Attack from Within

An urgent, comprehensive explanation of the ways disinformation is corrupting democracy, how we can identify the truth, and what we can do to fight back.

MSNBC's legal analyst breaks down the ways disinformation has become a tool to drive voters to extremes, disempower our legal structures, and consolidate power.

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: Russian fake personas, misinformed social media influencers, our own government. It's causing havoc in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and on our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:

• The authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini to Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians in history have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
• Disinformation tactics--like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and why they work.
• An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation (free speech, baby!) and how it is undermining our elections, sparking threats and violence, and destabilizing social structures.
• Real, accessible solutions to controlling disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country’s hard-won democracy.