Anne Applebaum is always important to read and never more so than this cover article for The Atlantic about how the West is losing the war of ideas.

She demonstrates how the authoritarian powers have learned that they cannot only control and censor information internally, they must be actively sowing information against the West and its values at home and abroad, including in the Western countries themselves. She reveals how new information and media networks have been created to spread this information in developing countries. And then how that information is also shared within the democracies. Some by the far Left but much more by the far Right. 

It is revealing that what Stalin once tried to do with the American Left, Russia has succeeded at doing with the Right. And what was then surreptitious, is now done brazenly.