(Note from Angie: I have no idea why my streaming software decided today was the day it was going to not share audio or suddenly stop recognizing my camera and mic altogether, but alas. I will summarize tomorrow with clips. In the meantime, I asked Claude to do what it could to clean up the transcript, so apologies for the gaps)
Hi there everybody, good morning. I did not make theme music for this delightful event. So we are about fifteen minutes out and I’ve got the task force hearing streaming video ready to go as soon as it comes online.
I’ve spoken with my colleague who is going to be a witness for the Democrats. That is Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, who is a former NIH program official, senior program official. She worked at NIH for twenty-two years managing a very large research portfolio of many different kinds of grants, as well as authoring different types of funding programs.
At NIH back in the day — this is going out of style now — the individual institutes and centers that make up the NIH would have their program officials get together and identify knowledge gaps that were important to fill, important scientific questions that needed to be answered, and they would offer funding opportunities to fill in some of those knowledge gaps. So that’s what Liz did for twenty-two years at NIH, and she did a lot of really impactful research.
Liz and I have had conversations about some of the projects that she had been working on when this whole nightmare started and she ended up leaving NIH. And it really breaks my heart as a scientist to think about all of the research that we’ve lost because of talented people at NIH like Liz. But thank goodness for her expertise, because she’s now available — now that she’s no longer at NIH — to still come and provide congressional testimony. And wow, what does a senior NIH program official have to do with mind control and MKUltra?
It looks like the streaming window has gone live. Sorry, I have a new monitor set up and a new desk, so I’m still trying to kind of make everything work. Liz is going to be talking about, I think, human subjects protection, because that’s what this MKUltra stuff is all about.
What even is MKUltra?
I thought before the hearing started I’d pop in and just chat with everybody a little bit about what MKUltra even is. What is this mind control that the CIA was getting up to? And why is Anna Paulina Luna, who is the head of this task force on the House Oversight Committee, involved in all of this?
Anna Paulina Luna is a very hardcore MAGA-aligned Republican congresswoman from Florida who is a former model and was in the Air Force. She’s taken a lot of pictures of herself looking hot in tactical gear. Now she’s a congressperson, and she’s relatively unhinged. She hangs around with the likes of Lauren Boebert, who will also be at this hearing today.
So this hearing is about MKUltra — mind control. But it wasn’t really mind control. The CIA was experimenting with ways to do mind control, but we don’t really know how successful they were, and probably not very. Mostly it was drugging people.
Back in the early nineteen fifties, the Cold War was at its height and we were doing everything we could in the US to make sure we got one up on the Soviet Union. The CIA was worried that the Soviet Union was getting ahead of us in terms of their mind control and interrogation tactics. So they started something called Project Bluebird, and then they had something called Project Artichoke — that was around nineteen fifty-one, I think — which was a way to trick an adversary into thinking that they were going into a medical clinic and getting some kind of medical treatment when actually they’d be getting some kind of drugs. And then this became MKUltra.
It doesn’t seem like they actually spent a lot of time trying to trick people into that sort of fake medical situation. The guy who ran MKUltra was Sidney Gottlieb, and he sounds like he was a pretty terrible guy, given that MKUltra did a bunch of experiments on people who didn’t realize they were being experimented on. That’s a big no-no in terms of research ethics. You don’t want to ever do that. And in this case, they were doing it on people who were in psychiatric hospitals, people who’d been involuntarily committed, and on prisoners. Big no-no. Not supposed to do that with human research participants or human subjects, as they were called back in the day.
It’s important to note that Project Artichoke and MKUltra were not trying to do this to American citizens. They were trying to do this to foreign enemies — like, to trick Soviet people into confessing all of the communist secrets. That was the point of MKUltra.
Now, in the early nineteen seventies, the CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, ordered that all of the primary research records for MKUltra be destroyed on his way out of office. They were incinerated. Many of the documents that exist now are financial records or administrative records — they don’t really have anything to do with the actual research that was done in MKUltra. So to a degree, we will never know what happened in MKUltra unless some sort of secret trove of documents is uncovered. But from what I can tell, there is no such secret trove, because it was well understood that Helms literally burned into ashes all of the records. So there probably won’t be very much accountability. But that’s not actually the point of this hearing.
Why is Anna Paulina Luna running this hearing?
Anna Paulina Luna loves these types of conspiracy theories, because ultimately what they do is point a finger back at the government and say: look at how bad the old democratic way of doing things was. Don’t you like things better now that we live in essentially an autocracy? That’s the point of this hearing. It’s not to get accountability for unethical human experimentation that was done as part of the MKUltra project. It’s something that’s going to be used to further the dismantling of the government — to do to the intelligence community what they are doing elsewhere in the government to science and public health.
And that’s where I come in. Because it turns out this does have to do with viruses. Anna Paulina Luna’s source for all of this information that she’s supposedly uncovered with her investigation is Tulsi Gabbard, who is a known Russian asset. Anna Paulina Luna herself is awfully friendly with a lot of people who are involved in the Russian government and who are friends with Vladimir Putin. Her activities include things like opposing any support and aid to Ukraine, essentially taking pro-Russian positions on most things, and certainly helping Tulsi Gabbard spread her Russian propaganda about biolabs in Ukraine.
So that is why Anna Paulina Luna is having this hearing — to get some of these ideas more out into the mainstream. And this is why I’m involved, because they are going to make it about vaccines. This is five-G-microchips kind of stuff that we’re talking about here.
Just because there was this one line in a Project Artichoke document about trying to trick somebody into taking drugs for interrogation by giving them a fake vaccine — an idea that was dismissed by Sidney Gottlieb because he thought MKUltra should be more covert — it’s now become a popular thing with the anti-vaxxers. Because of this one reference, there’s now this whole idea that fake vaccines were used for mind control.
And just to show that the Venn diagram of all of these crazy people is becoming a perfect circle, there’s a bunch of lab leak stuff involved in this too. Tulsi Gabbard, in addition to releasing JFK and MKUltra information which was supposedly taken out of her office by the CIA — her office was raided by the CIA and all these secret documents were removed, and then Anna Paulina Luna got them back — it’s so much dumb drama. These documents don’t say anything.
Ultimately, it comes down to: Fauci did the pandemic. So let’s get the NIH. Let’s get our national security apparatus. Let’s get our intelligence program. Let’s get the whole U.S. government. And that’s why I am here today. It’s anti-vax. It’s lab leak. I already know about all this stuff, so might as well learn about MKUltra.
There’s just not that much to learn about MKUltra. It was mostly a bunch of CIA people who read too much science fiction and decided they were going to start trying to do some of those things themselves, and probably were not very successful for the most part. They did a lot of unethical things in the process.
The Republicans have brought two witnesses. One of them is a historian — Stephen Kinzer, who wrote a book called Poisoner in Chief about Sidney Gottlieb. No idea really what he’s going to talk about — I’m new to this area. The other guy, Tom O’Neill, is a journalist who has written a book called Chaos about how Charles Manson was a CIA asset and MKUltra was kind of Manchurian candidating him or something. So these people are certified tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
And really, it all comes back to the same thing — here’s a convenient conspiracy that’s kind of an exciting story. Who doesn’t want to hear about, oh my God, the government was doing all this shady stuff to do mind control? I bet it was the Democrats who did it. I bet it was Joe Biden. He was somehow involved. You know, it comes back to this every single time. The old way of doing things, aka American democracy, was not a good way of doing things anymore. And we need to move to this more dictatorial format of government, which I personally disagree with strongly.
I really, really am upset by the fact that this whole thing — the collapse of American democracy, the death of my country, the subversion of normal processes — we are literally having a congressional hearing funded by our tax dollars about insane conspiracy theories. I’m resentful that these people are being such clowns about it.
All of this stuff is going to be a complete and total circus today. It’s going to be a clown show. Liz has already reported that there are some interesting people waiting to get into the hearing. I expect there to be a lively audience and probably some dramatic moments. So I’m glad that we’re watching along.
But it makes me really sad because at the end of the day, we can laugh at how stupid it is, and it’s going to be so, so, so unbelievably stupid. But that stupidity is what’s going to be the end of America as we know it. And I think it’s really important for people to understand that their tax dollars are paying for this. This is what our elected leaders are doing. Especially since there is a midterm election coming up in a few months, I really think that Americans need to see how their elected officials are representing them — how they are meeting this moment of tremendous crisis for our country — and they’re meeting it by having congressional oversight hearings about mind control and giving people LSD and experimenting on people.
There’s no secret that we can uncover. All the people who were involved in Project MKUltra are dead. They are not currently part of the dark web or whatever that’s running the government, the Shadow State, the deep state. The deep state these days seems to me like it is the Russian government more than anything else. And the fascists are pretty open about it. Anna Paulina Luna is one of those people.
Lauren Boebert is also on this. She tweeted back in April that Anna Paulina Luna was like, we’re going to have an MKUltra hearing, and Boebert was like, I’ve been waiting my whole time in Congress for this. This is just crazy to think that the people of Lauren Boebert’s district in Colorado elected somebody who has been waiting her entire congressional career for the opportunity to put on a show hearing where you’re basically going to codify this MKUltra conspiracy theory bullshit.
The strategy here is just to repeat these ridiculous conspiracy theories over and over and over again until they become true for most people. That’s what happened with the lab leak. As somebody who has co-authored multiple papers of original research showing that there was no lab leak, or at least that the evidence we have is inconsistent with a lab leak — the pandemic did not start because of a lab leak, it did not start because of Tony Fauci, it did not start because of virology research, it did not start because of dangerous gain-of-function research — but every time I open Twitter, I see Rand Paul and a zillion other Republicans all saying that it is a known fact that it is a lab leak, the debate is over. And they just say this over and over again.
[Hearing begins.]
So in other words, those documents are meaningless. Super organized. These dudes look exactly like I thought they were going to. Not sure if this guy’s crazy or not. He’s an academic. Could mean he’s crazy. Not that secret, evidently. Right, because most of it got burned. I don’t think anybody’s disputing that that’s bad. Sherlock Holmes in it, huh? Yeah, so they drugged him with LSD and threw him out a window. That’s how the story goes. I would agree with that.
Oh my god, I’m so sorry about the audio
Okay guys, I don’t know what’s going on with my sound. I’m gonna try to figure this out right now. I’m just closing the stream and I’m gonna restart it. Last time I did this there was an echo, so I wore my AirPods this time and I’m a little worried that perhaps that is causing the issue. So I’m going to take them out and we’ll just have to live with an echo if there’s going to be one.
The other issue is being able to share the system audio. And that’s what I’m doing right now.
Oh my god, I’m so sorry that everybody’s missing this because this is so incredibly fucking dumb. I’m gonna get this fixed before Lauren Boebert comes on. He’s talking about a poisoning MKUltra experiment in France that involved poisoned bread.
Oh, this is so annoying. I don’t know why it’s not working. Sorry, guys. So irritating. You guys, I’m just truly so astonished at how stupid this thing is. And I can’t believe that we’re missing it. I’ve almost got it back. I’m just completely reopening everything and we’re going to open this up on YouTube and then I’m going to move it back. We’re going to try this again.
Back online — and I missed the best parts
Hi, everybody. Sorry about this.
MACE:
Do you see now what I’m talking about when you say that the NIH doesn’t have integrity problems and trust issues? Did you hear the applause in this room? That should tell you right now that you’re pretty tone deaf to what the public thinks about how the NIH handled COVID and the cover-up — not only the funding of it, but the cover-up involved in the aftermath. Do you acknowledge that?
It’s a lie. I’m sorry. That’s not my understanding. That’s right, Liz.
Oh, he doesn’t like people clapping for her. Thank you.
Okay. I think I fixed everything. So sorry about all those technical issues. What you just missed was him basically talking about how Charles Manson was a CIA asset. And there’s Liz. She’s great.
[Reading viewer comments:] Going to be the first [gaveling] on record. I thought nobody was getting gaveled out.
It’s mind control bioweapons. If there was such a decision, I don’t think it’s known that he was murdered. Here we go. And they invented Lyme disease. There were a lot of Nazi scientists who came over in Operation Paperclip.
Boebert questions Kinzer on communist brainwashing
BOEBERT:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you to two of our witnesses who are here to actually talk on our subject here today. Mr. Kinzer, in your book, Poisoner in Chief, you describe how Project MKUltra was authorized by CIA director Allen Dulles in April of nineteen fifty-three — an umbrella program for research into the covert use of biological and chemical materials for mind control and interrogation. What specific geopolitical and intelligence concerns, particularly regarding alleged Soviet and Chinese “brainwashing” of Korean War prisoners, drove this authorization? And how did Sidney Gottlieb’s unique background and personality and worldview shape the program’s direction and methods and ethical challenges?
That’s because Sidney Gottlieb is Jewish.
KINZER:
Let me start by answering your second question about Gottlieb. He was a very different person from all of the other senior CIA officers of that era. Most of them came from silver-spoon backgrounds. They went to the same prep schools and the same Ivy League colleges and belonged to the same yacht clubs and worked for the same law firms and international banks. Sidney Gottlieb was the son of Orthodox Jewish refugees from Central Europe. He had a limp. He had a stutter. He went to Hebrew school. He was so different from all of the other officers.
Upon reflection, I think this may not have been an accident. I think that people at the CIA understood that whoever had this job was going to be doing some awful, terrible things that would be very bloody, that they might become known, and it might be necessary to blame it all on somebody. And they didn’t want to have to blame it all on one of their own. So Gottlieb actually became the person on whom everything was blamed. In fact, when he testified in secret here in Congress in the nineteen seventies, he complained that there were documents on which various signatures had been redacted, but his alone had remained — so is again a way of diverting attention away from the institutional responsibility of the CIA and trying to blame it on one crazy person.
As for the international situation at the time — I think it’s very important to understand this because there is a sort of parallel to today. The CIA misinterpreted several key incidents in the world, including those to which you referred: the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty [FLAG: transcribed as “Cardinal Mincenti” — verify spelling] in Hungary, and then the return of Korean War prisoners. Neither of those episodes really had to do with mind control, but in the CIA, they were interpreted that way. And this gave the CIA a reason to pretend that its research was purely defensive. So I think when you consider the world situation and the sense in Washington that we’re surrounded by enemies, that becomes a very dangerous environment.
Conspiracy theories stem from the growth of the covert sphere. There’s a great contradiction in American life — that we pretend to uphold certain principles at home and abroad, but it’s evident to many Americans that we actually operate in opposition to those principles, and we operate by secret and anti-democratic means. That contributes to suspicion of government. The very existence of MKUltra proves that some of the wildest fantasies about secret government research are actually close to reality. That makes the paranoid mindset seem ever more rational.
BOEBERT:
MKUltra ultimately encompassed at least a hundred and forty-nine sub-projects involving more than eighty institutions — universities, hospitals, prisons, pharmaceutical companies — often funded through cutout foundations to conceal CIA sponsorship. Can you detail how these funding and operational security mechanisms worked in practice?
KINZER:
As for the foundations — Gottlieb created a couple of bogus foundations. They’re called cutouts in CIA slang. These are foundations that appear to be independent but are actually fully funded and controlled by the CIA. It was those foundations that approached hospitals and clinics and asked them to become involved in research, particularly into LSD. So many of the institutions where these experiments took place did not even realize that those foundations were actually covers for the CIA.
BOEBERT:
Thank you very much. And Madam Chair, I yield.
Nancy Mace continues her reign of stupidity
LUNA:
I now recognize Representative Mace from South Carolina.
MACE:
Dr. Ginexi, you work with the NIH, correct?
DR. GINEXI:
No, I am no longer affiliated with the NIH.
MACE:
When did you leave the NIH?
DR. GINEXI:
April of last year.
MACE:
Did you ever speak with Anthony Fauci or any of your NIH colleagues when you were there?
Another great scientific mind. I forgot that she was going to be there.
DR. GINEXI:
No.
MACE:
Do you believe that the NIH or Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about COVID?
DR. GINEXI:
No.
MACE:
Are you familiar with Dr. Fauci’s statements to Congress about COVID?
DR. GINEXI:
No.
MACE:
You didn’t watch any of Dr. Fauci. You worked at the NIH and you didn’t watch any of Dr. Fauci.
I love how they think that people at NIH, like we’re just sitting around all day watching Tony Fauci.
MACE:
Do you think that the COVID shots harm American citizens?
DR. GINEXI:
No, I do not.
MACE:
Do you think that the COVID shots cause turbo cancers?
DR. GINEXI:
No.
MACE:
Have you read any — do you know if the NIH or NIAID track COVID shot injuries?
That’s not their job. The CDC and the FDA do that.
DR. GINEXI:
I am not aware of any harmful tracking. This is not my area of expertise.
MACE:
What is your area of expertise?
DR. GINEXI:
I’m a research psychologist, and I did not work at NIAID.
MACE:
And you’re here for what reason?
DR. GINEXI:
I am here to testify about what is happening to the NIH right now.
You’re doing great, Liz. Don’t let her throw you off.
MACE:
You are here to testify about MKUltra?
DR. GINEXI:
I am not an MKUltra expert.
MACE:
Why did the Dems send you here if you’re not an MKUltra expert?
DR. GINEXI:
But I am an expert in human subjects protection, which is related, and in the conduct of human subjects research.
She’s an expert in the ways that the government is being dismantled, and that’s why the Democrats asked her. But you don’t know anything about MKUltra, which is the purpose of this hearing. And I’m grateful for her being here.
MACE:
All right. So I have a couple questions for our witnesses who are here to talk about MKUltra. Mr. O’Neill, what are some of the worst abuses that you’re aware of in the MKUltra program?
She’s very, very, very fucking stupid.
O’NEILL:
I can start by naming one in particular that always sticks in my mind. In the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, a group of African American inmates was segregated and fed what were described in the protocol as double, triple, and quadruple doses of LSD every day for seventy-seven days.
MACE:
Did they all survive?
O’NEILL:
We have no idea what happened to them. This has stuck with me ever since I wrote that book. What happened to them? Did they ever find out what was given to them? Did they think they were going crazy?
MACE:
Do you think we’re still experimenting on prisoners or people in prison today? Yes, we’re giving them gender-affirming care.
O’NEILL:
I don’t have any information about that. I’m hoping there’ll be another book about what’s happening now.
MACE:
What are some of the worst abuses in MKUltra?
KINZER:
There were many. The Frank Olson case, which was referenced earlier — that was a murder. I don’t believe that was a suicide. The motivation was because he was going to be a whistleblower. He worked at the CIA. He worked in the development of biological weapons. He was planning to go public and announce that the United States government was using biological weapons in the Korean War. And also he was going to talk about what he knew about MKUltra experiments, including lethal experiments.
MACE:
How many people do you think died through the MKUltra program or were murdered?
KINZER:
No idea. Those who died largely were outside the United States. Many people were experimented to death in that safe house in Germany that I visited. And people in the neighborhood told me they knew what was going on in that house, and that people who were experimented to death are now buried in what used to be forest plots that are now covered over.
MACE:
Do you think the German government knew what the U.S. government was doing? Do you think there was a partnership there?
KINZER:
Yes. There is a memo that was written by the German Secret Service to Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of Germany, telling him: Americans are here capturing citizens, capturing people and conducting extreme experiments, which are in violation of German law. And Adenauer decided to put that aside and not to investigate further.
MACE:
I have one more question. Is this a massive cover-up by the U.S. government?
KINZER:
It’s certainly a coverup of what happened in the past.
MACE:
Mr. O’Neill?
O’NEILL:
Oh, absolutely, yes.
Look at all these institutions we should shut down!
LUNA:
I now recognize Mr. Kerr from Pennsylvania for five minutes.
KERR:
To Dr. Kinzer and Mr. O’Neill — can you name the locations, say the prisons, the hospitals, the cutout institutions, that would be familiar to the American people?
O’NEILL:
At the end of the nineteen seventy-seven hearings, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Daniel Inouye demanded that there be an investigation to find out who were the perpetrators, where were the experiments conducted, and most importantly, to locate victims, compensate them, notify them — because many didn’t even know they’d been experimented on — and give them lifetime medical care. President Jimmy Carter and Attorney General Griffin Bell said the federal government will begin an investigation. That never happened. Instead, the CIA created something called the Victim’s Task Force to investigate itself. It was a two-man investigation, and they completely avoided institutional experimental programs.
You’re asking about the hospitals — the Oklahoma City Hospital, the Lackland Air Force Base Hospital, Lexington Addiction Center, the Holmesburg Prison, Vacaville Prison, universities all over the country, Yale, Ivy League universities — none of those records had been touched. There was also a criminal investigation that was supposed to start into Gottlieb’s destruction of the records. The DOJ was supposed to investigate. They just kept passing it off and passing it off. I asked Griffin Bell what happened to all those investigations, and he said, “It just must have fallen through the cracks.”
KERR:
Is it possible that documentation remains at the prisons, the treatment centers, the universities where these things were conducted?
O’NEILL:
Yeah. I found Dr. West’s records at UCLA in his files. Hospital records are really hard to get because of HIPAA laws, and prison records from the Bureau of Prisons do have a lot. So yeah, it is possible. There are still documents buried places.
KERR:
What were the average ages of the people experimented on?
O’NEILL:
Well, there were adolescent studies done in juvenile detention facilities and jails with kids who were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, and at institutional schools for wayward kids — the National Training School for Boys here in Washington, D.C. had them. So it ranged from pre-adolescent through any age.
KERR:
If you could hazard a guess at the number of potential victims?
O’NEILL:
There were a hundred and forty-nine programs that we know of. And that’s what we know of. Everything we know of is minuscule compared to what was really going on. I mean, that could have been in the tens of thousands. And I believe that’s another reason that nothing was pursued — because if those people were compensated, it could have bankrupted the United States.
KINZER:
There’s been considerable progress in this regard in Canada. There was MKUltra research going on at a psychiatric hospital in Canada, and the Canadian government has made a real effort to try to find out who the victims were, also to compensate them and to provide them with medical treatment. So if we’re looking for an example of a place where it was done better, even though it was on a much smaller scale, Canada would be a place to look.
KERR:
Other than embarrassment to the federal government — the individuals involved are probably all deceased at this point — what is the reason for the mass redaction of the information that we do have?
KINZER:
Shame? I think it stands to reason that the individuals involved in conducting and authorizing this activity are probably all deceased. I make those arguments in my FOIA requests, but it doesn’t get me anywhere.
[Time expires.]
The very first black site was MKULTRA
LUNA:
I’m now going to go to something I believe Representative Boebert would like to elaborate on. Dr. Kinzer, what you stated about potentially their bodies — the German government — if that is indeed the case, can you elaborate further on what you were hearing from people in that area and on the potential locations of bodies?
KINZER:
First of all, the memo that Chancellor Adenauer received is on the record. You can find that memo warning that these operations are going on. I did speak to people who lived in that area, and they all understood. Some of them had cooperated with an investigation by Der Spiegel that called that house the CIA torture center. In that article, it said there were deaths, but the number is not known. So it was a secret to us. But what we were doing in that house was really not even a secret to the people in the neighborhood. It reminds me of the bombing of Cambodia. It was a secret to us. But if you lived in Cambodia, you would have known about it.
That all these neighbors knew what was going on and nobody said anything. They were like, oh, it’s cool — the German government’s working with the U.S. government — like, what are you talking about?
LUNA:
Just to confirm — when you found the initial transcripts with the chancellor, was there a response from the U.S. government to the Germans?
KINZER:
No. The U.S. government would possibly have advised Adenauer not to pursue it, but I don’t think Adenauer would have even needed to be told that. He would see it. He would understand that his close partnership with the United States made it impossible for him to criticize anything the U.S. was doing. Don’t forget, this was not so long after the end of the Second World War.
There was never any effort by the United States to reveal anything about what happened in Germany. One of the FOIA requests that I made that was never fulfilled, and one that I would urge you to pursue, is: what was Sidney Gottlieb doing during two years in Germany? He went to Germany and lived there as a case officer. I was never able to find out what he did during those two years in Germany. There were huge numbers of MKUltra experiments going on in Germany, including a number that were fatal. And since he was in charge of MKUltra, that would be a very interesting catch of documents to find.
LUNA:
We will definitely be following up. For either Dr. Kinzer or Mr. O’Neill: declassified CIA records have revealed that officers deployed overseas used USAID funding as official cover for operational work that had nothing to do with the mission of USAID — i.e. humanitarian aid, medical relief. In some cases, CIA officers operated under USAID cover and engaged in lethal activity. Is it possible that USAID may have been used overseas to further MKUltra, for example, on prisoners of war? Since part of USAID’s mission was to administer drugs to poor and needy populations, would the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign populations or creating dissociated states for interrogation?
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
KINZER:
I can’t speak directly to AID, but it’s certainly true that during this period, the United States was using publicly announced official government agencies to carry out covert action. We now know, for example, that five percent of all the money appropriated for the Marshall Plan was diverted for covert activities. A number of U.S. agencies were used as cover by covert operatives. That AID could have been one of them sounds very likely to me. And the NIMH admitted allowing itself to be used for covert funding of MKUltra experiments in the nineteen seventies when the operation was disclosed.
All the Manchurian candidates
BURCHETT:
Thank you, Chair. I remember when all the talk about MKUltra broke, and there were lawsuits, and the CIA and the federal government said that this didn’t exist. And then they came back and said, well, it does exist, but we’re not doing it anymore. My question is: which lie do we believe?
KINZER:
If any current research is going on and if it’s conducted in any comparable level of secrecy to the original MKUltra, it’s very deeply secret.
BURCHETT:
It’s going to be hard for Congress to act when they’re so dadgum compromised. I put myself in the place of one of those senior CIA officers — the ones back in the nineteen fifties — and I’m thinking: well, other people must be doing this, we’d be falling behind if we don’t do it. And nobody’s looking over our shoulders. I think there is a definite air of urgency and total secrecy.
BURCHETT:
What are the possibilities that what we’ve learned in MKUltra — now that it has advanced so much to algorithms and the computer and getting to loners — that some of these loners could, through this mass propagation of whatever you’re doing, cause someone to maybe take a shot at a president?
Manchurian candidate shit.
O’NEILL:
I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about the Butler shooting and I guess even the Charlie Kirk shooting. I just hate to speculate because I don’t know. I have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programmed through radio waves or through their computer activity. So I would never hazard a guess, except to say what I’ve already said — that they developed means that we’ve never been told about many years ago. And I imagine they’ve evolved to be much more effective now.
BURCHETT:
Don’t you think that they could cast this broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe they don’t know the exact person it’s going to affect, but they know what type of person it’s going to affect, and they know it’s going to happen? And that way they can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but they think it will happen. And then that way they can sort of wash their hands of this whole thing — we didn’t have anything to do with it — but in fact, they really did, because they put this out there.
I love that he did not follow up on the MKUltra and Charlie Kirk.
KINZER:
It sounds to me like you’re describing something like the Martin Luther King assassination. The FBI didn’t carry it out, but it created such a climate — denouncing King as the most dangerous man in America, putting out all this material about how he was helping communists — that they must have thought: it’s going to filter down. Somebody will take action, and then we can say we didn’t have anything to do with it. And James Earl Ray was a third-rate thief. He made an incredible shot — one foot on a commode, one foot in a bathtub, leaning out of a window. The next day, all the shrubbery was cut in front of the flophouse he was staying in. There’s a lot on that one that won’t be discussed.
And the evidence for this is that the shrubbery was trimmed outside the flophouse.
Mockingbird, radio waves, and direct energy weapons
BOEBERT:
Thank you. When we’re bringing up Operation Naomi and MKUltra, there’s Operation Mockingbird that was going on at the same time as MKUltra, and it really ties into what Congressman Burchett was talking about with radio waves — where you have this Venn diagram of individual people and the military casting a broader net. So you have the radio waves, computer activity, Operation Mockingbird, the programming that is taking place. So what do you see in relation to what was happening then and what we are seeing now that could be types of the same kind of programs, and even using direct energy weapons or the like?
O’NEILL:
I would just like to say — there was an objective outlined in the early proposals for MKUltra to do experimentation to see whether they could do mass conversion, you know, convert entire populations.
Mass formation psychosis is something that Robert Malone always talks about. This is bioweapons of MKUltra stuff at population scale.
O’NEILL:
And Operation Mockingbird played into that. If people don’t know, that was where CIA assets or co-opted people in the media would write basically propaganda and try to control the thoughts and beliefs of the population.
BOEBERT:
Is it still going on today?
O’NEILL:
I wouldn’t be surprised.
BOEBERT:
Dr. Kinzer, do you have anything on this?
KINZER:
I would say only that in the modern age, maybe radio waves and drugs are not necessary to control people’s minds. We have such a great collaboration of advertising, propaganda, press, social media. Marginalized and real debate is frustrated because people are not given access to full amounts of information. So that’s a way of controlling minds of populations. It doesn’t even require sophisticated electronics.
In other words, release my FOIA records so that I can write my next book.
O’NEILL:
I would just like to reiterate — conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more and more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the U.S., and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all. But there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere, and that is what makes people realize that things that used to seem really far-fetched are not so far-fetched after all.
KINZER:
I’d argue with this by saying that I don’t think it’s withholding information from people, it’s lying to people that is causing the problem with trust.
The American taxpayer whose money is being stolen is being stolen by this current administration, not anything else, not certainly our government agencies working on behalf of American people.
LUNA:
Thank you, Representative Boebert. Representative Burleson, do you have any further questions?
Charles Manson was the CIA’s MKULTRA muse
BURLESON:
Mr. O’Neill, going back to Charles Manson and the Helter Skelter incident — can you explain how someone who is an illiterate musician somehow became a cult leader and was able to inspire all of these individuals to do crazy things?
O’NEILL:
Unfortunately, I spent twenty years trying to find out how that happened. What I was able to prove was that from the moment Manson was released from federal prison in nineteen sixty-seven, he violated his parole, went to the Bay Area without permission, and was immediately put under the supervision of a federal parole officer who basically gave him leniency as he gathered his group of followers, gave them drugs, dominated them, turned them into more or less subservient robots who would do anything he said — all under the watchful eye of a parole officer named Roger Smith, who was also doing drug research at the same clinic that Jolly West had set up his operation.
So, I mean, this whole thing is so dumb. The idea is that MKUltra was basically committing all these crimes nonstop and was really, really successful at mind control — when twenty years in, Sidney Gottlieb, the guy who ran the program, said it was a complete failure. Tom O’Neill is saying that literally MKUltra had hired Charles Manson as a consultant because he was so good at being a cult leader and doing mind control. This makes absolutely no sense. There’s no proof of any of this — there’s this parole officer, and there’s this clinic, and there’s Charles Manson, and he’s giving everybody LSD and they’re going out and murdering people because he’s a serial killer and he’s insane. And somehow this is like, the CIA saw this and said, let’s hire that guy. Why is a parole officer running an amphetamine research clinic? And you know, he’s Charles Manson’s parole officer. What are you talking about?
O’NEILL:
I believe he was manipulated, and at the very least given freedom to do what he did while he was being observed.
O’NEILL:
And then the same individual Jolly West ends up — a year after the letter that I quoted in my statement, a year later on July third, nineteen fifty-four — a three-year-old girl was abducted and found later in a gravel pit, murdered, next to a car that had been abandoned. The search party that found the little girl’s body was approached by a man who was an airman at the base. He asked them where he was and how he had gotten there. He was arrested for the murder and described by the military officers who had him in custody as being in a trance or dazed. He didn’t have any drugs in his system. He didn’t recognize his wife when she was brought to see him. And at his trial, where Jolly West was his advising psychiatrist who examined him, it emerged that he had actually been being treated at the hospital at Lackland in an experimental program to cure his chronic debilitating migraine headaches. And he was executed four years later. And then years later, West ends up volunteering to handle Jack Ruby.
BURLESON:
In your expert opinion, were Jack Ruby and Manson assets of the intelligence agencies specifically pertaining to MKUltra?
O’NEILL:
Theoretically — Manson, I’ve never been able to prove absolutely. Jack Ruby — I believe. The Warren Commission investigation had Allen Dulles, the former CIA director who authorized and ran MKUltra until he was fired by President Kennedy, sitting on it. The CIA liaison to the commission — who handled the information coming from the CIA back and forth to the Warren Commission — was Richard Helms, who was a direct supervisor of Jolly West. They knew who West was. They knew what West was capable of and what they had paid him to do and what he had reported to them that he could do, including inducing mental disorders in people. That was never disclosed to the commission as far as anyone knows. So I believe that West was put in there to keep Jack Ruby from telling his story.
Good lord. But you don’t have any actual evidence of this.
LUNA:
I now recognize Representative Boebert for five minutes. Okay. Closing. I just want to thank you all for being here today and we will be following up. Dr. Kinzer, on your request to fully redact — I’ll be following up personally with the director of the CIA on the MKUltra files that we do have. Also, as I noted earlier, there will be more that will be declassified, specifically pertaining to newly found records. I did also want to just state that for the record, in regards to what statements were made earlier regarding the German government, we will also be following up on that. If there are indeed people that were victims of this that have been buried, we would like to know who those people are and who their families are as well, in order to correct the historical wrongdoings of this government.
Without further ado — all members have five legislative days within to submit materials and additional written questions for the witnesses, which will be forwarded to them. Without objection, the task force stands adjourned.
What this hearing was really about
Whew. All right. That was unhinged, and I’m really, really sorry that we missed some of the best parts. I was screaming in frustration because I could see them occurring while I was desperately trying to fix my audio. I really apologize for that, guys.
Next time I’m just going to go ahead and restart my computer fresh before doing one of these things, because I think that all of the hooking up, unhooking, all the stuff that I do with my computer all day just made the software unhappy. So I hope it wasn’t MKUltra mind control. I guess the CIA could have been getting into my computer — I know that I’m a high-value target, so I do try to keep my cybersecurity tight, but they got me again.
Let me just go over a few of the highlights that happened here. I think probably one of the things that people really should keep in mind when thinking about this hearing is that the point of the hearing is not actually to interrogate things that happened seventy years ago or hold anybody accountable for it. It’s really to make sure that there is a pretext for doing all of the dismantling to the government that they are going to do.
They really covered all of the bases. They got into MK Naomi, and that is some advanced-level MKUltra conspiracy knowledge. MK Naomi, as one of the witnesses said, was a sort of joint collaborative effort between the U.S. military and the CIA in which they were trying to make mind-controlled bioweapons. Now, this made me scream internally the second that I heard it, because the former ASPR — the Administrator for Strategic Preparedness and Response, Bob Kadlec — put out a report last year with the Scowcroft Institute at Texas A&M University that basically said that the pandemic was a neurocognitive bioweapon that was made to induce long COVID and disrupt Western society. So the idea of MK Naomi is still very much an idea that’s floating around. And that’s where this gets really chilling.
This whole hearing was about holding our own government accountable. They get these two expert witnesses in — Tom O’Neill, who wrote this absolutely unhinged book in which he finds all of these connections. And I mean, this is classic conspiracy theory stuff. You have your little photo here and your newspaper clipping here on your little conspiracy board and you’re drawing things with a string between them, but you’re not actually confirming that those connections are anything real. That’s really what guys like Tom O’Neill do best. They point to a lot of different facts that, when taken together and framed in the right way, look like they could be nefarious.
They are arguing that the US was in the business of making bioweapons to do this mind control at population scale. They’re alleging that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by somebody who got MKUltra’d into assassinating him. And that there have been all these other deaths, including of a three-year-old girl on a military base, from somebody who got MKUltra’d. So they’re making Manchurian candidates. They’re making secret assassins. They’re doing all this mind control stuff. And they are really not talking about the actual horrible stuff that happened with MKUltra.
I mean, they did a little bit. You know, my colleague and friend Liz Ginexi was there getting all sorts of shit from Nancy Mace and from Lauren Boebert. Two women who, I should add, are completely unqualified to ask somebody like Dr. Ginexi a serious question — which they demonstrated clearly, because Nancy Mace just started going in on her about how she doesn’t have any expertise about MKUltra. And you know what? I don’t have any expertise about MKUltra specifically either. I’ve looked into it just because I figured I had to, because MKUltra is the same thing as lab leak. It is the same thing as anti-vax. It is the same thing as every single pandemic conspiracy theory — that we actually had lockdowns, that people died from vaccines, that people died from school closures, that people died because of pandemic and public health measures, or that Tony Fauci started the pandemic. This is the same playbook.
And I’m going to get some clips to share with you tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even be able to bring Liz on and we can chat about it together. She started getting asked about, you know, did Fauci tell her about how he started a lab leak, and did she have knowledge of Fauci starting the lab leak? Liz Ginexi was not a senior program official at NIAID — which is the IC that Tony Fauci ran when he was in charge of it for fifty years. NIAID is the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That’s the virus department at NIH. That’s what Tony Fauci ran. Liz Ginexi did not run that. She is a research psychologist by training, and she has administered nearly a billion dollars in federal programs over the years or contributed to them, which has resulted in some really tremendous breakthroughs.
NIH has been a tremendous powerhouse for the American economy. It has allowed us to have all kinds of innovative new drugs. I think three hundred and fifty-four out of three hundred and fifty-six drugs that were approved between two thousand ten and two thousand nineteen, Liz said in her opening statement, were all the direct results of NIH-funded research. So she was there to actually talk about what the government was really doing in terms of scientific research.
USAID did not participate in mind control experiments
Because MKUltra ended in nineteen seventy-three. And while horrible things were done as part of MKUltra, nobody is pro-unconsented human experimentation on prisoners and children and people in the hospital. Nobody would take a position that would be for that even if they actually were for that. So I find this whole thing to be very disingenuous.
The question kept coming up: do you think this is still going on? Do you think there’s still MKUltra-ing happening? And that resulted in probably my favorite moment from this hearing — when Tom O’Neill suggested that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by somebody who is the product of modern-day MKUltra. The experts both talked about algorithms and things like that, as did some of the congress people, who were entirely Republicans. The point of all of them, though, comes back to this: trying to convince the American people that a bunch of things that didn’t happen actually happened, and that the government, the old government, the government under President Joe Biden, was not working for Americans and was doing all of these horrible things. Tyranny. Eroding our most basic freedoms and liberties. All those vaccines that killed so many people.
The reality is COVID killed a lot of people during the pandemic. Vaccines didn’t kill people during the pandemic. COVID killed people during the pandemic. And that’s the truth.
What they keep doing is bringing these experts in for these hearings to spread information that they talk about as if it’s true, and it’s completely not. And you saw Tom O’Neill and Stephen Kinzer say to almost everything that they don’t know — because they don’t. Most of the MKUltra files were destroyed. They were incinerated. They were burned in nineteen seventy-three, more than fifty years ago. So we are never going to find out a lot of these things. And you know what? If you want to go on a little document hunt and try to find administrative records and metadata that would shed more light on this, by all means, do it. I don’t think anybody opposes compensating the survivors of people who were wronged by the MKUltra program. Some of the stuff that they’re talking about is pretty horrific and some of it’s true. So I do think that those efforts should happen — but not in this context.
Why do we need to have a congressional hearing about this? The reason the Republicans think we need to have a congressional hearing about this is because they want the appearance of something official. So that when they say these ridiculous lies over and over again — for example, Charlie Kirk got assassinated by a guy who was MKUltra’d — people are going to say, well, congress people are saying this in a congressional hearing under oath. So there must be some truth to it. They’re experts — Congress brought them in to provide expert testimony.
And even though I know that those two guys are full of shit, you know, they’re documenting some historical things that happened with MKUltra, but again, the documents largely don’t exist. While it’s totally fine to be speculative and to have an opinion and to have a belief — all totally fine — don’t come into Congress into a task force on declassification and insinuate that a program that ended more than fifty years ago is still going on today. And it’s responsible for assassinations of political figures. This is not what you do when you’re saying we want accountability for something that ended fifty-three years ago, while showing no evidence whatsoever that it’s going on now in the U.S. federal government.
The same playbook, coming again from Rand Paul
Prior to this hearing, there was a hearing before the Senate that involved this guy before the HSGAC Committee — the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Rand Paul is the chair of — where he brought in this guy, James Erdman III, who is a so-called CIA whistleblower. And you know what? He’s blowing the whistle on all of their big issues. He blew the whistle on MKUltra. He blew the whistle on Fauci lab leak stuff. He blew the whistle on foreign biolabs. He’s just blowing the whistle on every single talking point that Tulsi Gabbard raised on her way out the door at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Now, in HHS, we’ve seen this government use things like this — CDC screwed up the pandemic, so let’s gut it. NIH was evil Fauci and the lab leak, so let’s gut that, let’s not give out any of these grants. FDA is a total shit show, so let’s turn that into a mechanism for extortion. They just keep using all of these different things to justify the cuts that are happening. And ultimately, these are all lies being used to justify taking tax dollars away from services that Americans benefit from and redirecting them to the oligarchs that are trying to take control of our democracy.
I really find these things to be intolerable and full of liars. And the reason that I’m watching all of this stuff is because I agree that the government needs to be held accountable for the lies that it’s told that have harmed Americans. And what’s happening now in these hearings is exactly that — we are hearing our elected officials, instead of standing up for us and our democracy, talking about the wildest conspiracy theories you can possibly imagine.
They are trying to say that USAID, which provided vaccinations, which provided HIV medications, which provided cancer treatments to people all over the world — and we’ve been hearing in the last week about all the people who have died as a result of not having the foreign aid that USAID was providing — they’re trying to say that USAID has been used to secretly continue the MKUltra program, doing unethical, without-informed-consent experimentation on poor people around the world, and calling it foreign aid.
In my case, I know of multiple ways that the lack of USAID funding has impacted the Bundibugyo Ebola virus response in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For example, one of the reasons this was detected so late was because cold-chain infrastructure that had been funded by USAID had been dismantled, so samples were not able to travel a long distance from Tori province to Kinshasa for testing. People have died as a result of not having USAID. And there is absolutely no evidence of anything like what they’re alleging. That is reprehensible to say, especially because it’s being used to justify the fact that USAID was cut at all, and now people are trying to hold the government accountable for the fact that it’s going to kill millions of kids. And they don’t want to be held accountable for that. So they’re going to redirect the blame.
They’re going to say that actually, it was the old government. It was not the Trump government. Welcome to the golden age. Welcome to our tyranny. We hate Joe Biden’s MKUltra tyranny. We’re going to put a stop to all of this bad — and made-up — shit that was going on. So that’s really what this hearing was about today.
Thanks for sticking with me through all of this
I just think it’s really important for people to follow along with this and hold their feet to the fire. Somebody needs to be documenting this, because one day there will be the opportunity for accountability. And when that day comes, I want to be able to point to when Nancy Mace told Liz Ginexi that she wasn’t an expert on anything and why is she even here, if all she wants to talk about is the destruction being done to our government and not this MKUltra conspiracy theory bullshit.
With that — I’m not doing a daily ranting show today because I have been on here already for two hours straight, there were a lot of production issues, and I’m feeling a bit peaked because I haven’t really been having a great week health-wise. So I’m going to sign off right now, but I’m hoping that tomorrow Liz can come and join me and we can unpack a little bit more of what happened in this stupid, stupid, stupid fucking hearing.
I’m also going to be talking to my friends at the Save America Movement about writing up a Substack on this and providing some more information so that you guys can make sense of all this. Because to a lot of people, I think watching, it just looks crazy and clownish and like they’re not really very competent — which is all true, by the way. But that’s by design. The dismantling of our current form of government and its replacement with an authoritarian dictatorship is by design.
The Americans, the elected officials who have taken an oath to their constituents and to the Constitution and to our country — they need to do their job, or we should hold them accountable. And so that’s why I’m going to continue covering stupid-ass hearings like this. Because you should understand that the mechanism by which our government is being taken apart is incredibly stupid. But you do need to know about it.
Thanks very much for bearing with me through all of the production problems. And as always, I strive to improve constantly. Don’t hold it against me. I will get some clips, hopefully, that have better sound of anything that you guys missed.
If you don’t already subscribe to me, all of my content’s free. But if you subscribe, it would really help me a lot — just in terms of being able to get the word out further, being able to let you know whenever I have some new material out. Right now I think the most powerful weapons that we have to fight for our freedom and our democracy are words — sharing information, information that’s reliable, information that people can actually trust and use. And so I’m going to continue doing that.
See you tomorrow at 1 PM. I will be back for my usual ranting show. Hopefully Liz will be there too. Take care, everybody.
Links from this episode
The hearing
House Oversight Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets — hearing video (YouTube)
House Oversight Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets
James Erdman III HSGAC hearing — “Whistleblower Testimony on the COVID Coverup” (May 2026)
MKUltra and predecessor programs
Frank Olson (CIA officer thrown from hotel window) — Wikipedia
Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West (MKUltra-linked psychiatrist) — Wikipedia
Key figures
DRC/USAID context
Thank you PJ Schuster, Deborah J., Shirley Figueroa, Chris McKinney, Andrea D (Canada), and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me tomorrow at 1 pm ET and if you find this useful, please consider subscribing!
