As Jefferson Morley, who has published several books on the CIA and written extensively on the JFK assassination, points out, if people believe the government is capable of covering up facts about an assassination attempt on a U.S. president, it is probably because it has done so demonstrably and is do it activelySimilarly, part of the reason people believe the CIA is capable of creating brainwashed assassins is because of its very real history of interest in exactly that. The famous MK Ultra was not only the inspiration for everything from the Bourne films to Strange thingsbut a real mind control research program – particularly the replacement of real memories with false ones – about which historians and researchers still have many unanswered questions, largely because records related to the program were destroyed in the early 1970s.
“There’s no turning back the clock,” Morley said. “People know. A lot of people know. So to say, ‘Oh, this is an irrational conspiracy,’ which is the attitude we hear in the mainstream press – ‘Oh, you know, how dare anyone question the CIA’s story?’ – I mean, that doesn’t ring true to most people, because most people know it’s not true.”
Social memory of the political murders of the 1960s, and the government’s withholding of information about them in some cases, certainly influences the public’s understanding of today’s events. collective meaning constructionto use the term used 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 made sense of the crisis in real time by gathering evidence and interpreting it through a frame, and how this was playing out and had already played out. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, they identified three politically coded frames: one suggesting that the shooting was staged, one focusing on the failures of the Secret Service, and one suggesting that the shooting was an inside job. The first seems to have collapsed because of the obvious reality of the shooting, including the death of Corey Comperatore and the serious injuries sustained by two other Trump rallygoers; the second, given the clear failures that led to the shooting. resignation The third point seems generally well founded.
“Every time there’s 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 watch the rally at which Crooks attempted to shoot Trump, and his first thought, he says, was: “Well, now my book sales are going through the roof again. They’re going to go through the roof, because people really want to believe that there’s no such thing as a lone assassin.”
O’Neill says he’s often asked if he believes the MKUltra program still exists, and he can only say that while he wouldn’t be surprised, he has no idea, because nearly all the relevant documents have been destroyed and because, in his view, transparency is almost a non-issue. “They’re not going to give away any of their secrets. That’s what they’re the CIA for,” he says. “And if they do give away something, you should be suspicious of what they give away.”
