What we have been exploring for the past 18 months is the systematic programming of American minds by the powers that be. What I intend to demonstrate through the Scientology history is an understandable microcosm of those mind control processes that continue to play out to this day in American society at large.
The first major revelations of the secret control mechanisms utilized by the shadow government (the deep state or cult of intelligence) was made by President John F. Kenney’s Chief of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty. In his 1972 book The Secret Team (updated and re-released in 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing) Prouty detailed how teams of lifetime intelligence members manipulate Presidents, Congress, media, academia and industry in order to forward the aims’ of an aristocracy while leaving the American people powerless and in the dark.
Two years later a former CIA agent Victor Marchetti followed in Prouty’s footsteps, corroborating the latter while disclosing a tremendous amount of new material. His book, co-authored with former State Department official John Marks, The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence (1974, Alfred K. Knopf) was a detailed expose of CIA methods used to carry out secret foreign policy as well as domestic operations to keep the American public in the dark as well as to eliminate dissent. It is noteworthy that Marchetti and Marks chose the word “cult” to describe what they investigated. This was near the inception of the “cult scare craze” of the seventies – which, perhaps not coincidentally, had the CIA’s fingerprints all over it.
What follows are quotes taken from the first chapter of The CIA And The Cult of Intelligence. This chapter describes the cult that runs the United States government unseen by the public and largely unaffected by elected officials including members of Congress and Presidents. The book (in conjunction with Prouty’s) answers the age-old question, “how is it that a democratically elected government seems to continually operate 180 degrees contrary to the will of the electorate?” The first chapter neatly and accurately sums it up.
“There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult – the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond government circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence – the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy…
…The cult is intent upon conducting the foreign affairs of the U.S. government without the awareness or participation of the people. It recognizes no role for a questioning legislature or an investigative press. Its adherents believe that only they have the right and the obligation to decide what is necessary to satisfy the national needs…
…For adherents to this cult of intelligence, hypocrisy and deception, like secrecy, have become standard techniques for preventing public awareness of the CIA’s clandestine operations, and government accountability for them. And these men who ask that they be regarded as honorable men, true patriots, will, when caught in their own webs of deceit, even assert that the government has an inherent right to lie to its people…
…A good part of the CIA’s power position is dependent upon its careful mythologizing and glorification of the exploits of the clandestine profession. Sometimes this even entails fostering a sort of perverse public admiration for the covert practices of the opposition intelligence services – to frighten the public and thereby justify the actions of the CIA…
…As the opportunities for covert action abroad dwindle and are thwarted, those with careers based in clandestine methods are increasingly tempted to turn their talents inward against the citizens of the very nation they profess to serve. Nurtured by the adversary setting of the Cold War, shielded by secrecy, and spurred by patriotism that views dissent as a threat to the national security, the clandestine operatives of the CIA have the capability, the resources, the experience – and the inclination – to ply their skills increasingly on the domestic scene.”
If you take the time to read the work of Prouty, Marchetti and Marks (also author of The Search For The Manchurian Candidate – cited in several recent posts) you will be see receipts in plenty proving virtually every bold-faced word above. Notice how accurately this chapter describes our current state of affairs, fifty years later. It may not be immediately noticeable as our minds have been conditioned by the very operation described. Prouty, Marchetti, Marks, Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) were ruthlessly attacked and targeted for censorship by the cult of intelligence and its legal and media arms. They survived as did their work. Yet, their works have subsequently been largely forgotten because of the efforts of an aristocracy (cult) that has spent trillions to distract our attention from looking at the Secret Team behind the curtain pulling the levers. Like frogs sitting half-unconscious in a pot full of water that is gradually increasing in temperature, we have become numb to the steady erosion of our civil rights that has ensued.
More recently, when the types of disclosures that were made in the seventies were made, the works never gained much currency and the authors (whistleblowers) were imprisoned and driven into silence or exile (Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange). And we apparently have been too distracted and conditioned to even care.
I believe we ought to be watching current affairs with eyes wide open. As much as the media is devoted to sowing division (see Matt Taibbi’s Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another), I believe there is something folks from both sides of the aisle ought to be paying attention to. That is something that has not occurred for over 60 years in this country. I am referring to President Trump’s clear (if you watch closely) toe to toe confrontation with the deep state (aka cult of intelligence, secret team). Whether you agree with Trump’s policies or disagree there is little question that he is facing down the cult. Whether he caves, is taken down, or triumphs may determine whether civil liberties are restored or are extinguished – in their entirety – in a relative short period of time.* Incidentally, Trump has shown signs of caving in, being taken down, and of triumphing in this struggle. What cannot be denied is the fact of the struggle.
Recall this John F. Kennedy reminiscence by former US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas regarding the aftermath of the Bay of Bigs fiasco: “This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect…it shook him up!”
*Never in the history of the United States has there ever been a greater encroachment on Freedom of speech and expression than during the years 2020-2024. If you doubt that, read this blog from 20 March, 2024 forward.
What does Ukraine have to do with Psy Ops fueled by your tax dollars being run on you? Everything. Nobody breaks down the Truman Show nature of today’s American society better than one of the few surviving deans of investigative journalism, Matt Taibbi. All corporate media a) prohibits the types of truth Taibbi specializes in uncovering, and b) constantly puts out the false narratives the truth is buried beneath. Therefore, Taibbi is fully independent. He operates Racket News on the Substack platform, here Racket News. Each week he and journalist/author Walter Kirn put out a broadcast that sums up and analyzes the week’s biggest corporate/deep-state sponsored, psy op snow jobs pulled on the American public. As a means to clear your mind from the fog of continual psy ops, I highly recommend a subscription to Racket News and especially to the weekly broadcast there, This Week in America. In the meantime, here’s Taibbi’s latest piece, providing the receipts on the truth that if you wave the Ukranian flag your mind has been captured with malice aforethought by people who believe Americans are sheep to be manipulated.
Sir Keir Starmer has told Volodymyr Zelensky he has “full backing across the United Kingdom” as the two met in Downing Street.
The Ukrainian president told the prime minister he was happy his country had “such friends” after arriving in the UK in the wake of a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump that descended into a row between the two leaders…
I read that headline as “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backrub,’” which might have been more accurate. The Zelensky World Tour for the last week now includes punking the White House, lecturing America for its insufficient billions, getting yelled at for having “no cards” by a furious Donald Trump (who took offense “on Putin’s behalf,” not the taxpayer’s, according to the New York Times), then instantly backtracking on X and opening the door to a NATO-less solution. Afterward, he fled across the pond to England, where he offered to resign in exchange for NATO admission before dismounting into the arms of Starmer, who eased urgency toward a settlement by pledging to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it may take.”
Zelensky’s transformation from affable populist to Anne Applebaum’s idea of a sex symbol was off-putting even before he started appearing before swooning legislators around the world wearing his trademark wan face and “I Saved The World From Putin and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” costume. We just spent three years turning a fixable local issue into a test case for a new ethos of imperial intransigence, one that apparently requires constant weeding of unbelievers and full control of media to preserve “democracy.” Zelensky may not have started as a hawk for this global Misinformation is Murder movement, but once he realized selling the idea was a requirement for NATO’s billions, he threw himself into the role with gusto. Now, he’s refusing to give up the part.
Many readers were offended last week by my irreligious attitude toward Ukraine’s president. Those of us who won’t salute this NATO-crafted character actor are apparently “careening into full-on MAGA paranoia,” no better than “comrades” and “fellow travelers” in Vladimir Putin’s figurative if not literal employ. The former comedian is now reprising Ben Kingsley’s Marvin role as the Mandarin, playing tough-guy mascot for transnational bureaucrats whose idea of a good joke is getting Americans to pay to correct their own wrong opinions. Maybe he’s doing what he has to do for his country, but seriously, fuck him. And fuck Starmer, for that matter.
If you’re not offended by the whole affair, you should be. Recapping:
Placed in an impossible situation when Russian forces massed on his border in early 2022, Zelensky at first pursued a strategy of speaking his mind. He criticized Americans for withdrawing diplomats from Kyiv pre-invasion, saying, “We do not have a Titanic situation here.” American officials complained he was “poking us in the eye” with comments that were “mind-boggling,” adding they were “puzzling” over his apparent optimism about a deal with Russia. They preferred he take a different approach, one in line with a new American idea about “information warfare” that didn’t permit local politicians to act like they had a say in how America chose to conduct wars on their territories.
Before Russia invaded, American officials announced in a series of high-profilefeatures in the New York Times that it planned to “beat the master at his own game” by using the press to engage in “information warfare,” claiming it was difficult to go “toe-to-toe with an autocratic state” if the U.S. couldn’t also flood the media zone with untrammeled propaganda. The first target of “information warfare” was said to be Putin. By releasing intelligence in papers like the Times, we were told, he might be stunned by our level of insight into his operations and “reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.” Pre-invasion, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine even told us the new strategy was working, that “Putin has already blinked” and was now “looking for a way out.”
Tanks rolled anyway three weeks later, after which we were told there was a new target of “information warfare”: ordinary people, including Ukrainians and the foreign populations supporting them. Our leading media outlets now filled with heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance, including the eerily Bastogne-like “Go fuck yourself” tale of Snake Island Ukrainians choosing death over surrender to a Russian warship, or portraits of the mysterious “Ghost of Kyiv,” a MiG-29 fighter pilot who “dominates the skies” with his supersonic “brass balls.” The story was repeated over channels like MSNBC even after it came out that the key images had been stitched together from old Twitter posts and a flight simulator program:
GOOGLE AI Overview:
The “Ghost of Kyiv” is a mythical fighter pilot that some say shot down Russian planes over Kyiv in 2022. The Ukrainian Air Force later acknowledged that the fighter was fictional.
The Times in pointing out that these stories proved mythical noted they “do not compare to the falsehoods being spread by Russia,” and that it was “important” to “keep morale high among the fighters and marshal global support for their cause.” A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Peter Singer, said, “If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose.” He added that in the social media age, audiences are targets and participants, so sharing such images “makes them combatants of a sort as well.”
We were no longer just readers about the conflict in Ukraine, but a type of soldier in battle. By swallowing tales like the “Ghost of Kyiv,” we were “doing our part,” to put it in Starship Troopers terms. But how to square this with the movement against “misinformation”? First, the Times quoted one “Twitter user” saying, “‘Why can’t we just let people believe some things?’” Then it quoted Twitter, which said such videos didn’t violate its terms of service. Finally, Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos declared, “I think this demonstrates the limits of ‘fact-checking’ in a fast-moving battle with real lives at stake.”
It wasn’t until a year later that we found out that these events coincided with a broad-scale program in which the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, sent lists of accounts it wished to ban to the FBI, which in turn sent those requests to American platforms. We thought it was a scoop when a letter from the FBI’s San Francisco office to Twitter asking to remove Canadian journalist Aaron Maté along with hundreds of other accounts was found in the Twitter Files.
That was just one item on a giant conveyor belt of SBU requests to Twitter, Instagram, and other outlets. The House Weaponization of Government Committee later found the SBU induced the FBI to pass on requests to remove 15,865 posts across 5,165 Facebook accounts, and even requested (by mistake, possibly) the removal of the official Russian language Instagram account of the US State Department, @USAPoRusski. When colleague Lee Fang managed to contact Ilya Vitiuk, head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity service, and asked how he differentiated “Russian disinformation” from legitimate content, Vitiuk explained, “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’”
In April 2023 word broke that an Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixiera was arrested after leaking intelligence documents. These showed internal U.S. assessments calling Ukraine a “catastrophic situation” that was “grinding toward a stalemate” and a “protracted war beyond 2023.” This came out just after Anthony Blinken said Ukraine’s position was “stronger than ever,” Joe Biden said Putin would “never” win, and General Ben Hodges said Ukraine would be liberated by August.
Having established the U.S. may conduct “information warfare” even against its own people, it now arrested Teixiera for interrupting official messaging with truth, and media outlets like the Times and the Washington Posthelped authorities catch their own source. Not only did media not report negative news about Ukraine, it helped authorities arrest those who possessed such information.
David Sanger, the Times reporter who helped write the piece introducing “information warfare,” now wrote an article explaining that the “freshness” of the Pentagon Leaker docs made them different from those of Ed Snowden or the Wikileaks cables. It also became common to dismiss any defense of Teixiera or communication of the information he leaked as right-wingpropaganda.
If you’re keeping score, the Ukraine war established American officials could plant deceptions in media as part of “information warfare”; Pro-Ukraine deceptions would be tolerated to maintain “morale”; Russian media was blocked officially in Europe and quasi-officially here; individual posts of Americans were routinely removed or deamplified, sometimes at the behest of Ukraine; and leaks of true information running counter to our own state media narratives would be harshly punished. We banned foreign state media, and essentially mandated fealty to our version at home.
Less formal campaigns denounced anyone who advocated a “diplomatic solution” as a spewer of Russian talking points, on par with the Russian diplomats who were now described as “disinformation warriors.” It did not take much digging to figure out that many Ukrainian news operations denouncing figures like John Mearsheimer or Robert F. Kennedy were funded by the American State Department. The U.S.-Ukraine Foundation that ran a piece saying Kennedy furthered “Russian talking points” had a DOS award, and others with detailed schematics of Ukraine’s informational enemies were done up spiffily by USAID contractors. One is a perfect metaphor for what this war turned into: a way for European contractors to get paid by Americans to correct Americans.
The sub-awards for Peregrine (a company “associated” with other names like Goldbelt and CP Marine) included a $2.43 million outlay for a British firm called “Zinc Network.” That contract featured a similar start date of September 27, 2018, and ran through 2023. Like Peregrine, Zinc is linked to at least three names, including Breakthrough Media and Camden Creative. The description of its award from Peregrine says it aimed to “mitigate the effects of Russian disinformation and engage online audiences primarily in the east of Ukraine by amplifying trusted local voices” to “present a positive, democratic version of a unified Ukraine.”
Following just this one group of contractors reveals the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “social media influence” all over the world. In Ukraine, much of the money went to European middlemen who created dummy Internet personalities to sell the war. They put this in writing! Zinc was obligated $1.23 million from the State Department’s Office of Acquisition Management for two contracts, each of which would “identify, train, and engage 25 to 40 social media influencers” who’d “produce and publish their own social media content in line with U.S. Foreign policy objectives.”
When I called Peregrine, they were shocked to hear a request for a public relations office. The London-based Zinc office seemed similarly unprepared for public inquiry. It’s too bad, because it would be good to know why an American contractor like Peregrine at the outsetof a Ukrainian social media campaign needed to hire a call center associated with a U.S. embassy in Mexico. From Zinc, it would be nice to know identities of its social media influencers (did they “engage” Americans?). Also, what did it do for its $500,000 USAID “Pro-Vaccination Campaign” in Georgia, or its $911,613 State Department award for “social media management services for Hindi/Urdu”? What does an “information integrity” services contract entail?
I generally have sympathy for people like Zelensky. The former Soviet Union is a place where success is mostly reserved for men of violence, and anyone outside that club who manages to rise usually needs a big bag of other extraordinary qualities. But this politician allowed his persona to become just another legend “in line with U.S. foreign policy objectives,” forgetting that voters decide what those objectives are, not contractors who don’t answer the phone, or Keir Starmer, or Jens Stoltenberg, or any of a hundred other officials who think they know what wars we must support. I’m tired of being lied to about why this mess can’t get fixed and just want to move on. Is there really anyone left who doesn’t feel the same way?
Matt Taibbi is one of the last true investigative reporters of the 21st Century. In 2017 he published a book about his travelling the 2016 Presidential election campaign trail. Taibbi was so unimpressed with Donald Trump (as was I at the time) that he titled his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus.” Nonetheless, Taibbi made what has proven to be an important, incisive observation. He gave Trump credit for something that made sense to me, given my 45 years in dealing with the media. According to Taibbi’s real-time observations, exactly one, single decisive move on the part of the “clown” turned the electoral tide in his favor. It was not immigration, it was not the promise of no more war, it was not anti-DEI sentiment, it had no racial overtones, it did not involve abortion, the Supreme Court, nor any other issue the media would have the American public clutch its pearls over.
At a certain point during the general election campaign the media chorus became so coordinated and so shrill against Trump – and his supporters – that Trump gave up on impressing the mainstream media (msm) and instead began treating them overtly as what he later called “the enemy of the people.” Read Taibbi’s book and see for yourself. It is a real time, organic observation that was largely ignored. Instead of self-reflecting and considering what it might do to correct itself, msm declared Matt Taibbbi an enemy. Before that, Taibbi was an ever-present presence on mainstream media. After that he was a pariah. He has since gone independent on Substack (Taibbi Substack) where he has earned more influence than he ever had when the msm embraced him.
Why is this so relevant at the moment? Because what you have witnessed over the past several months (culminating in last Thursday’s Presidential debate) not only proves Taibbi right, it proves that the “clown” wasn’t such a Bozo after all. Exhibit A is the huge portfolio of the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN – virtually every msm outlet – covering up President Biden’s degenerating cognitive state. Even a week ago, the WH press spokesperson was promoted by each of those outlets as stating the “truth” of the matter, “Biden only looks incompetent because people are altering videos” (without a single instance of alteration being offered or proven). Perhaps the best sum up of the collective MSM position over the past year comes from former Congressman longtime MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another (OR Books 2019) is an essential read for anyone caught up in today’s news cycles.
Taibbi traces the news media’s devolution since Noam Chomsky’s 80’s classic Manufacturing Consent.
Taibbi provides insider evidence to demonstrate that while the media’s overall purpose and function has remained relatively unchanged since the late 20th century, its means of achieving that have shifted. The aim remains to line its and its sponsor’s (big corporate America) pockets. It continues to do so by entertaining in a fashion that keeps the public’s eyes off the more significant issues facing humanity and thus ignoring its victims (most of the population). Instead, it distracts with non-stop coverage of the class of victims it deems worthy, or in current terms those liable to command the most eyeballs and clicks.
Taibbi shows that media has discovered a bonanza by tailoring itself to specific publics, right wing vs left wing, religious vs anti-religious, xenophobes vs immigrant friendlies, warnicks vs. peaceniks, etc. and plying them with around-the-clock tailored, hyperbolic bias confirmation that feeds their fears and prejudices. It has abandoned the façade of objectivity in order to overtly stoke and exacerbate conflicts between factions. Media is now in the business of manufacturing hate. It has enhanced its manufacturing consent function by ditching public-interest investigative reporting, leaving its corporate sponsors free to rape, pillage and plunder at unprecedented levels while its viewers do virtual war on one another. Parenthetically, see the BBC documentary The Century of Self available free on Youtube, to understand the mass psychology marketing trend that lead to this ‘have it your own way’ model’s inevitability).
This passage sums up the current picture and its effects:
We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second. This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society. There is a terror of letting audiences think for themselves that we’ve never seen before. There’s no, ‘Go back home tonight, rest, and think it over.’
Even from show to show the viewer is asked to remain glued to the conflict at all times. In print media your eyes scroll down to similarly themed stories, stringing you from one outrage to another. Keep clicking, keep delving deeper into the argument, make it more and more your identity.
We don’t want you signing off until tomorrow because we don’t want you to even understand that you have an inner dialogue separate from the news experience. Click on, watch, read, tweet, argue, come back, click again, repeat, do it over and over, rubbing the nerve ends away just a little bit each time. With each engagement, you’re signing over more and more of your intellectual autonomy.
You’ll soon become dependent on the cycle, to the point where you’ll lose the ability to dispute what you’re being told, because disputing would mean diluting the bond with your favorite news sources. Once you reach this point, you’ve entered the realm of belief, as opposed to conclusion.
This without a doubt is a form of religious worship.
Taibbi’s conclusion is both ironic and telling. While he makes a snarky indirect reference to Scientology (although it could just as easily be read as a double entendre including its critics) in teasing out the religious worship angle, he finally concludes with something that Scientology’s founder was endlessly crucified for recommending:
It will be hard to keep concealed for long the obvious fact that turning off the news results in an instantly positive psychological change for most people. If you want to be happier, if you want to live in a world that may be thick with problems but is at least a sunnier place where people are more decent to one another and more willing to cooperate and show kindness, just turn off the tube.
It is no wonder you don’t see Taibbi riding the cable news circuit much these days after the release of his important book. He is just too direct and effective in removing media masks. After recounting the Iraq-WMD hype that was foisted on the public to garner its support of war, he distinguished that from what is going on today:
This current craze is far more intense, bipartisan, and open-ended. It’s not designed to be a temporarily blinding fervor This is panic you’re told not to excise from your life, ever, or else…
Or else what? We [the media] don’t articulate that, for a very good reason.
Of all the taboos and deceptions in media, this is the one we lie about most. The thing we’re most afraid to discuss has to do with precisely that question of what happens if you should stop following the news.
The answer, of course, is nothing. Not only can you live without us, you probably should, most of the time anyway.
Tony Ortega at the Village Voice published an interesting story on the spiking of the FBI investigation into David Miscavige, supreme leader of Scientology Inc’s human trafficking operation.
If someone wants to really understand how Scientology Inc is able to manipulate the highest levels of America’s most powerful law enforcement agency they should read the two references I suggested Tony read.
First, read Matt Taibbi’s epic story in Rolling Stone magazine, Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? Taibbi’s expose of corporate corruption at the top of the US federal government is very accurate. It has been going on for decades, and over three decades under the direction of David Miscavige I helped Scientology Inc perfect how to capitalize on that filth bucket.
Second, if you want a post-graduate level understanding read Lawrence Wright’s bookThe Looming Tower. Wright was deservedly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for this work. His description of the political and money motivated systemic corruption of the FBI tracks on all four corners with what I observed in interfacing with them (and out-maneuvering them) over three decades.
Don’t get too worked up. I’ve been saying it for three years and I’ll say it again. The solution to Scientology Inc is not ‘over there’; it is in the hands of Scientologists. Independent Scientologists who take responsibility for the subject by proliferating its practice in a safe and sane manner.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 