115: The Church Committee and MKUltra; Or, Uncle Sam Wants YOU To Take LSD

Mar 20 2024 • 1 hr

In the age of YouTube, it feels like there’s a new conspiracy every day. Some of them are ol’ chestnuts - love how we faked the moon landing that one time, right? Some of them pop up in the seemingly most random places, like Taylor Swift’s “secret plan” to use her popularity to boost Joe Biden’s approval rating (That’s just downright silly. We all know it must have been Travis Kelce’s idea, not Taylor’s). But even with all the bonkers stuff we all come up with, the secret stuff the government actually does is sometimes even crazier. And in the 1970s, a group of senators decided to find out how deep that rabbit hole of government overreach went.

Ray teaches Rob and Daniel all about how Nevada senator Frank Church and a group of his colleagues banded together to unmask the government’s darkest secrets; why being a target of “Project Shamrock” was the opposite of being lucky; the CIA’s decision to buy up the entire global supply of LSD for use in Project “Midnight Climax”; why Sydney Gottlieb became known as the “Poisoner In Chief" of American intelligence agencies; and why the government’s fears about mind control may not have actually been that outlandish, given the recent allegations of interference by foreign countries into American elections.

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