Disinformation starts at the top — with America’s elites

The Javelin missiles making mincemeat out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks in Ukraine work differently from old-fashioned antitank weapons.

Instead of flying straight at the tank and having to defeat the thick armor on the front and sides, they pop up into the air and come down from above, attacking the comparatively defenseless top, where the armor is much thinner.

That works well for tanks, whose defenses haven’t caught up with the new realities yet.

But something similar is happening in our ideological wars, and we’re not doing well there.

Just like tanks, our society is more vulnerable to “misinformation” attacks at the top, but we’ve been concentrating our defenses further down, with poor results.

Efforts at protecting our society from “foreign disinformation” are mostly aimed at keeping unapproved messages from reaching the common people, who are presumed to be too dumb to see through foreign propaganda.

There are two problems with this.

One is that the common people are also what are known as “voters,” and efforts to limit their exposure to unwelcome information and ideas are inevitably — and I mean inevitably — perverted into domestic political manipulation.

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