What is #Pizzagate?

[seemslikeadream]

Emma Best Wikileaks DMs dump, section on Podesta and #spiritcooking, etc

I missed this post ...did you see her latest?

Distributed Denial of Secrets

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41553

[elfismiles]

Sunday, February 17, 2019
Pizzagate Arson
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2019/ ... Arson.html

[liminalOyster]

My god this is bad. Pizzagate is a big old ball of shit. But this analysis is like the intellectual equivalent of a paint n sip class at Costco.

Pizzagate, Satanic Panic, and the Power of Conspiracy Theories
Anna Merlan
Today 8:00amFiled to: ANNA MERLAN

In my forthcoming book Republic of Lies, I spent a lot of time thinking about the primacy of conspiracy theories in America, and talking to people involved in a variety of conspiracy communities. In this section, I attended a rally for Pizzagate believers across the street from the White House, and talked to them as they waited for David Seaman, a star in the movement, to take the stage.

“We need an investigation,” a woman named Angel told me patiently. A casino worker in her mid forties, she’d driven all the way to DC to hold a neat hand-lettered sign featuring a picture of a Comet staff member’s toddler daughter, her hands taped to a table with heavy white masking tape. “We can’t call people innocent without an investigation.”

Given that she believes the federal government is involved in the sex-ring cover-up, who should do the investigating? I asked her.

“We need an unbiased investigator,” she said, just as patiently.

Like a lot of people I spoke to, Angel was fairly certain there are no longer any children in the basement or back rooms of Comet Ping Pong.“I’m sure they’ve cleaned themselves up to the point where if you, look, there’s nothing there,” she told me.

“They use the word ‘conspiracy’ as a catchall to delegitimize any questions about anything,” complained a woman standing next to Angel wearing a black benghazi matters T-shirt and an NRA hat. Refusing to tell me her name—I was instructed to call her “LaLa”—the woman went on, vacillating between rage at the press and a slightly irritable but basically kind desire to set me on the right path.

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“This is why Trump has emerged as someone people trust,” she said. “He calls things out as he sees them. And maybe these conspiracies aren’t just theories, they’re actually truths? That have been going on since the beginning of time?”

“Amen,” Angel responded forcefully. “Having sex with babies and children, they say it gives them power.” She shook her head. “They get what they want in life.”

She produced a list of primary sources: an Oprah episode from the 1990s about a woman who was sexually abused by a cult virtually her whole life, a Dr. Phil episode from earlier in the week, and the “pedo rings” in England, by which I think she meant the very real sex abuse scandal uncovered a few years ago implicating some of the most famed presenters at the BBC. There’s absolutely no denying that sex trafficking is real, we agreed, that child abuse is sadly common, that rape and sexual violence are constant, daily realities for a lot of people, especially women and children.

It was at that point that I noticed a man in his late thirties hovering very close to us, filming us with his phone and talking quietly to himself; I realized after a moment that he was livestreaming, telling his viewers what he was seeing. When LaLa mentioned Trump, he laughed out loud, a short, sharp bark.

“Controlled opposition,” he said loudly, pointing the phone at LaLa. “Controlled. Opposition.”

“What?” I said.

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“What?” LaLa and Angel asked.

“Controlled by what?” LaLa inquired.

“Nothing,” he said. And then, to me: “I’ll talk to you about it later.”

He couldn’t quite help himself, though. “You love Trump,” he told LaLa. “You love David Seaman.” The crisp NRA hat, the Benghazi shirt—it all looked to him as if she was a plant, sent to the rally to discredit the movement. (Later, in an online video dissecting the event, he zoomed in on her purse, which looked barely used. A sign that it was freshly bought and contains a hidden camera, he speculated.)

“Why follow David Seaman?” he said to her.

“I don’t know who that is,” LaLa responded. “I’m some kind of plant? That’s insane. I don’t even know her.” She pointed at Angel.

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“I came with my friend over there,” Angel said. They looked at him together, baffled and offended.

“All right.” The man’s hands were shaking so violently I was concerned he was going to drop the phone. Then, to his viewers, “They’re telling me I’m wrong, guys.” He didn’t sound convinced. He drifted away.

David Seaman took the stage to cheers. He was tall and thin and mild-looking, with sandy brown hair and big glasses and a blue hoodie, like a Facebook employee or your company’s quietest IT guy. “According to Newsweek, I’m a mentally unstable con man,” he told the crowd.

They booed sympathetically.

“There’s a man here who’s been recording me all morning, who attacks me on YouTube,” Seaman said next. “I can’t think of anything lower.” He pointed dramatically at the man who was filming LaLa, Angel, and me. His name, it turned out, was Nathan Stolpman, and he ran a conspiracy-oriented podcast called Lift the Veil. He and Seaman were mortal enemies, each of them accusing the other of being plants, sent by God knows who.

With a rush, much of the crowd surrounded Stolpman.

“What’s your endgame?” someone yelled in his face.

“You’re protecting child molesters, bro!” screamed a tattooed, heavily muscled man with the sides of his head shaved.

“Asshole!” an older woman cried. They were filming and photographing Stolpman, pressing in on him from all sides. The potential for violence seemed high; I could almost feel the air thicken.

Then, as if responding to a signal I couldn’t hear, they stepped away. The tension dissipated. The rally continued. Stolpman was smiling slightly, looking calm, still holding his phone aloft. Onstage, Seaman dropped to his knees and led a prayer for the abused, captive children. (Like me, Seaman is Jewish; I briefly wondered where he got into the Christian habit of kneeling in prayer.)

After Seaman and Wolfe finished their exhortations to arrest the unnamed molesters, anyone was free to speak. A winding and sometimes ragged group of people took the stage, one after another, for hours.

There were impassioned pleas against child abuse, rants against CIA mind control, heartrending personal tales of sexual assault and child neglect, a guy who talked about the family court system being biased against dads.

“The American Bar Association is behind all this child theft!” a man yelled at one point, to considerable applause.

For many of the people in attendance, the only hope in this morass of baby-abusing corruption lay in the New York Police Department, who they believed wasn’t beholden to the same pedophilic interests as the feds. They trusted that the NYPD was investigating Weiner, whose sexts with that fifteen-year-old girl could be the key to bringing the entire child-molesting house of cards crashing down.

I wandered the crowd, getting a sunburn in the crisscross pattern of the shirt I was wearing, sweating through my coat, trying to figure out what I was hearing. As chaotic and bizarre as the rally was, the common thread was clear enough: abuse, secrecy, and cover-ups, a government rife with pedophiles, and a media that refused to take a word of it seriously. A minor-league neo-Nazi podcaster was roaming the crowd, yelling intermittently at the stage about “Jewish ritual murder,” but he was there alone and nobody was taking him seriously. LaLa pulled me aside and assured me the Nazi, too, was a plant to discredit the Pizzagaters.

Pizzagate adherents break down into a number of subgroups. Among them are survivors of child sexual abuse who know firsthand the pain of that kind of violence. There’s also what I think of as the chaos arm: people like Mike Cernovich, brought in far right, prone to pushing anti-Democratic conspiracies (and who saw the lack of coverage by the mainstream media as evidence of their having been bought off by the Democrats). And then there are deeply religious Christians, often evangelicals, to whom Pizzagate is proof that the Devil is real and working hard on Earth.

If all this is beginning to sound unpleasantly familiar, it should. Medieval historian Michael Barbezat pointed out that Pizzagate looks a lot like the “nocturnal ritual fantasy,” a phrase coined by Norm Cohn, another historian: a belief that shadowy groups are gathering at night to plot the overthrow of society while participating in the ritual abuse, torture, and/or murder of innocents, usually children.

Throughout the Middle Ages, it was popular to charge supposed heretical groups with meeting at night to solidify their bonds of friendship with orgies, black masses, and baby murder. Medieval Jews, Barbezat writes, were persistently accused of conducting rituals involving the abuse of children, beginning in England in the early 1150s.

“The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the blood libel, often featured a sexual component as well,” he explains. “In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.”

In all such accounts, the nocturnal ritual fantasy is used as justification for violence against the suspected group, Cohn and Barbezat write, a way of quantifying its wickedness in terms that justify any means to stop it. Writer and activist Chip Berlet calls the fantasy “coded rhetoric” meant to incite “scripted violence.”

Accordingly, accusations of ritually killing Christian and Muslim children have been used to justify mass executions of Jews across Europe and the Middle East. Claims of blood libel persisted throughout the twentieth century, intensifying with the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the forgery of minutes of a secret meeting of hand-rubbing Jews plotting world domination).

The Protocols and the idea of ritual killings or blood libel are cited even now. In 2013, to pluck one disturbing example out of dozens, Khaled Al-Zaafrani, founder of the Egyptian Justice and Progress Party, declared, “It’s well known that during the Passover, they make matzos called the ‘Blood of Zion.’ They take a Christian child, slit his throat, and slaughter him. Then they take his blood and make their [matzos]. This is a very important rite for the Jews, which they never forgo... They slice it and fight over who gets to eat Christian blood.” At the Pizzagate rally, then, the neo-Nazi yelling about “Jewish ritual murder” was making a connection between Pizzagate and the blood libel, although he might not have known the historical and cultural roots of what he was doing.

**Pizzagate also looks chillingly like a revival of a more local paranoid fantasy, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of childcare workers, teachers, and parents were accused of engaging in the ritual abuse of children. The panic was partially set off by the publication in 1980 of a book called Michelle Remembers, cowritten by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, his patient and eventual wife. The book purported to be a chronicle of Smith’s recovered memories of horrific Satanic ritual abuse in the 1950s, and it initiated some two decades of procedures in which self-proclaimed experts guided vulnerable patients through “recovering” similar memories.**

Satanic Panic was an irresistible blend of sex, black magic, and crime, and stories about it soon pervaded the culture: huge media outlets from Oprah to 20/20 ran straight-faced stories on Satanic ritual abuse. (Angel had referred to the Oprah episode in our conversation, remembering it as the story of a woman abused by a Satanic cult for generations. I later figured out that the specific episode she was likely referring to recounted the case of a woman named Laurel Rose Wilson, who under the name“Lauren Stratford” claimed to have been used as a “breeder” in a Satanic cult, producing babies for sacrificial rites. Her stories were deemed unfounded by police, investigative journalists, and the Christian magazine Cornerstone, and her books on the subject were pulled from print.)

Heavy metal was also seen as a culprit and a signifier of Satanic activity, as was the game Dungeons & Dragons. Three teenage boys in Arkansas, the so-called West Memphis Three, were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence of the ritual murder of three little boys; one of the teens, Damien Echols, was sentenced to death, and all three would have died in prison had their case not been covered by a popular documentary series, which attracted intense celebrity support. The West Memphis Three were eventually released from prison after close to twenty years, as were several other people—daycare workers, babysitters, teachers—falsely accused of child abuse.

In the case of Pizzagate, the demonic aspect of the plot was enhanced by an additional thread discovered in John Podesta’s hacked emails: “spirit cooking.” Podesta and his brother, Tony, were purportedly attending Satanic rituals conducted by the artist Marina Abramović where guests dined on semen and blood consumed on “earthquake nights.”

“WIKI WICCAN: PODESTA PRACTICES OCCULT MAGIC,” yelled the far-right aggregation site Drudge Report when the telling emails came to light. Alex Jones dubbed spirit cooking “black magic,” and Mike Cernovich weighed in with “sick stuff” and “sex cult.” Abramović’s repeated rebuttals that “Spirit Cooking”—the title of an art installation—was just that, art, and that nobody ate semen, blood, or anything else unsavory, had no impact. Those who bought into spirit cooking as a real demonic activity are certain that Abramović and the Podestas and everyone else involved in this Satanic sex-and-death cult will face their judgment, sooner or later.

**These outbreaks of religious hysteria recur so persistently in American life for a reason: they are, like so many conspiracy theories, a response to moments of social change and perceived societal fracture. Satanic Panic allegations first arose during a moment in the 1980s of intense concern over the number of women in the workforce and a subsequent rise in “latchkey kids” and paid caregivers.**

**Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 elections, a time when Americans were re-litigating, to an exhausting degree, our beliefs, our vision of America, and our sexual ethics. The paranoid idea of sexual predators hiding in the highest echelons of power was not so paranoid; Pizzagate, though, spun it through a nexus of faux black magic, imagined ritual, and nonsensical accusations that were somehow both unbelievable and yet, for a lot of people, unbelievably powerful.**

From the book Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power by Anna Merlan. Copyright © 2019 by Anna Merlan. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.

https://jezebel.com/pizzagate-satanic-p ... 1833551416

[JackRiddler]

I wrote a spontaneous, long response to the last post (Anna Merlan's book), but while it fits here I decided it fits even better in another thread, so I posted it there instead:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40434&start=600#p672301

As for the poll with which this one started: It should have an option for "Pizzagate" being a fabrication that intentionally caricatures and renders absurd the story of the child-rape ring run by one Jeffrey Epstein, his clients, and of how the state allowed him to escape justice. "Pg" functions as a kind of keyword hijacking, if you will, occupying the space where Epstein should be.

I cast only one vote in the original poll, that "Pg" is a made-up Clinton smear. Of course there have been a great many anti-Clinton smears over the decades, here their supporters are actually right. This is basically because the copious real shit they do is spook-and-cash business as usual (from Mena to Haiti) that we don't want exposed because it would endanger the status quo generally.

But I would have cast my second vote in favor of also saying "Pg" exists so as to distract from the Epstein story, the latter being an undeniable reality of both conspiracy and pedophilia, and one that includes B.Clinton. It's fucking uncanny, this "Q" arriving and making up an easily disproved bullshit narrative that mirrors the real Epstein story on the key details. Burying that also benefits Trump and his cabinet secretary, Acosta, so it's a twofer, a threefer. By being both outrageously untrue and incredibly stupid, the pizza shop defamation protects the Epstein perps from a real scandal with potential to end both tribes politically and maybe even land a couple of them in prison.

And with most of the giant corpse of #Russiagate in the rear view mirror (we will be driving past its tentacles and strewn bits of guts for months yet), I think it's worth at least a minute to wonder if that, too, was set up intentionally as a distraction and ultimately a protection, acting predictably as an obstacle to a real-left opposition to the real Trump policies and crimes (especially given, again, that most of these are still only intensifications of business as usual).

.

[Belligerent Savant]

And with most of the giant corpse of #Russiagate in the rear view mirror (we will be driving past its tentacles and strewn bits of guts for months yet), I think it's worth at least a minute to wonder if that, too, was set up intentionally as a distraction and ultimately a protection, acting predictably as an obstacle to a real-left opposition to the real Trump policies and crimes (especially given that most of these are still only intensifications of business as usual).

.

Yes, certainly.

An astute comparison, yet this M.O. is an oft-repeated one, given the efficiency in achieving primary objectives.

So long as the majority remain ill-informed the theatrics/masking of actual intent will continue, and succeed.

[liminalOyster]

I wrote a spontaneous, long response to the last post (Anna Merlan's book), but while it fits here I decided it fits even better in another thread, so I posted it there instead:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40434&start=600#p672301

As for the poll with which this one started: It should have an option for "Pizzagate" being a fabrication that intentionally caricatures and renders absurd the story of the child-rape ring run by one Jeffrey Epstein, his clients, and of how the state allowed him to escape justice. "Pg" functions as a kind of keyword hijacking, if you will, occupying the space where Epstein should be.

I cast only one vote in the original poll, that "Pg" is a made-up Clinton smear. Of course there have been a great many anti-Clinton smears over the decades, here their supporters are actually right. This is basically because the copious real shit they do is spook-and-cash business as usual (from Mena to Haiti) that we don't want exposed because it would endanger the status quo generally.

But I would have cast my second vote in favor of also saying "Pg" exists so as to distract from the Epstein story, the latter being an undeniable reality of both conspiracy and pedophilia, and one that includes B.Clinton. It's fucking uncanny, this "Q" arriving and making up an easily disproved bullshit narrative that mirrors the real Epstein story on the key details. Burying that also benefits Trump and his cabinet secretary, Acosta, so it's a twofer, a threefer. By being both outrageously untrue and incredibly stupid, the pizza shop defamation protects the Epstein perps from a real scandal with potential to end both tribes politically and maybe even land a couple of them in prison.

And with most of the giant corpse of #Russiagate in the rear view mirror (we will be driving past its tentacles and strewn bits of guts for months yet), I think it's worth at least a minute to wonder if that, too, was set up intentionally as a distraction and ultimately a protection, acting predictably as an obstacle to a real-left opposition to the real Trump policies and crimes (especially given, again, that most of these are still only intensifications of business as usual).

.

Wholehearted agreement with the great majority of this. But one key big distinction that relies only on my felt sense and demonstrates my lack of Wombat's very much more sophisticated repertoire of info - in a general way, I'm totally convinced that Q, PG and RG were all written and disseminated by the same source. I am (almost) 100% convinced that there is a black office made up of people who look a whole lot like us here who were tasked with operationalizing CT at some point mid Obama years. Probably just after Sunstein's early missives, actually......

ps. Is this where everybody went and why RI became a ghosttown full of Maddow-bilia?

[Belligerent Savant]

.

My wholly uneducated and purely intuitive take is that you're giving too much credit to a single source, unless you mean 'source' as in a clandestine 'thinktank' of sorts, in which case: certainly plausible.
But the source doesn't matter -- to me, at least -- as much as the demonstrable efficacy of the impact.

Even here in RI. To your latter point, this place has been an f'ng WAREHOUSE of state-sponsored Russiagate propaganda for ~3yrs and counting, and this place is (or rather, was once) considered the place to go when seeking an escape from the standard mind-scramble offered by establishment press.

(That said, the pervasiveness of said content here has also led to insightful commentary by a number of the regulars, so perhaps we should be grateful to a degree)

Job well done by that f'ing 'thinktank'. And it's not yet over.

[alloneword]

Wholehearted agreement with the great majority of this. But one key big distinction that relies only on my felt sense and demonstrates my lack of Wombat's very much more sophisticated repertoire of info - in a general way, I'm totally convinced that Q, PG and RG were all written and disseminated by the same source. I am (almost) 100% convinced that there is a black office made up of people who look a whole lot like us here who were tasked with operationalizing CT at some point mid Obama years. Probably just after Sunstein's early missives, actually......

ps. Is this where everybody went and why RI became a ghosttown full of Maddow-bilia?

^^^ Now, there's a thought (or two). I take it to mean 'source' as in an "Integrity Initiative" type thing?

I had to look up Sunstein:

3. Cognitive infiltration

Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.

How might this tactic work?

Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts.
Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.

I wonder how Cass Sunstein would feel if he knew I was using his paper to promote a "CT" regarding the cognitive infiltration of an online group?

*** Shit... Maybe he already does??? ***

Or maybe that's just my crippled epistemology talking.

[liminalOyster]

.

My wholly uneducated and purely intuitive take is that you're giving too much credit to a single source, unless you mean 'source' as in a clandestine 'thinktank' of sorts, in which case: certainly plausible.
But the source doesn't matter -- to me, at least -- as much as the demonstrable efficacy of the impact.

Even here in RI. To your latter point, this place has been an f'ng WAREHOUSE of state-sponsored Russiagate propaganda for ~3yrs and counting, and this place is (or rather, was once) considered the place to go when seeking an escape from the standard mind-scramble offered by establishment press.

(That said, the pervasiveness of said content here has also led to insightful commentary by a number of the regulars, so perhaps we should be grateful to a degree)

Job well done by that f'ing 'thinktank'. And it's not yet over.

Yes, I meant "source" as in clandestine think-tank.

[liminalOyster]

I wonder how Cass Sunstein would feel if he knew I was using his paper to promote a "CT" regarding the cognitive infiltration of an online group?

*** Shit... Maybe he already does??? ***

Or maybe that's just my crippled epistemology talking.

How a Liberal Scholar of Conspiracy Theories Became the Subject of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory
By Andrew Marantz
December 27, 2017

In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy. In it, Sunstein and his Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule attempted to explain how conspiracy theories spread, especially online. At one point, they made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” The authors’ primary example of a conspiracy theory was the belief that 9/11 was an inside job; they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.”

Nowhere in the final version of the paper did Sunstein and Vermeule state the obvious fact that a government ban on conspiracy theories would be unconstitutional and possibly dangerous. (In a draft that was posted online, which remains more widely read, they emphasized that censorship is “inconsistent with principles of freedom of expression,” although they “could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable.”)* “I was interested in the mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”

Sunstein has studied the spread of information since the mid-nineties, when he co-wrote a series of law-review articles about “cascade theory”—a model describing how opinions travel across juries, markets, and subcultures. He was particularly interested in what he called the Law of Group Polarization: how ideologically homogenous groups can become “breeding grounds for unjustified extremism, even fanaticism.” In 2001, his first book on political polarization on the Internet, “Republic.com,” warned that, even when people have access to a range of robust and challenging views, many will favor information that confirms what they already believe. He updated the book in 2007, as “Republic.com 2.0: Revenge of the Blogs,” and again this year, as “#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.” When he wrote “Republic.com,” social media didn’t really exist; when he wrote “Republic.com 2.0,” social media’s impact was so negligible that he could essentially ignore it; in “#Republic,” he argues that services such as Facebook comprise the contemporary agora, and that their personalized algorithms will make it ever more difficult for Americans to understand their fellow-citizens.

In the endless debates about what constitutes “fake news,” we tend to invoke clear cases of unfounded rumor or outright deceit (“Melania has a body double,” or “President Trump saves two cats from drowning after Hurricane Harvey”). More prevalent, and more bewildering, are the ambiguous cases—a subtly altered photograph, an accurate but misleading statistic, a tendentious connection among disparate dots. Between the publication of “Republic.com 2.0” and “#Republic,” Sunstein became a target of the same online rumor mill he’d been studying from a distance, and many of the conspiracy theories about “Conspiracy Theories” fell into this gray area—overheated, but not wholly made up. “If you had told me that this obscure paper would ever become such a publicly visible and objectionable thing, I would have thought it more likely that Martians had just landed in Times Square,” Sunstein said. “In hindsight, though, I suppose it’s sort of appropriate that I got caught up in the mechanisms I was writing about.”

When Barack Obama became President, in 2009, he appointed Sunstein, his friend and former colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, to be the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The O.I.R.A. reviews drafts of federal rules, and, using tools such as cost-benefit analysis, recommends ways to make them more efficient. O.I.R.A. administrator is the sort of in-the-weeds post that even lifelong technocrats might find unglamorous; Sunstein had often described it as his “dream job.” He took a break from academia and moved to Washington, D.C. It soon became clear that some of his published views, which he’d thought of as “maybe a bit mischievous, but basically fine, within the context of an academic journal,” could seem far more nefarious in the context of the open Internet.

Estrin, who seems to have been the first blogger to notice the “Conspiracy Theories” paper, published a post in January, 2010, under the headline “Got Fascism?” “Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy,” he wrote on the “alternative progressive” Web site the Rag Blog. Three days later, the journalist Daniel Tencer (Twitter bio: “Lover of great narratives in all their forms”) expanded on Estrin’s post, for Raw Story. Two days after that, the civil-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece for Salon headlined “Obama Confidant’s Spine-Chilling Proposal.” Greenwald called Sunstein’s paper “truly pernicious,” concluding, “The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned—rationally—to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.” Sunstein’s “scheme,” as Greenwald put it, wasn’t exactly a government action or statement. Sunstein wasn’t in government when he wrote it, in 2008; he was in the academy, where his job was to invent thought experiments, including provocative ones. But Greenwald was right that not all skepticism is paranoia.

Three days after Estrin’s post was published on the Rag Blog, the fire jumped to the other side of the road. Paul Joseph Watson, writing for the libertarian conspiracist outfit InfoWars, linked to Estrin’s post and riffed on it, in a free-associative mode, for fifteen hundred words. “It is a firmly established fact that the military-industrial complex which also owns the corporate media networks in the United States has numerous programs aimed at infiltrating prominent Internet sites and spreading propaganda to counter the truth,” Watson wrote. His boss at InfoWars, Alex Jones, began expanding on this talking point on his daily radio show: “Cass Sunstein says ban conspiracy theories, and that’s whatever he says it is. That’s on record.”

At the time, Glenn Beck hosted both a daily TV show on Fox News and a syndicated radio show; according to a Harris poll, he was the country’s second-favorite TV personality, after Oprah Winfrey. Beck had been delivering impassioned rants against Sunstein for months, calling him “the most dangerous man in America.” Now he added the paper about conspiracy theories to his litany of complaints. In one typical TV segment, in April of 2010, he devoted several minutes to a close reading of the paper, which lists five possible ways that a government might respond to conspiracy theories, including banning them outright. “The government should ban them,” Beck said, over-enunciating to express his incredulity. “How a government with an amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech bans a conspiracy theory is absolutely beyond me, but it’s not beyond a great mind and a great thinker like Cass Sunstein.” In another show, Beck insinuated that Sunstein had been inspired by Edward Bernays, the author of a 1928 book called “Propaganda.” “I got a flood of messages that night, saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re a disciple of Bernays,’ ” Sunstein recalled. “The result was that I was led to look up this interesting guy Bernays, whom I might not have heard of otherwise.”

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Inside the Minds of the New Crossword Constructors

For much of 2010 and 2011, Sunstein was such a frequent target on right-wing talk shows that some Tea Party-affiliated members of Congress started to invoke his name as a symbol of government overreach. Earlier in the Obama Administration, Beck had targeted Van Jones, now of CNN, who was then a White House adviser on green jobs. After a few weeks of Beck’s attacks, Jones resigned. “Then Beck made it sort of clear that he wanted me to be next,” Sunstein said. “It wasn’t a pleasant fact, but I didn’t see what I could do about it. So I put it out of my mind.”

Sunstein was never asked to resign. He served as the head of O.I.R.A. for three years, then returned to Harvard, in 2012. Two years later, he published an essay collection called “Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas.” The first chapter was a revised version of the “Conspiracy Theories” paper, with several qualifications added and with Vermeule’s name removed. But the revisions did nothing to improve Sunstein’s standing on far-right talk shows, where he had already earned a place, along with Saul Alinsky and George Soros and Al Gore, in the pantheon of globalist bogeymen. Beck referred to Sunstein as recently as last year, on his radio show, while discussing the Obama Administration’s “propaganda” in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. “We no longer have Jefferson and Madison leading us,” Beck said. “We have Saul Alinsky and Cass Sunstein. Whatever it takes to win, you do.” Last December, Alex Jones—who is, improbably, now taken more seriously than Beck by many conservatives, including some in the White House—railed against a recent law, the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, claiming, speciously, that it would “completely federalize all communications in the United States” and “put the C.I.A. in control of media.” According to Jones, blame for the law rested neither with the members of Congress who wrote it nor with President Obama, who signed it. “I was sitting here this morning . . . And I keep thinking, What are you looking at that’s triggered a memory here?” Jones said. “And then I remembered, Oh, my gosh! It’s Cass Sunstein.”

Recently, on the Upper East Side, Sunstein stood behind a Lucite lectern and gave a talk about “#Republic.” Attempting to end on a hopeful note, he quoted John Stuart Mill: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value . . . of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves.” He then admitted, with some resignation, that this describes the Internet we should want, not the Internet we have.

After the talk, we sat in a hotel restaurant and ordered coffee. Sunstein has a sense of humor about his time in the spotlight—what he calls not his fifteen minutes of fame but his Two Minutes Hate, an allusion to “1984”—and yet he wasn’t sure what lessons he had learned from the experience, if any. “I can’t say I spent much time thinking about it, then or now,” he said. “The rosy view would be that it says something hopeful about us—about Americans, that is. We’re highly distrustful of anything that looks like censorship, or spying, or restriction of freedom in any way. That’s probably a good impulse.” He folded his hands on the table, as if to signal that he had phrased his thoughts as diplomatically as possible.

In the original “Republic”—the one by Plato—a distinction is made between dialectic and eristic. The former is argument made in good faith, with the goal of apprehending the truth; the latter is argument as performance, with the goal of tearing down one’s opponent. Sunstein confesses that he is so devoted to the dialectic, and so suspicious of the eristic, that he sometimes fails to recognize the latter’s power. “After so many years at the University of Chicago, where people of diverse political views have terrific, substantive arguments, I was a bit surprised to see so many point-scoring arguments,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t think it’s my job to use Twitter to out-shout Glenn Beck. Even if I could do that, I would feel like taking about five showers afterward.” Sunstein’s coffee arrived. He grabbed three packets of Splenda, tore them all open at once, and stirred them into his coffee before tasting it. Later, he continued, “Look, I’m an academic. I’m aware that the paper I just published, in Trends in Cognitive Science, will be read by a tiny fraction of the number of people who would read an op-ed column in a not-very-popular newspaper. But I think it’s my job to put ideas out there. If that comes with the risk that someone is gonna do something horrible with it, well, that’s life.”

*A previous version of this article referred only to the final version of the “Conspiracy Theories” paper, published in 2009. A draft of the paper was posted online in 2008.


Andrew Marantz, a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2011. His first book, “Antisocial,” about social media and the mainstreaming of fringe politics, is forthcoming.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/perso ... acy-theory

[/quote]

[Project Willow]

I’m resurfacing for one, I'm fairly sure, final post.

Wholehearted agreement with the great majority of this. But one key big distinction that relies only on my felt sense and demonstrates my lack of Wombat's very much more sophisticated repertoire of info - in a general way, I'm totally convinced that Q, PG and RG were all written and disseminated by the same source. I am (almost) 100% convinced that there is a black office made up of people who look a whole lot like us here who were tasked with operationalizing CT at some point mid Obama years. Probably just after Sunstein's early missives, actually......

ps. Is this where everybody went and why RI became a ghosttown full of Maddow-bilia?

Yes, undoubtably, but there've been teams working on similar projects long before Obama. An apt scholar could do a decent job of tracking them by simple observation alone. However, just acknowledging such things might exist, despite a hundred years of growth in the science of propaganda, despite the huge size of the intel bureaucracy, is a conspiracy theory premise, so no one would risk their career, or perhaps even their own constantly patrolled thought, to let such an idea creep in. It's a brilliant neat trick, isn't it?

All anyone need have done if they wanted to legitimately implicate the Clintons, is interview a half dozen survivors of elite trafficking and put their testimony together with mainstream media reports on the Clintons’ travel and company at high holidays. It’s not like the truth isn’t out there, it is, but no one is really interested, or rather interested in risking their necks, which is the banal natural order of all things human. No need for Epstein either. He’s rather a low level player, an opportunistic grifter, a real shiny bare ass that wiser people on the inside wouldn't have entertained in their right mind. I sometimes amuse myself with imagining the machine gun approbation all around in secret meetings between a few names in Epstein’s black book and those who could and did know better.

Does it really matter anyway? To what official body could any survivor or investigator report? None exists anywhere that can’t be co-opted or corrupted, that isn’t already controlled or controllable whether via social conditioning or strong arming. We’re talking about (sometimes organized, and ritualistic) rape and torture of children and adults committed by the most powerful people on the planet. With what institution, army, or individual are you going to go up against them? You can’t, and everyone knows it, and that’s why there’s so little truth anywhere, including here.

What does it matter that people speculate in this forum, does it make any material difference to anyone’s life? RI has functioned as a big honeypot, a testing facility, and the last few years, a small corner where divergent thought is effectively rendered useless. The mod team is often run by slaves to the network, the very people who design targeted propaganda efforts as described above. It’s kinda funny, but also sad. Keep writing though, keep speculating, even while you’re lost in a haze and shouting into a nebulous black void. At least there’s a record of your utterances, for now, and if the record persists, perhaps in future someone who enjoys complicated puzzles may stumble upon it, for whatever it’s worth.

Oh, and BTW, it took me over a decade, but I know the true meaning of Willow. It's the name of one of my handlers, or co-handlers, sadly, not very free herself. If I ever felt an impulse to post here again, I'd have to retire my handle. I'm done with Willow.

Goodbye and good luck.

[Grizzly]

Thanks, Lynn. I mean that. God on ya. Thanks for showing how the Canary cries. Much healing and thankfulness gratefulness in my heart for your time, experience and wisdom.

[RocketMan]

Thank you PW for all your years and insight here!

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Thanks, Lynn. I mean that. God on ya. Thanks for showing how the Canary cries. Much healing and thankfulness gratefulness in my heart for your time, experience and wisdom.

Thank you PW for all your years and insight here!

Agreed. Her voice/insight will be sorely missed here. Her last posting above gives us quite a bit to chew on.

[Grizzly]

Guess we can now stop pretending there is no elephant in the room as , "A Glimpse into Pedo-Culture in Washington, DC" seems to have won. Welcome to the normalization of psychopathic blackmail thriving culture...