Redacted
The things they don't tell you.
The Government lies to you… constantly.
In this issue:
🗂 Declassified
✌︎㋡ It Was Never Left vs. Right
⚠︎ The Ethics of the Necessary Lie
It’s probably not a surprise to most that their government lies to them. (This is NOT just an U.S. thing, after all.) If any government told you about all the heinous shit that happened in the name of “keeping the public safe” they’d probably all be put in front of a firing squad, and with that being said…
Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!
🗂 Declassified
The word “conspiracy theorist” was weaponized by the CIA in 1967.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a documented memo, CIA Document 1035-960, dispatched to field offices after the Warren Commission report started taking heat from critics, instructing agency assets embedded in media to deploy the phrase against anyone asking uncomfortable questions.
The people who trained you to mock skeptics invented the insult specifically to protect themselves from your questions.
Start there. Build from there.
MKUltra ran from 1953 to 1973.
Twenty years. Two decades of the United States government dosing American and Canadian citizens with LSD without their knowledge or consent, exploring sensory deprivation, hypnosis, psychological torture, and the operational possibility of programming human beings to perform acts they wouldn’t remember performing.
It ran through front organizations, university research programs, and hospitals that didn’t know what they were hosting. The subjects were prisoners, mental patients, addicts, sex workers, and ordinary people who believed they’d checked into a legitimate medical facility for legitimate reasons.
Frank Olson was a government biochemist who apparently had a crisis of conscience about the program and was, depending on which documents you read and how much you trust official cause-of-death determinations, either driven to suicide or defenestrated from a New York hotel window ten days after being dosed with LSD without his knowledge at a CIA retreat in Maryland.
His family fought for answers for fifty years. His body was exhumed in 1994. The forensic evidence suggested blunt force trauma to the skull inconsistent with a fall.
Gottlieb kept his pension. Frank Olson’s family kept their questions.
The program director, Sidney Gottlieb, ordered the files destroyed in 1973 when he sensed congressional interest developing like weather on the horizon.
What we know now comes from a box of financial records his people missed in a separate filing location.
The shredders got most of it. We’re reading the accident. We don’t know what was in the documents that didn’t survive, and that not-knowing is the point, that’s the architecture of it, you design the program to be deniable and then you destroy the evidence and what remains is just enough to confirm something happened and not enough to fully prosecute it.
The Senate Church Committee convened in 1975. Gottlieb testified. He expressed regret in the careful language of a man who has consulted attorneys. He retired afterward to rural Virginia where he grew vegetables and did hospice volunteer work with the terminally ill, which is one way to spend your remaining years after running a federally funded torture program.
He died in 1999.
There’s a kind of dark symmetry in spending your last years sitting with dying people when you spent your best years engineering psychological death in people who didn’t know you were doing it. I don’t know what he made of that symmetry.
He didn’t leave notes. The committee got his testimony. The public got the summary. Gottlieb got a garden in Virginia.
COINTELPRO ran from 1956 to 1971.
The FBI, under Hoover, ran systematic disinformation campaigns against the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, feminist organizations, the American Indian Movement, and any political formation that Hoover personally decided threatened the American way of life, which meant anything that threatened J. Edgar Hoover’s vision of the American way of life, which is a different and considerably narrower thing.
They forged letters designed to create paranoia and conflict between organizations.
They sent anonymous mail to activists’ spouses alleging infidelities.
They sent a letter to Martin Luther King suggesting he kill himself before his alleged affairs became public, timing it to arrive before he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.
They infiltrated organizations with informants whose operational mandate wasn’t surveillance.
It was destabilization. Make the group distrust itself. Make the leaders suspect each other. Make the meetings feel watched because they were watched. Get people fired. Get people arrested.
In documented cases, through coordination with local law enforcement, get people killed.
The program was exposed not by congressional oversight or journalistic investigation but by a group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, which broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971, the night of the Ali-Frazier fight when they correctly calculated the office would be empty and understaffed, and stole every document they could carry.
They mailed copies to journalists and members of Congress. The Washington Post published. The program unraveled. The people who burglarized the FBI to expose a federal criminal enterprise waited forty years to attach their names to the story, because the statute of limitations on burglary runs out but the institutional memory of federal agencies does not.
The agents who ran COINTELPRO retired with full benefits.
Operation Paperclip brought over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists into the United States after World War II.
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency recruited them, the State Department and Army processed them, and the records were scrubbed to remove or obscure SS memberships, war crimes involvement, and participation in slave labor programs.
Wernher von Braun designed the Saturn V rocket. He also held an SS rank, was present at the Mittelwerk underground facility where V-2 rockets were assembled using concentration camp labor under conditions deliberately engineered to work people to death, and has been estimated by historians to bear some responsibility for the deaths of somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people.
He got a ticker-tape parade in New York City in 1969, two months after the moon landing. He got a postage stamp in 2011. His full SS record got a classified file that took decades to partially surface.
The people who built the rockets that took us to the moon were, in some cases, the same people who built the rockets that killed civilians in London and worked prisoners to death in Germany. America decided it needed the science more than it needed the accounting.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a policy decision that got made at the highest levels and then papered over with security classifications and favorable biographies and eventually a postage stamp.
Here’s the epistemological wreckage this leaves behind.
If MKUltra is true, and it is, what’s the institutional baseline for behavior?
If COINTELPRO is true, and it is, what does “conspiracy theory” mean as a diagnostic category?
If Paperclip is true, and it is, what exactly is the relationship between the official history of the country and what the country actually did?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re load-bearing questions. The answers determine how you evaluate everything official sources tell you next, and the next time after that, and every time after that for the rest of your life.
I’m not arguing that every fringe claim is true. Most of them aren’t.
The epistemology of paranoia has its own failure modes, its own way of flattening complex bureaucratic dysfunction into cartoon villain narratives, its own tendency to mistake correlation for causation and pattern for plan. Not everything that looks like a conspiracy is one.
Some of it is incompetence.
Some of it is institutional inertia.
Some of it is a dozen separate bad decisions that look coordinated in retrospect because humans are pattern-recognition machines running on hardware that was optimized for a different environment.
But the track record is not ambiguous. The pattern is consistent across administrations, across agencies, across decades.
They do the thing. They classify the thing. The FOIA requests come in twenty years later. The committee convenes. The report gets released. Everyone expresses regret in carefully lawyered language. Nobody goes to prison. The program starts again under a different name with a cleaner paper trail and better operational security.
The paranoids were right about MKUltra. Right about COINTELPRO. Right about Paperclip. They were right because they were paying attention to the operational history of institutions rather than the public relations history of institutions.
Those are different documents. They always have been.
🔗️ Store Links:
Simple-Fix PDF Field Manual: The update to the popular Simple-Fix PDF Engine goes into much more depth. (Buying from this link gets 50% off.)
The Digest Manifesto is all about my love of the digest sized printing format and how to print books that fit in pockets through Amazon KDP.
Overlooked Puddles by Mike Searles is absolutely one of the best guides on getting started doing the necessary things to make your one-person publishing empire.
✌︎㋡ It Was Never Left vs. Right
The most successful magic trick the ruling class ever pulled was convincing you that your enemy is the person across the aisle.
Think about what that costs them.
Nothing. It costs them nothing.
While you’re screaming at your neighbor about immigration or gun control or which bathroom people should use, the people making the actual decisions about your life, your wages, your healthcare, your sons and daughters going to wars that make other people rich, those people are at dinner together.
They went to the same schools. They sit on the same boards. They donate to both parties because the parties are not the point.
The parties are the arena. The bread and circuses. The thing that keeps you oriented horizontally, toward each other, instead of vertically, toward them.
I’m not interested in blaming individuals for this.
The nurse voting Republican because she’s terrified about crime in her neighborhood and the teacher voting Democrat because she can’t afford insulin are both responding rationally to real pressures. The game is designed so that both of them are too exhausted and too frightened to notice they have the same enemy.
Here’s what the scorecard looks like when you read it without the team jerseys on.
The bank bailouts of 2008 were bipartisan.
Both parties voted to hand seven hundred billion dollars to the institutions whose fraudulent practices had just destroyed the retirement savings of millions of ordinary Americans. No meaningful criminal prosecutions followed. The architects of the collapse went back to work. Some of them got bonuses.
The homeowners who lost everything got a hotline number.
The surveillance state is bipartisan.
The Patriot Act passed the Senate 98-1 after September 11th. The FISA amendments that allowed warrantless wiretapping of American citizens got renewed repeatedly under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Edward Snowden showed us the architecture of the thing in 2013 and both parties condemned him for it. The apparatus didn’t shrink. It expanded.
Your phone is still a surveillance device that makes occasional calls.
The wars are bipartisan.
I know something about this from the inside.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force that sent people I served with to die in Afghanistan passed the Senate 98-0 in 2001.
The Iraq War authorization passed with broad Democratic support.
The drone program that kills people in countries we’re not officially at war with has operated continuously across multiple administrations of both parties, expanded under each one, and been subject to approximately zero meaningful congressional oversight.
The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961 has a larger budget now than at any point in the Cold War. It keeps growing regardless of who wins.
The pharmaceutical industry owns the regulatory apparatus that’s supposed to constrain it, and it owns it across both parties.
The insurance industry wrote significant portions of the Affordable Care Act.
The revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury Department spins continuously regardless of which party controls the White House.
None of this is secret. It’s all public record. It just requires reading the record instead of watching the television.
The television is very good.
I’ll give them that. The television keeps the temperature exactly high enough that you’re always activated, always outraged, always oriented toward the person on the other team.
The tribal brain is ancient hardware and it runs hot and clean and it cannot easily distinguish between a real threat and a manufactured one.
They understand this. They’ve built an entire media ecosystem around exploiting it, and it works so well that people will defend it, will argue passionately for the team that is quietly and efficiently picking their pocket.
I came out of the military with a particular allergy to this. You spend enough time in institutions watching how decisions actually get made, watching the gap between the public rationale and the operational reality, and you develop a different kind of pattern recognition. You stop asking which team is right and start asking who benefits from you believing that the teams are what matter.
The answer is always the same. The people who own the teams benefit. The players are interchangeable.
This isn’t cynicism. Cynicism is when you stop caring. This is the opposite of that. You can’t fix a problem you’ve misdiagnosed. If you spend all your energy fighting the other half of the country, you’re delivering exactly the outcome the people above both of you are paying for.
The divide is not left and right. It never was.
It’s the people making decisions about your life without your meaningful input, and you. That’s the line. Everything else is theater designed to keep you from finding it.
Wake up. Look up. The enemy doesn’t live in your neighborhood.
🛰️ Good Reads:
⚠︎ Other confirmed “conspiracies”
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service recruited 399 Black men with syphilis in Alabama, told them they were being treated, and deliberately withheld penicillin after it became the standard cure in 1947. They wanted to observe the disease’s full progression. The study ran for forty years. It ended because a whistleblower leaked documents to the press. The last survivor died in 2004.
Operation Mockingbird (1950s-1970s) The CIA recruited journalists at major American newspapers and broadcast networks to plant stories, suppress information, and shape domestic public opinion. Confirmed by the Church Committee in 1975. The full list of participating outlets was never made public.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964) The second attack that justified congressional authorization for the Vietnam War almost certainly didn’t happen. Robert McNamara admitted it in 2003. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and an estimated two million Vietnamese died in the war that followed.
Operation Sea-Spray (1950) The U.S. Navy sprayed bacterial aerosols over San Francisco for six days to test how a biological attack might spread through a civilian population. Residents inhaled Serratia marcescens, a bacteria the military classified as harmless. Eleven people were hospitalized with infections. One died. The operation was classified until 1977. The family of the man who died sued the government. The case was dismissed on national security grounds.
The CIA’s Foreign Assassination Program (1960s-1970s) The CIA ran active programs to assassinate foreign leaders including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and others. The Castro plots alone numbered at least eight confirmed attempts, including poisoned cigars, an exploding seashell, and a hypodermic needle disguised as a ballpoint pen. The Church Committee confirmed the programs in 1975. Most operational details remain classified. Castro died in 2016 at age 90 in his own bed.
The Lavender Scare (1950s) The U.S. federal government systematically purged gay and lesbian employees on the grounds that their sexuality made them vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. Thousands lost their jobs and security clearances. President Clinton apologized in 1998. Most of them were long dead.
Operation Northwoods (1962) The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed staging terrorist attacks on American soil, including shooting down a civilian aircraft and blaming Cuba, to manufacture public support for an invasion. The plan was signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and sent to the Secretary of Defense. Kennedy rejected it. It was declassified in 1997.
The NSA Mass Surveillance Program (2001-2013) The government collected phone metadata and internet communications on hundreds of millions of American citizens without individual warrants. Officially denied until Edward Snowden leaked the documents in 2013. The people who lied to Congress about it faced no charges. Snowden still can’t come home.
🧠 ON MY MIND
If you made it here, that means you should…
That’s it for this week. Don’t forget, just do the helicopter so you don’t get pee on your hands. Until next time…
~ J.D.
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Only a writer with the highest levels of intelligence could write an article with such probing depth. Reading details of some of USA's government and political historical events felt like slowing down to look at the car crash in the opposite lanes of the freeway. At the same time thinking "I shouldn't look but I can't help it." Brilliant writing, Joe. And thanks for mentioning my Overlooked Puddles.
It's fun to remind people that the US government straight up poisoned people like dime store thugs. https://historyfacts.com/us-history/fact/the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition/