This should not come as a surprise, as Biden’s new addition to the Department of Homeland Security is a bizarre figure named Cass Sunstein who famously described exactly what this was going to look like in his infamous 2008 report ‘Conspiracy Theories’ (co-authored with Harvard Law School’s Adrien Vermeule). In this under-appreciated study, the duo foresaw the greatest threat to the ruling elite took the form of “conspiracy theorizing” within the American population using as examples of this delusion: the idea that the government had anything to do with the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, or the planning and execution of 9-11.
Just to be clear, conspiracy literally means ‘two or more people acting together in accord with an agreed upon idea and intention’.
The fact that Vermeule has made a legal career arguing that laws should be interpreted not by the “intentions” of lawgivers, but rather according to cost-benefit analysis gives us a useful insight into the deranged mind of a technocrat and the delusional reasoning that denies the very thing which has shaped literally ALL of human history.
In their “scholarly” essay, the authors wrote “the existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be.”
After establishing his case for the threat of conspiracies, Sunstein says that “the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”.
