This is utterly self-refuting, and calling activists “info warfare terrorists” should disqualify you from any serious discussion. But, because you flatter the left’s prejudices, it’ll be accepted by those partisans.
Foreign powers manipulating Americans using information warfare must pay. But what about domestic forces using the same tactics?
My massive piece for @wired on the conspiracy architecture supporting Kavanaugh, & the information terrorists that built it.https://t.co/Zokd7ba7QM
— Molly McKew (@MollyMcKew) October 3, 2018
This is CVE2.0, and a lot of the familiar faces—err, grifters—are back.
Countering Violent Extremism was a way to pretend study of terrorism had nothing at all to do with Islamic terrorism, the major problem facing nearly every country, very much including Muslim ones.
It became a racket, and an entire cottage industry. Hundreds of “experts”—people who had absolutely no real knowledge about Islamic terrorism, but could brand themselves in CVE-world using flimsy pseudo academic credentials—flocked to the Obama era gravy train.
CVE sought to establish that there were all kinds of “terrorisms” that were just as awful and worthy of serious study as the Islamic variety. (Nevermind that bodycounts—in Muslim countries alone!—dwarfed all other types of terrorism.)
Perhaps it was unavoidable that, given the state of academia today—and Sokal II is just the tiniest and most recent of examples—CVE would become an engine to scream about Right Wing Terrorism. Criticism coming from many CVE folks amounted to, “how dare you conflate non-violent Islamism (or even what they considered more nuanced groups like Hamas) with violent terrorists?” That’s one reason why these grifters *hated* people like @SebGorka, who didn’t toe the line.
But, considering who was involved—and the truly off the charts radical place academia is in right now—I always knew the goal was to begin pushing out the definition of Right Wing terrorism to include just about any voices to the left of socialist.
They set up an official-looking institution that would draw the line of acceptable discourse on the Right, and then keep moving it leftward. “Science!” In the last month, we’ve seen 2 major pseudo academic studies—this one and one from Data&Society—that does essentially the same thing.
Be *very* careful when “analysts” try to define legitimate, homegrown dissent as foreign provocation. It’s a dirty game—and totally unAmerican.