They Could Be MK Ultra-ing Us Right Now

Better stop doing science, intelligence, national security, or democracy

On Tuesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Task Force kicked off its MK Ultra “investigation” led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Luna, along with her fellow party faithful, wasted two hours and who knows how much taxpayer money gabbing about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) infamous attempt at developing mind control techniques.

During this hearing, two of the witnesses and Congresspeople asking them questions really put their imaginations to work as they got to the bottom of a seventy-year-old program that was dumb to start with. They started with things that have been known for decades: the CIA did recruit Nazi doctors through Operation Paperclip (itself a rich vein for mining conspiracy theories). They were afraid that the doctors and scientists who weren’t convicted and hanged at Nuremberg might take their evil Nazi secrets to the Soviets, so the Army offered them jobs instead. It’s also true that some of these Nazis did work on MK Ultra projects. But that’s where the facts end and the fantasy begins.

The CIA were everywhere back in the day and they were getting up to all sorts of terrible, unethical, and totally illegal things. This is not news. MK Ultra was a real program. It was appalling, based on the records that the CIA itself has made available. The guys who ran it not only had stupid and scientifically implausible goals for doing all sorts of silly, scifi mind control things with hypnosis, LSD, various amphetamines, and “radio waves.” Sometimes they drugged people and they got hurt or died. They drugged military personnel, psychiatric patients, and prisoners. These are facts established for decades.

Yet the head of the program, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, said that it didn’t work. All that nonconsensual human experimentation and nothing to show for it but a bunch of records so shameful that the director, Richard Helms, ordered all the research records incinerated when he retired in 1973. Gottlieb destroyed them all. We will likely never know all the atrocities carried out by Gottlieb and the CIA under MK Ultra and related projects because of this. We know there was a lot more than we have records for.

In theory, that is why Luna convened this task force: to uncover any remaining secrets that might be found in classified documents and achieve “accountability.” It’s implied this will mean some form of justice for MK Ultra victims. Most are unidentified. They are all long-dead, as are all the people who perpetrated these crimes. MK Ultra happened 70 years ago. Since there is nobody alive to hold accountable, the US government will be to blame. Not the current leaders of the government—the government itself. The only solution will be to dismantle it and build something new and considerably less democratic.

This is why we will continue to endure investigations into any batshit conspiracy theory, no matter how tired or stagnant, that can be rejiggered to achieve a modern political goal. MK Ultra ended more than fifty years ago. It failed to develop mind control, because the idea was stupid and impossible from the start. MK Ultra was horrible, but not relevant to the horrors we currently face.

The hearing itself comprised two of the most useless hours of my life. I learned nothing new about MK Ultra, but I did learn a lot about how severely Luna and her colleagues are willing to debase themselves and their offices in their zeal to betray their constituents and their country.

ICYMI the MK Ultra body count now includes Charlie Kirk

The hearing itself was almost beyond belief in terms of what was said with a straight face. One of the experts, journalist Tom O’Neill, testified that Charles Manson was a CIA asset, who MK Ultra scientists enabled to continue murdering because they wanted to learn his hippie cult leader mind control secrets. He has written a book making the same claims. When asked directly if he could prove this, he was unable to offer evidence to support the claim and called it “theoretical.” He’d be able to prove it, surely, if only he could get hold of the documents that he’s never seen but he’s certain must exist.

In addition to that, murders and assassinations have been carried out by MK Ultra subjects at the CIA’s behest. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, who may have been MK Ultra’ed. In turn, he was assassinated by Jack Ruby, who was either also MK Ultra’ed or was just about to blow the whistle on the whole operation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated thanks to MK Ultra methods. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) confidently noted that James Earl Ray was a “third-rate thief” who “made an incredible shot.” This can never be proven, since a hedge outside the “flophouse” where Ray was got trimmed before the MK Ultra forensics team could come do a full work-up. MK Ultra historian Stephen Kinzer declined to full-throatedly endorse this view, but did note there was an FBI “climate” against King. It could have happened, right…?

There were reports of other deaths (O’Neill separately claimed that an airman murdered a 3 year old “in a trance” while experimentally being MK Ultra’ed and the deaths reached into the tens of thousands) and “black sites” in foreign countries. Apparently the Operation Paperclip Nazis weren’t the only Germans involved. The US was also working with the new non-Nazi German government in the 1950s, according to O’Neill, who offered as proof anecdotal reports that he heard when taking a tour of a German “chalet” where people were “experimented to death.” While Cold War-era black sites in Germany did exist, it’s unclear that it’s established the German government was in on it and that’s why the surrounding forest is full of bodies in unmarked graves. Kinzer claimed Gottlieb had a “license to kill” and that CIA officers in foreign countries requested “expendables” (people who wouldn’t be missed) for their experiments.

Luna claimed that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided cover for CIA MK Ultra assassins in Vietnam. She went on to further claim that USAID was a vehicle for mind control at scale. Instead of distributing food, medicine, and vaccines, USAID was actually experimenting on the people it claimed to be helping with foreign aid. Good thing USAID is no more!

Nearly everyone in the hearing talked about “programming” via radio waves, “direct energy weapons” per Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), poisoned bread per Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO), and algorithms and computer usage according to Burchett. The MK Naomi program, which was a CIA x Army collab, made mind control bioweapons, for MK Ultra-ing entire populations. Social media was also implicated, which was probably the only thing they got right at all, except it was in the context of “Democrats are using social media to MK Ultra people against Trump and we need to stop it at once.”

That was the point of the hearing. Once the conspiracy theories of the past were introduced as factual evidence, the next questions for O’Neill and Kinzer concerned the present: did they, the hand-picked witnesses invited by the Republicans, think MK Ultra really ever ended?

They both think MK Ultra is still going on today, as did every single Congressperson in the hearing. O’Neill discussed “mass conversion,” a popular idea in the New World Order globalist conspiracy theory universe that suggests mind control can occur at population scale. This is better known as the Great Replacement theory, the racist idea that immigrants (usually people who are not white, Muslims, and Jews) are deliberately superseding the native-born white men that this regime values above all else. Unsurprisingly, nearly all of the task force members seem to agree with it!

O’Neill also claimed that the CIA succeeded in erasing and implanting memories. They must have hit him with the MK Ultra memory eraser as to where he left the evidence supporting that claim. But probably the biggest tell was directly linking MK Ultra to two icons of the regime: Trump and Charlie Kirk. Burchett floated the idea that both Trump’s attempted assassin in Butler, PA and Charlie Kirk’s murderer were “programmed” by radio waves and some sort of unspecified “computer activity.” Zero evidence was offered to support either of these claims.

I was told this meeting was going to be about CIA mind control

Former NIH Senior Program Official and social psychologist Elizabeth Ginexi told me a few days ahead of time the Democrats asked her to appear in her capacity as an expert on federally funded studies involving human subjects. Ranking member Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) was out sick and this is a “task force” the Republicans assembled to conduct investigations into scandals they made up. They don’t have the power to really do anything besides ask questions of people who voluntarily show up to testify. Liz was on her own, but she still showed up. Even though she is no longer a public servant, she still does her duty for the American people she served during her time in government.

Liz spoke about the catastrophic damage inflicted by cuts to NIH, where she worked as a senior program official for more than twenty years, and the direct impact of those cuts to US response capacity. She talked about how these cuts have devastated our most basic capacity to respond to disease outbreaks and crippled our ability to compete in scientific innovation. She spoke about the harm these destructive cuts would do to human participants in clinical trials. Unlike MK Ultra, these would harm Americans participating voluntarily in studies of lifesaving new cancer and Alzheimer’s drugs. But the Tinfoil Hat Task Force did not want to talk about any of that.

Mostly they wanted to ask leading questions about whether or not former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci started the pandemic via a dinky subaward on a R01 grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Uh oh, more of that DANGEROUS GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH that we reckless virologists so adore. Not that a single one of the people shouting about it could define what that is. Instead they just repeated their message over and over again, demanding that Liz answer bad faith questions for which the correct answer is politically wrong.

Liz was repeatedly heckled by pearl-clutching Republicans about how nobody trusts NIH anymore after the pandemic: Lockdowns (that didn’t happen)! Vaccine injury epidemic (that didn’t happen)! mRNA vaccines killed people (that didn’t happen)! Lab leak (that didn’t happen)! Fauci did crimes against humanity (that didn’t happen)! All of the horrors that the Biden administration wrought on America were presented in their usual repetitive and completely unsupported glory.

Eli Crane went so hard at Liz that he got applause when he demanded that she speak for all of NIH on why science has lost the public’s trust and admit that it was Fauci and the lockdowns and the mandates and the pandemic. The government screwed it all up. The government is your enemy.

This is the face Nancy Mace made when she asked Liz whether she’d ever asked Fauci if he funded the lab leak. It’s the same face she made triumphantly when Liz admitted she’d never asked him “did you make COVID and lab leak it?” when she ran into him at the NIH water cooler, and again when Liz said that the Party’s version of events wasn’t her understanding, and again and again.

Together we can eliminate the scourge of democracy

Mace lost her primary, by the way, so this and all of her public appearances until her term ends will be an audition for her next role as a pro-Big Brother lobbyist. After haranguing Liz for not getting Fauci’s confession—who she was in the same room with four times in more than twenty years (I asked)—Mace’s triumph was complete when Liz truthfully said she is not a MK Ultra expert and was instead asked by “the Dems” (per Mace) to speak about human subjects protections.

As a research psychologist who oversaw nearly a billion dollars’ worth of NIH-funded research during her career, Liz is a subject matter expert on human subjects research. Mace made the ultimate Mace face, then abruptly shifted to O’Neill and Kinzer, who were only too happy to resume jabbering about speculative MK Ultra atrocities that they can’t wait to write their next books about. If anything is unwelcome at these hearings, it’s actual expertise. Can’t let those boring facts get in the way of a good story!

Still, Liz’s presence was the only thing that brought any semblance of accountability to this circus. The fact that she was attacked rather than ignored suggests how afraid these collaborators are that the public will hold them accountable before the government has been fully dismantled and authoritarian power is secured. We had a nice long chat about it here and Liz also wrote a great essay about it:

The stupidity is hard to overlook but it’s also an act

It’s sometimes hard to believe that anyone could degrade themselves as a dignified, moral human being who takes their elected office seriously by cosplaying as a slack-jawed idiot in a tinfoil hat talking about Biden’s/”the Dems’” deep state Cold War mind control tactics to take out Charlie Kirk in the halls of Congress. But that’s precisely what these Republicans are doing. What they are doing comes across as profound stupidity, but it is not stupid. It is propaganda. It is working.

The government is not perfect, but in a democracy it is not the enemy of the people. The American government is the people. It operates in the people’s interests. It is funded by the people and it exists to serve them. By casting the government as the enemy of the people, it is easier to justify its destruction. By using boring, policy-mediated mechanisms of destruction like mass reductions in force and withholding funds in various forms of bureaucratic purgatory while simultaneously acting like their constituents elected them to make Congress more like an episode of InfoWars.

This has been brutally effective at dismantling our government’s ability to function. We can see the effects: unchecked measles, with outbreak control nowhere in sight. Resurgent New World screwworm, endangering our food supply. Millions lost health insurance and supplemental nutrition support. The education system is being dismantled. And this is happening in the intelligence community, as well as throughout the federal government. When former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard left office, her successor Bill Pulte began firing people at Trump’s command.

Just yesterday, Trump bragged that Pulte’s short tenure will allow him to focus on declassifying all the deep state secrets he has promised to root out. It’s much more palatable to claim that Pulte was installed to reveal unspecified buried truths than admitting that he is deliberately gutting our national intelligence capabilities.

This has continued despite protests that acting DNIs are not authorized to eliminate an agency’s entire org chart or have such broad declassification powers. It has continued throughout the US government, including at NIH, where grant awards have cratered relative to the budget. Most recently, installing political censors to ensure grants align with “presidential priorities” has forced thousands of NIH grants into a potentially eternal state of administrative limbo. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, Project 2025 author, Christofascist prick, and current attempted thief of more than one trillion in federal grant money has a single goal: to cross out the Appropriations Clause of the Constitution and claim one of the last standing checks against a dictatorship, the Congressional power of the purse. The only way he can do this is if the American people tolerate it.

Grants are boring. Government bureaucracy is boring. Combing through declassified documents for 70-year-old metadata that might reveal incrementally more information about MK Ultra is boring. It is only not boring if you make up a wild story about it; plausibility is no limitation. If that story serves to distract an exhausted, heavily propagandized public from the boring but consequential restructuring of our democracy behind the scenes, then it graduates to a performative attempt to legitimize it, such as a House Oversight Task Force hearing that is meant to give Congressional cover to lies.

MK Ultra was a failure, but it revealed some truths that people like Russell Vought obviously paid attention to: you don’t need LSD to control people’s minds. Joseph Stalin, the leader of our Cold War enemy that inspired MK Ultra in the first place, figured out that controlling information is much more effective, especially if you can deal with skeptics using authoritarian brutality.

If you want to control what people are going to think, you tell them what you want them to think. You do it over and over until most people just think what they’ve heard must be the truth. After all, it was serious enough to warrant a Congressional investigation. Most people won’t question it. The ones who do, well…if the regime in power continues to get away with this unchecked, they will have the authoritarian power to use brutality to enforce the Party position. Remember ICE? The more we tolerate Congresspeople blatantly lying for political purposes, the more we will have to tolerate them too. The greatest danger lies in our complacency, which the regime is doing everything to encourage. If we are too exhausted to think critically and to be skeptical of what we have heard from known liars, we will accept it until it is too late to do anything about it.

Regrettably, it is now clear that America’s slide to fascist doom will take the stupidest, most clownish possible route. We must remember that under the tin foil hat is something truly frightening and antithetical to everything I understand America to be. On the eve of our fair nation’s 250th birthday, as wrath of God weather rains down on most of the country, I hope Americans will save some space for this threat we face. It’s the same threat our grandparents did, except this time it’s at home. But this is what we do as a country. This is what separated us from the Soviets. This is what made us American. We stand up to bullies and their bullshit. We won’t be manipulated. We fight fascists, not allow them to stage-manage Congressional investigation theater. I refuse to believe that the American people will fall to performative idiocy. I choose to believe instead that most Americans will do the right thing. I hope more will do it soon.

Happy 4th of July!