crimea, amid a blizzard of Russian denials and false flags. What these events had in common besides their violent law-lessness is that they were the opening salvos in a new era of global information war, where countries and non-state actors use social media and disinformation to create their own narratives and undermine anyone who opposes them. Stengel was thrust onto the front lines of this battle as he was tasked with responding to the relentless weaponizing of information and grievance by ISIS, Russia, China, and others. He saw the scale of what he was up against and found himself hopelessly outgunned. Then, in 2016, the wars Stengel was fighting abroad came home during the presidential election, as "fake news" became a rallying cry and the Russians used the techniques they learned in Ukraine to influence the election here. Rarely has an accomplished journalist been not only a close observer but also a principal participant in the debates and decisions of American foreign policy. Stengel takes you behind the scenes in the ritualized world of diplomacy, from the daily 8:30 morning huddle with a restless John Kerry to a midnight sit-down in Saudi Arabia with the prince of darkness Mohammed bin Salman. The result is a rich account of a losing battle against trolls and bots-who are every bit as insidious as their names imply."--

The level of discourse in campaigns and elections ideally should elevate citizens' knowledge about the candidates and the issues that face the polity. But elections today are often beset by negative campaigns and an emphasis on the "horse race" over issues of substance. Running on Empty? looks at sixteen carefully selected, highly competitive races in the House and Senate during the 2002 midterm elections. Measuring various aspects of campaign discourse throughout a wide variety of paid and unpaid media coverage-including radio, TV, newspapers, direct mail, and the Internet-the authors arrive at some arresting conclusions about the quality of the messages conveyed, whether positive or negative. In all, this impressive set of original essays by political experts provides a timely assessment of the effectiveness of media reform and the democratization of campaign discourse in theory compared to practice.

Has globalization diluted the power of national governments to regulate their own economies? Are international governmental and nongovernmental organizations weakening the hold of nation-states on global regulatory agendas? Many observers think so. But in All Politics Is Global, Daniel Drezner argues that this view is wrong. Despite globalization, states especially the great powers still dominate international regulatory regimes, and the regulatory goals of states are driven by their domestic interests. As Drezner shows, state size still matters. The great powers the United States and the European Union remain the key players in writing global regulations, and their power is due to the size of their internal economic markets. If they agree, there will be effective global governance. If they don't agree, governance will be fragmented or ineffective. And, paradoxically, the most powerful sources of great-power preferences are the least globalized elements of their economies. Testing this revisionist model of global regulatory governance on an unusually wide variety of cases, including the Internet, finance, genetically modified organisms, and intellectual property rights, Drezner shows why there is such disparity in the strength of international regulations.

An all-access pass to the populist insurrection brewing across the country. Job outsourcing. Slashed paychecks. A war without end, fatally mismanaged. Americans on both the Right and Left are tired of being disenfranchised by corrupt politicians and are organizing to change the status quo. In his invigorating new book, David Sirota investigates this uprising, taking us into the trenches where real change is happening–in the headquarters of the most powerful third party in America, at an ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, and on the quasi-military staging area of a vigilante force on the Mexican border. The Uprising is essential reading for anyone who wants to look beyond presidential politics at the new populism that is reshaping the American political landscape.