As Jefferson Morley, who has published several books on the CIA and has written extensively on the JFK assassination, points out, if people believe that the government is capable of hiding facts about an assassination attempt on an American president, it is probably because it has demonstrably done so and is actively doing itSimilarly, if people believe the CIA is capable of creating brainwashed assassins, that is partly due to their very real history of interest in Exactly this. The famous MKUltra It was not only the inspiration for everything from the Bourne films to Strange thingsbut an actual research program into mind control—particularly the replacement of true memories with false ones—about which historians and researchers still have many unanswered questions, largely because files relating to the program were destroyed in the early 1970s.
“You can’t undo MKUltra,” Morley says. “People know it. A lot of people know it. So to say, ‘Oh, that’s an irrational conspiracy,’ which is the attitude we get from the mainstream press: ‘Oh, you know, how dare anyone question the CIA’s version of that?’ I mean, it just doesn’t ring true to most people, because most people know it’s not true.”
The social memory of the political assassinations of the 1960s, and the government’s withholding of information about them in some cases, undoubtedly influences the public’s understanding of current events. collective senseto use the term employed by researchers at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
Two days after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, researchers published an analysis describing the process by which groups were making sense of the crisis in real time by gathering evidence and interpreting it through a frame, and how it was unfolding and how it had already unfolded. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, they identified three politically coded frames: one suggesting the shooting was staged, one focusing on Secret Service failures, and one suggesting the shooting was an inside job. The first appears to have fallen apart given the glaring reality of the shooting, including the death of Corey Comperatore and the serious injuries sustained by two other Trump rally attendees; the second, given the manifest failures that led to Corey Comperatore’s death and the serious injuries sustained by two other Trump rally attendees, was a failure. resignation The Secret Service director appears to be on solid footing overall. The third appears likely to hold.
“Every time there is a school shooting, my book sales go up,” says Tom O’Neill, author of Chaoswhich among other things draws intriguing if ultimately inconclusive connections between Charles Manson and MKUltra. O’Neill happened to be watching the rally at which Crooks tried to shoot Trump, and his first thought, he says, was: “Well, there go my book sales again. They’re going to go through the roof, because people really want to believe there’s no such thing as a lone killer.”
O’Neill says he is often asked if he thinks the MKUltra program still exists, and he can only say that while it wouldn’t surprise him, he has no idea, because nearly all relevant records have been destroyed and because, in his view, transparency is almost irrelevant. “They’re not going to give away any of their secrets. That’s why they’re the CIA,” he says. “And if they do reveal something, you have to be suspicious of what they reveal.”