Meet Obama’s confidant, and Samantha Power’s husband, Cass Sunstein.

In a 2003 University of Chicago paper entitled, “Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay” Cass Sunstein supported the idea of the federal government assigning an increased monetary value to the lives of youth and senior citizens in relation to health care spending. During House Energy and Commerce Committee hearings in 2011, Sunstein attempted to walk back his forceful earlier comments.

“I’m a lot older now than the author with my name was, and I’m not sure what I think about what the young man wrote,” Sunstein told the committee. “Things written as an academic are not a legitimate part of what we do as a government official. So I am not focusing on sentences that a young Cass Sunstein wrote years ago.”

A 2008 book co-authored by Sunstein called for a “presumed consent” policy in regards to organ donation. Sunstein said, “Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting organ donors.”

If Sunstein’s policy he was advocating for was ever approved, Americans would have had to sign up for an “unwillingness to donate” organ registry. His book Nudge was written in-part to “nudge” people into becoming organ donors.





Also in 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a paper proposing that the U.S. Government should 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 undermine the credibility of “conspiracists”. The paper’s abstract can be read, and downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocated that the Government’s infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, 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.”

We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI. There the agents are called “provocateurs” — even if only “cognitive.” One learns to smell or deal with them in a group, or recognize trolling online. But even suspicion or partial exposure can “sow uncertainty and distrust within conspiratorial groups [now conflated with conspiracy theory discussion groups] and among their members,” and “raise the costs of organization and communication” — which Sunstein applauds as “desirable.” “New recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides.” (p.225). Sound familiar?

Cass Sunstein is Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School friend, who was appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (where, among other things, he was responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs”), and married to Samantha Power, former ambassador to the UN.

This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he ended up overseeing. The government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desired has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last several decades, including in revealed practices of the Obama administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about the current political class. All of that makes Sunstein’s papers and books worth examining in greater detail.

Note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape political debates.

Bush’s Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.

Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.

In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.

In response to this, Democrats accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, said was illegal propaganda. Indeed, what Sunstein advocated is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government “propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens.

Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself. He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true.

Consider the revelation that the Obama administration made very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on Barack’s health care plan. Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House — falsely — as an “independent” or “objective” authority.

Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of Obama’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed. Sound familiar?

This created an infinite loop in favor of Obama’s health care plan which — unbeknownst to the public — was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).

In that 2008 paper, Sunstein advocated exactly what the Obama administration had been doing that whole year with Gruber: covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as “independent” analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line. Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different.

The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite, like himself and Obama.