In August, The Verge (owned by liberal Vox Media and founded by former CIA asset Markos Moulitsas) and the National Review, the failing neocon journal edited by Rich Lowry, posted articles on how to best undermine the First Amendment right of millions of Americans.
The Verge cites a recent paper by N. F. Johnson and a collection of academics. Johnson and his fellows compare online “hate and extremist narratives” to a chemistry project.
“We observe the current hate network rapidly rewiring and self-repairing at the micro level when attacked, in a way that mimics the formation of covalent bonds in chemistry,” they write.
Because of this dynamic, the authors suggest fighting “hate” (unacceptable political speech) by inserting a “population in a pre-engineered format” within a targeted “hate-cluster” and destroying it from within.
This is a tactic taken right out of the COINTELPRO handbook.
Branko Marcetic writes:
As the Church Committee, a congressional committee set up in 1975 to analyze the excesses of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies over the preceding decades, put it, what followed was a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order…
The bread and butter of COINTELPRO operations was the use of wiretaps, anonymous letters, informants, and other means of subterfuge to, in the Bureau’s own words, foster factionalism and create suspicion within groups, bring individuals into disrepute before the American public, and create disruption and discord among such groups and movements in order to destroy the Left, or at least render it useless.
