Jefferson Morley, author of several books on the CIA and extensive writing on the JFK assassination, points out that if people believe the government could cover up the facts of an assassination attempt on the President of the United States, it’s probably because the government clearly does and actively does so. Similarly, if people believe the CIA could create brainwashed assassins, that’s largely due to their history of interest in exactly this. The infamous MKUltra has not only been the inspiration for everything from the Bourne movies to the movies. Stranger ThingsHowever, it was a real mind-control research program, specifically replacing true memories with false ones. Files on the program were destroyed in the early 1970s, leaving many questions unanswered among historians and researchers.
“You can’t ring the MKULTRA bell again,” Morley says. “Everybody knows it. A lot of people know it. So the attitude of the mainstream media is, ‘Oh, it’s an illogical conspiracy.’ ‘Oh, you know, who’s going to question the CIA explanation?’ So it doesn’t ring 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 concealment of information about them in some cases, undoubtedly influences the public’s understanding of events today. To use a term used by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for Information and Public Affairs, it influences collective meaning-making.
Two days after the July 13 assassination attempt on President Trump, the researchers published an analysis outlining the process by which the group made sense of the crisis in real time by gathering evidence and interpreting it through frames, and how it was unfolding and had already unfolded. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the researchers 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 frame seems to break down because of the obvious realities of the shooting, including the death of Cory Comperatore and the serious injuries of two Trump rally attendees. The second frame seems largely plausible given the obvious failures that led to the resignation of the Secret Service director. The third frame seems likely to linger.
“Every time there’s a school shooting, my book sales go up.” chaosdraws an intriguing but ultimately inconclusive connection between Charles Manson and MKUltra. O’Neill happened to watch the rally where Crooks tried to shoot Trump, and says his first thought was, “Oh no, my book sales have dropped again. Sales are going to skyrocket, because people really want to believe that there aren’t lone assassins.”
O’Neill is often asked if he thinks the MKUltra program still exists, and he says he wouldn’t be surprised if it did, since most of the relevant records were destroyed and he sees little value in transparency, but he has no idea. “They’re not going to give away any secrets — that’s why they’re the CIA,” he says. “If they do give away something, you should be suspicious of it.”
