Are Our Prohibited Conversations Multiplying?

Does it seem that our list of things we are not supposed to talk about is growing ever longer?

I raise this for a few reasons I will explain in a moment. . . not because this is the season, that with the holiday dinners starting with Thanksgiving we get the inevitable advice columns about what to do when, as extended family members are brought together, our viewpoints clash.  (These articles posit that some of your uncles might just be a little `crazy’ when it comes to things you don’t really need to talk about.)

Here’s one reason I’ve been thinking about what we are not supposed to talk about.  The other day I went into Manhattan to participate in a demonstration.  Arriving early, it wasn’t immediately apparent where things were going to be, so I started walking around looking.  A veteran of quite a few demonstrations, my eagle eye caught a large bag– with the sides of collected foam boards peaking up out of it.  It just had to be full of placards.

“Is that for a demonstration?” I asked the fellow standing beside it.

“Yes.” he said, “BUT, it’s a demonstration for . . . .”  Mentioning the demonstration.

“That’s the demonstration I’m looking for,” I said, “do you know where it’s going to be?”

“I’m not sure.  They might be assembling over there,” he said indicating the block across the street.                

“When you told me what the demonstration was for, why did you say ‘BUT’?” I asked.

“Because you are wearing that. .  button,” was his response.  He actually said what kind of button I was wearing that he referred to, but because I want to discuss the principle here, I want to keep this abstract.  He said that I must therefore be some kind of . . . The things he mentioned, I actually am not.  I’m not even truly conversant with the details of what he might have been envisioning or why it would be viewed as incompatible by him.

“Actually,” I started to tell him why the button I was wearing might actually mean, not surprisingly, that showing up for the same demonstration, we might both of us be, at least mostly, or very much, on the same page about the important reasons why we both showing up. . .

. . . I didn’t get very far. . .

“Don’t talk to me!” he said.

“If you’re here to win people over,” I said, “you should want to reach out to people.”

“Stop talking to me!”  He said.

“You’re putting yourself in a bubble, if you’re not willing to have conversations with people,” I said.

He covered his ears.  “If you keep talking to me, I’m going to scream,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it.  Everything I was saying I was saying in a quiet, calm and polite voice.  “This is not the way to reach out to people and win them over,” I said.

It didn’t work.  His ears still covered with both hands, the fellow started screaming, “Stop talking to me!  Stop talking to me!” He screamed over and over again and he started walking around in circles.  It was not a normal scream, but an exceptionally loud and full scream that I figured could probably be heard for at least the length of the block or more.

There was nothing more to do.  I slowly ambled away, shaking my head as I headed in the “probable” direction that the demonstration might form.  As I did, I wondered what the woman who had been standing with this gentleman thought.  Leaning against a building, she had remained impassive throughout our exchange.

Our numbers quickly grew to a pretty good sized and easy to find demonstration.  Presumably lost somewhere in the crowd, I never noticed the fellow again.

It’s worthwhile to note that we were there for a cause that, far from being universally popular in this bleeding and forsaken world, sorely needs more converts to be effective in its aims.

So I ask this: Have we lost the ability to talk with one another?  Are certain topics, an increasing number of them, off limits to more and more people?  I wonder.  It’s not just topics that are off limits; it’s also who we are not supposed to talk to, or who we are not allowed to talk to.  We’ve got a superfluity of categorizations of individuals related to setting up these limitations.

It’s worse than that: Now sometimes the people we are not supposed to are people we shouldn’t talk to, because those people have, in turn, already talked to somebody that they weren’t supposed to talk to.  We seem to be training ourselves to watch out for disqualifying “associations.” “Guilt by association,” is becoming a quick and ready time saving substitute for disqualifying who we can talk to as opposed to bothering to verify that their “beliefs” are actually dangerously at odds with our own.–   And more and more, for other’s people’s beliefs not to be dangerous to own, the people we are willing to talk to have to believe almost everything we believe, rather than just some or most of the things we ourselves believe.    

If you are surprised at my harangue, here’s more about this that has fixated me in this wondering.  At roughly the same time I went to that demonstration, I went to a “Town Hall” discussion about “Free Speech and Censorship,” instigated by journalist Matt Taibbi who is researching and writing about the subject.  In a provocative mood, he was looking for advocates of censorship to discuss the topic with.  He got some of the action he sought.  The Town Hall was in Park Slope’s beautiful old Montauk Club.

Taibbi has been directing his attention to copious documentation showing the United States government’s coordination with social media companies to achieve the censorship (in various ways) of information and viewpoints that the government doesn’t like.  This includes censoring information and facts that are true but that the government doesn’t like because of the potential influence such true information and facts might have on people.

Some of what has been subject to this kind of coordinated censorship involves quashing what should be considered political speech.  Again, in order to stick with a focus on principle, I don’t want to get very specific about the appreciable list of topics this coordination was censoring, but suffice it first to say that, as can be readily guessed, the documentation shows that among things, the government doesn’t like is speech that is critical of the wars and military actions that the United States is engaged in or backing.

Oh, and once again without being specific, that struggling cause we demonstrated for where the fellow covered his ears and screamed “Stop talking to me”? . . . .  Promotion of that very same cause is one of the things our government and the social media companies are censoring strenuously.

For purposes of all these coordinations, there are theoretically good points of view and bad beliefs, good guys, and bad guys.        

Taibbi began his Town Hall by referring back to 1989, when, in August, Milt Ahlerich of the FBI sent a letter to a small independent record label, Los Angeles's Priority Records setting forth a warning criticism of its distribution of the “Straight Outta Compton” album’s hip hop song, “Fuck tha Police.”  The letter unacceptable to the FBI the lyrics protesting police brutality and racial profiling.  Taibbi noted that, in 1989, this effort at government suppression of speech sparked outrage and that it was widely covered in the liberal media at the time.  Then he noted that the government’s coordination to silence points of view it opposes are currently magnitudes greater, the same thing occurring regularly on an ongoing basis, thousands of times over.  (Protest of police brutality and racial profiling is more acceptable since 1989, although maybe not to the FBI.  It is still targeted for social media censorship.)
            
Taibbi noted that a vast number of people who consider themselves “liberals,” no longer seem to care, and have abandoned the notion that protecting free speech is still important.  One might want to point out that the cause of free speech has been adopted by many on “the right,” except that, in an unprincipled way, when it is speech they don’t like, many on the right are insufficiently antiauthoritarian, and similarly promote censorship.

Clearly, with some self selection, there were many in the Town Hall audience that night who sympathetically following along with the points Taibbi was making, but, there were also contrary views expressed.  It was suggested that the public may need protection from hearing some kinds of information.  There was the notion that when the government has determined that it’s needful for the public to think certain things or get behind certain actions it can be good to suppress true information if that true information may possibly interfere with manipulations to get the public in line.  There was also the idea that the government and social media companies need to be on guard to protect sensitive segments of the population, probably mostly minority segments, about whom hateful, critical or perhaps even politically incorrect things might be said.

Again, since I want to stick with thinking of these things in terms of principles, I want to steer clear of the specific suppressions and reason for them that were advocated to be condoned. . .

 . . . However, we can note that with changes of fashion, and updates that have been urged for societal mores, some in attendance at the Montauk Club that evening hoped for regulating the social media companies into versions of political correctness that could ban lots of communications that used to be (so thoughtlessly?) commonplace in our very recent past.

Midway through the evening, there was a fellow expressing a number of these views about how and why speech should be regulated.  Maybe he was not for real?  Maybe he was a theatrical student trying out a performance on us?  After he expressed a number of these views, he said he was going to produce “a wail” for all the poor creatures who would be hurt and injured and maybe die, if they were not protected by a regulated internet.  Then he began to produce the wail.  Loud, it lasted for maybe the better part of a minute. He had good breath control. I thought of the fellow at the demonstration covering his ears.  Then our wailer abruptly picked up and left the meeting, leaving behind a scribbled manifesto of his beliefs.   

The strongest thing said in favor censorship during the evening was the idea that the internet has changed everything, that we are no longer the same people we were before the internet, that, now, with the internet, everything is out of control in a way that makes free speech threatening in a way that it has never been threatening before.  To me, rather than a brand new argument, this sounds like an age old argument, the age old argument that “free speech” is generally good, EXCEPT. . .  EXCEPT, EXCEPT– Except for this war, except for that emergency, except for fighting communism, etc.

And I am reminded who brought us the internet.  It came out of the DARPA and the military.  It may be that those who brought us the internet have always been ahead of the rest of us in many respects regarding its uses.  Surveillance is certainly one of them.

The internet has been the great disruptor.  And as is the case with a great many rapid disruptions, much as the example disaster capitalism often furnishes, the seeming chaos of abrupt change reliably gets seized upon and taken advantage of by the power elite who are always alert as to how to amplify their interests.

Is it possible that internet, or no internet, the real answers to what is right, wrong, or best for free speech are really still, basically the same as they’ve always been?. . That we are basically the same human beings we have always been . . .

. .  Or do we really suddenly have a world with which we can no longer cope?

Have I given you enough explanation for why I am wondering about how verboten topics seem to have multiplied?

I’ll give you another reason I am thinking about this. . .

. .  Someone senior up in the leadership of the church congregation to which I have long belonged disclosed to me recently that the leadership of the congregation has concluded that the congregation membership is `not very good at handling conflict.’  Therefore potentially conflict-inducing subjects, difficult topics, need to be avoided.  I won’t say who in the leadership told me this.  I won’t specify which congregation.  The latter is probably easy to look up anyway.  Does it matter?  I’ll wager this kind of assessment may be commonplace in  congregations these days. – Some of the thinking seems to be that this helps the congregation “grow” – in numbers.

I’ve never thought that coddling was religion’s role.  I’m extremely wary of religion dictating the answers . .    Still, I’ve always thought the work of religion is tackling tough questions to which we seek answers. “Seeking”— Did I use to think my own congregation had a good quotient of “seekers”?  Our church’s history is resplendent with notables who didn’t hew to conventionality and valued exploration and curiosity.

What does this conflict avoidance mean?  Does it mean that congregation members talking to each other about the wrong topics has to be avoided?  Indeed, maybe so– At least don’t facilitate such discussions.

Even a topic such as the social injustice of censorship and the suppression of free speech may need to be avoided. . . because of where it might lead?  So many social justice issues may have to be avoided, because they might be difficult; so let’s only discuss the few justice issues that everyone can safely agree about, which means perhaps those “issues” don’t really need to be thought about, or discussed much at all. . . . unless you are taking time out to pat yourself on the back.

It generally means don’t rock the boat for powerful interests.

And if discussion of issues that might induce conflict ought to be avoided by the congregants . . . if those exchanges of information and viewpoint amongst congregants can, in fact, be avoided. .

. .  Sermons can be delivered into the resulting void that more adroitly and expertly sidestep the awkward.

There can be soothing sermons that purport to discuss the meaning of life, morality, and/or good and evil, while skirting big issues profoundly affecting most all of us.  Sermons that can skip over our connections to many serious things going on in the world even as those things are life and death issues for the less fortunate.

The hole in what doesn’t get sermonized about might lead to a certain blandness.  Am I a crank to suggest it exalts moral flabbiness?  If we aren’t wrestling with the difficult, is it easier to not stumble in concluding that we are “Okay” moral beings?  MSNBC, to name just one network, similarly never upsets the apple cart for powerful interests– and it is also good at avoiding many significant topics while sending its audience away convinced that they are endowed with a certain righteousness.

I am getting too contentious and I digress too far.  The point is that I worry that as a general populace we are losing our ability to exchange ideas, to grow and learn by listening to each other.  That leaves the lane wide open for our heads to be filled by the noise of the self-serving, harmful nonsense the corporately owned media continually pumps out.  And the powers that be drive home the same messages of how we should shape out ideas via many other channels as well.

If the populace is infantilized into incapacity, then those in power have no problem paternalistically stepping in to tell us what to think.

Maybe part of the growth, potential adulthood involved in learning from one another, involves evolution where we might change our minds or develop thinking that’s more nuanced and complex?

`Changing one’s mind’?: I am not sure whether that is necessarily regarded as either a good or a bad thing these days. . I mean in terms of the off-limits lists.

. . . Recently, I had a long conversation at a wedding with a fellow guest who told that me that a certain prominent individual in the news these days was “crazy” and–  worst part– notoriously never changes his mind, no matter that facts.  When I walked into the Montauk Club’s room for Taibbi’s Town Hall, I found myself almost instantly involved with an individual, somebody there on the side of free speech, who told me that this exact same well known individual was “crazy” and not to be taken seriously, because we was “always changing his mind” so you could never know what that individual thinks.

Personal confession: While I may hope that my principles aren't wavering hypocritically, there are important issues where my thinking has changed in some major ways.

I am obviously not leaving you guessing: I am the side of conversing with people.  Yes, whether or not they agree with me.  The buttons I choose to wear announce my availability for such conversations. As you might have been able to easily tell from what I’ve written here, they lead me into a lot of great and very interesting conversations.

Are you impatient with views that disagree with your own?  Is it distressing when you get angry because others are disagreeing with you, or because others are angry with you because you disagree with them?  I have friends who are tired of the headwinds they encounter respecting what they think are clearly mass delusions.  They find themselves deciding to give up on talking to those who think differently.

It’s oversimplifying and far from the entire answer, but patience is a virtue.  And you don’t have to get angry even when someone is angry with you for disagreeing with them. . .  Ask people why they hold the opinions they hold!  They might surprise you with some interestingly valid answers.  Or they might surprise themselves realizing that they don’t really know exactly why they have decided to think what they told you they think.

Among others, I wear “Don’t Sell Our Libraries” buttons, which I’ve been regularly wearing for a long time.  The beauty of those buttons is that almost everybody agrees with those buttons—   It’s just that they often don’t know about the sale of New York City’s libraries.- Because that’s one more thing the corporate press avoids covering.

I’ve been wearing a “Your Government is Lying to You” button.  It can startle people, maybe generate a chuckle, maybe a nervous one reflecting some unease about its implications.  They might be unsettled about how to direct some possible anger.  Nevertheless, most people find they can’t disagree with that button.    

The buttons I choose are for getting into the conversations we are being trained not to have.

It seems to me that one of the best indicators of exactly what’s most important to talk about is what gets designating as off limits topics and what gets subjected to the most vigorous censorship.  There is, of course, censorship that's straight out and vanilla in nature.  There is also a greater range of what gets done to silence voices.  What gets done includes silencing journalists: We can algorithmically suppress them; we can fire people, deplatform them; we cut them off from collecting funds; we can even imprison them, in some cases murder them; we can target them for execution, sometimes the executions can involve significant numbers of journalists; and, most awful, their family members may be targeted too. . .

These are signals which should tell us to pay attention. . . and where to direct out attention.

I am not going to get specific about the buttons that I’ve been wearing that are most likely to provoke disagreement.  That’s again, for the purpose of keeping this abstract for a focus on principle, but those buttons present subjects that have been made controversial largely because the establishment can be so desperately energetic when trying to keep certain viewpoints down to a minority.

I will, nonetheless, specifically mention that I’ve been wearing “Peace” buttons.  (“Brooklyn For Peace” is a good source of them.)   One might hope “peace” wouldn’t be controversial, but recently, I’ve found it important to include more “Peace” buttons amongst those I’ve been wearing.  It’s odd, but “Peace” buttons are escalating into the most controversial of the conversation starting buttons one can wear.

People, no doubt, are often ready to think that “peace,” abstractly speaking, is a good thing.  At the same time they can fret that “peace” can be a problem when if you might be opposed this or that particular new war.  Why?  Because inevitably, our government promotes our current wars as necessary and good.  And, inevitably, it can take time for a lot of us to catch on our government’s latest lies.

We may sing about “peace,” during the holiday season, but please let us shun the idea of talking about particular wars that need to be ended to bring peace about.

I’ll end by reiterating the question I started with: Does it seem that our list of things we are not supposed to talk about is growing ever longer?

Hmm, if so, are we, through self-censorship, handing over the formulation and structuring of our narratives to others?

Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now, And Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, In Talks About Merging Their Broadcasts

Amy Goodman left, Rachel Maddow right

It’s not like `continental drift’ although there is a `drift’ to be gotten, . . . and it is drift on a truly monumental scale.  People talk about `watching grass grow’ or ‘watching paint dry’ when they talk about things happening slowly so as to go unnoticed.  `A watched pot doesn’t boil,’ but when your tea kettle starts whistling, you know that something’s happened.

These are the words of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman letting the cat out of the bag about her talks with Rachel Maddow about merging their shows based on the things they increasingly have more in common.  Goodman seems very happy to be the one giving the exclusive `cat out of the bag’- or is it `trial balloon’?- interview.

“Look,” says Goodman, “change is part of life.”  Goodman seems more relaxed than usual, as though allowing herself to wax philosophically this way is allowing her to speak her thoughts more truthfully in a liberating way.  She continues:

Yes, change is part of life.  It was when Rachel was doing Air America radio with Al Franken as a “left–wing,” albeit poorly funded, counter to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, that people got to know who she is.  That was then. [2004] Now she, like us, has regular headlines that track well with the lead you can get from the New York Times.  Rachel, us, and also pretty dependably the New York Times, we’re true blue behind the powerful narratives of the Democratic Party. When I say that those narratives are powerful, I don’t mean that they are inspiring or attuned to the populace, or to the directions for leadership our populace may yearn and hunger for, what I mean is the power of Democratic party coming from the corporations that the party aligns with and, of course, coming from Wall Street.  It’s those alignments that give the selective narratives of the party extraordinary force as they are deployed and can be insisted on.  And I am very happy about the whole identity politics thing.

If, with some migration of platforms, Democracy Now and the Maddow show are going to merge, the reason for their discussion of the possibility is the growing commonality of themes.

Goodman points out that the nation’s had an era where the awfulness of Donald Trump made it easy to find common ground, “I mean Donald Trump’s awfulness was so important, that you didn’t need to pay attention to really anything else.”  And, she points out there have been a lot of things tying into Donald Trump’s awfulness that were consequently easy to agree on: Russiagate and the way that Russians are nefariously interfering to make this country worse and make Trump more dangerous, January 6th and the way we have to stop insurrectionists from taking away our democracy, which we are realizing really needs to be revered (“January 6th sort of taught me that word `insurrectionist’ and got me thinking about it, before then I doubt I’d thought to know what it meant– did you know it’s right out of the constitution?- Though no law under it yet”- interjects Goodman parenthetically), the way we have to censor hate speech (including anything an insurrectionist or any of those election deniers might have to say, and then there’s need to regulate speech in our social media Town Squares so that people don’t get depressed by conversational downers.

Goodman sips her green tea and goes on: “Rachel is very much against hate speech,” she says, “she’s a firm counter the bad kind of hate speech we both deplore.”  Blowing on her tea, she continues:

We are also aligned by being both on the right side of those divisive cultural issues that the Trump presidency made even easier to checklist for future segment coverage.  Thank God Trump changed his position on abortion, thankfully 180 degrees, before taking on his role as a supremely obnoxious president, otherwise it could have been confusing!

We were also both perfectly aligned on the Covid narrative thing: "Wear a mask, wear two masks," we told our Democracy Now audience, "it’s an act of love.'  (We didn’t get to adding the eye visor thing, but thought about it.- Oh maybe we did)  While Rachel was beautifully firm and emphatic: "Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person."!

The whole Covid thing, the crazy need for lock-downs meant there were a lot of fearful things, numbers and statistics to tumble out before the public in a stream; for a while Democracy Now even changed its mantra slogan from "the war and peace report? to the "quarantine report."  When it comes to history and wars waged, history, when it doesn’t repeat itself, at least rhymes.

But that Covid fear and what to do about it, that’s another thing where we both agreed about how important it was to be saying the right thing and make sure that people were not allowed to say the wrong thing– That Joe Rogan! Talk about people who need to be stopped in their tracks with a dose of good old healthy censorship and centrally managed social opprobrium- Imagine saying good things about the `horse paste’ Ivermectin,

 Mentioning Rogan and Ivermectin Goodman wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“We still have significant differences, Rachel’s show and mine” says Goodman, “so I don’t know where that takes us.”

She mulls:

Rachel is more provincial, addressing herself more specifically to what riles Americans living locally in this country, more specifically, her kind of Americans.  Democracy Now has an increasingly worldwide audience and worldwide sensibility, for instance, Rachel hasn’t caught up to match me with things like my guttural pronunciations, like when I say“Afghanistan,” or introduce my co-host Nermeen Shaikh.  It just isn’t her style, and we can’t expect it.

But Democracy Now can’t leave its worldwide audience behind it.  If this thing is going to happen, we have to take that worldwide audience along with us in the merger.  We at Democracy Now, also spend more time feeling for the victims in this world, which is not exactly the way Rachel likes to keep the energy up, especially when those victims come from far-flung places in the world that Americans have rarely heard of.  When the time comes, we at Democracy Now are better positioned to do truly convincing ‘worthy victim’ stories.

Some things are going to be very problematic.  Democracy Now was originated out of, was incubated out of WBAI, out of the Pacific network of station.  We are still carried on that family of stations, still with a reasonably hefty listenership.  We’ve established ourselves and Pacifica has cast its lot reporting, with a fair amount of honesty, about the Israeli state’s vile and horrendous treatment of Palestinians.  That honesty, on our part and many other Pacifica carried programs, has been determinative in the loss of a certain appreciable amount of funding for Pacifica.  Unlike perhaps some other things, that’s something where we can’t now leave our audience behind by backtracking or denying our core DNA. . .

    . .  But you can imagine what a problem this would be for Rachel.  Even if our meld is only accomplished by doing back-to-back shows that could be a toxic proximity for her.  The solution, if the time comes, may be to take our cue from her.  She deep-sixes those kinds of stories and that kind of reporting.  So you also don’t hear anything about our U.S. Saudi Yemen war from her.— Out of sight is out of mind.  What we could do, and might do, is just move all of out Israel/Palestine reporting and coverage to our web edition special section.  There it would be invisible to the kind of audience that never looks for that kind of thing and justifiably still there for the kind of audience that still does.  You know we are all in our individual bubbles these days.  So you always have to remember to think in those terms.

It causes Goodman to sigh.

But merging these shows is meant to take us counter to that bubble thing.  Instead of isolating bubble thinking, we’ll have more people thinking the same things when we get our shows together.  But we can’t move too fast.  Our audience has to move with us.  We do polling and focus groups to make sure we don’t get too far out in front of them.  We are alert for feedback.  And, for instance, at Democracy Now we’ve recently had to go back and do some stories to illustrate that we are still anti-war and ant-US imperialism, like what’s expected of us from our past.   Like, for instance, with that particular segment of the audience that still listens to us on Pacifica stations, those we haven’t yet pulled away to listen to us just through the disintermediation of our multiple internet platforms, it can a bit jarring right now if our content is too different from other Pacifica shows.

We want to be on the same page with Rachel and crew about things like the Ukraine war, [Goodman catches herself and doubles back]. .  The `Russian provoked’ Ukraine war, [she emphasizes], but our audience can get a little unnerved by the idea we are on the brink of possible nuclear annihilation of the world and wonder if we really are still sincerely for peace enough if we are to expect them to keep following us where we go. An easy way to offer reassurance, like we just did, is to use the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, ahem, U.S. invasion of Iraq, and reiterate where we stood on that twenty years ago.  The past is a place where you can anchor the trust you hope to keep getting  in the future.  So people will keep following into whatever Heraclitian storms may toss us on the waves in that future.

Look, I believe that `in solidarity there is strength.’  For progressivism to win, we have to be rowing in the same direction.  When we marched into wars, the Democrats were once thought of as the anti-war party.  Now we have two war parties, but it’s clear that the Democrats are now taking the lead.  The Republicans have a few isolationists who are against our bringing democracy-enhancing regime change to other countries. . .  The name of our show is Democracy Now, something to remember, when we try to keep our bearings.

The interview can’t end without posing one obvious question: Why not PBS or NPR instead?  Goodman smiles, shaking her head as if disappointed with the quality or lack of perspicacity of such a question, even if it might be obligatory and expected as inevitable.  Goodman speaks slowly and deliberately:

Merging our audience with PBS or NPR wouldn’t be any kind of achievement.  PBS and NPR are already where Rachel and her show are, which is to say, aligned with The Washington Post and New York Times, but PBS and NPR are selling the audience the idea that they are the thinking man’s version and the cultured man’s of media consumption.  That pose already successfully siphons audience, say from Pacifica, when the audience is looking for better production values along not so obvious and time-consuming commercials that you get with `commercial’ broadcasts.  But sliding over there wouldn’t be an achievement.  Because it’s sort of contrary to their brand, PBS and NPR don’t fish for audience indignation, including the Red Team, Blue Team variety of indignation, the way that Rachel and I do,– not so overtly–  Rachel does it with her raised-to-the-sky eyebrow and cocked neck, while I put it in my voice.  I can do it with slight variations in my tone and I also pick words to drawl out more slowly.  Moreover, we at Democracy Now do subtle, not quite subliminal, editorializing with our interspersed music segments, something Rachel doesn’t do.  Bringing our audience to MSNBC with skillful drifting would be a much more real achievement.      

One last question to Goodman (but is it too rude?): And the true “achievement” to be aspired to might also be inextricably associated with handsome recompense?— Doesn’t Rachel Maddow get paid something like $30 million a year counting salary and regular bonuses?  Goodman simply smiles.

Democracy Now and The Rachel Maddow Show are not merging broadcasts just yet.  This April 1st interview with Goodman was just to preview how it’s being talked about.  Goodman was specific that if it happens it could be a year from now, say next April 1st, or two years from now on the April 1st after that.

Attaining A New Level of Global Nuclear Weapons Security, Weapons Will Be Purchased For Transfer Away From Belligerent Countries To New Private Peace Keeping Consortium

The Four Bien Guys Peace Project: Bezos, Zukerberg, Gates and Musk

“Blessed are the peacemakers” is what the Bible’s New Testament tells us Jesus told his assembled flock in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:9): “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  Blessed once were also the “Peacekeepers,” missiles made by Martin Marietta, the LGM-118 being the most modern ICBM in the United States Air Force  inventory (designed primarily for nuclear weapons delivery- one or more thermonuclear warheads, third-generation) for almost 20 years before it was retired in 2005 as a result of arms reduction treaties.

Once we had nuclear weapons called “Peacekeepers”; Now its time for all the nuclear weapons on our earth to all to be called the “Peacemakers,” because that’s what their new owners have decided they will all be renamed upon transfer of title.  And this will signify the purpose of a new plan being executed to attain a new maximum level of procured global nuclear weapons security.  Heretofore, nuclear weapons have all been very undependably held by various belligerent countries, holding those devices out of fear and hostility towards one another.  But this is an inherently dangerous situation and, as recent years have made clear, few things are as unstable as the governments of all the countries across the world, basically each and every one of them: Any madman can be elected to head almost any one of them.  (Let’s leave out the word “almost.”)

Moreover, there is another problem: Nuclear weapons like ICBMs fly through outer space.  As everyone knows, the space race and space exploration has been taken over by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and their private companies who, for their purposes of being in outer space in the first place, want serenity and order in our starry skies.  Who wants a belligerent nation’s ICBM whizzing past their telecommunications satellite?  Or zooming within impact zones of their lower altitude hovering (LEO- “Low Earth Orbit”) “internet of all things” 5G tracking monitors?  

And things have gotten dangerously worse: The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 set outer space aside for peaceful purposes. For decades, it precluded any nation from deploying weapons in space or waging war there.  But, much to the consternation of other nations, including China and Russia, the United States walked away from the treaty even as Trump launched Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military specifically to fight in outer space.

To people like Bezos and Musk, and to their friends who think like them, Bill Gates and Mark Zukerberg most specifically, the answer for the world was simple, basically more of the same that came with privatizing space flight: “Why share?”  If the heavens are to be privately theirs for all other purposes of regular space frontier dominance, why share any last lick of the heavens for the potential destructive interference of weapons flying through the stratosphere and beyond, maybe catastrophically even leaving behind the clutter of exploded debris that would be impossible to deal with?  “If the orbit of our planet is filled with a debris field,” says Musk, “it will be impenetrable and we will never be able to leave earth to go elsewhere as should be humanity’s destiny.”

The answer was not to put the nuclear arms industry out of business (potentially unending the world’s economies), but to expand and bring the weapons under private ownership.  For this purpose a new peace keeping or peace making consortium has been formed by a small group of four Big tech colossuses, Musk, Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg. Into this private consortium will be conveyed all the world’s nuclear weapons.  These four men are four of the ten wealthiest men who just doubled their wealth during Covids’ two years.  As these four are taking the lead for the public’s benefit here, they are naming the consortium the Four-Bien Guys Project.  (“Bien” is French, a not too foreign word for “good.”)

“It’s a natural next step for private ownership,” says Bill Gates who has been privatizing the worldwide health delivery schema along with worldwide thought patterns about it, while buying up farmland to become the biggest owner of it in the United States.  Gates amplified:

Since governments are  increasingly less dependable, corporations are increasingly taking things into their own hands in other areas, privatization of intelligence agency work, private military forces, schools, etc.

    Nuclear weapons are just another subset of science, which, as you see with medicine, pharma, the private ownership of the internet and most of the electronic technology that serves us, plus all the patent joint-venturing investments of our universities, has all been privatized already.– The arc of history is long, but it bends toward privatization.  It bends toward neoliberalism.  It bends toward `liberalism’ actually-- I don’t know why we have to put that “neo” in before the word, except to assure conservatives that what we are talking about is actually compatible with, and essentially what they also believe in.  

The four guys said that they will be calling in their chits with other oligarches around the world to make sure the plan happens with the necessary responsiveness from– not naming any names-  all their respective countries.  

Bezos and Zukerberg both say that they feel at ease with their assumption, via the consortium, of responsibilities that, before transfer, once had a military flavor.  Bezos pointed out that he built up the gigantism of his entire Amazon empire based on skillful and knowledgeable use of the internet and that his maternal grandfather and mentor, Lawrence Preston Gise was one of those who, at DARPA launched and set the internet in motion, plus, he said, he was now doing a lot of work with the CIA and also acquired and owns a newspaper that is one of the most important in the country for telling American what to think about USA’s military conflicts. Zukerberg noted that the nuclear weapons sharing under NATO was certainly a foremost means by which such weapons were deployed throughout the world and that he had a lot of experience and was very comfortable working with NATO’s Atlantic Council think tank to regulate Facebook sharing and news popularity and permissions on the platform.

The weapons will be paid for.  Title to the weapons will transfer to the consortium at the very outset, whereupon their renaming as “Peacemakers” will take place, but payments will be made over an extended period, which may or may not be keyed to the time frame during which the weapon’s incorporated isotopes are expected to remain radioactive.  A loan will be provided to the Four-Bien Project Consortium by the Fed.

The U.S. Space Force and all its employees will also be simultaneously transferred to the consortium.  Gates said, “we need them to feel secure in space and these days we can only depend on ourselves to make sure they get paid.”  Commanding the Space Force after transfer will be Comdr. Newt Rippley who has expressed assurance that experiences resulting from the privatizations will be good.

The various governments of the world have agreed to pay (or as the case may be, will be required to pay) to the consortium a caretaking fee. But, while the agreed upon and the to-be-specified amounts are more than enough to pay the loan, Gates is not sure that payments can always be expected to come in on time: “If governments were that dependable, we wouldn’t have to step into so many situations continually to take over.”  He says that taking care of nuclear materials is also very expensive and could take thousands of years.

Because humans lack longevity and are not exactly so perfect for the job, keeping the weapons will be turned over to robots and there is fanfare about this as an opportunity to unroll the most start-of-the-art AI, that will also apply to clear algorithms about how and when and what would apply if there is ever a question of whether any weapons needed to be used.  This is one reason Gates was solicited as a principal to participated in the consortium.  “This is really most desirable” says Bezos of the robots, “because, after all, who would want just a few oligarchs deciding what is best when it comes to matters that concern the fate of the entire world.– No, says Gates, we will be keeping ourselves out of these decisions.”

So “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the divine children of our gods.”  A memorandum of understanding to effect the plan is being signed today, April 1st, with a consummation date for full transfer specified as one year from today, also April 1st.

The Fourth of July- Quashing The Independence of Other Countries Day!- What We Now Celebrate: Enough Said?

 

Samantha Power, “Humanitarian Hawk,” Is Married To Cass Sunstein, “Libertarian Paternalist”: They Both Advocate Censorship– Should That Advocacy Be On WBAI “Free Speech” Radio 99.5 FM?

With their Harvard professorship and presidential administration connections Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein appeared holding hands as a “Power Couple” in pictures in a “Presidential-Love Issue” of the Harvard Independent.- They both promote censorship of viewpoints that trouble them.

They are a strange couple.  Between them, they probably both wield a lot more power than is immediately obvious or generally acknowledged.  Even though they both write books they are both probably largely off the American public’s radar screen for what and who they really are. . .

They have each, respectively, been christened with oxymoronic monikers.  The fact that they are married almost certainly informs how those monikers should be interpreted: She, Samantha Power is the “Humanitarian Hawk,” (as in war advocacy “hawk”); he, Cass Sunstein, is the “Libertarian Paternalist.”

They are both out in the world advocating censorship.
   
Should their advocacy for more censorship be carried on WBAI “free speech” radio?  WBAI is the one truly listener supported public radio station in New York City, 99.5 FM.  WBAI is part of the Pacifica network.  With its record of free speech, WBAI, along with the rest of the Pacifica Network, has a long and venerable history of supplying counternarratives to those official narratives of the American Empire that have taken us to war repeatedly.

And if we engage in the kind of increasing censorship Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein propose?: Well then there is an extreme likelihood that free speech and those anti-war narratives would be censored and hollowed out.  Accordingly, should such advocacy for censorship be broadcast on WBAI “free speech” radio?

Should it?- Good question, and a real one, because I did hear exactly such advocacy for censorship on our "free speech" radio.

Unlike Cass Sunstein, I believe that the remedy for dangerous speech, no matter how pernicious, is pretty much always more better speech.  We are going to try that very thing in this article.  Consequently, I do not believe that Cass Sunstein appearing on WBAI “free speech” radio to advocate for censorship should be censored. . . .

. . . Instead, I believe that the remedy is to discuss who Mr. Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power are and the remedy will include exploring what they are really up to.

Once you know that Cass Sunstein believes in and studies how to use covert manipulation, then his recent appearance on WBAI can become a learning exercise with which to sharpen your ability to listen for the tactics he uses.  Moreover, while I believe that it is essential to reveal who Cass Sunstein is when he appears on WBAI, his choice to present himself in a more covert way is also actually something to learn from. . . .

What might be incumbent for Mr. Sunstein to reveal about himself in an interview?  We’ll get to consider that here.  Ought he be going so far as to tell us he is married to Samantha Power and to tell us who she is? . . . Maybe that’s a little extra, but let’s, in fact, start by discussing who Mr. Sunstein’s wife is.

Samantha Power (“Humanitarian Hawk”):

Samantha Power is in the news right now because President Biden has nominated her to head U.S.A.I.D. (U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID).  Biden says that if she is confirmed he will also appoint her to the National Security Council where she will, according to one former national security adviser, contribute “substantively to important interagency deliberations and effectively articulating how USAID is an essential component to help advance U.S. national security interests and to achieve our foreign policy objectives.”

USAID is generally understood by most moderately aware people to effectively be a semi-covert branch of the CIA.  The CIA edited Wikipedia currently goes at least this far:

Some say that the US government gives aid to reward political and military partners rather than to advance genuine social or humanitarian causes abroad. William Blum has said that in the 1960s and early 1970s USAID has maintained "a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover."

There is hint that Power’s appointment to USAID will entail an increase to the agency’s staff, its portfolio (the “scope of the knowledge” and the information it will be responsible for), and, along with that probably the agency’s budget.  We’ll note that, among other things, USAID is currently a channel for “billions” to “to fight COVID-19 in more than 120 countries” with a focus that “the Agency must prepare for lasting changes to the development and humanitarian landscape” in a context where “the COVID-19 pandemic threatens security and prosperity at home, challenges democratic governance globally, and has led to adversaries exploiting the pandemic to compete with the U.S.”  

This USAID role with respect to Covid should be filed away for future reference when we get to discussion of Ms. Power’s husband.

The term “high profile” is being widely used to describe Power as the nominee to head USAID it even being said that she would be the “among the highest-profile figures to ever occupy that role.”  She is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  She was also previously on the National Security Council once before, where, according to the New York Times, “during the Obama administration she pressed for military intervention to protect civilians from state-sponsored attacks in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013.”  She was also involved in launching the United States into the illegal war being waged against Yemen.  That same New York Times article tells us that, if confirmed, Power “will confront adversaries by bolstering democracy and human rights,” and that “China is an early focus.”

“Confronting adversaries” using “human rights” as her excuse is what Ms. Power specializes in. It’s why she is called the “humanitarian hawk”; She leads or manipulates us into wars by selectively focusing on and proposing the premise that we are coming to aid of certain victims.  Back in 1988 in their book “Manufacturing Consent,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky laid out the concept of the “worthy victims” of the world versus the world’s “unworthy victims.” It’s a construct that American corporate press routinely aligns with to manipulate the American public into supporting or tolerating American military adventurism. The “worthy victims,” no matter how many or few and no matter how fictionally described, are those victims of regimes we supposedly must go to war with to rescue. The “unworthy victims,” no matter how many, are the direct victims of our country’s imperialist and military activities to whom we are supposed to give little thought to. As we give little though to them, they are often undercounted and unsympathetically described.

In 2015 journalist Robert Parry astutely nailed “interventionist” Samantha Power, very influential within the Obama administration, for exactly these kinds of manipulations; “promoting aggressive strategies that will lead to more death and destruction.” He argued that, with her liberal posing, Power was “laying the groundwork” for “potential ethnic slaughters.”  He noted that:

Though Power is a big promoter of the “responsibility to protect” or “R2P” she operates with glaring selectivity in deciding who deserves protection as she advances a neocon/liberal interventionist agenda. She is turning “human rights” into an excuse not to resolve conflicts but rather to make them bloodier.

Parry writes that Power “was one of the instigators of the U.S.-supported military intervention in 2011 which was disguised as an `R2P’ mission to protect civilians in eastern Libya” where Obama signed onto “a military mission that quickly morphed into a `regime change” operation” with Gaddafi’s troops being bombed from the air and Gaddafi eventually “hunted down, tortured and murdered.”  Parry observes:

Propaganda and genocide almost always go hand in hand, with the would-be aggressor stirring up resentment often by assuming the pose of a victim simply acting in self-defense and then righteously inflicting violence on the targeted group.

(See: Consortium News: Samantha Power: Liberal War Hawk, By Robert Parry, June 15, 2015.)

Parry was writing in the late spring of 2015, not that long after Max Blumenthal had also written about how Power is a “dangerous cynic” who is intent on “shrouding” who she really is by dressing herself up as someone who cares about human rights.  See: Samantha Power, Obama’s Atrocity Enabler, by AlterNet and Max Blumenthal, October 27, 2014.  In that article Blumenthal described how Power advanced her career when she theatrically teared up with an “incredible display of pain and emotion.”  Blumenthal details how one of Power’s most important roles in the Obama administration was to protect Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory (“the world’s only active settler-colonial state”) from scrutiny, legal and otherwise, for charges of crimes against humanity in that country’s treatment of Palestinians (e.g. the Goldstone Report).

Power’s pose as humanitarian and interested in preventing human rights abuses is based importantly on a book she brought out just after 9/11 (February 20, 2002), “`A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.”  

Her book makes the case that `decent Americans’ inside and outside government should not be so reluctant and refusing to get militarily involved to stop genocides.  Jeremy Kuzmarov, writing about Power when she had become “Obama's new ambassador to the United Nations” (she assumed that post August 5, 2013), took on the narrative of Power’s book and her assertions that U.S. policymakers should “intervene more forcefully to prevent human rights crimes” including arguing in this vein as a rationale for promoting the war in Afghanistan. See:  History News Network (Columbia and Georgetown)- Samantha Power: Liberal War Hawk and Second Rate Scholar, by Jeremy Kuzmarov.        

He notes that “Despite its being advertised as providing a comprehensive analysis of American response to genocide in the twentieth century, Power’s book does not discuss several major genocides of the post-World War II era.” He cites some omissions: the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 with “between 250,000 to a million people . . slaughtered,” many of them targeted after being “identified through lists provided by US military intelligence”; nearly a billion dollars in economic assistance to Guatemalan General Efrain Rios Montt provided by the Reagan administration while he genocidally killed Mayan Indians who supported left-wing guerrillas; the U.S. military pacification campaigns in Vietnam that killed an untold and vast number of civilians; the Nixon administration's secret 1970 bombing of Cambodia that killed “anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000 people” and overthrew the neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and destabilized the country leading to even more chaos and killing..

Kuzmarov says that Power’s book:

ignores the structural variables underlying most military interventions, including the quest for overseas military bases, access to mineral resources, and the imperatives of the U.S.-military industrial complex. For Power, the U.S. is an innocent country which can only do good. That successive presidential administrations have been complicit in major human rights violations through arms sales, police and military training programs and warfare escapes her notice.

Kuzmarov’s verdict is that Power’s book is “more fiction than history.”  It says a lot about the world we are living in and its power structures that, in 2003, Power’s book won her the Pulitzer Prize.  That means very few people will be asking how much of a work of fiction it actually is.

Currently, one of the most massive genocides going on is the siege warfare and bombing of Yemen for which the United States is one of the countries that must take principal responsibility. The U.S. is very involved in supplying support and all of the weapons used.  Jimmy Dore has taken on Power for being two-faced and hypocritical about Yemen given her role in arming the Saudis and authorizing the war and its funding this and thereafter `criticizing’ Trump for continuing the policies she and Obama implemented. See: Jimmy Dore Show- Saudi Arms Deal Exposes Obama Administration’s Jaw Dropping Hypocrisy, May 26, 2017.

The mainstream corporate media generally presents a flattering portrait of Samantha Power, but, obviously, right now, if you look on the internet you can find much that is far from flattering and very far from how Power would like to be portrayed when she coaxes us into new wars on humanitarian grounds.

Maybe one day she’ll have less of a problem with what people find on the internet: Samantha Power is calling for the internet and its public forums to be more censored than currently.  See this MintPress News, By Alan Macleod: Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government Control of Your Facebook Feed- Facebook content is already partially curated by government-linked think tanks, but for Samantha Power and others, that is simply not enough, October 26, 2020.

Hers is some of what Macleod has to say:

Writing in the Washington Post, senior Obama-era official Samantha Power has called on social media giant Facebook to do more to crush what she calls conspiracy theories and disinformation circulating on its platform.

Describing it as being “overrun with foreign disinformation,” Power demanded Mark Zuckerberg “take far more drastic steps” to “detox” the company’s algorithm. The former United States ambassador to the United Nations compared the viral vitriol circulating on Zuckerberg’s platform to the weaponized disinformation campaigns in the former Yugoslavia, implying that it could help spark a conflict in the United States.

Go to Macleod’s article to find more about how Facebook, since at least 2017 is already deliberately throttling traffic to left-wing alternative news sites and how the militaristic Atlantic Council is involved in such censorship while promoting war-promoting narratives the Atlantic Council would prefer not to have contradicted with facts.

From the Macleod article, Samantha Power who advocates censorhsip at an event of the militaristic Atlantic Council, an organzation charged with censorhsip responsibilities

Samantha Power, an interesting woman; she likes power and war and likes to be seen as something other than she is; she advocates censorship for more control as she wields such power.  Who would like to marry her?

That’s what we get to next!  In 2008, it was on July 4th,  Samantha Power married Cass Sunstein.  July 4th?  The Fourth of July?
 
Cass Sunstein (“Libertarian Paternalist”):
            
Sunstein and Samantha Power are said to have married in 2008 after they met working on Barrack Obama’s campaign.

That year, during the campaign, right around the time Sunstein and Power were married, Sunstein demonstrated himself to be a friend of illegal surveillance and of George W. Bush and those in his administration along with the telecommunications companies they had worked with to engage in such post 9/11 abuses of power.  Constitutional law professor Cass Sunstein is said to have been a key influencer who persuaded former Constitutional law professor, now presidential candidate (the presumptive Democratic nominee), Senator Barack Obama to vote on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 to give all of these characters retroactive immunity for the illegal warrantless wiretapping program by which the privacy of the telecommunications corporations customers was violated.  (Senator McCain against whom Obama was running skipped the vote.)  Obama also voted, “siding with Republicans,” to prevent debate on the retroactive immunity legislation.  

Max Blumenthal described it this way:

With Sunstein by his side, Obama reversed his initial objections to the NSA’s domestic spying operations, voting as a Senator for retroactive immunity.

The vote allowed the NSA to expand its domestic spying operations, clearing the legal hurdles obstructing the creation of PRISM. The stage was set for the second term scandal that would leave Obama reeling.   

Let us note at this time, that had the incredibly large scale government and telecommunication corporation illegal wiretapping activities not been accidentally discovered by someone willing and courageous enough to report it in a documented way, that to speak about describe the program or imagine it existing would have been to engage in conspiracy thinking.

Our intelligence agencies don’t just engage in passive surveillance.  Harry Truman, under whom the modern CIA was charted and launched replacing the OSS, regretfully considered that it was a mistake for the CIA to also be allowed to also have a nonpassive operational arm.  But that is what we must contend with when it comes to dealing with our intelligence agencies.

Cass Sunstein also believes in covert intelligence agency type operations. And in 2008, along with advocating retroactive immunity for illegal surveillance,  he was expressing his belief in such covert activities.

Project Censored is an organization that works to bring to light news, information and important narratives that are going unreported in the mainstream press.  It delves, in a media literate way, into the reasons those things are going unreported. As part of its work, every year Project Censored publishes a list of the top 25 stories of the year that are not being reported.  In 2010 one of those stories involved Cass Sunstein.  (Project Censored also, in the recnt decade, has an ecellent hour-long show that airs weekly on the Pacifica Network.)

Cass Sunstein was a member of the Obama administration in October of 2010. The official title he’d been appointed to by President Obama was head the Office of Information. Number 14 on Project Censored’s list of unreported stories October 2010 was, to a significant extent, about how in 2008 Cass Sunstein wrote a paper calling for groups with views unacceptable to the government (“extremist”) to be cognitively infiltrated by the government because “refuting these groups in public is not productive.”    

The Project Censored article noted that:

Sunstein is essentially calling for a return of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) from the cold war days when agents of the US government covertly infiltrated antiwar and civil rights groups with the intent to disrupt and discredit their activities—provoking violence or planning illegal acts themselves in order to bring groups up on criminal charges.

Glen Greenwald (in his pre-Edward Snowden reporting days, before the Snowden PRISM program revelations) had already caught on to the danger of what Sunstein was proposing and he wrote about it in January, prior to publication of Project Censored’s list that year.  See his piece in Salon: Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal- Cass Sunstein wants the government to "cognitively infiltrate" anti-government groups, By Glenn Greenwald, January 15, 2010.

Greenwald wrote:  

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs."  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  

    * * * *

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social objurgates, or even real-space groups."  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."

Greenwald’s January 15, 2010 Salon article linked to the abstract of Sunstein’s January 2008 paper.  A visit to that link indicates that on January 18, 2010, three days after Greenwald’s article, revisions were made to the page presenting Sunstein’s article.

Sunstein’s abstract, which scolds “conspiracy theories,” starts out:

Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event.

Yes, the idea that `powerful people would act secretly in their own interests contrary to the public’s’ is a typical, serviceable definition of a conspiracy theory. As such, there is brazen Orwellianess to paradoxically propose that beliefs in conspiracy theories are somehow “antidemocratic” or “dangerously threaten” democracy.  Nonetheless, that’s a message we are being bombarded with now.  In another Orwellian turn, we are also being told that “free speech” is an enemy of democracy.  In yet one more paternalistic `leave democracy in the hands of the experts and establishment powers’ gambit, it is now being argued that we shouldn’t think too much about challengingly complex matters (so-called “rabbit holes”), but instead go to and rely on more mainstream official sources whenever there are controversial matters to be evaluated.

Sunstein, writing in 2008, asserts that “conspiracy theories” are the result of “cognitive blunders” by those who “suffer from a crippled epistemology.”   This was long before QANON’s the recent mysterious and heralded arrival on the scene as the embodiment of a strawman foil perfectly tailored to bolster Sunstein’s argument.  When Sunstein wrote in 2008, he cited 9/11 conspiracy theories as his principal target for excoriation saying that those who subscribe to such theories offer “serious risks” of “violence” and raise “significant challenges for policy and law.”    

Sunstein would undoubtably not be pleased by the Architects and Engineers For 9/11 Truth having just produced “Seven” the new 45 minute documentary about the engineering and mysterious "collapse" on 9/11 of the third building, World Trade Center Building 7.  Sunstein certainly wouldn’t be happy with the way their film forthrightly questions a key part of the official narrative about 9/11, nor would he be pleased that the Architects and Engineers have carefully, and patiently assembled evidence, including taking three years for a two pronged computer assisted engineering study of Building 7, given that their meticulously sober conduct fails utterly to conform to Sunstein’s preferred portrait of conspiracy theorists.

The tactic of scorning and dismissing conspiracy theories in a ridiculing manner is generally, by those who have examined the question, traced back to a CIA memo dated April 1, 1967 with instructions about how best to counter widespread public belief that the official stories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy weren’t to be trusted.  Yes, that memo was actually dated April 1st , April Fool’s Day.  But there's was no April fooling about its existence.

The notion that the CIA’s April 1st memo launched a now time honored tradition of trying to derogate “conspiracy theories” as “crazy” has, itself been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” if you would like to accept the judgement of Snopes rather than treat Snopes as suspect.  The CIA memo came out after the February 21, 1965 assassination of Malcolm X where government and police were involved in the plot that killed him.  Part of the CIA’s 1967 memo’s suggested argument for dismissing JFK assassination conspiracy theories was that Robert F. Kennedy would not have allowed such a conspiracy to remain hidden. June 6, 1968 brought the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, which itself came hard on, just months after the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which was just a year after the CIA memo.  December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was murdered by Chicago Police officers who plotted with the FBI to set up his execution. 

Snopes asserts that it’s a “conspiracy theory” to claim that the CIA launched the tactic term in 1967 to disqualify those who questioned the official version of John F Kennedy’s assassination, because:

the actual term “conspiracy theory” emerged much more recently. It was only a few decades ago that the term took on the derogatory connotations it has today, where to call someone a conspiracy theorist functions as an insult.

Actually, Snopes is wrong: On January 3, 1968, the New York Times ran a story closely tracking the instructions of the then recent CIA memo saying “Johnson Aide Is Critical of Conspiracy Theorists,” in which conspiracy theorists were “dismissed as ‘marginal paranoids’”  April 11, 1968, the New York Times ran a story “False Police Reports of Chase After Dr. King's Death Give Impetus to Conspiracy Theories.”

If Sunstein’s 2008 urging has been followed, that covert agents should by stealth "cognitively infiltrate" online groups, websites, activist groups, chat rooms, online social networks, and even real-space groups, and, if his goals of discrediting “conspiracy theorists” had been borne in mind, then who and what we are dealing with whenever we encounter almost anybody gets called into question.  As one critical example, who knows, what to make of so-called QANON?

Aside from giving government a fairly free hand with illegal surveillance and advocating covert and cognitive  infiltration and Sunstein has other ideas, as we will get to (censorship and clever techniques for choice manipulation) that he backs for controlling the behavior of his fellow citizens.  We need to mention one of the important things Sunstein is doing now and we should also mention what else he has been doing more recently . . .

We know from the short form summary bio information often posted in connection with Sunstein appearing in various places, that after 2012, after Sunstein was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he served on: 1.) the President's Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, and 2.) on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board.  Sunstein’s LinkedIn profile doesn’t have information about either of these two positions and neither does the relatively complimentary Wikipedia page about Sunstein.  Each of these positions sound like they’d be ideal for Sunstein to continue to pursue his ideas about manipulating public debate, but they were not exactly the same thing.

Although it isn’t easy to find information about Obama’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, it issued a report at the end of 2013 that was partly a quick response to the Snowden revelations in the spring of 2013.   The Washington Post, having just been acquired by Jeff Bezos, described the report as advocating “curbing” surveillance.  The ACLU accepted it at face value as proposing surveillance reforms.  It was opposed by some as proposing that surveillance be too severely restricted.

The report recommended the solution, which you may remember from the time, that instead of having the government collect private data on citizens, that this function be done by private third-party companies who would then be ready to turn such data over to the government when the government sought it.  That solution, entrusting third-party companies like Google and Amazon to collect private data is actually founded on a line of court cases that make the spying and data collection arguably Constitutional.  It is also consistent with the general trend pursuant to which most of the government’s surveillance operations have been privatized by contracting those activities to the private sector.  (See: Tim Shorrock’s 2008 book “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,”)

Sunstein joined the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board in July of 2016 the same time that Jeff Bezos was added to the board.  Already on the board to greet them was Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google’s Alphabet Inc..  Sunstein’s bio posts refer to his being on that board in the past tense and it is unclear to me what the usual tenure on the board is.  Schmidt, on the board when Sunstein arrived that July 2016, reportedly stepped down four years later in September 16, 2020.

The Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board does things like make recommendations about what makes Artificial Intelligence warfare ethical.  Meanwhile we find Sunstein participating (November 2020) in a “colloquium on AI Ethics” that is, among other things “part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities” (i.e. Stephen A. Schwarzman who has been involved as a NYPL trustee in dismantling NYC libraries), where it was being discussed why it is “very good” when algorithms eliminate the noise of “variability in judgments that should be identical.”

Cass Sunstein is leading the WHO advisory group (seen here) on “how best to increase” Covid-19 vaccine  demand

Our news these days is 24/7 about Covid-19.  Therefore it’s of the utmost importance that right now Cass Sunstein is the Chair the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health, which is working and giving advice under his leadership on “how best to increase” Covid-19 vaccine “demand in settings with high virus transmission & low demand, & to forewarn on risk reduction & equity.”  Does the `WHO affiliation' make this recent Sunstein role sound innocuous?  That’s a probable reaction for many, unless, as is unlikely, they have read the Grayzone’s article of last July, about how the WHO has, through various financial machinations, become more or less a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bill Gates who, himself is now strangely in charge of leading the world’s Covid response.

All that in mind, let us think back now to remember that Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power, will be in charge dealing with the U.S.’s interactions concerning Covid with other countries worldwide if and when she’s appointed to head USAID.

Cass Sunstein Takes The Argument For Censorship To “Free Speech” Radio

Some months ago, I tuned in recently to listen to one of the Pacifica Network’s West Coast stations and was perturbed to hear what I thought were fairly naive arguments for more vigilant and aggressive censorship of so-called “fake news” by the big tech companies. I was troubled, because, after all, the Pacifica Network stations do brand themselves as “free speech” radio.  `That would never happen on Pacifica’s New York Station, WBAI,’ I told myself.  Full disclosure, I am a member of WBAI’s local station board, my wife also.

Then on a recent Sunday, I tuned into WBAI in the middle of a program and I heard a very similar argument for censorship of so-called “fake news.”  Muttering, I predicted than when we came to the end interview identity of the advocate for such censorship would be announced to be one of the amply paid professors whom I have been compiling into a list: These professors seem to have been seeded in colleges across the country as `experts’ on controlling `fake news.’  These “experts” seem always to be expert at teaching their students, like children at a playground, to ridicule and deride “conspiracy theories” as fake news, . .    But they never, ever seem to teach about the fake news involved in “Manufacturing Consent” (typically for war), as carefully analyzed with great scholarship and erudition by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.  One of these professors featured recently in the New York Times as a “pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation” is Joan Donovan.  Like Sunstein and, his wife Samantha, Donovan can boast of being yet another Harvard professor.  

Oh my!. .

. .  When the name of the interviewee advocating censorship on WBAI was finally announced, I was stunned to find that it was none other than Cass Sunstein himself. . .

 The program was City Watch, Sunday, April 18, 2021, 10:00 AM.  Officially Sunstein was on this program that deals with New York politics and political affairs to discuss his book, “Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception.”

Analyzing it closely, the WBAI interview serves to teach us a lot about Sunstein’s modus operandi.

Tweet annoucing that Cass Sunstein is going on WBAI "free speech" radio- can you guess from this that it will be to advocate changing the Constitution to allow for greater censorship?

Background: The structure of the Cass Sunstein interview is interesting in terms of whether it incorporates formulae Sunstein has advocated for manipulating choice.  As set forth in the Amazon summary for Sunstein’s earlier, more famous 2008 book, “Nudge” (supposedly about “Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”) Sunstein considers “that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases” and that “by knowing how people think” and “choice architecture” we can push people into making decisions that those in charge think best “without restricting our freedom of choice.”  His “Nudge” book was published April 8, 2008, just months after he published his paper advocating covert cognitive infiltration to manipulate groups.

Because Sunstein seeks first to manipulate instead of actually restricting “freedom of choice,” he gets, as we have already noted, the seemingly oxymoronic moniker of a “libertarian paternalist.”  But he is not libertarian: He is about top-down societal control.  To reiterate, he and his “humanitarian” war advocating wife both advocate censorship and banning information whenever it its necessary to control thought and choice if manipulation fails.  He is, if you will, about starting out with `gentler’ more subtle forms of control and then graduating to stronger, more forceful controls. Given that he has advocated what is essentially an updated version of the covert COINTEL program, it is unclear where he draws any line, if, in fact he ever does.

The CIA edited Wikipedia says that the following criticism of Sunstein’s “Nudge” book (co-authored with Richard H. Thaler) has been offered by American law professor Pierre Schlag: that framing their issues, Sunstein and Thaler neglect a number of important questions: “(1) What to optimize? (2) When is a nudge a shove? (3) Should we prefer experts? and (4) When do we nudge?”   Most important, and left off Professor Schlag’s  list, is (5) Who is doing the “nudge” manipulation, and (6) What is their motivation, do they really want what is best for the person being manipulated, or, as with the example of Samantha Power, Sunstein’s wife, are they pushing for wars or other ill-advised things to generate cooperate profit?  Lastly, (7) does resort to this “nudge” approach value and encourage dumbing down the public– Thus will it lead to unexamined lives where the public doesn’t reflect on important decisions or engage in complex thinking about complex issues, leaving all such thought to those who are in power?

The Guardian thought Sunstein’s book was a “jolly” “romp.”

Sunstein’s Nudge concepts are not just theory.  He puts it into practice.  For example, Sunstein serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.  From the Deloitte consulting firm we learn:

In 2010 [i.e. two years after publication of Sunstein’s Nudge book and cognitive infiltration paper], the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team became the first governmental “nudge unit” to study and harness behavioral patterns for more informed policymaking and improved government services. Since then, there has been a proliferation of formal and informal nudge groups within government agencies, as hundreds of countries, states, and cities have applied the concepts of nudge thinking to improve outcomes.

It's something he might even proudly acknowledge: Cass Sunstein is an obvious inheritor of the mantle of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, the “grandfather of spin, public relations.”  Mickey Huff of Project Censored has pointed more than once to this significant Bernays quote (with ellipses) from Bernays 1928 book "Propaganda" (he thought “propaganda” was a good thing): 

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country . . . We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Sunstein’s concept about manipulating decisions (because he asserts people have `two systems of thinking’) is that when decisions are complex, or are not simplified and presented as complex, people can be pushed to make decisions based on emotional and reflexive biases.  
     
So-called “nudge theory” gets into the possibility of lots of little “micronudges” (cumulative?) And microtargeted designs targeting specific groups of people broken down differently. It is important to think about the extent that all of this is already integrated thoroughly into the technological ways big tech, including all of social media, now provide most of our means to interface with world and the public square.  Now even more so with the Covid lock down forcing on us more technology to interface with the world.

Although the WBAI Sunstein interview never mentions or even hints at Sunstein’s chairmanship of the WHO Behavioural Insights groups that is working to increase demand for Covid injections, the WBAI interview is to a large extent about Covid and controlling information about Covid.

The highly politicized subject of Covid has gotten to be a touchy one, i.e. also an emotional one.  When we get to reviewing the WBAI Sunstein interview in a minute, you will see how the touchiness of what people are supposed to, or not ask supposed to, ask questions about in this regard plays a factor in the arguments Sunstein makes for censorship.

Comedian and political show host Jimmy Dore (who has been advocating that people wear masks to protect themselves) has presented a number of clips of Dr. Anthony Fauci on his show demonstrating that Fauci cannot be relied upon to tell the truth and that Fauci has contradictorily changed, sometimes even during the course of an interview, what he is saying and clearly will dissemble.

Dore ran Fauci clips like that as part of his April 22, 2021 program and, at the end of that program (53:50), noted that when he first ran such a clip of Fauci lying about wearing masks, he was called in to meet with the General Manager and the Program Director of KPFK, the Los Angeles station that is part of the Pacifica network where his program was airing for over ten years. Asked by them about his Fauci reporting, Dore said he told the GM and Program Director that his reporting was accurate and that if they had a problem with the facts he reported they should let him know. Dore was oblique about what happened next and it is not entirely clear (although Dore opined that the station was moving a McCarthy-censoring way to the neocon right). But Dore said that he was off KPFK's air soon after.  (His show continues as a not yet censored internet podcast.)

KPFK’s website has a January 29, 2021 post consisting of  Jimmy Dore’s brief “Thank you” to Pacifica Radio and KPFK, saying in part:

    It was an honor to uphold a proud heritage.

        Being a voice against War,
        being a voice against Cold-War McCarthyism,
        being a voice for The People,

    Dissenting journalism that questions Establishment narratives will be needed more than ever now.

Knowing Sunstein’s penchant for manipulation and control and the subtlety of some of the techniques he espouses, it is interesting to see the extent to which the WBAI interview follows formulae for manipulation.  Here is the structure of the interview.  It is a very tight 22 minutes commencing the show that appears to have been carefully scripted on both sides (it would be interesting to know more about that scripting): 

    •    Nice relaxed folksy guitar intro.
    •    Host- A friendly, `Hope you’ve got your coffee.’
    •    The host then needs to slide into the subject because the program is about to go outside of its usual lane of covering New York affairs.  The host explains that the show has focused on health and that the Covid and death rate in NYC remains at a high level- `on Friday 58 more New Yorker died of Covid, 35 in New York City’.. But now 50 or older can get vaccines.
    •    A `concerned’ host speaks more about the danger to his listeners: I realize it is a personal choice and among our listeners there are people who do not believe in vaccinations, but I also worry about your health, and the fact that the virus is still mutating and there are recent discoveries of more contagious versions around the world.
    •    The host links that danger to misinformation and asks for their trust: I also worry about misinformation and who we listen to, where we get the information that we trust, and trust is an important word. - Who we treat as credible.
    •    The host asserts he is broad minded: I watch multiple TV shows consume a lot of media and read both liberal and conservative media so I can hear different political observations.
    •    Now the host sets up the dichotomy to manipulate listeners about who they are going to trust: “We just finished a presidency [Trump!] where it was clear that depending on what you watched you ether believed that at the outset of the virus it was under control and nothing to worry about [Trump!], or you felt that this was an imminent threat and we needed to act quickly or more quickly to rein in this virus and ultimately save more lives [I’m on the life-saving side]
    •    Now the host invokes another listener-hated right wing person to ensure the audience will respond emotionally and to cue the listeners that what is about to be presented as an alternative is more in line with their own political leanings, and thus ought to be more readily accepted: Just a few days ago Tucker Carlson said that perhaps the Covid vaccine doesn’t work [There are actually multiple “vaccines” or more accurately "shots"] and they are simply not telling you that.
    •    The host tells the audience: This is despite clinical trials [conducted by big Pharma and excluding normal  FDA oversight]
    •    The host invokes Dr. Fauci as a trusted figure while dissing conspiracy theories: And Dr. Anthony Fauci has called this a “crazy conspiracy theory.”
    •    Host posits falsehoods and equates them with danger: So when we think about distortions and lies, at what point do they become dangerous?
    •    Host makes a pitch for the safety of paternalism: Especially if we ourselves are incompetent in deciphering fact from fiction?
    •    The subject of censorship is broached with a less threatening euphemism: Should there be some type of a sanction [censorship]?
    •    Host: That brings me to my guest Cass Sunstein- Sunstein gets presented with happy sounding, noncontextual, and reassuring credentials:

        •    Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard
        •    He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.
        •    A prize [from the lovely, reliable country of Norway] described as the “equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Law and the Humanities [very reassuring]
        •    He’s the author of dozens of books that you’ve heard of. [i.e. you know who he is and he’s a safe authority.]
        •    His wrote the “Citizen’s Guide To Impeachment” [He’s against Trump and on your side!]
        •    His newest book is about “liars” [i.e. he’s not one and wants to do something about them] and how we should deal with “false speech” in the modern era and how we should deal with it given the problem [“problem”?] of protection of free speech as a Constitutional principle to deal with.
        •    He “explores these issues with a creative and rich set of perspectives.” [Certainly, an invitation to be creative and share his "perspectives."]

    •    The intro doesn’t reveal that Sunstein has argued for covert infiltration and manipulation to control thought.  It doesn’t say that his wife is Samantha Power who has played a key role in manipulating the United States into several major wars.  It doesn’t say that Cass Sunstein is chair of World Health Organization World Health Organization Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights & Sciences and as head thereof is actually tasked with the responsibility to steer behavior to accept the Covid-19 narrative and vaccinations.  It doesn't mention his work on the Pentagon advisory board alongside the big tech guys.
    •    The Host suggests that fake news comes from hated figures like Trump and not, for instance from those who want to steer us into wars: The book is “timely” right now because of the four years of Trump [raise emotional hackles?] and how it raises the issue of “fake news” and “alternative facts.”
    •    Host links "lies" to death: In this last year, as you worked on the book, lying had “deadly [oh my!] consequences.”
    •    Sunstein makes the case that lying is different than it used to be and also more fearsome: Last few years the omnipresence of falsehoods, sometimes intentional, and they can spread to a lot of people in a hurry, has become clearer than ever.
    •    Sunstein: These might be lies about the source of the virus [more and more we are seeing revisions in the official story about the source of the virus leading us to a new official narrative that the source was a lab leak- officially an accidental one, which means that the first official stories about the source were actually false], lies about existence of the virus, lies about responses to the virus.  These lies, not hyperbolically speaking are literally dangerous [reptile brain], they can and have cost lives.
    •    Host goes back to anchor this in rejections of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity- And goes back, based on this dichotomy to ask the question of who to trust.
    •    Host and Sunstein play a game of “rating” the danger “from one to ten” and then don’t actually.
    •    Sunstein suggests that he has statistics that Carlson’s viewers were safer than Hannity’s viewers because Carlson was more in line with the official narrative.
    •    Host then says that there is a second chapter to Sunstein’s book that provides an official grid for determining when to censor people.  Host encourages listeners to study the grid to assess the level of possible harm.  Sunstein says the second chapter is his favorite and then supplies an anecdote that it was included at the suggestion of a friend.
    •    Sunstein says that the grid “helps break the logjam” between those “who think `freedom of speech, freedom of speech, freedom of speech,’- God Bless them [curtly dismissive- `freedon of speech’ - blah, blah.] and those who think `danger’ exclamation point.” [Appealing to simplistic thinking] He says “we are concerned about four things, just four; it’s not that complicated” [It’s not that complicated unless you ask whether the censor in charge of censoring is acting with good intentions.  Sunstein thereby has totally shifted the discussion away from whether the statements are true or need to be considered.]
    •    The host, making the Constitution seem unpleasant, asks: “Is there a constitutional right to lie”?
    •    Sunstein says we are “really at the frontiers now: He dismisses the 2012 Supreme Court decision that there is no Ministry of Truth [Stolen Valor case]  as from a bygone era that is so “Brittany Spears.” [i.e. he is encouraging that traditional value of free speech be discarded simply to keep pace with those new fashions your peers are probably moving on to- don’t be left behind.]
    •    Sunstein says you shouldn’t be able to sell health nostrums that don’t actually help heart disease. [A potential inoculation, because people who focus first on natural paths for maintaining their health might be among those more apt to question certain pharma-based narratives about Covid.]
    •    Host again makes the case that traditional values don’t apply because lying is now new and different, not what it used to be: We are in this age where it is so much easier to lie and where lies spread more quickly and widely through doctored videos, social media.
    •    Sunstein says were are “on a precipice” [frightening] and we need to do something about it! [i.e. living, like we used to, in a world like your grandparents and parents lived in, where everyone is aware that people lie, is no longer acceptable- action has become imperative].
    •    Sunstein explains the “truth bias” paradox that you can’t state a negative without invoking the positive and lodging that positive in people’s consciousness as a likely fact.
    •    Sunstein then says falsehoods tend to spread more rapidly than truth, maybe because they are more vivid and jarring and scary- This drives falsehoods to have comparatively more power than truth [That’s scary and vivid!].
    •    Sunstein belittles as silly `homilies’ what people traditionally believed about addressing falsehood: Social media companies shouldn’t resort to “homilies” about how the best remedy for false speech is more speech.
    •    Giving Sunstein extra validation, the host takes this opportunity to say he is glad that Sunstein will now tell the listeners about the “responsibility” that social media has to “censor or respond to” clear falsehoods.
    •    Sunstein says the social media companies should censor what they deem to be false content according to the guidance of his grid.  [sounds so reliably scientific!] He manages to sound sage and considered by saying some cases will be easy cases to decide, some will be hard and in some cases reasonable people may differ.
    •    The host asks again about “counterspeach” as a remedy [previously alluded to by Sunstein as a `homily’].  Sunstein says it is generally a remedy, but he says that “with fear and trembling” it isn’t a full remedy.
    •    The host then goes sideways to get into the case for paternalism.  He asks whether the lies are hurting society or causing people to become more astute, ‘better learners” who are about to discern falsehood.
    •    Sunstein says that the lying is hurting us “a lot.”  He says its “all very well to talk about freedom of speech,” but with the “vivid” example of health and safety and if you have “say 200 people dead from a health related matter that’s a tragedy, and not an abstraction. .[even though he had just offered “say 200 dead” as a theoretical]  . really causing damage, and we all need to think what to do about it”
    •    Sunstein tells us our law and Constitutional law needs to be reassessed. To make this less scary he says “not radically.”
    •    AND Sunstein tells us “the practices of our social media platforms website operators need to be reassessed.” [In other words the entire internet world that now constitutes our public square and most of the basis for interfacing with anyone else these days needs to be reassessed fro how it is used- By people like Sunstein?]                             
    •    Then Sunstein does something really cute: As to whether or not people are smart and learning to deal with fake news, he says its an empirical question with no data, but he divides up the public saying there’s “a lot of diversity out there.”  The division?  Getting specific on two fronts, he refers to “all of us have heard from friends and family something crazily preposterous, that they actually believe and they tell us that crazy preposterous thing.”  This is an oblique, but fairly obvious reference particularly to the QANON convenient strawman foil.  (Remember that Cass Sunstein advocated squelching what he defined as “conspiracy theories,” long before QANON’s arrived as a serviceable strawman to mock them.)  Then Sunstein offers his other category, that some people are “astute and cautious” [that allows listeners to self-flatter by imagining themselves in this category- it also allows them to imagine themselves as being part of the paternalistic elite who will do the censoring].  He also says that it can be a question about what people want to believe.    
    •    The last thing Sunstein signs off with as the host concludes is to say that if you put his name into Google you’ll find what his Harvard employer website says, which, he jokes, is “mostly truthful” and “you will find a lot of falsehoods about me.” [I don’t know if the WBAI show host was intrigued enough to look to see what falsehoods Sunstein was referring to, but it does not appear to be easy to find internet falsehoods about Sunstein, only the true things that are out there.]

Conclusion:

WBAI and Pacifica were key in opposing and publishing reliable information about the war in Vietnam when that war was underway. WBAI, Pacifica and its listeners are therefor naturally acutely aware of the COINTEL program that infiltrated and worked to debilitate the antiwar movement, not to mention also the civil rights movement and groups like the Black Panthers. It would be naive to think that WBAI and Pacifica did not experience some of that debilitating infiltration itself.  Sunstein being the advocate, with very limited gloss to it, of what is essentially a modern day continuation of the COINTEL program, there is perhaps a certain hubris on Sunstein’s part to also venture onto WBAI’s "Free Speech" radio and advocate for censorship based on the idea that those, like him, put in charge of the censoring, will know best. . .

. . . His visit as a guest on the station is almost like a reconnaissance mission into enemy territory to see if he will be recognized.  It is even more like a traipse into enemy territory given that Pacifica and WBAI continue to be critical of the wars and the false narratives that lead the American empire into them.  We are talking about the kind of narratives that Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power is so much a part of.

True hubris?: Or is Mr. Sunstein guessing that he will be recognized and simply trying to provoke a reaction?

PS: I have a coda to this article that I will publish separately concerning whether Pacifica’s flagship news program, incubated out of WBAI, has been affected by Mr. Sunstein- But that is another article, for later publication.