As Jefferson Morley, who has published several books about the CIA and written extensively about the JFK assassination, notes, if people believe the government is capable of covering up the truth about an attempt to assassinate a US president, it is probably because it has been proven to be real and are actively doing so. Likewise, if people believe the CIA is capable of creating brainwashed assassins, it is partly due to its very real history. attention to exactly. MKUltra Not only has it been the inspiration for everything from the Bourne movies to Strange thingsbut rather a real research program into mind control—specifically the replacement of real memories with false ones—that historians and researchers still have many unanswered questions about, largely because records related to the program were destroyed in the early 1970s.
“You can’t take the MKUltra bell off,” Morley said. “Everybody knows about it. A lot of people know about it. So to say, ‘Oh, it’s a conspiracy nonsense,’ which is the attitude we get from the mainstream press—‘Oh, you know, how dare anyone doubt the CIA’s version of that?’—I mean, that’s not true to most people, because most people know it’s not true.”
The social memory of the political murders of the 1960s, and of the government’s in some cases at least cover-up of information about them, will certainly inform the public’s understanding of events today. It thus informs create collective meaningin the terminology used by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Two days after Trump’s assassination on July 13, the researchers published an analysis outlining the process by which groups were making sense of the crisis in real time, gathering evidence and interpreting it through a frame, and how this was and was occurring. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, they identified three politically encoded frames: one that the shooting was staged, one that focused on Secret Service failures, and one that the shooting was an inside job. The first frame seemed to collapse given the obvious realities of the shooting, including the death of Corey Comperatore and the serious injuries suffered by two other Trump rally attendees; the second frame, given the apparent failures that led to resignation of the Secret Service director, looks pretty good. Tuesday looks like it’s going to drag on.
“Every time there’s a school shooting, my book sales go up,” says Tom O’Neill, author of chaosAmong other things, there were intriguing but ultimately inconclusive connections between Charles Manson and MKUltra. O’Neill happened to be watching the rally where Crooks tried to shoot Trump, and his first thought, he said, was, “Oh, my book sales are down again. They’re going to skyrocket, because people really want to believe there was no lone assassin.”
O’Neill said he is often asked whether he believes the MKUltra program still exists, and he can only say that while he is not surprised, he does not know, because almost all relevant records have been destroyed and because, in his view, transparency is almost irrelevant. “They are not going to reveal any of their secrets. That’s why they are the CIA,” he said. “And if they reveal something, you should be skeptical of what they reveal.”
