"Presidential adviser wrote about crackdown on expressing opinions."
A high-ranking official in the Obama administration has come under fire in the past few weeks for suggesting that it would be a good idea to deploy federal agents to "cognitively infiltrate" political groups that believe in conspiracy theories. "Cognitive infiltration" may just be a fancy way to describe what chat room trolls do every day, but it's downright Orwellian in its implications, summoning visions of disinformation campaigns, agents provocateurs, and J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO. The official is Cass Sunstein, the long-time University of Chicago law professor (he has since moved on to Harvard), who is currently serving as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Sunstein's proposal was not issued under the auspices of the government, but in an academic paper. Co-authored with Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in 2008 (it can be downloaded as a PDF file here), "Conspiracy Theory" surveys the existing scholarship on the origins and characteristics of conspiracy theories and contemplates whether or not governments should try to neutralize them. In general, it takes a social sciences approach, arguing that conspiracy theories are neither legitimate political ideas nor symptoms of a psychological disorder, but are rather the inevitable distortions of closed-off, self-reinforcing belief systems. Using government agents to inject "cognitive diversity" into those communities, it suggests, just might provide the body politic with an antidote to the thought contagions they inspire.
Glenn Greenwald ripped into Sunstein's "truly pernicious" article in Salon (click here for his post, several PS's, and the 600-plus comments it received). "Note how similar Sunstein's proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates," he wrote. "There is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government 'propaganda' within the U.S., aimed at American citizens." The far right World Net Daily was no less alarmist: "Top Obama czar: Infiltrate all 'conspiracy theorists,'" its headline read. "Presidential adviser wrote about crackdown on expressing opinions."
Though their tone may be shrill, they both make a valid point. The US government has a sufficiently expansive bully pulpit at its disposal that it needn't and shouldn't resort to secret agents and bought-and-paid-for claques and shills and ringers to promote its ideas. Unless and until it can prove that they are planting bombs or providing material assistance to people who are, it has to live with the likes of Glenn Beck (who once called Sunstein "the most dangerous man in America"
, Alex Jones, the White Aryan Resistance, and David Ray Griffin.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-goldwag/cass-sunsteins-thought-po_b_453562.html
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