You may or may not be aware of who Cass Sunstein is, or be familiar with the material with which he’s earned the tingling spines and risen hackles his name triggers among members of Informed Paranoia’s cognoscenti, but the fellow is an old hand at mind games on the national scale. In 2008, Sunstein earned his Totalitarian wings by authoring a paper suggesting all manner of online shenanigans (including the hiring of operatives to troll chat rooms and forums with anonymous disinfo, aka, spreading “cognitive dissonance”) in order to disrupt these pesky Conspiracy Theorists.
“Conspiracy Theorist”, of course, replaced “Commie” as the debate-foreclosing neutron bomb of political discourse in the early 1960s, when too many informed, rational, professional people found profound fault with the inevitable “findings” of the Warren Commission (which doesn’t, I feel, get nearly enough credit as a work of Golden Age Sci Fi). In other words, “Conspiracy Theorist” has a serious pedigree as an effectively-irrational pejorative and half a century after the successful conspiracies to off J. Kennedy, his little brother, MLK, Malcolm X and various pesky cultural figures and foreign heads of state, et al, the term is still very much on the job… and now working hard with Sunstein.
Any utter bullshit you now see on YouTube, for example, explicating the wackier end of the “Conspiracy” spectrum, could be (six years later!) Sunstein’s godchild. Especially the more popular bullshit sites, the ones featuring seemingly sane and articulate presenters… who seem that way for fully fifteen or twenty seconds before they really get into it. At which point they say things that no rational and *honest* human with more than a 3rd-grade education could possibly say without shame, or pants-wetting hysterics, or a gun to his or her head.
I offer this hilarious… or sickening?… example (this woman has to be a Pro):
THE IMPERIALIST 