We live in a media environment awash with sophisticated advertising, public-relations posing as news, and tribal propaganda. Back in the old days Americans got their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and while there was propaganda, Americans generally trusted the media. The rise of Google and their monopolization of advertising revenue has eviscerated local newspapers, while the rise of social media has produced a information dystopia.

Meanwhile, the US economy and infrastructure are in tatters, it’s fueling a proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian, threatening war with China over Taiwan, and actively supporting genocidal ethnic cleansing–killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of mainly children and women and trampling every precept of humanitarian and international law–on behalf of Israel, a violent settler-colonial project.  And in this catastrophic conjuncture, the U.S. political and media culture throws up Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, two of the most incompetent figures imaginable to vie for the presidency.

Americans have noticed.

Trust in politicians and the corporate media is at all time lows.

But don’t expect any changes. Ever since 2016 we’ve seen US empire managers publicly wringing their hands and fretting about the disadvantage they have in the information age because of the 1st Amendment which allow the enemies of liberal values–read Trump voters–to spread “propaganda” and “disinformation” to gullible Americans. And now the US government censors speech and propagandizes Americans to “manufacture consent.” But they also engage in “cognitive infiltration” to stymie the sharing of information on the internet that challenges the official story promulgated by the corporate media.

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a vibrant movement of “conspiracy theorists” developed on the Internet, arguing that the true facts had been quite different than the official story, with most of them suggesting heavy American government involvement in those momentous events. Back then, the Internet was far less channeled and regulated than it eventually became, and few effective means existed for the political establishment to shut down such troubling discussions.

Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, soon to become a top Obama aide, shrewdly suggested that the activities of dissenters could best be undermined and disrupted by means of “cognitive infiltration.” Agents of the government or its close allies should join those online communities and promote a wide range of additional theories, often rather absurd ones, thereby stirring up internal conflicts, diverting the members into theoretical dead-ends, and heavily discrediting them with the broader American public.

The idea was that rather than attempting to refute conspiracy theories, the solution would be to infect them with wild claims and accusations to add confusion to the mix in order to misdirect them. The consequence would be that conspiracy theories would look so ridiculous that no one would believe them. What deep state managers such as Sunstein realized was that one of the most effective means of severely disrupting the investigation of a conspiracy has been to promote one or more closely-related but entirely fraudulent theories that are far more sweeping and “exciting,” and therefore draw enthusiasm from gullible conspiracy-activists.

The upshot was that as the 9/11 Truth movement began to gain traction around 2008, elements of our political establishment began a quiet but concerted effort to use such techniques of “cognitive infiltration” to sabotage and disrupt it. If it was was a deliberate attempt at organized manipulation then it succeeded brilliantly.

The ultimate result was to severely damage the credibility of all “conspiracy theorists.” Many Americans now believe that anything that reeks of a conspiracy theory–even relating to the JFK assassination or the Oklahoma bombing or 9-11–is cray-cray and those people and ideas are to be shunned.

As Ron Unz says in American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and “Cognitive Infiltration”: “Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in cognitive infiltration.”

Trump, Covid and the aftermath have brought increasingly strident call for censorship of “disinformation” and the creation of the “censorship industrial complex”, but cognitive infiltration remains an integral part of the elite toolkit. With the corporate media’s massive loss of credibility, combined with American’s low knowledge of history and politics, the information and narrative battle-space is a target rich environment that the cognitive infiltrators have taken full advantage of.

The QAnon movement, is almost certainly “cognitive infiltration”, with all of the crazy-pants ideas and narratives about the behavior of liberal elites, that made Americans who are upset about real government malfeasance sound deranged.  And, for anyone susceptible to QAnon the idea that a high-ranking Obama Administration official, like Sunstein, had previously suggested that the government employ online operatives to infiltrate and disrupt the conspiracy community would be like catnip.

I don’t know what the solution is to cognitive infiltration, but I do know that it’s not a new tactic. Cointelpro, the FBI’s clandestine war against dissidents during the Cold War, employed agent provocateurs to discredit revolutionary movements like the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panthers. Cognitive infiltrators are simply doing the same thing to online rebels.

Whenever there’s a conversation on controversial topics I can always get a laugh by confidently proclaiming specialized knowledge because I read it on the Internet. While I read a lot on the Internet, I try to read a wide variety of sources, ranging from Zero Hedge, a Libertarian site, to Jacobin, a Socialist site, then settling on Naked Capitalism, where they link to a multitude of mainstream and alternative media sources.

Halloween is coming so stay safe out there and watch out for the cognitive infiltrators.