While many debate the essence of the Robert Mueller report any fair reading of it details chapter and verse how the Russians tried to influence the 2016 election with social media accounts set up under names like Blacklist or the Heart of Texas as they posed as grassroots activists on one side or the other of the political aisle while targeting much of their activity in swing states.  All this in the interest of sowing discord in America.  While it’s hard to say definitively that it turned that election, the discord they sought has arrived in a torrent.  And now these tactics of disinformation–the deliberate spreading of lies as truth is the most powerful weapon today in our political discourse.  It’s capstone activity was Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” challenging the 2020 election results of what his own chief of election security called the fairest and most secure election in our nation’s history.  And sixty court cases, when asked to rule on it, threw out his bogus claims.  Attorney and University of Michigan law professor, Barbara McQuade, in her new book “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America” looks at the history of how lies are spread and have become such a malevolent force with the advent of social media.  She identifies the central causes and possible solutions to a problem that can make a democracy impossible to sustain.