The Brilliance of Cass Sunstein

What's the best way to destroy a conspiracy theory movement?

Answer: Suggest that some of the members might be government agents.

This is almost too funny for words. Cass Sunstein, a former Harvard professor and current member of the Obama Administration, suggested in a paper that the government consider "cognitive infiltration" of conspiracy theory groups, with the idea that "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."

Well, to a bunch of paranoids, everybody looks like a government agent. Consider the comments over at Flogger on the thread concerning Alex Jones' appearance on The View. There are some over there who consider Jones an imperfect vessel for the "Truthers" to pour their hopes and aspirations into:

Sorry folks, hate to break the news to you, but AJ getting this publicity is BAD NEWS for the truth movement. One visit to infowars and you are immersed in conspiratorial theories, mixed in with facts, so that while some of the facts are true, there are so many theories and mis-info linked, that the media will only use it to rip us apart. Try going on there and simply find basic facts about 9/11. It's rather difficult and takes some sifting. They will paint all people who are seeking justice being just like Alex Jones, and in case you didn't know...
That's a bad thing.

Well, how dare anybody diss AJ?

Hello , Cass Sunstein.

Jon Gold, one of the "responsible" Troofers, rachets the paranoia up a notch:

"This movement was infiltrated and manipulated LONG before Cass Sunstein made his suggestion about doing so. When he wrote his piece, the first thing that popped into my mind was, "where the hell have you been?"

And we're off to the races. What's nuttier than believing that some of the Troofers are secretly working for the government? Well, believing that Cass Sunstein is secretly a "Truther" probably qualifies:

a lot of people in the TM are unaware that DRG has esoterically decoded Cass Sunstein's words in the book Cognitive Infiltration I read it and i think CS could well be a closet one of us who doesn't want to get fired there are indicators in his footnotes where he deliberately contradicts himself if you replace "the 9/11 conspiracy theory" with "the bush/cheney 9/11 conspiracy theory" then suddenly CS's theses ring true including the notion that the OCT leads to violence whereas it would be preposterous to say that the 9/11 TM is leading to violence

The rabbit hole always goes deeper; there's always another red pill to take!

Meanwhile, John Parulis, last seen orchestrating the Troofer Burn fiasco in 2007, where he was supposed to cut through some steel beams holding up a "Truth" sculpture to demonstrate how nanothermite brought down the towers, before he got cold feet and instead burned some thermite in a pail, checks in with a discussion of the cognitive infiltration he's witnessed in the movement:

Due to sloppy vetting procedures, two individuals were allowed into the group and one became a board member of Architects and Engineers. This guy started floating ideas out about changing the emphasis of our mission away from “controlled demolition” into something he called “engineered destruction”.

So it was a semantic shift but a very important one, because words have power and AE911Truth was founded on the very strong evidence of controlled demolition in the three World Trade Towers, that’s a theme that Richard Gage harps on constantly and continuously and…

Then he had an associate in there and they started attacking the authors of the nanothermite paper, in fact at one point calling them amateur investigators.

Sloppy vetting procedures? Mike Rotch will no doubt be shocked to hear that! But it gets better, much better. They go into the recent paper over at Flogger on David Ray Griffin's BS voice-morphing claims:

And I think it’s a barometer of what’s going on at 911blogger, that that kind of hateful posting about one of the premier researchers of 9/11 Truth, in fact the man, who is personally responsible for turning Richard Gage on to 9/11 Truth, David Ray Griffin, would be so abused in this thread.

Now I did break the rules of 911blogger, I named names, and I called out some of the people on…. were making these types of posts. And I asked them to be accountable for the past ten or twenty years of their lives. That’s one thing that I ran into as a roadblock with one of the people I mentioned at the AE911Truth controversy.

I talked to this guy on the phone and I said you know I’ve been looking for you on the internet, I can’t see anything. I, I said: “Why don’t you tell me about yourself, you know, what i… what’s your educational background, where have you spent the past ten or fifteen years of your life and he said: “I’m not talking about that…”

I cannot imagine why a paranoid fruitcake would not be willing to disclose that information, can you? And you gotta love this part:

I think there were some legitimate concerns about the fake phonecall study of Dr. Griffin. I think that’s not one of his strong points, I think, perhaps there are some problems with the analysis, but… one of the things that we had decided in the AE911Truth internal conflict we had a year ago was to keep our problem inhouse and not discuss it in public or let it go out there.

Erm, until now, I suppose? DOH!