The Perils of American Democracy

This installment is greatly focused on the historic figure of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump. Any who may not read on because they simply don’t want to hear about him anymore, I understand. But to any who object because they resent partisanship in political discourse and historical analysis, I would argue, at this point, that criticism of Donald Trump’s actions in office and out of it is no longer partisan. If you care about American democracy, you should listen on.

It was recently reported that President Joe Biden took some time in early August to sit down for a 2-hour conference with a group of history scholars who spoke to him with some urgency regarding the historical moment in which the United States now finds itself. Specifically, this varied group of historians included Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, expert on Human Rights Allida Black, Pulitzer -winning journalist Anne Applebaum, and Sean Wilentz, whom you may remember for his unfortunate criticism of the 1619 Project, which I spoke about in my defense of the project. These experts raised concerns not only about the rise of authoritarianism and threats to democracy around the world, but specifically to the danger that American democracy currently faces. These historians are not alone. According to a very recent NBC News poll, “threats to democracy” have replaced concerns about the economy as the most important issue to voters. Many are those who think they’re clever but only reveal their ignorance by pointing out that “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” but of course, a republic, by definition, is a democracy. Specifically, it is a form of government in which power resides in the voting populace, with their will exercised by their elected representatives. Or as Founding Father Alexander Hamilton once wrote of the Constitution, “This representative democracy as far as is consistent with its genius has all the features of good government.” The fragility of American democracy is not a new concern. Even back when our democratic system of government was still in the intermediary stage between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, we more than once almost went a different way with our experiment. In 1782, there was there a conspiracy among the leaders of the Continental Army, who had not been paid, and who threatened what would essentially have been a coup d'état, proposing to establish a constitutional monarchy with General Washington as its king. Had it not been for Washington’s famous rejection of the offer and subsequent efforts to quell the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy by arranging payment for the troops, our country might have taken a decidedly different path. Then in 1787, during the convening of the Constitutional Convention, rumors swirled about the Continental Congress scheming to offer a proposed regency over the United States to Hohenzollern Prince Henry of Prussia. Indeed, the anxieties and the protest ran so high that the conclave at the Philadelphia Convention had to print an official denial that they intended to establish another monarchy. For decades, these rumors and accusations were unsubstantiated, but in the early 20th century, corroborating evidence appears to have been found in the royal Prussian archives in Charlottenburg. A letter from Henry of Prussia, addressed to an old friend, Baron von Steuben, a Prussian-American general who had whipped the Continental Army into shape during the Revolution and was retired in New York at the time of the Philadelphia Convention, remarks pretty directly on the offer. In French, Henry writes, “I confess that I cannot believe that we can resolve to change the principles of the government which has been established in the United States of America, but if the entire nation should agree to establish others, and would choose for its model the constitution of England, according to my judgment I must admit that it is of all constitutions the one that seems the most perfect to me.” Now if either the Newburgh Conspiracy or the Prussian Scheme had succeeded in their designs, we cannot claim that America would be any less a democracy than is the UK, but both stories serve to show that now is certainly not the first time the fate of our particular brand of democracy has been threatened. This is not to say that concerns are unwarranted. Rather, it is to demonstrate that vigilance is required to preserve our way of life.

Let us begin this discussion by bringing the blog full circle back to the topic of my very first installment, which I removed from the podcast feed a while back because the sound mix wasn’t great and the subject matter caused some new listeners who started at the beginning to not give the podcast a chance. However, the transcript is still available here. Its topic was demagoguery. From the establishment of our federal government, the biggest threat to American democracy has always been the danger of a demagogue coming along and manipulating the people for his own benefit. George Washington wrote to Marquis de Lafayette during the Constitutional Convention that he feared “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his Country so much as his own ambitious views” might exploit the opportunity to seize power. And during the convention, numerous speeches indicate that this danger was on many minds. James Madison spoke of the “Danger of Demagogues,” Elbridge Gerry asserted that “Demagogues are the great pests of our government, and have occasioned most of our distresses,” and Alexander Hamilton warned over and over against the threat of demagogues. In The Federalist Papers, he warned that they were the historical cause of the overturning of most republics—men who start out as demagogues, “paying an obsequious court to the people,” thereafter becoming tyrants. This danger is one of the principal reasons for the checks and balances baked into the system. Specifically, the power of impeachment was the ultimate check against a demagogue chief executive. So what is a demagogue? We might judge from one revision to the records of the convention, in which Elbridge Gerry states that “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” This term, pretended patriots, had originally been taken down as “demagogues” and was later changed. This sentiment seems rather anti-democratic at first blush, as if the people don’t know what’s good for them and need governing, but in fact, his concern is exactly that some authoritarian ruler may fool the American people into raising him up, that the populace might be exploited by one who only pretends to serve them but in fact serves only himself. I’ll revisit the quote from James Fenimore Cooper that I shared in my first episode, “The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people…. The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners and…appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning…instead of manifesting the frank, fearless qualities of the democracy he so prodigally professes.” In that first episode, without stating it outright, since back in 2016 it seemed gauche, I implied, rather heavy-handedly, that this described Donald Trump to a T, as it were, and I went on to compare him to Lewis Charles Levin, a 19th century nativist demagogue. Now, today, there are many valid reasons that the public fears U.S. democracy may be in peril, such as polarization, misinformation online, loss of trust in the media, etc. But without leaning too heavily on the I-told-you-so button, I must argue that the principal threat to our democracy in recent years has been and continues to be incorporated in the person of the former president. There are many historical parallels to the danger we now face and the threat he continues to represent, and we will examine them, but it must be conceded that this existential threat to American democracy, embodied and incited as it is by a disgraced former leader of the country, is utterly unique.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

After the failure of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6th 2021, it seemed Trump had finally been revealed as the anti-democratic force that he clearly is. More than a year later, with the revelations of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s central role in inciting the insurrection made more and more clear, it has been truly disheartening to see so many Republican representatives and talking heads on conservative media fall in line to defend the indefensible. And now, since the FBI search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago and the revelation that Trump illegally took classified documents out of the White House and kept them at his private residence for years, it has been further dispiriting to see Trump’s civilian foot soldiers launch more than one assault on FBI offices. These criminals who have taken up arms against federal law enforcement in what should rightly be considered a second insurrection do so because they think the agency is wrongfully persecuting Trump, and they believe Trump’s explanations that he was just taking work home with him because don’t we all do that? When it was revealed that the “work” Trump removed from the White House included classified and Top Secret documents, these true believers credited Trump’s further explanation that he had actually declassified the documents he took home, under a standing order that anything he took out of the Oval Office be automatically declassified. This last claim was called “preposterous” by national security experts who explain that the classification system has been established over the course of numerous executive orders since World War II, requiring the head of whatever department or agency originally classified the document to review them before declassification and to consult with any other agency or department that may have some interest in the classified material before officially removing the classification marking from the document. Anyone who would believe that the very act of removing the document from the Oval Office declassified it just because Trump said it did, without any official executive order to change the declassification process, simply doesn’t understand the matter and should defer to the experts. The fact of the matter is, Trump appears to have broken numerous laws by taking these documents home with him. Section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code specifies that a person removing classified information without authority and keeping them “at an unauthorized location” can be fined and imprisoned for five year. Of course, Trump is arguing that, as the chief executive, he had that authority, but the Presidential Records Act of 1978 further clarifies the powers of a sitting President when it comes to document handling. It is pretty fitting that Trump, who is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice, has now run afoul of a law passed because of Richard Nixon, another flagrantly corrupt President who made history as the only president to have resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office. When Nixon resigned in 1974, he wanted to take all of his presidential documents home with him, including recordings that were important evidence of his crimes. Fearing that evidence would be destroyed, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, making Nixon’s records public property. And in 1978, having learned our lesson about what a corrupt president might try, the Presidential Records Act was passed so that no future president could remove documents from the White House like Nixon tried to do. Under this law, the American people own those records and documents, and upon a president leaving office, they must be removed directly to the National Archives. Trump’s further explanation that his exit from the White House was simply chaotic, and that the documents were taken by mistake, is perhaps more believable but does not excuse his actions. What it reveals is that he was so certain that he would succeed in overturning the election that he never bothered to pack and ended up having to do what many call an old fashioned shit-shove. However, ignorance is no justification, and since it has come out that someone in his inner circle informed the FBI that these classified materials were in his possession, it seems apparent that even if he didn’t realize what he'd taken at the time, he certainly must have known a year and a half later, especially after a grand jury subpoenaed Trump for the documents in June and he still did not surrender them, necessitating the FBI search of his home.

In fairness, we do know of at least one other American president to have taken home classified documents, and it was a Democrat: Lyndon B. Johnson. Of course, this was years before the passage of the Presidential Records Act and decades before section 1924 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. In 1969, when Nixon took office and Johnson vacated the White House, he secretly told a staffer to smuggle out some highly classified documents. The contents of the documents and the reason for their removal takes us back further, to the 1968 presidential race, when Richard Nixon, who had previously been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president and had been thwarted in his presidential aspirations by the popular John F. Kennedy, Johnson’s late predecessor, ran against Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s VP. This was during the height of the war in Vietnam and the anti-war protest movement. In fact, the American public’s widespread opposition to the war was one of the principal reasons LBJ chose not to run for president again, though he had only served one term as an elected president. As election day drew near in 1968, Johnson saw a path to ending the war in Vietnam in a way that would be acceptable to him, and wanted to pursue it, believing that any indication of his administration ending the war might help Humphrey beat Nixon. However, Richard Nixon became aware of these efforts, and in a stunning betrayal of his country, worked to sabotage peace efforts. Through Anna Chennault, who raised funds for the Republican Party and led the political support group “Republican Women for Nixon,” Nixon made contact with the South Vietnamese government and put pressure on them not to cooperate with Johnson’s peace initiatives. President Johnson, in turn, became aware of Nixon’s sabotage and ordered the FBI to place Chennault under surveillance. From wiretaps, he uncovered evidence of Nixon’s plot “to monkey wrench it,” as one of Nixon’s aides put it. Unsure of what to do with this information, Johnson was on the eve of the election convinced by his cabinet advisers to bury the story. Their reason was that disclosure of the story would be bad for the country, in that it would irreparably harm the American people’s trust in their elected leaders. Certainly this would have been the case. Nixon was elected the next day, but even if disclosure of the story right before Election Day had resulted in a victory for Humphrey, the story would have shown a former vice-president and popular presidential candidate playing politics with the lives of soldiers. In between 1968, when the war in Vietnam might have ended, and 1975, when it did end, countless further lives were lost that might have been saved but for the callous political chess game played by Richard Nixon. And in hindsight, it seems Johnson’s noble motives for keeping Nixon’s treachery a secret were all for nothing. The American public was already disillusioned with the government and its elected leaders. They had been since the start of the Vietnam War and especially since the assassinations of the 1960s that many believed had been orchestrated by our own government. And certainly after Watergate, any vestiges of trust in the American presidency were obliterated regardless. Johnson’s surveillance of Americans in contact with the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., was not, at the time, illegal, nor was his removal of classified documents relating to what that surveillance uncovered. In fact, in telling this story, I would argue that rather than comparing what Trump did to what Johnson did, a more apt comparison is to compare Nixon’s betrayal of the country to Trump’s alleged treason.

Richard Nixon gives a speech on the conflict in Vietnam, which he prevented from being resolved in order to win the presidency.

Here we address more clearly what makes Trump a clear and present danger to American democracy. Clearly he was unwilling to give up power and sought to unlawfully overturn the election and steal the presidency. Anyone who denies this now is performing mental gymnastics and ignoring all the evidence presented in the January 6 Committee hearings. But what makes both the insurrection he clearly orchestrated AND his removal of highly classified documents from the White House even more egregious is the evidence that he has improperly colluded with hostile foreign governments. In the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, when it was revealed that some of the classified documents seized were marked above Top Secret, or S.C.I., which stands for sensitive compartmented information, and that among these were documents containing U.S. nuclear secrets, speculation has run rampant that Trump may have been enriching himself by selling secrets to foreign governments. What evidence is there that Trump has actually done this? The evidence is mostly circumstantial. For example, in the weeks before the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump hosted a controversial Saudi-Arabian funded golf tournament at his golf course in New Jersey, and the timing between this event and the revelation that the FBI recovered classified nuclear documents from Mar-a-Lago resurrected some former allegations raised in 2019 by the House Oversight Committee that the Trump administration attempted to “rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia,” even suggesting that his actions may have violated the Atomic Energy Act. Even more recently, since it’s been revealed that a Russian-speaking woman “infiltrated” Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s circle, by posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family, Russia is brought to mind. If we are going to worry about Trump betraying American secrets to a foreign government, we should really be talking more about his collusion with Russia. Throughout his presidency, as the collusion between Trump’s election campaign and Russia was being investigated, Trump maintained that it was a baseless conspiracy theory, but unlike most baseless conspiracy theories, there is overwhelming evidence that his campaign worked with Russia, even if he managed to insulate himself personally. Also unlike baseless conspiracy claims, the evidence for Russian collusion has been vetted and uncovered by credible investigative journalism, not fringe researchers. Again, denying Trump’s involvement with Putin’s Russia takes a purposeful refusal to acknowledge overwhelming documentary evidence. Though Mueller’s report, heavily redacted by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, didn’t explicitly implicate Trump himself, his investigation resulted in the conviction of numerous advisers and aides to Trump who had lied about their involvement with Russia, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon. Then there are the uncovered connections between Russia and his administration and close family members, like his Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, his White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, his first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his son, Don Jr. As for Trump himself, even discounting the questionable contents of the so-called Steele Dossier, the opposition research that purported to reveal that Trump had been cultivated for years as a Russian asset through blackmail, Trump’s very public praise of Putin in the years leading up to the 2016 campaign, his public call for Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee—which they promptly did—and his actions favorable to Russia while in office all go to support, if not prove, that he may have had, and may still have, an inappropriate relationship with a foreign power that should cause all Americans even greater concern after learning that he attempted to secretly keep classified nuclear documents after being voted out of office. 

The warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago did not actually list the Presidential Records Act as a reason for their search. Rather, it cited the section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that criminalizes the destruction or concealment of documents intended to obstruct an investigation, as well as a section of the U.S. Code dealing with the concealment of public records, and, rather importantly, it cites the Espionage Act. This law was passed in 1917, during World War I, long before Harry Truman penned the first executive order governing the classification of sensitive documents. When searching for a historical parallel for potential prosecution under the Espionage Act of persons accused of mishandling nuclear secrets, one cannot help but consider the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the summer of 1950, amid the height of the Second Red Scare, as the Korean War began, a number of Jewish members of the American Communist Party were arrested for conspiracy to commit treason. It began with Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass, who worked in the nuclear program as a machinist and was charged with stealing secrets related to our atomic bomb technology. Greenglass pled guilty and named Julius, his brother-in-law, as a co-conspirator. The Truman administration then leaned hard on Julius Rosenberg to get him to name others in their spy ring, but Julius maintained his innocence. The Truman administration claimed Julius was the head of the ring and arrested Julius’s wife Ethel, with whom he had two young sons, despite Greenglass’s insistence that his sister was innocent in the matter. Ethel’s arrest seems to have been only a means of coercing Julius to talk, but he remained uncooperative. So they pursued a death penalty, still, it seems, mostly to scare Julius Rosenberg into giving up others in the ring. However, what Truman seems not to have counted on was the clamorous mob mentality of the American people at the time, who had been led to fear Soviet infiltration and to mistrust all Jews as Communist conspirators. According to polls taken at the time, almost three-quarters of the country wanted to see the Rosenbergs executed. Internationally, however, there were nearly universal calls for clemency. Finding himself in a bind, Truman simply passed the buck to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who feared looking weak and, over the protest overseas as well as the counsel of his own advisers, chose to capitulate to the bloodlust of the people, and sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths in 1953. To the end, they maintained their innocence, and for decades, many social critics and scholars likewise argued that the case against them was weak, with evidence predicated on the testimony of an informant trying to save his own skin, evidence as absurd as a Jell-O box being in their possession that was said to be carried as a signal to other spies in the ring, when of course, in the 1950s, one would be hard-pressed to find a household that did not contain a box of Jell-O. These critics were mostly silenced, however, in 1995 with the public disclosure of certain cables intercepted by the Venona project, a U.S. counterintelligence program, which showed that, indeed, Julius Rosenberg had been part of an atomic spy ring.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in custody.

The fact that the Espionage Act was invoked on the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago does not indicate there is any evidence that Trump was selling or disclosing information related to national defense. The Act is used not only to prosecute those who spy for a foreign power but also those who mishandle secrets, including those who leak secrets to the media as whistleblowers. It seems pretty clear, however, that Trump, who openly reviles leakers and all legacy media outlets, was not doing the latter. However, even if he were caught giving American secrets to Russia or the Saudis, let me be clear that I am not advocating for the death penalty. Even in the case of the Rosenbergs, I would argue that justice was not served by taking their lives. Certainly the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was inconclusive. She was accused over the denials of their informant, and the only evidence against her was a set of notes that she allegedly typed, but it’s impossible to ascertain who actually typed the document. The extent of her crime might have been some vague knowledge of her husband’s activities and tacit approval of them, but this should not have been enough to extinguish her life and leave her children parentless. Even if you do believe that her passive involvement earned her a capital punishment, there is the matter of the unequal apportionment of such sentences. David Greenglass’s wife Ruth was just as likely to have been aware of their activities, but she was never charged. And Greenglass himself, who was more directly guilty of stealing atomic secrets, was sentenced to 15 years and only served nine of them. We might attribute this to his cooperation with investigators, but others involved also were not sentenced to death, such as Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who actually worked directly on the bomb at Los Alamos and only served 9 years. When we consider the Rosenberg case with this context, they appear to have been singled out, perhaps because of Julius’s alleged leadership position in the ring, or perhaps because they had been uncooperative, or perhaps because they were Jews from an immigrant family. Whatever the case, I agree with scholars who argue that in trying not to appear weak, Eisenhower clearly demonstrated his weakness by sacrificing their lives to boost his approval ratings. Ironically, though, while I would not advocate for Trump to face the same sentence as the Rosenbergs, even if it were proven beyond doubt that he did indeed sell or surrender nuclear secrets to a foreign power, he does advocate for death sentences in such cases himself. Speaking about Bowe Bergdahl, Trump on several occasions advocated for shooting traitors.

One should not ask whether or not the former president is capable of treason. He is a human being, and thus fallible. He is capable of it. He has shown throughout his careers, both business and political, that he has no qualms about putting himself before his country. Consider his years of tax avoidance, or his serial disregard of the Emoluments Clause as he used the power of his presidency to enrich himself. If you’re unaware of any of these facts, I might suggest that you choose different news sources. Regardless, though, asking whether he betrayed his country in his handling of Top Secret documents is something of a moot point. The very fact that he incited an insurrection at the Capitol in his efforts to overturn the legitimate results of an election and retain power against the will of the American people is proof enough that he has already betrayed his country and done damage to our democracy. However, as I said, he is just one man. The fact that this man, who openly admires dictators, was elected U.S. president and was thus able to do all this damage is more of an indictment on those who voted him into office, though, than it is to him alone. It is the people who raise up demagogues. And it is the fact that so many Americans voted for Trump and continue to support him despite everything that really has the historians who met with Biden worried. They compared the political climate today to other times in U.S. history when American democracy was at risk, such as before the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln cautioned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Does this mean we face the threat of another Civil War, as we did in the disputed election of 1876? Or is our situation more like the years before the U.S. joined World War II. I favor this analogy, since just as today we see an entire wing of the support for Donald Trump coming from White Nationalists, the threat to American democracy in the late 1930s was not just from Hitler but also involved a rise in fascist sentiment and anti-Semitism within America, fueled by demagoguery. While fascism was spreading across Europe, Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a radio program, spread fascist ideology to his some 30 million listeners. He had started out as a booster of Roosevelt and the New Deal, but his broadcasts turned more and more anti-Semitic, until finally he was praising fascist policies implemented by Hitler and Mussolini. In a kind of deplatforming akin to what happened to InfoWars demagogue Alex Jones, Roosevelt eventually intervened to get Father Coughlin’s program cancelled and make his newspapers illegal to mail. Father Coughlin faded into obscurity after that, unlike Alex Jones. Perhaps it is counter-democratic, but history has shown that the best way to weaken a demagogue is to deny them a platform. Donald Trump, however, is a different beast entirely. Having once held the highest office in the land, voted into office by 63 million citizens and winning the vote of 74 million Americans even when he lost his reelection, he simply cannot be deplatformed. When social media companies tried, validly citing his spread of misinformation and incitement of unlawful acts on January 6th, he simply started his own platform, and his followers, as is their nature, followed.

Father Charles Coughlin giving a speech.

In the years since Trump’s election, numerous books have been published pondering the future of democracy, with titles like, How Democracy Ends, and How Democracies Die. The number of magazine, newspaper, and web articles about democracy being in danger, or in crisis, or decline are countless. And this spring, the Brookings Institution started The Strengthening American Democracy Initiative. Tellingly, the 1930s saw the same rise in alarmed concern for the health of democracy. All over the country, lectures were delivered with titles like “The Future of Democracy,” “The Prospects of Democracy,” “The Crisis of Democracy,” and “How to Save Democracy.” And the similarity did not end at the fact that they faced the spread of authoritarian ideology via demagogues over mass media, just as we do today. Their concern, much like ours in the wake of January 6th, also stemmed from what appeared to have been a failed coup. In 1933, shortly after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, numerous right wing paramilitary militias, most of them explicitly white supremacist, formed for the express purpose of inciting rebellion against the progressive president. If this reminds you of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, it should. In this volatile climate, it was not so surprising when, that summer, a Marine Major General named Smedley Darlington Butler informed the FBI that he had been approached by a cabal of Wall Street businessmen and asked to lead a fascist coup, marching on Washington at the head of an army of veterans, to eject not only FDR but also the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and every other politician in the order of succession. In their place, Butler was tasked with raising up a dictator. Just as Trump-supporters and their complicit media outlets today call the Russian scandal a hoax, so too did much of the press declare that the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch, as it was called, was a hoax, but the congressional committee tasked with its investigation found it to be all too real. And neither were they in the business of just stirring up baseless political controversy. In fact, according to Butler, the committee actually protected the wealthy conspirators by having their names redacted from their final report. It might be tempting to say worries in the 1930s were nothing but hand-wringing, and that the same is true today, that the Wall Street Putsch never would have succeeded in overthrowing democracy, and neither were the Capitol insurrectionists really capable of doing irreparable harm to our democracy. Maybe that’s true. But what about the next time? What about the next demagogue, the next coup?

As I said at the top of this episode, this is not a partisan argument. Any truly patriotic Republican must be just as alarmed as I am by Trump’s actions and his influence on their party. Really they should be even more concerned. But with the recent primary results, in which so many of Trump’s picks took nominations and most of the incumbent Republicans who voted to impeach him lost their support, his stranglehold on the GOP’s electorate appears unyielding. If deplatforming won’t thwart Trump, the most powerful and probably most destructive demagogue in American history, then prosecuting him for his crimes may. And if it is impossible to hold him accountable for his attempt to unlawfully overturn the election, then we must prosecute him under the laws listed on the FBI’s warrant. We need not lock him up, as he was so fond of chanting about Hillary Clinton when she was accused of being careless with classified communications. Rather, a simple fine will suffice as long as he is convicted under the third law on the warrant, Section 2071 of title 18 of the U.S. code, which criminalizes the removal and concealment of records. Conviction under this law makes him ineligible for holding federal office. As for his followers, who pose the real threat, we must welcome their legal protest but likewise aggressively prosecute those who resort to violence and insurrection, which we know they are prone to do. And afterward, we must remain vigilant. We must work to foil the next demagogues, who may have seen what Trump proved was possible and prove themselves more capable than he of carrying it off. And it is not just the next demagogue we must worry about, but also the next coup, which may not be a coup of force but rather a more insidious legal coup. Take, for example, the pending case Moore v. Harper that will be considered by our abjectly partisan Supreme Court. This case will determine the constitutionality of the “independent state legislature” theory, which if recognized as valid by this packed bench, would give state legislatures not only carte blanche to aggressively gerrymander, but would also grant them the ability to throw out presidential election results and appoint electors as they please. Essentially, it would make the overturning of legitimate presidential election results legal. So raise your voice, cast your vote, and pray to whatever power or principle you hold dear that the Department of Justice and elected representatives who genuinely seek to preserve democracy will have the moral fortitude and courage to do what must be done.

*

Until next time, remember, according to the Democracy Index, the United States is already deemed a “flawed democracy.” If we slip further into the autocratic range of the spectrum, it will have been a pretty short and sad run for a country that prides itself on representing freedom to the whole world. After all, we could only truly consider ourselves a democracy after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making us a relatively young democracy compared to most others, like, for example, New Zealand, which as a self-governing colony became the first country in the world to adopt universal suffrage in 1893. We may like to pretend we were the grandfather of democracy, but for most of our existence, we were a democracy in name only. And calling yourself a democracy means nothing. To illustrate, Hitler and Mussolini were also quite fond of boasting about their “democracies.”

Further Reading

Denton, Sally. “Why Is So Little Known About the 1930s Coup Attempt Against FDR?” The Guardian, 11 Jan. 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s.

Farrell, John A. “Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery.” The New York Times, 31 Dec. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html?_r=0.

Herenstein, Ethan, and Thomas Wolf. “The ‘Independent State Legislature Theory,’ Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, 6 June 2022, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/independent-state-legislature-theory-explained.

Krauel, Richard. “Prince Henry of Prussia and the Regency of the United States, 1786.” The American Historical Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1911, pp. 44–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1832837.

Lepore, Jill. “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died.” The New Yorker, 27 Jan. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died.

Lynd, Staughton. “Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?” Monthly Review, vol. 62, no. 9, Feb. 2011, pp. 43–53. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/10.14452/MR-062-09-2011-02_4.

Myre, Greg, and Wynne Davis. “The Reason Why Presidents Can't Keep Their White House Records Dates Back to Nixon.” NPR, 13 Aug. 2022, www.npr.org/2022/08/13/1117297065/trump-documents-history-national-archives-law-watergate.

Savage, Charlie. “Laws and Lists in Search Warrant Offer Clues to Trump Document Investigation.” The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/12/us/politics/search-warrant-trump-investigation-documents.html.

Scherer, Michael, et al. “Historians Privately Warn Biden That America’s Democracy Is Teetering.” The Washington Post, 10 Aug. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/10/biden-us-historians-democracy-threat/.

Schwartz, Jon. “  It’s Not Just Trump — LBJ Took Classified Documents Too.” The Intercept, 11 Aug. 2022, theintercept.com/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-mar-a-lago-classified-documents-lbj/.

 West, Darrell M. “Trump Is Not the Only Threat to Democracy.” Brookings, 25 July, 2022, www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/07/25/trump-is-not-the-only-threat-to-democracy/.

Quinn, Melissa. “A Look at the Law Governing Presidential Records.” CBS News, 9 Aug. 2022, www.cbsnews.com/news/a-look-at-the-law-governing-presidential-records/.

Stranger Things Have Happened - Part Three: The Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project

On a summer afternoon in 1752, as storm clouds gathered over Philadelphia and rain spattered the city, writer, diplomat, inventor, scientist and all-around polymath Benjamin Franklin did not seek shelter inside as so many others did. Rather, he saw an opportunity to conduct an experiment that he had been planning for some time. He prepared a kite, but rather than a paper kite, this one was a silken handkerchief stretched over crossed sticks, making it more likely to withstand the wind and the rain of the storm, and he attached to the kite a house key. Most Americans are very familiar with this experiment, but in its countless retellings, it has become a historical myth, with many claiming that, in conducting it, Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity. In truth, electricity had been a recognized form of energy for more than a thousand years. In fact, numerous scientists had studied the nature and effects of static electricity, going all the way back to 546 BCE, when Thales of Miletus (Thay-leez of Meal-le-tus) produced electricity by rubbing wool against amber. The purpose of Franklin’s experiment, rather, was just to prove the electrical nature of lightning. This was a popular theory at the time, winning French scientists accolades for their speculation on the topic, based on the observation that lightning appeared to be attracted to spikes, or high points, a fact about which Franklin himself had formerly been skeptical. The design of his kite experiment, however, clearly demonstrates how much was known about the conduction of electricity. Franklin attached a wire to the top of his kite, and made sure that the twine was wet, so that the lightning, or “electrical fire” as he called it, would be conducted from the wire at the kite’s tip down to the key at the end of the twine, which would collect the charge. And to protect himself from the electricity, at the end of the wet twine, where the key was tied, he attached another string, this one of silk, which he did his best to keep dry, for he held the other end of it. At the conclusion of his experiment, he was able to charge a rudimentary capacitor, called a Leyden jar. He published the details of the experiment, and thus the myth was born. Some other mythical aspects of the experiment have to do with where he stood, with some accounts describing him being in a field, when in fact he explicitly described standing in a doorway so as to keep his silken tether dry. Other versions have it that he climbed the spire of Christ Church to conduct the experiment, but this is a corruption. In fact, he intended to use the spire on Christ Church for his experiment, but at the time the church had no such steeple. Franklin even financed its construction by organizing a lottery, but it would not be built until a couple years after he went ahead with the experiment using a kite instead of a steeple to reach the height necessary. And lastly, most tellings of the story have it that the key-adorned kite was struck by lightning. If that were the case, Benjamin Franklin would very likely have been killed. In fact, the year after, a similar experiment in Russia did end up electrocuting the physicist conducting it. Rather, in Franklin’s experiment, the wire collected the ambient electricity in the storm cloud and conducted it to the key. This experiment, which for a long time was referred to as the Philadelphia Experiment, really happened and was rather momentous in the study of electricity and meteorological phenomena, but like other real incidents in history, it has gathered myths over time. In contrast, today, the term “The Philadelphia Experiment” is used mostly to refer to another momentous scientific achievement around 200 years later. The difference is, this one never really happened. However, it too has evolved into numerous historical myths, including wild conspiracy claims that our government has abducted children for psychic experimentation, opened portals in time-space, and brought actual monsters into our world.

*

I described this series as an exploration of the historical and pseudo historical basis of the Netflix series Stranger Things, and it is here that we veer into the decidedly pseudohistorical. Some may protest that the topics I’ve been covering, MK-Ultra human experimentation and CIA-sponsored studies of anomalous mental phenomena, were not the actual basis of the series. Rather, the creators of Stranger Things were inspired not by history but by 80s science-fiction, and this is certainly the case. One of the great pleasures of watching the series is in identifying each bit of homage that they’ve woven into it. But we can see that one of the biggest influences on the show, Steven King’s Firestarter, was itself influenced by the intelligence projects I’ve been discussing. The novel clearly references MK-Ultra drug trials as well as CIA efforts to develop a psychic asset in its premise about a scientific intelligence agency that gives test subjects psychic powers by dosing them with a psychoactive drug. Certainly the first season of Stranger Things, which has government agents chasing after a little girl with psychokinetic powers, owes much to King’s novel and its film adaptation. However, it has been reported that the show’s creators certainly were inspired by the real-life urban legend of the Montauk Project, which I will be discussing in this episode. The original name of the series was actually Montauk, and a couple of years after the series premiere, the creators were sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed to have pitched them a feature film called The Montauk Project, about an abducted child, secret experiments in a military installation, and an inter-dimensional monster. Eventually the lawsuit was withdrawn, either because the case was weak or because the plaintiff was paid handsomely to drop the charges. Regardless, these facts are enough to confirm that the story of the Montauk Project, a wild and thoroughly debunked tale that continues to be believed by many fringe researchers and paranormal conspiracy theorists, was the principle basis for the show Stranger Things. However, before we can even begin to approach the story of the Montauk Project, we must first examine the legend of the Philadelphia Experiment, which would become the bedrock upon which the later legend was built.

Promotional material produced to help sell the concept of Stranger Things, made to look like a dog-eared Steven King paperback, with the original title: Montauk. Via ScreenCraft

The legend began in 1952, when Morris K. Jessup, a UFO researcher, received a letter from someone calling himself Carlos Allende, who took issue with Jessup’s urging of legislators to fund research aimed at completing Einstein’s Unified Field Theory as a means of developing antigravity propulsion and advancing space travel technology. Over the next year, Jessup received more than 50 letters from Allende, who claimed that, contrary to common knowledge, Albert Einstein actually had completed his Unified Field Theory and had used it while working with the Navy on a top secret experiment. For any other lay person, like myself, the Unified Field Theory was the idea that all the forces of nature, specifically the field equations of relativistic gravitation and electromagnetism, must be connected and thus should be describable with a single, integrated theory. This notion obsessed Einstein, who indicated in a 1923 Nobel lecture that he “cannot rest content with the assumption that there exist two distinct fields totally independent of each other by their nature.” He worked on unification for the last thirty years of his life, even poring over his notes on his deathbed, but he never achieved a working theory. Some say this is because he was simply ahead of his time, as back then, only two subatomic particles were known, whereas now we’ve discovered several others. Also, only the two fundamental forces of nature he was trying to unify were recognized, but now we recognize two others, the so-called strong and weak nuclear forces at work inside of atoms. Others will say that Einstein was simply not keeping up with the vanguard of physics in his day because he had rejected quantum mechanics, or they will say he had simply strayed too far from physical reality in his mathematical theories, which more and more had to involve theoretical dimensions in order to work. Today, it’s thought that string theory, which likewise requires the theoretical existence of numerous dimensions, may eventually lead to the Theory of Everything that Einstein sought, though string theorists too have been criticized for straying too far from physical reality and not producing testable theories. However, according to Morris K. Jessup’s mysterious correspondent, Carlos Allende, Einstein actually did complete his unified theory and tested it at a Naval shipyard in Philadelphia, in 1943, when he managed to make a naval destroyer, the U.S.S. Eldridge, disappear. According to Allende, as part of the war effort, Einstein was applying his unified theory in an effort to make the warship invisible, but as an unforeseen result of the experiment, the destroyer was teleported to Norfolk, Virginia, and back again. Allende knew about this because he had witnessed it. He had been a merchant mariner aboard a shipping vessel at the time, and he had seen strange equipment brought aboard the Eldridge, such as transmitters and generators, as well as what appeared to be a Tesla coil that that was wrapped around the entire vessel. Before the ship disappeared, he claimed to have seen it become enveloped in a bright green haze. Over the course of his many letters, Allende described the experiment in greater detail, explaining that sailors aboard the Eldridge became disoriented, that when the vessel reappeared in Norfolk, some crew members’ bodies had physically fused with the solid matter of the ship’s bulkheads, and that some had disappeared entirely.

In the spring of 1957, the year after Jessup had received the increasingly strange letters from Allende, agents from the Office of Naval Research contacted him. They had in their possession a volume of Jessup’s 1955 book, The Case for the UFO, that had been anonymously sent to them annotated by what appeared to be three different people using different colored ink. Something in the annotations, which implied knowledge about the propulsion technology of UFOs and suggested Jessup was too close to figuring out the truth, had interested the agents, and of course this helps fuel conspiracy theories about official cover-ups. When Jessup read the annotations, he found their technical jargon similar to that of Allende and showed the officers Allende’s letters. According to the story, these Naval investigators went to the Pennsylvania return address that appeared on the letters, but found only an abandoned farmhouse. Afterward, the Navy seems to have lost interest—or maybe they had never been all that interested at all?—but Morris K. Jessup grew more and more obsessed. The legend almost died with him, however, when Jessup committed suicide in 1959 without publishing anything about the Philadelphia Experiment. However, Allende would not let it die. He began writing further letters to UFO researcher Jacques Vallee almost a decade later, and word of the strange story spread throughout the UFO researcher community. In 1968, a book was published, and suddenly the Allende Letters, and copies of the annotated Jessup book—called the Varo edition, after the company that made 127 reproductions of it—became nearly mythical among UFO researchers. These conspiracy theorists variously speculate that Jessup was actually murdered—even though there is evidence of his psychological distress before his suicide, resulting from a failed marriage and poor health after an automobile accident—and that Carlos Allende, who remained in hiding for his entire life, posting letters from various locations in America and Mexico, was actually an extra-terrestrial. Then in 1979, the story of the Philadelphia Experiment really reached prominence in the public imagination when a widely read paranormal writer, Charles Berlitz, who had previously popularized the idea of the Bermuda Triangle, teamed up with UFO researcher Bill Moore to write a book about it. Listeners of the show should recognize those names, as Moore and Berlitz were the duo who later popularized the legend about the Roswell Incident, and Moore would eventually be made a pawn in the UFO disinformation games of Rick Doty, helping to torment Paul Bennewitz and propagate the hoax Majestic 12 documents. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I invite you to listen to my three-part series UFO Disinfo, released last year around this time. Moore, who also apparently corresponded with the mysterious Carlos Allende, expanded on the mythology. The experiment was code-named Project Rainbow, Berlitz and Moore wrote, and the research into invisibility may have applied Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, but Einstein’s theory had been completed by Townsend Brown, an inventor of questionable background and character who claimed to have developed in the 1920s an antigravity thrust technology, called the Biefeld-Brown effect, that today is recognized as a misunderstanding of the ionic or coronal wind phenomenon. Furthermore, according to Berlitz and Moore, the application of this unified field technology toward invisibility was developed by mathematician and Manhattan Project collaborator John Von Neumann. Of course, exactly how Townsend’s “electro-gravitation” might have produced invisibility, let alone achieved teleportation, is, unsurprisingly, not exceedingly clear.

Morris K. Jessup

Carlos Allende’s story was, of course, dubious from the start. For example, if he had seen the ship disappear and reappear in Philadelphia, how did he know where it had teleported to? And why was there no record of the event from other witnesses? Even if no others on Allende’s ship had seen it, the sudden disappearance of a destroyer, which would have displaced around 2,000 tons of water, would have been noticed simply because of the resulting turmoil in the waters, as it would have created massive waves that would have crashed through the naval shipyard. In fact, ship logs and naval records indicate that the ship may not have even been in Philadelphia in October 1943, and in 1999, sailors who had served on the Eldridge reunited and said the ship never docked there. And in 1994, in an article in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee writes about an interview he conducted with one Edward Dudgeon, who had been a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Engstrom, which had been docked at the Philadelphia Naval shipyard in October 1943. Dudgeon revealed rational explanations for everything Carlos Allende might have observed if he really were there, watching the strange activities on the destroyers in the Navy yard at the time. They had indeed been loading unusual high-tech equipment onto destroyers that night. These included new sonar devices as well as new depth charge launchers, and rather than being wrapped in Tesla coils, they were being wrapped in high-voltage cables to alter the ships’ magnetic signatures, making them more difficult for magnetic torpedoes to target. It was a process known as degaussing, and it sometimes produced no smell of ozone, as Allende described. It’s even possible that Allende may have overhead a sailor saying something about how it would make them invisible, not to the naked eye or even to radar, but to torpedos. As for the green haze, this was a common enough occurrence at sea, a weather phenomenon called St. Elmo’s Fire, caused by electrical discharge, which we might assume to have been pronounced by the degaussing process. And Dudgeon even offered an explanation for the disappearance of whatever ship Allende had seen and believed was the Eldridge, as well as its appearance in Norfolk and reappearance at Philadelphia in too short a time for such a journey. According to Dudgeon, who actually claimed the Eldridge was there in Philadelphia, which does conflict with other reports, a destroyer leaving the Philadelphia shipyard one night, appearing in Norfolk shortly thereafter, and then reappearing back in Philadelphia would have seemed impossible to a merchant marine, as their ships would have to take a 2-day trip to the harbor entrance, but the destroyers were able to take the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, an inland channel, that would make such a short trip possible, and necessary, as Norfolk was where such ships were loaded with ammunition. Therefore, it is somewhat understandable that such a tall tale might be told by a merchant marine who saw the destroyers loaded up with secret anti-submarine technology and witnessed the unusual and definitely classified process of degaussing the ships, and who may have seen the ships engulfed in a strange kind of green fire during the process, and who later that evening noticed a ship had departed but the next morning saw it was present again, and perhaps even later heard through the grapevine that the same ship had been at Norfolk in the middle of the night, a round trip that would have seemed to him impossible to complete in so short a time if he were unaware of the shortcut naval warships were taking between the two Navy yards.

It is impossible, though, to give Allende the benefit of the doubt and suggest he may have actually been there and seen something that he honestly mistook for a ship teleporting. From the beginning, in his correspondence with Jessup, there was evidence that he was perpetrating a hoax. How, for example, could a merchant marine aboard a separate ship have even known all the particulars he claimed to know, down to Einstein’s involvement and his secret completion of the Unified Field Theory? And what else but an elaborate hoax could explain his annotation of Jessup’s book, in which he pretended to be three different people, or rather beings, engaged in a conversation in the margins about mere humans and their inability to grasp the explanations of various paranormal phenomena. The only rational alternative to it being a hoax is it being the product of mental illness. In 1969, though, Carlos Allende, or a man claiming to be him, appeared at the Arizona office of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and confessed that his letters and annotations in the Varo edition of Jessup’s book had been a hoax. Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz chose not to believe this, though, and Allende later recanted. However, a year after the Berlitz-Moore book, Carlos Allende was discredited once and for all. In 1980, researcher Robert Goerman, who happened to live in the Pennsylvania town Allende had given in his return address, decided to look into it. Apparently little serious research had been done to track down Allende, as the address previously said to have been a vacant farmhouse was not vacant at all, and Goerman was pretty easily able to locate the estranged parents and siblings of Carlos Allende, whose real name, it turned out, was Carl Allen. In fact, it further turned out he knew the man’s father pretty well, and the family was only too willing to share stories about the eccentric drifter he had grown up to be, showing Goerman all the letters Carl had sent home over the years, in which he bragged about being the author of books that he had merely scribbled in, including not just Jessup’s book but Berlitz and Moore’s as well. The portrait that emerged from Goerman’s interviews was of a mischief-maker possessed of a gifted intellect. According to the Allen family, Carl had squandered his potential and had nothing to show for his life but a widely-believed urban legend. That legacy, however, continued on strong even after his discrediting in 1980, with a feature film dramatizing the story of the Philadelphia Experiment in 1984 executive produced by horror master John Carpenter, whose work, including his self-composed synth scores and the 1982 classic The Thing, has been paid extensive homage by the series Stranger Things. Indeed, this film adaptation of Berlitz and Moore’s book seems to have gone on to inspire the next clever fabricators of urban legend who came along, or rather, if they are to be believed, the movie just jogged their erased memories.

Carl Allen, AKA Carlos Allende, fabricator of the Philadelphia Experiment Hoax.

Around 1988, a videotape called The Truth about the Philadelphia Experiment began circulating in ufology and fringe belief circles. The video featured three men talking to a small audience in a private Long Island residence while they shared a slide show projected onto a bedsheet. Underground tapes like these sold for $20-$30 a pop and were copied and shared among likeminded conspiracy theorists who felt like such videos made them privy to secrets of which the sheeple were blissfully unaware, and it was through such independently produced and disseminated media that misinformation and hoaxes were spread before the advent of the modern Internet in the 1990s. In the video, the three men, Preston Nichols, Duncan Cameron, and Al Bielek, spoke about how they had recovered long repressed memories about their involvement with outlandish secret government experiments after viewing the film The Philadelphia Experiment. Preston Nichols claimed that he had been working in the 70s and 80s as a microwave engineer on Long Island but began moonlighting at nearby Montauk Airbase, ostensibly to work on their radar equipment. But he had recovered memories, he said, of his involvement with a series of bizarre experiments in an underground bunker at Camp Hero, a military installation that was at the time officially abandoned. According to the mythos, John Von Neumann, who Berlitz and Moore had claimed was instrumental in the development of the technology used in the Philadelphia Experiment, had gone on to further develop the electrogravitic field technology and apply it to some completely different purposes. Using technology contributed by Nicola Tesla for the Philadelphia Experiment, Von Neumann supposedly designed a chair that amplified and relayed human thoughts to a computer, which through some hocus pocus field technology then materialized that thought into reality. They could think of a can of beer and then it would appear, so real they could drink it. What does this have to do with the Philadelphia Project, you may be asking? Well, so the story goes, the participants used this technology that brought into reality whatever the person in the chair thought about, in conjunction with weather manipulation technology that allowed the opening of vortices, to open wormholes through space and time. Exactly 40 years after the Philadelphia Experiment, they opened one such wormhole and became linked to the field that had teleported the Eldridge from Philadelphia to Norfolk and back. Enter Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron, who claimed to be sailors aboard the Eldridge who leapt overboard during the experiment and landed in Camp Hero, 40 years in the future. Through an astonishing coincidence, Bielek and Cameron were not just any sailors. Bielek was a brilliant scientist-engineer who had been closely involved with the technical aspects of the Philadelphia Experiment, so he went to work at Montauk in the 1980s, and Cameron just so happened to be a gifted psychic, making him the perfect operator of the Montauk chair. All three of them claimed to have only recently remembered these events, after having seen the 1984 film, because they’d had their memories wiped by CIA brainwashing techniques. This is perhaps the least outlandish aspect of their story, but as we saw in part one of this series, it too is hard to credit, since the CIA failed to ever develop any such targeted amnesia effects. But however convoluted and unbelievable the story already sounds, strap in, because it only gets more tortuous and preposterous from here.

In the 1990s, terrestrial radio became a major channel for the spread of such hoaxes and conspiracy claims, and the biggest purveyor was Art Bell, host of Coast to Coast. Al Bielek and Preston Nichols appeared numerous times on Art Bell’s program to promote their claims and, of course, to sell copies of their tape, or of the series of books, co-authored by one Peter Moon, that Nichols began to self-publish in 1992. Over the course of these retellings, as the Montauk Mythos was revealed, or coalesced, or evolved, or was sporadically improvised—however you want to look at it—it grew more and more sensational. Al Bielek claimed to be a man out of time, whose identity had been rewritten. He was actually Ed Cameron, he said, and Duncan was his brother, but over the course of their time travel experiments at Montauk, he had gone back and forth in time and had even been age regressed into a 1-year-old’s body to have his identity erased, which seems far too elaborate a plan to get rid of him when the shadowy group running the Montauk Project could have just had him killed. It conveniently accounts, however, for there being no record of either Cameron on the Eldridge and also explains why there is no evidence that he, Al Bielek, had ever earned the advanced degrees in science and engineering he claimed to possess. As for who that shadowy Montauk group was, as with much of the story, this changed over time. It was a secret government operation a lá Mk-Ultra, involving Nazi scientists recruited via Operation Paperclip, performing experiments on psychic test subjects. Or rather, it was the project of a secret Nazi order that had survived the fall of the Third Reich and, funded by Nazi gold, sought to bring the Reich back through manipulation of the timeline. But then again, it used technology not just developed by Tesla and Einstein, but by extra-terrestrials who had signed a secret treaty with the U.S. government. The projects undertaken with the teleportation and time travel technology developed were equally wide-ranging and fantastical. For example, they claimed to have teleported to a facility beneath the pyramids on Mars in order to deactivate a defense grid that prevented aliens from entering the Solar System, and they described a plot to go back in time, assassinate Jesus Christ with a pistol, steal his blood, clone it, transfuse it into Duncan Cameron and then have him arrive on a flying saucer to Earth, the idea being that when scientists tested his DNA against traces on the Turin Shroud, they would have successfully faked the Second Coming. As with much of the mythos, these supposedly brilliant scientists seem to lack a fundamental grasp of much of the technical claims they make, for example, a blood transfusion does not change one’s DNA. But we will look at the plausibility and logical flaws involved with their story shortly. To conclude, we should point out the parts of their meandering mythology that seem to have inspired Stranger Things. According to the books, the Nazis or aliens or Nazi aliens behind the project began abducting children in the 1970s to experiment on them, torturing them and either uncovering their innate psychic abilities or cultivating them. Finally, in an act of resistance to the project, Bielek’s psychic brother, Duncan, used the thought-form-generating chair to bring a monster into being, and as this monster rampaged through Camp Hero, they ended up having to destroy the lab’s equipment to make it dematerialize, resulting in the end of the Montauk Project. Here we see all the seeds of the Netflix series Stranger Things, from missing children, to experiments on abducted psychic children, to the opening of portals with the power of the mind and the drawing of a monster into our reality. But as we will see, and as you should already be able to discern, the show was not based on anything real. It was inspired by a work of fiction that is even more far-fetched than the show is, and that only masqueraded as a true story.

Al Bielek, supposed time traveler.

As I started to write this section of the episode, which the entire series has built up to, it occurred to me… do I really need to debunk so absurdly ridiculous a conspiracy claim? Is it not enough to stick my thumb toward some of the most outrageous claims these people have made and just shrug? It feels embarrassing to even dignify the story of the Montauk Project by putting effort into disproving it, like it’s beneath me. However, if I were to share it without demonstrating its clear falsehood, I would be engaging in the same kind of media amplification that allows hoaxes like these to spread and achieve the status of legend. So here we go. It should be enough to point out that the burden of proof is on those making the claims, and as they are extraordinary claims, according to the Sagan standard, they require extraordinary evidence, but none has ever been provided. Oh, it’s been promised, though. For the remainder of his life, until his death in 2007, Al Bielek assured the public that he was working on a definitive book that would demystify the science behind all the experiments he claimed to have been involved with, but unsurprisingly, this world-shattering treatise on teleportation and time travel never appeared, nor is there any indication that he ever penned an academic article that he attempted to get published in a scholarly journal, or that he ever made an effort to demonstrate any of his claims to a bona fide scientist. Oh but he sure made the time to coauthor a book on “UFO conspiracies” with paranormal writer Brad Steiger. Likewise, when asked in an interview why Preston Nichols didn’t publish anything regarding the secret scientific advancements he was always on about being privy to, he hand waved the question by saying there was no market or audience for that. I’ll just point out, first, that there would obviously be a massive market for such a scientific breakthrough, including any number of private corporations that would jump at the chance to patent such technology, and second, Nichols was tacitly confessing here that he was in the business of promoting paranormal conspiracy theory because there is an audience and market for that. As for the credibility of the men, consider Bielek, who has been caught in errors both logical and technical and then simply changes his story. Even if you were to believe his claim that his true identity was erased, along with evidence of his higher learning, one fundamental lie about his background has been discovered. He claimed to have never heard of the Philadelphia Experiment before seeing the film and recovering his memories, but UFO researchers have revealed that they had known Bielek since the early 1960s and known him to be obsessed with UFOs and with the Philadelphia Experiment, even owning and sharing a copy of the annotated Varo edition of Morris Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (something Bielek himself eventually conceded), so it’s pretty clear that his entire story is founded on a fundamental lie. As for Preston Nichols, discrediting him takes us to darker places. After the publication of Nichols’ books, when he would speak about Montauk on the paranormal circuit, men began to approach him saying they thought maybe they had been Montauk boys and had their memory erased. Preston encouraged them in their beliefs, meeting with them privately to “deprogram” them of their falsified memories. Numerous participants in these deprogramming sessions, including Nichols himself, describe how he touched the subjects’ bodies with his hands in something like the Mesmeric stroking I recently described in my Blind Spot exclusive minisode on Mesmerism and hypnosis. But more than that, it has been established that Preston Nichols convinced these men that in order to deprogram them, he had to masturbate them, while applying some kind of electromagnetic radiation—a well-known pseudoscientific alternative medicine called radionics. At the end of this bizarre journey, then, it becomes strikingly clear that these men perpetrated an elaborate hoax to make money off of the famously credulous UFO conspiracy theorist community, and at least one of them, Preston Nichols, used his mystique to take sexual advantage of numerous men.

So there we have it, the dark heart of the source material for the Netflix series Stranger Things. I greatly enjoy the show, and I’ll say that I’m far better able to suspend my disbelief while watching it than I am while reading about the Montauk Project. It is very strange to think that it was likely inspired by this outlandish conspiracy claim that has been used to molest its adherents. So after all, we might say that the series Stranger Things is not based on any real history, since the elements of real history it uses were present in the fiction that inspired it, and the story of the Montauk Project is also fiction. Indeed, the books that established and expanded the Montauk mythos, including those written by Preston Nichols and Peter Moon, as well as later books written only by Peter Moon, and books written by Stewart Swerdlow, one supposed Montauk boy who underwent the handsy deprogramming of Preston Nichols and then claimed to have recovered his memories about Montauk, all of them are published by Sky Books, Peter Moon’s publishing house, and all of them are officially categorized as fiction despite their claims to authenticity. In fact the Sky Books slogan is “Where science fiction meets reality.” However, if you visit their website, you’ll be directed to their sister website, The Time Travel Education Center, and if you dig in there, you’ll feel like you stumbled on the web presence of a cult. And that’s essentially what it is. In fact, it has quite a lot in common with that other, more famous conspiracy-addled, Internet-based cult, Qanon. Like it, the Montauk cult has become a breeding ground for baseless conspiracy delusion. Qanon’s habit of trying to integrate all conspiracy theories has been remarked on before, including by myself in my series on Illuminati conspiracy claims. Like them, Preston Nichols, Peter Moon, and Stewart Swerdlow have brought every conceivable conspiracy theory into the fold, managing to weave in legendary artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Destiny, and enigmatic figures like John Dee, L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley, and Jack Parsons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one talking point of Qanon was being spread by Stewart Swerdlow long before the purported revelations of Q, as Swerdlow was known to claim that the Montauk boys were tortured in order to extract that sweet adrenochrome from their pineal glands… never mind that adrenochrome is derived from the adrenal glands, which are nowhere near the pineal gland. One wonders if Al Bielek ever would have made such an elementary error as this. Really, this is representative of the general devolution of hoaxery that we see today. Whereas thirty years ago, one had to be a clever and convincing storyteller capable of spinning an intricate yarn and firehosing technobabble on live radio, today we have conspiracy influencers like Canada’s Qanon Queen Romana Didulo who just uploads videos in which she claims to be “the only visible leader on this planet,” suppressed by, who else, pedophile globalists, and she still finds dupes to eat it up, turning their sometimes violent ire on whoever she targets, be it healthcare workers for administering vaccines or police for enforcing business closures and masking. Honestly, it’s this nauseating reality today that makes me so nostalgic for my childhood in the 1980s, and for stories like Stranger Things, in which an innocent but savvy group of kids overcome the machinations of bumbling but no less nefarious adults.

The less than impressive Preston Nichols.

Further Reading

Goerman, Robert A. “Alias Carlos Allende.” FATE, Oct. 1980. Carlos Allende and his Philadelphia Experiment, windmill-slayer.tripod.com/aliascarlosallende/.

Margaritoff, Marco. “Inside The Montauk Project, The US Military’s Alleged Mind Control Program.” All That’s Interesting, 7 May 2022, allthatsinteresting.com/montauk-project.

Metzger, Richard. “THE MONTAUK PROJECT: THE IDIOTIC CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT INSPIRED ‘STRANGER THINGS.’” Dangerous Minds, 4 May 2020, dangerousminds.net/comments/the_montauk_project.

The Philadelphia Experiment from A to Z, www.de173.com/.

Tretkoff, Ernie. “This Month in Physics History: Einstein's quest for a unified theory.” APS News, vol. 14, no. 11, Dec. 2005. APS Physics, www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200512/history.cfm.

Valee, Jacques F. “Anatomy of a Hoax: The Philadelphia Experiment Fifty Years Later.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 8, no. 1, 1994, pp. 47-7 I. CiteSeerX, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.541.6200.

Stranger Things Have Happened: Psychic Spies

In a previous series, I spoke in great depth about Nazi occultism. Among many in the Third Reich, their nationalist and racial ideology was founded on a view that Germans were the descendants of lost race, and that the power of this race survived in ancient Norse runes, Teutonic magics, and legendary artifacts scattered around the world. Heinrich Himmler was the most prominent and influential of these true believers, and he started Das Ahnenerbe, the Institute for the Research and Study of Heredity, to investigate and prove the veracity of his obsessions. The man he placed at the head of this organization was Karl Maria Wiligut, a medium who claimed to be in psychic contact with the lost Aryan race Himmler imagined were his forerunners. Wiligut had previously been certified insane, but Himmler believed in his abilities, and under Wiligut, Das Ahnenerbe delved into more and more arcane areas of study, beyond the archaeological expeditions to prove their theorized heritage or the pseudoscientific conjecture about weird cosmological views like the Hollow Earth Theory or the World Ice Doctrine. Through the “Survey of the So-Called Occult Sciences,” they investigated spirit channeling, divining, astrology, and other forms of extra-sensory perception, or ESP. However, Adolf Hitler called all of it “nonsense” and complained about Himmler wanting to bring back the mysticism they had left behind when he had suppressed the Catholic Church. Indeed, in 1941, Hitler launched Special Action Hess to suppress the occult, arresting all known practitioners of ESP or the divining arts, be they fortune-tellers, astrologers, healers, or just anyone who claimed to be clairvoyant, and he seized all their literature and the trappings of their arts as well, including crystal balls and tarot cards. But Hitler had good reason for this outside of his distaste for their supernatural claims. The Special Action was named after Rudolph Hess, his former deputy Führer, who in May of that year had secretly flown to Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and been captured. Hitler believed Hess had been encouraged in his plans by false horoscopes manufactured by the UK as propaganda, and this, it seems, was the real reason for the suppression of the occult in Special Action Hess. While the Nazis were earnestly studying divination and anomalous mental phenomena, British intelligence was making use of such practices in more devious ways. It is unclear whether Hess really was influenced by fabricated horoscopes, but it is known that British intelligence, aware of how many Germans trusted in astrology, did forge horoscopes as propaganda. In fact, they engaged the services of a woman famous for claiming to be a “witch,” Sybil Leek, to write these bogus horoscopes. Likewise, the most famous astrologer in America, Louis de Wohl, whose popular syndicated column, called “Stars Foretell,” usually focused on the war in Europe, was unbeknownst to his U.S. readers actually a propagandist for British intelligence, fabricating reports for the sole purpose of convincing Americans that the U.S. should enter the war. In the aftermath of the war, as U.S. intelligence competed with the Soviets to seize Nazi science, it was discovered that Das Ahnenerbe was taking ESP seriously, and much as the race for mind control began, this marked the very start of what would become a Cold War psychic arms race. 

If you haven’t read part one of this series, check it out before reading on. It’s not a single story, and you can enjoy this installment alone, but you should know that this series is an exploration of the historical and pseudohistorical basis of the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. As you may or may not know, the premise of that show involves a psychic character whose powers were studied and cultivated by a secret U.S. government experimentation program. In part one of this series, I discussed the very real human experimentation programs conducted by the CIA under the cryptonym MK-Ultra in search of mind control technology, and in this episode, we will look at government sponsored programs studying extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. These categories of phenomena cover most of the capabilities of the psychic character in Stranger Things, who demonstrates the ability to move objects with her mind, see others’ thoughts or memories, and even spy on someone over a great distance as though through out-of-body experience, a technique that has come to be called “remote viewing.” Just as all of the dastardly human experiments undertaken by MK-Ultra were absolutely true, so too are the U.S. government studies and experiments with ESP. However, whereas Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA eventually came to accept that the elusive mind control drugs or techniques they sought did not actually exist, many of the scientists involved with ESP programs were true believers. What we must consider in this installment of the series is not just what happened, but also whether what happened was genuine anomalous mental phenomena or can be more rationally explained. Among the first government-sponsored ESP experiments organized after World War II were those in 1952, when the Department of Defense tasked J.B. Rhine with studying the psychic powers of animals. Rhine had coined the term ESP back in the 1920s and conducted some of the first experiments to study it in his Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. For the DoD, he conducted tests to determine whether dogs could psychically discern the location of landmines, whether cats could telepathically follow instructions to choose one food dish over another, and how homing pigeons made their way home. His experiments with dogs and cats yielded no results that couldn’t be explained by chance, and as for the abilities of homing pigeons, those remain a mystery today. After these failed experiments, the U.S. government’s interest in ESP resumed, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it coincided with its search for a viable mind control drug.

J.B. Rhine, Father of Parapsychology, testing subjects’ ESP abilities with Zener cards. Via NCDR.gov

Under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, Subproject 58, headed by Morse Allen, involved the search for the legendary “magic mushroom,” a fabled Mexican drug that it was thought could be useful, if not as a mind control agent then perhaps as a poison. The problem was that the “magic mushroom,” or teonanáctl, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, had never been proven to really exist. In his search for it, Morse Allen had sent a chemist to masquerade as a botany professor and infiltrate various mycology enthusiast groups, with little luck. Eventually, a man who had reportedly traveled to Mexico and been in contact with shamans who used the mushroom in their rituals came to their attention. They learned of him through a third party, Andrija Puharich, a towering figure in the study of ESP. Puharich had been fascinated with the topic since he was a child and believed he had calmed an aggressive dog with only the power of his mind. After serving in the armed forces, he earned a medical degree and published numerous papers theorizing that some unknown energy force connected to the brain and nervous system might explain anomalous mental phenomena. Dashing and charismatic, Puharich seemed to attract wealthy benefactors who gladly bankrolled his research projects, allowing him to start the Round Table Foundation, dedicated to experimentation that might take the topic of ESP out of the realm of parapsychology and into the realm of science proper. Among the admirable work that Puharich undertook was the study of human hearing, which he suspected may overlap with or provide insight into ESP. During the course of his foundation’s study of the topic, a revolutionary surgery to restore hearing was discovered by one of the doctors on his staff. Furthermore, during his study of psych ward patients who hear voices, it was he who discovered that a man’s dental fillings can actually receive the broadcast of nearby radio stations and thereby saved some otherwise mentally healthy individuals from unnecessary institutionalization. Puharich left his Foundation for a time to work for the government. Having delivered a speech to the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, the Army thought ESP might just be a worthwhile field of inquiry and called him back into service, stationing him at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, and tasking him with finding “a drug that might enhance ESP.”

It was, of course, during his search for ESP-enhancing drugs for the Army that Puharich first took interest in the “god’s flesh” mushroom, which legend had it provided divinatory powers to the shamans who consumed them during rituals. However, when Puharich tracked down the explorer who had found the Mexican mushroom-eating shamans and brought him to the CIA’s attention, hoping to get security clearance and join MK-Ultra Subproject 58, there was a problem. Puharich was viewed as something of a crank, and for good reason. He had a habit of giving in to his confirmation bias and falling for the acts of stage mystics and charlatans, becoming obsessed with each new psychic he studied. In fact, his interest in the “magic mushroom” had only been stirred because a spirit channeler named Harry Stump had claimed while in a trance that it “would stimulate one’s psychic faculties,” and Puharich took this as gospel truth. In the end, Morse Allen chose not to grant Puharich security clearance and instead circumvented him, approaching the explorer, a man named R. Gordon Wasson, who happened to also be the vice-president of J.P. Morgan bank, directly. Financing his further expeditions, the CIA was then in on the ground floor when Wasson became the first white man in history to partake of the drug and returned to America with enough of the mushroom that the CIA could grow more. Once again, as with LSD, the CIA was responsible for the entrance of psychedelic mushrooms into our culture, and though Puharich had been cut out entirely, Wasson still gifted him a supply of the drug. Leaving the Army, Puharich returned to his Foundation and began further experiments, locking up the supposed psychics who obsessed him, like Harry Stump, in Faraday cages as a laboratory control and feeding them mushrooms. Gradually, Puharich’s personal life and his experiments would drift out of control, until both his marriage and his Foundation failed, but he always found a way to stay afloat. He sold his services as an expert in mushroom toxicology to the Army and later won funding from various other government entities, like the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA, for further ESP experimentation programs throughout the 1960s, all the while investigating a variety of purported psychics. In the 1970s, his study of one such individual, Uri Geller, would eventually bring the CIA around to working with him after all. As the Cold War had dragged on, it was feared that the Soviets had themselves a psychic super soldier. Therefore, we would need one ourselves, or at least we would need to seem like we had one.

Andrija Puharich, perhaps the most prolific tester of psychic phenomena on behalf of the U.S. government.

The CIA had good reason to fear Soviet progress in psi research, but they also had good reason to doubt it. The reason for this dichotomy was that intelligence reports had revealed the ESP and psychokinesis studies the Soviets were conducting, but there was always the strong possibility, especially in so fantastical a field, that what they’d learned was actually disinformation intended to mislead the U.S. about their capabilities. Certainly it was true that the Soviets were conducting psi experiments, and they had taken care to do so under euphemistic names, trying to present such research as strictly scientific since any mysticism or religion was anathema to good Marxists. So their research facilities were given pseudoscientific names like the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena, and the topics of their research were equally coded. Psychokinesis, or PK, what we might call telekinesis today, was referred to as “emissions from humans,” which if I were a little less mature I might make a crude joke about. Likewise, telepathy was called “long-distance biological signal transmission.” But what troubled U.S. intelligence more than these was what they called “psychotronic weapons.” Intelligence suggested that the Soviets’ investigations in the area of so-called biocommunications were two-pronged; they studied individuals who claimed to be capable of the phenomena, but they also developed weapons meant to neutralize the capabilities of such persons, which meant devices that generated “high-penetrating emission(s),” typically microwave or electromagnetic, intended to interfere with brain function. Indeed, it was discovered in 1962 that such emissions were being actively transmitted toward the upper floors of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which realization sent U.S. intelligence scrambling to study the technology themselves. Though their research could not definitively prove that the emissions were having a harmful effect on embassy staff, certainly the presence of the microwave radiation disrupted U.S. intelligence operations and had them chasing their tails for a while, secretly testing the health of everyone in the building. There are other theories and considerations with the Moscow Signal, of which I’ll have more to say in a patron exclusive, but perhaps that was the point of it, just to mess with their heads in a psychological sense. Such an objective could also be ascribed to the most terrifying of supposed Soviet breakthroughs in psi: the experiments conducted on Ninel Kulagina. This woman, a former Soviet soldier, was purported to be gifted with astounding psychokinetic abilities. The West knew this because state-run Soviet television had produced a special documentary about her, showing her moving small items like matches and salt shakers with her mind. Think of the scenes in Stranger Things when the psychic character sits staring at a Coke can, trying to crush it with her thoughts. But U.S. intelligence had acquired supposedly classified footage of Kulagina supposedly stopping a frog’s heart with her mind, which raised the possibility of a psychic assassin being able to perpetrate untraceable murders. Of course the American intelligence community recognized that it might all be fake, that the feats shown in the footage were a clever fraud, and that the TV program as well as the classified film in their possession was just propaganda. Just the same, it seemed the U.S. was in the market for our own psychics capable of telekinesis, or at least some people we could suggest were capable of it to the world and specifically to our Communist rivals.

The candidate that Puharich brought to the CIA’s attention was an Israeli man named Uri Geller who had made quite a name for himself. He performed in theaters like a stage magician, but he claimed his powers were real, not illusion. Not only did he perform feats of supposed mental telepathy, but he also bent spoons with only the power of his mind, or so it seemed. Unsurprisingly, Puharich took an interest and brought him to America for testing, and when he called up the CIA to say he had a genuine telepath capable of psychokinesis, the agency was so pressured by rumors of Soviet psychic soldiers that they took Puharich up on his suggestion of funding his research with Geller. However, the CIA still thought Puharich a liability, and furthermore, there were rumors that Geller was with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. If American and Soviet intelligence were in the business of finding or pretending to find psychic assets, then it followed that Mossad may have been following suit. Furthermore, the feat that brought Geller great international fame was when he appeared to predict that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, had been killed, information that might have been advanced to him by his handlers to bolster his claims. The CIA therefore insisted that an agent of their own, Kit Green, oversee the study of Geller, and to distance themselves from association with Puharich and his foundation, they directed their funds to the Mind Institute of Los Angeles, an organization created by Edgar Mitchell, a former astronaut interested in the research of psychic phenomena whom they insisted be involved. Despite what seem to have been precautions taken to avoid exposure in the press, Uri Geller’s celebrity in America and the UK continuously rose, such that it was compared to Beatlemania. Considering the kinds of mystifying feats he performed and how much of a household name he was, I would compare him more to David Blaine today. The height of his fame came when he went on BBC Radio and urged all of the UK to concentrate with him at the same time, willing a spoon to bend, and the BBC’s switchboard was inundated with calls from listeners claiming to have bent spoons and other items in their own homes. Of course, these reports were never confirmed, nor could they be, really. But aside from the obvious doubts about Uri Geller’s abilities, which we will discuss next, there is the burning question of why the CIA, who were conducting classified research into his abilities, would allow him to parade them around the world on a press tour. On paper, Puharich was blamed for this breach of secrecy, but one cannot help but wonder if this is exactly what the CIA wanted: well-publicized reports that they too had in their employ psychics whose powers might rival those of the mysterious Ninel Kulagina.

Ninel Kulagina, moving a compass in what is certainly a Soviet propaganda film probably faked using magnets under the table.

With Geller’s fame arrived accusations of fraud. But these were not lobbed just by sardonic journalists in the usual skeptical editorials. Geller’s outrageous claims of possessing supernatural powers and his unprecedented celebrity were enough to galvanize the scientific community. Astronomer Carl Sagan, mathematician Martin Gardner, and psychologist Ray Hyman came together with magician James Randi, who insisted Geller was an illusionist rather than a genuine psychic, and formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a noted skeptic organization that is still active today, for the sole purpose of combatting the surge in irrational belief they were observing. Most criticism of Geller comes down to his act being a pretty typical stage magician’s act, using distraction to pre-bend spoons and then hold them in such a way as to dramatically reveal the bend, making it look as if it is only then being bent. Indeed, there have been times when Geller refused to even perform if magicians were present, likely because he knew they would see through his tricks. As for his telepathic demonstrations, he has even admitted that his manager, a young man named Shipi Shtrang, helped him to fake certain psychic feats like guessing audience members’ license plate numbers. As for secondary effects, such as the people who claimed Geller had somehow imparted to them the ability to bend spoons themselves, a simple explanation is that mass delusions can be encouraged by the power of suggestion, and that believing a thing to be true can have concrete effects that may seem to confirm its truth, a phenomenon related to the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy or the Tinkerbell effect, a sociological concept called the Thomas theorem, which states that “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” But regardless of skeptical opposition, the CIA continued their experiments with Geller. According to later declassified reports, Geller was the subject of experimentation by nuclear scientists working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who tested his ability to affect the computer program cards inside an ICBM, exploring the proposition that a person with psychokinetic abilities could feasibly deactivate nuclear missiles in flight. Strangely, after these experiments, the scientists involved experienced weird poltergeist activity at home, seeing unexplained phenomena like floating images and orbs. It was so bizarre that Kit Green, the CIA agent overseeing the experiments, reportedly came to believe that they had become the focus of a CIA psychological operation, using drones and holograms—the fact that a CIA man, and one who himself said he ran the ”weird desk,” would think this the likeliest explanation of such paranormal phenomena goes a long way toward supporting some of the theories about UFO disinformation programs that I discussed in previous episodes. Aside from this, though, it’s hard to know what to make of this bizarre report. What is more curious, to me, is the fact that the results of one of the Geller experiments was declassified in 1979, revealing that a magnetic program card had seemingly been erased when Geller was concentrating on it. If the result of this experiment is to be trusted, why would U.S. intelligence declassify it? It occurs to me that, if this were a genuine breakthrough in the use of psychic powers as nuclear self-defense, we would want to keep it secret at all costs. However, if it were not genuine, but we wanted our enemies to believe we were developing such capabilities, only then would we want it declassified. Framed in this manner, it makes one wonder how much of U.S. intelligence’s psychic experimentation programs that have remained classified were purposely falsified and leaked as disinformation, just as it was suspected that the footage of Ninel Kulagina had been.

Uri Geller was not the only psychic asset being studied by the CIA in the 1970s. Another man, studied at the same facility where Geller was often studied, the Stanford Research Institute, or SRI, was Ingo Swann, who formerly acted as a psychic test subject for the oldest psychic research organization in America, the American Society for Psychical Research. During his time with the ASPR, he began to undergo experiments involving the projection of his consciousness outside of his body, called travelling clairvoyance. These experiments involved suspending a tray in the air across the room and asking him what was on it. These experiments drew the interest of a physicist named Hal Puthoff, who invited Swann to SRI, a laboratory affiliated with the Defense Department, and reportedly tested him by directing him to agitate a magnetometer located several feet below him, encased in concrete. The story differs according to the telling, with Puthoff and Swann describing a perturbation of the device’s readings as having never been seen before or since, representing it as a successful demonstration of Swann’s psychokinesis, while other scientists have suggested it was a relatively common frequency variation for which Swann merely took credit, or that the machine had malfunctioned coincidentally and remained out of order afterward. One thing is certain, though; they never repeated the experiment, which any scientist worth his salt would have done before thinking to tout it as evidence of anything. During his time at SRI, Swann adapted his travelling clairvoyance routine and renamed the feat “remote viewing,” a name that Hal Puthoff and another physicist at SRI, Russel Targ, preferred because it sounded far more scientific. At first, their remote viewing experiments involved an individual going somewhere and concentrating on what they saw while Swann sat in a Faraday cage and tried to sketch what he thought the individual was looking at. However, since they were working for the CIA and clearly developing techniques for espionage, even if they weren’t openly acknowledging it, it became apparent that, even if this process produced results, it was pretty pointless, since if they were sending an operative into the field to infiltrate some site, they wouldn’t need the remote viewer at all. Rather, to be useful, Swann discerned that a psychic would need to be able to remote view any location, without a person present at the site sending back willful thoughts about the place. He came up with the idea that they would use coordinates. Kit Green asked an acquaintance for a set of coordinates, not knowing what was at the location, and Swann sketched the place. The results were rather vague, and at first didn’t seem to match the location Green’s acquaintance had provided: a family cabin. However, when another individual volunteered his remote viewing services, the details were far more precise, and it appeared the remote viewers were focused not on the cabin but rather on a top secret military facility called Sugar Grove just nearby the cabin.

Uri Geller, celebrity psychic, displaying a spoon he claims to have bent with his mind. Notice the film does not show the spoon bending. Gif uploaded by MindBob on Tenor.

This other, more accurate remote viewer was a Scientologist named Pat Price, and he presented himself to the researchers at SRI in a very strange way. He just approached them while they were out buying a Christmas tree for their lab and said he could help. Later, when Ingo Swann was in the process of attempting to remote view the coordinates provided by Kit Green, Price just called up Puthoff and offered his services. Curious, Puthoff gave him the coordinates, and a couple days later, Price called him back with an astonishingly detailed account. When it was discovered that the two men, Swann and Price, seemed to be viewing the Sugar Grove facility, Price’s reading raised alarms. Apparently, it was so precise that it described the color of filing cabinets and the names that appeared on the files therein. Even the rather credulous Hal Puthoff could hardly believe it and came to suspect Price was a CIA plant, ordered to approach them and test whether they could detect a fake who might have been feeding them sensitive intelligence as if it were psychic impressions. After all, Geller was still suspected of being Mossad, so the CIA had reason to fear they might be fooled. Very quickly, though, the interest of the agency shifted from Ingo Swann to Pat Price. Swann left SRI, perhaps a little resentful, and Price left to work directly for the CIA. This can’t necessarily be taken as evidence that he wasn’t working for them all along, however, as it’s quite possible that because of Price’s performance, the CIA decided the program at SRI was a liability, and Price left just to come back into the fold, his operation concluded. Certainly the CIA got out of the psychic research business after that, but not until after a very mysterious event. Pat Price was on a visit to Las Vegas in 1975 and met up with Kit Green and Hal Puthoff for dinner and reminiscence. At dinner, he left early, not feeling well. Afterward, he died of a heart attack in his room. An unidentified man arrived later with Price’s medical records and waived an autopsy. The researchers at SRI suspected murder, but who to suspect? The CIA themselves, or perhaps the KGB? Apparently, the Church of Scientology even came under suspicion. In the end, though, we don’t know what Price did for the CIA, or why he might have been killed, or whether he even was killed, for after all, he might have simply succumbed at 57 years old to a cardiac event.

After the CIA discontinued their funding of the psychic research at SRI, Uri Geller continued in his quasi-mystical, illusionist-esque career, fading slowly into relative obscurity and becoming something of a joke. Most recently, he threatened to telepathically prevent Brexit, and obviously failed to do so. While the CIA may have given up on remote viewing, though, the U.S. government in its entirety did not, and afterward, the Defense Intelligence Agency revived the endeavor under the codename Stargate Project. With a manual for training soldiers to remote view written by Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, they kept psychics on the payroll, loaning them out to whatever agency or branch of the armed forces wanted to use them, until the project was declassified in 1995. At that point, as the DIA sought to transfer the project back to the CIA, two academics, statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, one a believer and one a skeptic, were engaged to evaluate the 20-year project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they came to opposite conclusions, but Hyman’s reservations, published in Skeptical Inquirer, show that, even 20 years later, much of the same fundamental problems with psychic research remained. The problem of inadequate laboratory controls has always been an objection of skeptics. For example, the original remote viewing activities of Ingo Swann and Pat Price, in which they described the Sugar Grove facility, were completed at home, with no supervision.  They could have researched the coordinates or received outside information. Additionally, the problem of the bias of the researchers who undertake these studies, like Puharich and Puthoff, who were always entirely convinced of their subjects’ abilities, was always an issue. Just the same, in the 90’s, Hyman’s central objection was that all the remote viewing studies, which involved the evaluation of sketches to determine likenesses to the target supposedly being viewed, relied on a single judge, the person conducting the experiment, who was invariably a believer. He pointed out that even statistically significant results, which seemed to indicate something more than chance, were suspect until independent judges could reproduce the same results. And the repeatability and reproducibility of supposedly successful results in psychic research has also always been problematic, with researchers routinely claiming that results cannot be reproduced if observed by non-believers, a difficulty that should not be and is not an issue in science generally. In the years since its declassification, remote viewing became the stuff of satire, like the book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, and today these experiments are something of a laughing stock to many, despite the former participants in the program and practitioners publishing numerous books and speaking regularly on the paranormal circuit. But even as far-fetched as their claims are, they still pale in comparison to the final and perhaps biggest inspiration of the series Stranger Things, which was an outright hoax.

The Stanford Research Institute group, from left to right: Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, Kit Green, and the mysterious Pat Price. Via Vice.

Until next time, remember, in science, experiments must devise positive tests to discern whether a phenomenon is present or absent, but no such tests have ever been devised for psychic powers, which are defined negatively: when normal explanations are eliminated, researchers claim that is evidence that psychic phenomena exist. But that’s not how science works. You can’t point to any fluctuation in the data of your study and claim it proves your pet paranormal phenomenon is real. 

Further Reading

Hyman, Ray. “Evaluation of the Military’s Twenty-Year Program on Psychic Spying.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 20, no. 2, March/April 1996, pp. 21-23. Center for Inquiry,  cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1996/03/22165045/p21.pdf.

Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

Stranger Things Have Happened: MK-Ultra and CIA Mind Control

In 1925, at the Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, world leaders took the initiative to renew the international prohibition on chemical warfare that had previously been affirmed in the Versailles Treaty, and to this prohibition was added a ban on what was then a new frontier in warfare, bacteriological weapons. Before World War II, every major world power had ratified the Geneva Protocols, except Japan and the United States, which actually would not ratify it until 1975. Before that time, though, the U.S. would undertake numerous secret experimentation projects that would violate these international standards as well as the forthcoming Nuremberg Code and many of our own laws, in order to keep up in an arms race that may have been, in large part, a paranoid fantasy. Intelligence reports in the early 1940s convinced the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, that the Japanese, that other holdout from the Geneva Protocols, was developing advanced germ weapons, and in response, President Franklin Roosevelt created the first American biological weapons research agency, the War Research Service. By 1943, upon the direct request of Winston Churchill, who feared Nazi Germany was preparing a biological attack on Britain, Roosevelt authorized the Chemical Corps to begin developing and stockpiling biological weapons at its newly designated Biological Warfare Laboratories at Camp Detrick, a training base under the command of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. At Churchill’s urging, the US began preparing 500,000 bombs full of anthrax spores, which were thankfully, never used. Throughout the war, administrators of the War Research Service were convinced that Nazis and the Japanese, who were engaged in experimentation on human subjects, were far more advanced in their biological weapons research, and when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was formed for the express purpose of recruiting Nazi scientists, those at Camp Detrick took interest. Typically any individual who had been an “ardent Nazi” or had been guilty of war crimes could not be recruited and would have to face a tribunal in Nuremberg, but Operation Paperclip, so called because of the use of paperclips to mark the files of “troublesome” cases, offered a way to bring even the worst Nazi offender into the fold of American scientific intelligence. They simply “bleached” their files, erasing their history of involvement with the SS or the Gestapo and expunging any record of human experimentation. Operation Paperclip is a mainstay in many a modern-day conspiracy theory about the clandestine activities of U.S. intelligence. Regardless of the lack of support for some conspiracy claims that revolve around Operation Paperclip, it is well established that the program existed, and that the U.S. government whitewashed the crimes of Nazi mad scientists so that we could put them to work for ourselves. After all, if we didn’t take them, the Soviets would, or so the justification went. Among the notorious figures who were shielded from international prosecution in exchange for their efforts to further American biological warfare research were Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, whose crimes were legendary. Blome murdered thousands of concentration camp prisoners by exposing them to nerve gas, infecting them with typhus, and experimenting with ways to give them cancer. Ishii, at his secretive Unit 731 labs in Manchuria, killed as many as 12,000 test subjects in some of the most horrific experiments ever conducted: exposing them to poison gas, electrocuting them, popping their eyes out in pressurized chambers, injecting subjects with air to cause embolisms, burning them alive with flamethrowers, and freezing them slowly to study hypothermia. He exposed his victims to countless diseases, including cholera, syphilis, bubonic plague, and anthrax. Frequently he concluded his experiments with vivisection, dissecting the subjects while they were still alive in order to better study their organs at the time of death. He was truly a monster, and rather than see him face justice, General Douglas MacArthur guaranteed him immunity in exchange for his expertise. This would prove to be the genesis of state-sponsored American mad science. We may never have committed atrocities at this level, but as you’ll see, we did not balk at secret human experimentation.

*

Besides reading thoughtful blog posts, I’m unsure what your preferences are for entertainment. I enjoy a good book, and I stream probably too many movies and series. If you’re like me, you recently enjoyed or intend to soon binge the latest season of Stranger Things. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the new season or even if you haven’t watched the show at all. I’ll reveal no spoilers here, beyond some vague references to its premise. This series will not be about the show, but rather about its historical and pseudohistorical basis. Recently I overheard someone talking about the program, telling someone else that it is based on real events. To clarify, the show prominently features a character who was the subject of human experimentation sponsored and overseen by the U.S. government. This person was referring to real CIA human experimentation programs and appeared to be suggesting that the American government really did conduct the kind of esoteric research and mad science portrayed in the show. But of course, this is only partially accurate. Clandestine intelligence programs did indeed engage in mind-bending experiments on human subjects, and these certainly did, in part, seem to serve as inspiration for what is portrayed in Stranger Things. You heard me refer to these programs before, in my series UFO Disinfo, which suggested that U.S. intelligence could feasibly be staging UFO sightings and encouraging UFO culture as part of a long-running psychological operation. That, of course, was, admittedly, a conspiracy theory, but it was supported by the fact that we know such psyops and programs that experimented on U.S. citizens definitely existed, having come to light despite being the subject of a massive government cover-up. This is no baseless conspiracy speculation. It happened. However, much of what is presented in Stranger Things, such as secret government development of psychic agents capable of remote viewing and telekinesis, derives from a combination of fact and fiction, and some of it, such as the idea of experimentation on abducted children and the opening of portals, entered the public consciousness through hoaxes and baseless conspiracy claims. In this series, I plan to reveal the astonishing truth of what U.S. government-sponsored mad scientists really did, after which I will descend into the realm of what is exaggerated or misrepresented and what is outright fabrication.

Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii, two mad doctors guilty of crimes against humanity in WWII whose work was studied and furthered by U.S. scientific intelligence.

After the Second World War, President Harry Truman dissolved the secret intelligence agency the Office of Strategic Services, but in signing the National Security Act two years later, in 1947, he formed a new clandestine intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency, to address the threats of Soviet Russia and Red China. Two years into its operations, in 1949, a particular event drove the agency into the business of mad science. That year, the show trial of  Hungarian Catholic Cardinal József Mindszenty struck fear into the Western world. Mindszenty had resisted the Communist ruling party of Hungary, and after his arrest and confinement, he appeared befuddled during his show trial, speaking in an unconvincing monotone as he confessed to charges of conspiracy and treason. Senior CIA officials suspected that Mindszenty’s behavior proved that Communists had developed some revolutionary approach to interrogation or even some sort of mind control technique, accomplished with some drug or through hypnosis, or perhaps by a combination of the two. And the CIA were not alone. In response to the Mindszenty trial, the Chemical Corps formed a secret group at Camp Detrick to develop drugs specifically intended to be used for coercion. The next year, the CIA director approved a new project, called Bluebird, that authorized experimentation on prisoners, defectors, and refugees with the sole purpose of developing “Special Interrogation techniques” that could result in “control of an individual.” That year, as Project Bluebird got up and running, the CIA began to believe its own anti-Communist propaganda. An anti-Communist propagandist who formerly worked for the OSS created a media sensation with an article published in the Miami News alleging that Communist China had perfected a mind control technique the author dubbed “brain washing.” Believing this propaganda entirely, one CIA official who would later rise to become its director, Allen Dulles, focused much of the CIA’s resources on mind control projects. Project Bluebird established secret prisons and torture houses in Germany, and later in Japan, at which they employed former Nazi doctors whose records had been bleached by Operation Paperclip, at which they continued the legacy of Nazi human experimentation, studying all kinds of physical torture techniques and dosing prisoners with a variety of drugs, including amphetamines, heroin, and mescaline, all in an effort to see if these Special Interrogation techniques would make prisoners more cooperative, encourage them to reveal secrets, alter their personalities, or induce amnesia. These operations expressly violated the Nuremberg Code that such experiments be conducted only on witting and willing subjects, but those involved justified such violations through their belief that their enemies were doing the same, and such codes did not apply during conflicts with enemy states who themselves violated the codes. This rationalization was predicated on a fundamental error, though, as it would be revealed years later that Mindszenty and other prisoners who were believed to have been “brain washed” by Communists had not been the victims of some cutting edge drug-induced mind control, but rather had been worked over with rather mundane torture techniques and psychologically manipulated using the well-known, long-used approaches that interrogators had known for decades were effective at breaking spies and prisoners of war.

In 1951, amid the fearmongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was creating a paranoid panic by convincing many that Communists had infiltrated every level of American society, Allen Dulles put the CIA’s mind control program into high gear, hiring one Sidney Gottlieb to head the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff—in other words, Project Bluebird, or as they then renamed the expanded program, Project Artichoke. Gottlieb was an unusual fellow, a chemist with a club foot and a love of folk dancing who lived a strange double life, as a spiritual back-to-nature type at home and as a zealot devoted to perfecting mind control at all costs at work. Gottlieb would rise to become the CIA’s mind control czar, as well as its chief developer of poisons and poison delivery systems, and the programs he directed would be responsible for the destruction of countless lives. He is by far the most notorious of American mad scientists, our own Dr. Mengele. Under his auspices, and under the supervision of Morse Allen, the callous former director of Bluebird, the “Special Interrogations” evolved to become known as the “Artichoke Method” and to include far darker practices. Their torture techniques came to include ever more creative and cruel approaches, such as exposing subjects to radiation and extreme heat, and giving them electroshock treatments. Allen unsurprisingly found these practices less than effective, especially electroshock. While he could easily reduce his subjects to vegetative states using this tool, he could not use it to extract information from them, nor could it erase specific memories and leave them otherwise unaffected. It was simply a needlessly elaborate way to lobotomize. Their use of drugs on subjects evolved during these years as well. First they used tetrahydrocannabinol, or what cannabis users may better know as THC, which they referred to as TD, or “truth drug.” But finding that it mostly either relaxed the subject or induced fits of laughter, they moved on to cocaine, hoping that its tendency to induce talkativeness may be useful, but as that talkativeness seemed to derive from elation rather than relaxed inhibitions, it proved useless as well. From there, they tested heroin, but they found this only useful when withheld from addicts, who would be more likely to cooperate in exchange for a fix. Lastly, they turned to psychoactive drugs, more specifically mescaline, following once again in the footsteps of Nazi madmen who had experimented with the drug in Dachau. It is unclear how many of their test subjects at their secret torture houses in Germany may have died, or how comparable their death count may have been to those of their Nazi counterparts, but one document did indicate clearly that the disposal of corpses was “not a problem.”

One of the few extant images of Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, seen here preparing to testify in 1977 about his career with the CIA.

Although Artichoke men did not find mescaline to be useful as a truth drug or mind control agent, another more recently discovered psychoactive drug piqued their interests. Lysergic acid diethylamide-25, more commonly known as LSD or just acid today, was derived by accident from ergot fungus in a Swiss laboratory in 1943. Although very little was produced in Switzerland at first, it showed up on the CIA’s radar, and Artichoke men performed some dosing experiments with it, finding it just as ineffective as other drugs they administered without further, more brutal Artichoke methods applied. Sidney Gottlieb, however, took especial interest in the substance, which he felt bore further study. As has long been common practice among chemists experimenting with drugs, Gottlieb and other scientists used LSD themselves in order to evaluate its effects, and Gottlieb was enamored of it. He marveled at how powerful an effect even the tiniest dose seemed to have and wondered what could be accomplished with larger doses combined with other Artichoke methods, like torture and hypnosis, deciding that LSD would prove to be the key to his quest for mind control. He sent men to Sandoz labs in Switzerland, who had developed the drug, bought out the world’s supply of it, extracted a promise from the lab not to produce any of it for Communist regimes, and then tasked an American pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly, with cracking its chemical composition and synthesizing massive amounts for the CIA’s use. Furthermore, believing that environment and personality played a major role in each subject’s reaction to the drug, he convinced his superiors that their experiments must be expanded beyond their current scope. There was only so much they could learn by dosing themselves or dosing prisoners. They needed a variety of people from different backgrounds, who might be experimented on without their knowledge, outside of the specific context of captivity, which did not provide an accurate sense of how the drug might be used in the field. This required a massive domestic program to illegally experiment on civilians, a program that would be “ultra-sensitive” and require the utmost secrecy, with many levels of insulation to prevent all but a few from knowing its extent. Allen Dulles, now director of the CIA, authorized this program with Gottlieb at its head. Gottlieb named it MK-Ultra, using a prefix common for Technical Services Staff projects, along with a cryptonym that indicated how ultra-secret the program must be.

Some of Gottlieb’s early experiments on civilians appear to have been conducted brazenly, in public. In 1952, some agents lured a young American artist named Stanley Glickman to a café in Paris popular among expatriates. There it is likely they dosed Glickman, who panicked when the drug hit him and fled. Seeking treatment at American Hospital, which had a secret relationship with the CIA, Glickman later claimed he was further dosed with hallucinogens and given electroshock. Glickman’s life was ruined. He never resumed his artistry and was transformed into a paranoid recluse for the rest of his years. Meanwhile, in America, he engaged Dr. Paul Hoch of New York Psychiatric Institute to secretly dose one of his patients, a tennis player who was being treated for depression after a divorce. This poor unsuspecting patient, Harold Blauer, was injected with psychoactive drugs 6 times over the course of a month, and when he requested the treatment be stopped, Dr. Hoch injected him with a dose 14 times greater than the previous doses. He died after about 2 hours of flailing. Conscious of the fact that he would need to exercise more discretion, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a corrupt narcotics officer and alcoholic who had developed a taste for the drugs he confiscated, to set up a safehouse in New York in which subjects could be unwittingly drugged in a safe and controlled environment completely wired with surveillance so that Gottlieb and others could later examine the resulting behavior. White posed as an artist or a sailor and prowled Greenwich Village, luring underworld types back to the safehouse where he dosed them, confident that their various illicit lifestyles would discourage them from going to the authorities following their experiences, not all of which were unpleasant. And even when a subject inevitably sought medical attention and declared they had been drugged, White’s law enforcement connections protected both him and MK-Ultra. As this safehouse operation continued, Gottlieb remained interested in mental health institutions as useful environments for more terminal experiments, which could be taken to further extremes. In 1953, he arranged with Dr. Harris Isbell of the Addiction Research Center in Kentucky to perform the most egregious LSD experiments ever undertaken. Using drug addicted patients as subjects, many of them African-Americans who technically agreed to the experiments in exchange for a fix of heroin, Isbell administered lysergic acid in exponentially larger doses over the course of 77 days. Even the most ardent enthusiast of the recreational use of LSD will shudder in horror at the thought of tripping every day for two and a half months. It would be mind-breaking.

A photo of the notorious George Hunter White, on file at Stanford Special Collections in Palo Alto, via SFWeekly.

Astonishingly, Gottlieb directed these human drug experiments with immunity until 1953, when finally a slipup of his own caused him some difficulties and threatened to expose MK-Ultra. In the fall of that year, Gottlieb invited several Camp Detrick men to a classified retreat at a cabin on Deep Creek Lake, in Maryland. Among the attendees was one Frank Olson, an expert in the aerosol delivery of chemicals. Olson was a man privy to many sensitive secrets. He had played a role in Operation Sea-Spray, in 1950, when the U.S. Navy attempted to simulate a biological weapons attack by releasing what it believed was a harmless bacteria on San Francisco and ended up making numerous San Franciscans ill with urinary tract infections, one of whom died, and possibly causing a mysterious pneumonia cluster. Recently, after visiting European black sites where Artichoke work continued, he became disillusioned with his work. He confided to a friend that he was troubled by the CIA’s use of drugs and torture on prisoners, and their collaboration with Nazi scientists. Before attending the Deep Creek retreat, he had spoken of resigning. While at the retreat, he and several other Camp Detrick men were unknowingly dosed with LSD by Gottlieb himself, who only informed them after the drug had taken effect. Later reports indicate that, while he was under the influence of the drug, some of his colleagues may have confronted him about his decision to leave the CIA. Afterward, Olson became depressed and preoccupied. His family worried about him. The CIA assigned a psychiatrist to speak with him. He became increasingly agitated over the next several days, and paranoid about being dosed again or being arrested. Just before Thanksgiving, he was taken by his colleagues to New York, where he slipped away and wandered around the city in something like a fugue state. On November 28th, he plunged to his death from the window of a hotel room he shared with Gottlieb’s chief lieutenant, Robert Lashbrook. According to Lashbrook, Olson, in a state of undress, had run across the room and leapt at the window with such force that he crashed through the drawn curtains and the glass to fall to his death. Outside of the exact dimensions and extent of the crimes against humanity committed during the course of the program, Olson’s death is perhaps the central enduring mystery related to MK-Ultra. Was Olson dosed more than once during the days after Deep Creek, thus explaining his increasingly aberrant behavior? Was he targeted by his colleagues as a subject for testing because of his recent reservations about their work? Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered to cover up MK-Ultra? One thing is certain, as evidence would later show: a cover-up did occur. Police were told the death must be kept quiet as a matter of national security, Lashbrook’s background was falsified to investigators, and Olson’s family was handled by convincing them their patriarch had died from a “classified illness” and paying them off with survivor’s benefits. In the end, there were a few investigations, but it resulted, at the time, in nothing more than a memo stating Gottlieb had shown “poor judgement.” It was less of a genuine slap on the wrist and more a pantomime of one.

Afterward, MK-Ultra continued its work in renewed secrecy. George Hunter White moved to San Francisco and opened new safehouses wired for surveillance, this time staffed with prostitutes whom he trained to dose johns, engage in less than typical sex acts with them, and afterward to get their sex partners talking. It was part of a new initiative to study sex in conjunction with drugs as a means of eliciting sensitive information, an initiative White called Operation Midnight Climax. In practice, however, these brothels became dens of debauchery. George White spent most of his time sitting on a portable toilet behind a one-way mirror, watching sex acts and drinking martinis by the pitcher. MK-Ultra contractors and CIA agents, including Sidney Gottlieb, would visit regularly not on business, but rather for pleasure, seeking the free services of sex workers employed by the agency. Meanwhile, MK-Ultra’s engagement of medical professionals to perform horrific human experiments only increased, insulated through an academic organization, The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which they used as a front to dispense “grant money.” One contractor, who like others was unaware that he actually worked for the CIA, was Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. At facilities in Canada, Cameron conducted experiments that on their surface seem very similar to those depicted in the fictional program Stranger Things, as they involved sensory deprivation, a procedure that is shown numerous times on the show. But Cameron’s work is far more horrific than it appears in Stranger Things. Believing that he needed to “depattern” the minds of his subjects before they’d be susceptible to the “psychic driving” he attempted in his mind control experiments, Cameron’s subjects were first sedated and then subjected to extreme periods of sensory deprivation. These were not a matter of hours but rather of weeks, and sometimes months, locked in dark water tanks. It resulted in patients forgetting how to walk. Afterward, he administered electroshocks far stronger than any other psychiatrists dared. Finally, the patients were fed LSD and fitted with helmets that played recorded phrases like “My mother hates me” on repeat. These horrifying experiments typically resulted in complete mental breakdown, with subjects reverting to infantile development stages. These were otherwise normal individuals who had come to him for help with issues like anxiety and post-partum depression. The destruction of their minds was nothing less than a state sponsored crime against humanity.

Donald Ewen Cameron, prominent psychologist and conductor of horrific torturous medical experiments funded by the CIA.

There is no telling how many lives were destroyed by the MK-Ultra program over the course of its existence, as after it was finally shut down, having failed to produce any working technological or pharmacological mind control techniques, the CIA had all records relating to the project destroyed during the panic caused by Watergate. What we know only emerged later in the 1970s, when the Presidential Rockefeller Commission, the Congressional Church Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were formally tasked with investigating CIA crimes and abuses. By that time, Gottlieb had retired, and when questioned, he claimed to have little recall of the project’s activities. In 1976, journalist John Marks obtained boxes of redacted files under the Freedom of Information Act and wrote the first definitive exposé of MK-Ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. By that time, the wider effects of Gottlieb’s experiments had been felt by everyone in America, if not the world, as it became clear that his encouragement of experimentation with hallucinogens extended to universities, where major counter-culture figures like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey helped to spread its use as a recreational drug and means of enlightenment among the general populace. And as the years have passed, more and more people have come forward to sue the CIA for being the unwitting subjects of their experiments, including Frank Olson’s family, who went on a crusade against the agency. We have further learned that their psychological experiments may have unexpectedly resulted in mass murders. It was in later years revealed that mafia figure Frank “Whitey” Bulger had been extensively experimented on early in his prolific criminal career, during which he murdered 19 or more. The Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was also part of an abusive, CIA sponsored psychological experiment during his time at Harvard, long before his reign of terror. And there is even a conspiracy theory that Charles Manson was the subject of CIA experiments, although I am not prepared right now to evaluate those claims, which smack a bit of unsupported conspiracy speculation. Suffice it to say that the extent of the terrible effects of these Nazi-esque crimes committed by U.S. intelligence can only be speculated on. And at the end of John Marks’ revelatory book, he speculates about the different directions that MK-Ultra mind control research may have taken afterward, under some other classified cryptonym. He mentions genetic engineering, a science that we know has grown by leaps and bounds, as well as brain stimulation, the domination of subjects by surgically inserting electrodes to remotely stimulate specific areas of the brain, a deeply unsettling prospect. Lastly, he suggests that they may have directed their funding toward secret research with a more fantastical focus, such as extra-sensory perception or other psychic abilities. This notion is certainly reflected in fiction like Stranger Things, which promotes the idea of secret government research in this area, and in Part Two, we’ll see to what extent this is, surprisingly, quite true.

Further Reading

Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Henry Holt and Company, 2019.

Marks, John. The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control; The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Gun Violence in America

In Manhattan, in January of 1911, satirical novelist and muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips took his usual route from his Gramercy Park apartment to the Princeton Club, a private club for the Ivy League university’s alumni. Phillips cut a tall, impressive figure, wearing light summer suits in winter, handsome with striking pale eyes. When he arrived at the club, a man he did not know approached him, lifted a handgun, and fired several bullets into Phillips, crying out “Here you go!” before shooting himself in the head. As Phillips slowly died from his gunshot wounds, he expressed confusion about who his murderer had been, but police had little trouble determining the motive, remembering that Phillips had not long ago come to them about a series of threatening letters he’d received. His killer was Fitzhugh Goldsborough, the deranged son of a wealthy family whom he believed Phillips was lampooning his fiction, some of which satirized rich, entitled youth. The coroner who examined their corpses, who regularly corresponded with the press to offer them grisly statistics on New York deaths, afterward spearheaded a campaign against the easy acquisition and public carrying of concealable handguns, a campaign that was met with much public support. Just five months before the murder/suicide outside the Princeton Club, a dockworker had shot popular New York Mayor William Gaynor in the neck. Gaynor had survived, but the incident had touched off a robust debate about whether mental illness, or the media, or our national culture had contributed to the crime. After the Phillips murder, the debate shifted to focus on the fact that a disgruntled and violent individual had been so easily able to acquire a gun and carry it to the marina where the mayor was waiting to board a steamship. The push for gun legislation in 1911 was further championed by a State Senator named Timothy Sullivan, who framed the campaign as a solution to gang violence. The reign of terror of certain street gangs was very real to New Yorkers. Less than ten years earlier, the Jewish-American-dominated Eastman Gang of the Lower East Side had clashed with the Italian-American dominated Five Points Gang in a bloody shootout on Rivington and Allen Streets. When police arrived, the two gangs turned their guns on the officers. The streets had been transformed into a warzone, and in the intervening years, the gang wars had continued. Senator Sullivan introduced gun control legislation in 1911 that instituted licensing for the possession of any firearm and left the decision of whether to issue a carry license up to the licensing authority, the police, who rarely granted the privilege of carrying firearms in public. This gun control law has been criticized as a way for Tammany Hall politician Timothy Sullivan, portrayed by his rivals and critics as a crime lord himself, to have his adversaries arrested by having firearms planted on them. Indeed, it’s been said that some street toughs took to sewing their pockets shut so that police could not plant handguns on them. It has also been argued that police racially-profiled members of immigrant communities when enforcing the law, which certainly seems to be the case. The first man imprisoned under the law was an Italian, and in an editorial after his conviction, the New York Times praised the judge for the 1-year sentencing, saying that it “suitably impressed the minds of aliens in New York that the Sullivan law forbids their bearing arms of any kind,” while also, to their credit, asking, “would it not be well to ‘get after’ the notorious characters who are not aliens?” and conceding that “’frisking’ such persons is less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.” Regardless of such ulterior motives or corrupt enforcement policies, though, the Sullivan Law shows us that there was a time, before the rise of the powerful gun lobby, that gun violence could be responded to with reasonable gun control legislation. While there is evidence that this law greatly reduced suicide rates, there is no evidence that it reduced New York homicides, and certainly it did not prevent Payton Gendron from legally buying a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle at a gun shop in Endicott, New York, and opening fire on the patrons of a Buffalo supermarket in the recent racially-motivated massacre. I would argue, though, that it is difficult to quantify what heinous crimes by mentally ill individuals might have been prevented just because they were discouraged by the licensing process. But regardless, what the law shows us is that, a hundred years ago, it was not portrayed as un-American to consider gun control legislation in order to reduce gun violence. But as I sat down to write this, it was in the news that the conservative activist justices packed onto our Supreme Court, who also just overturned established precedent in order to reduce civil liberties and rescind reproductive rights, have also ruled this New York gun control legislation unconstitutional. And they have done this in the wake of the most heinous school shooting since the Sandy Hook Massacre, just one month after nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. To put a little perspective on this, the same gun rights activists who protest the push for sane gun control measures in the wake of every mass shooting, arguing that it’s more appropriate to mourn quietly than to demand real social change after such a tragedy, are simultaneously applauding the erosion of established firearms legislation during a mass shooting’s aftermath. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd. And I don’t want to hear that “Now is not the time” evasion. It is long past time to talk about Gun Violence in America.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. Whenever a gun rights proponent tells you that it’s not appropriate to discuss change or legislation in the wake of some gun violence, they are displaying a clear blindness to history. In modern America, that is the only time when significant gun control legislation has ever been passed, and it used to be that the Nation Rifle Association supported such legislation and even helped draft it. Among these reactive gun control measures were the 1934 National Firearms Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938. These measures were enacted in direct response to the gangland gun violence of the Prohibition Era and mass murders such as the St. Valentines Day Massacre of 1929, when seven Irish gangsters were stood against a garage wall and gunned down. The more direct impetus, though, was the attempt of a lone gunman on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life in Miami in 1933, when he was President Elect. The attempt failed, though the Mayor of Chicago was killed in the hail of bullets fired by the assassin. Recently, a conspiracy theory emerged that the assassin was working for the mafia and that the mayor was his true target, but at the time, the fact that a lone fanatic with a revolver bought from a pawn shop could come so close to ending his life put a fire under Roosevelt to push for gun control legislation. At first, the National Firearms Act was intended to require the registration and prohibitive taxation of all firearms, including handguns like the one that had nearly killed Roosevelt, but in the end, it ended up only focusing on “gangster weapons,” including machine guns and short-barreled shotguns and rifles. The later firearms act of 1938 made licensing a further requirement of gun sellers, and prohibited the sale of firearms to certain persons, such as felons. The NRA again supported these measures. They were, after all, founded as a sporting and marksmanship club focused on promoting gun safety. In fact, the year after the 1938 legislation was passed, the President of the NRA, Karl Frederick, stated “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” 30 years later, in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, after learning that Lee Harvey Oswald had acquired the murder weapon through the mail on the cheap with an NRA coupon, the NRA agreed that the mail-order sale of guns must be prohibited. And again, after the further assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the NRA was very involved with the drafting of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which replaced and updated the two existing firearms acts, introducing serial numbers, a minimum age for gun ownership, a restriction on sales across state lines, and the prohibition of sales to known drug addicts and the mentally ill. What those without historical blindness must see is that there is a long history of passing gun control measures in response to acts of gun violence, and that the NRA used to champion the gun control legislation that today they call unconstitutional.

The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Roosevelt in Miami, when Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was shot.

Although the NRA supported and helped craft the Gun Control Act of 1968, we see the beginning of their transformation about this time, as they used their influence to block the most sweeping of the bill’s measures, including the licensing of all gun carriers and a national registry of all firearms. President Lyndon B. Johnson called them out for this in a speech, saying “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby,” and within a couple years, the entire platform of the NRA would change after an ill-fated raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, during which an NRA member who was believed to be stockpiling weapons illegally, was shot and paralyzed. After that, the NRA began to oppose any federal enforcement of gun control legislation, and began to tout the Second Amendment as a protection of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, which it was never intended to be. I’ll explain and support this further later in the episode, but suffice it to say that the argument of individual gun rights being protected by the Constitution never even came up in the debate over the sweeping gun control legislation of the 1930s, and such rhetoric had previously been the domain of militant groups like the Black Panthers, whom the NRA had vehemently opposed and whose supposed right to publicly carry firearms they refused to recognize when just a couple years earlier, in 1967, they had supported the Mulford Act in California, a bill to prohibit the carrying of loaded firearms publicly without a permit. Ever since this turn to the right in the 1970s, when new leadership set out to become the obstructive political force they remain today, the NRA defined and constructed gun ownership as a social identity, and for many gun owners, including some close family members of mine, it is one of the major pillars of their personal identity. They cultivated this notion of gun ownership as a social identity principally through their longstanding publication, American Rifleman, and thereafter politicized this social identity, such that support for gun rights has become a conservative Republican litmus test. Because of the NRA’s influence on their constituency, as well as because of their large campaign contributions, the major political figures and media apparatus of the right have further encouraged the notion of gun ownership as a distinct and legitimate social identity, one that Republicans claim as their own. Like the modern Republican Party generally, seemingly devastating scandals have arisen that should have caused the NRA’s dissolution entirely. After the 2016 election, it was revealed in a U.S. Senate Committee on Finance Minority Staff report that the NRA had become a Russian asset in its election meddling campaign, demonstrating that NRA officials sought out Russian money and facilitated the political access of known Kremlin agents, including Maria Butina. Republican apologists for the NRA argue that they were acting as individuals rather than on behalf of the NRA, but subsequent investigations by the New York Attorney General have revealed widespread fraud and cronyism in their organization. But the NRA simply left New York for Texas, declaring bankruptcy, and appears to be no less influential after these scandals. As one President who took money from them to further their agenda once said of himself, they could probably shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.

Despite the growing power of the NRA to kibosh any gun control legislation, they have been unable to stop certain major gun control legislation, especially when it is enacted on a wave of outrage after an infamous act of gun violence. Early on they even found themselves at odds with their Republican allies. After he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., in 1981, Ronald Reagan supported the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, more commonly known as the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks and a waiting period. By the time the act was passed, the NRA was able to get the five-day waiting period replaced by an instant computer background check, and until such a system could be put in place, they sought to fight the mandate. They financed a series of lawsuits in an effort to take the bill to the Supreme Court, which they succeeded in doing in 1997, winning an opinion that compelling law enforcement to run background checks was unconstitutional. The decision had little effect, though, since state and local law enforcement mostly chose to continue running the background checks of their own accord, and soon the background check database was in place. By this time, though, there was a much broader piece of gun control legislation for the NRA to fight, this one too passed in the wake of an act of gun violence that could not be ignored. On January 17th, 1989, a station wagon full of fireworks that had been parked behind Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, not far from my own home town, was set on fire, creating something of a distraction as a deranged and suicidal drifter in a flak jacket named Patrick Purdy set foot on the school’s playground, took position behind a portable building with an AK-47 that he had acquired quite easily at a gun shop in Oregon, and started firing. He wounded more than thirty that day, and he murdered five children before taking his own life. The unthinkably heinous act resulted in numerous pieces of gun control legislation. In California, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989 prohibited the transfer and ownership of more than 50 different semi-automatic assault weapons, the George H. W. Bush administration banned the importation of assault weapons that the ATF determined had no “sporting purpose,” and in 1994, a Federal Assault Weapons Ban was passed along with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of that year. The Assault Weapons Ban prohibited large capacity magazines and, much like the California law, banned the manufacture of specific semi-automatic assault weapons for use by civilians. Rather than restrictions on handguns, it is measures like these, meant specifically to fight mass public shootings, that gun control advocates have been urging after every mass shooting for the last 20 years. We have had them in place before, and it did not result in tyranny. The only reason we must advocate for these restrictions again is that the Assault Weapons Ban had an expiration date, and in 2004, it was not renewed.

Portraits of the children murdered by Patrick Purdy, from clevelandschoolremembers.org

Let us look further at the ten years 1994 to 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was in place. Perhaps this seems rather a recent time period for a history podcast to be discussing, but since gun rights proponents act like banning assault weapons would spell out certain doom for our democracy, it seems memories are so short that we must remind many that less than 20 years ago we had such a federal law and it wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it appears to have had a measurable effect on gun violence. The entire rationale behind the ban was that violent incidents involving assault weapons and high-capacity magazines typically involve more shots, more victims, and more wounds, and statistics support this assertion. Rather ridiculously, assault weapon apologists argue that the recoil of these weapons means worse aim and thus we cannot assume assault weapons are better able to strike more people. If that were the case, of course, it just makes them even more useless for sport or home defense, rendering them suitable only for spraying rounds into crowds. In other words, it just proves they are unsuitable for civilian use and especially dangerous in the hands of a mass murderer. Critics of the Assault Weapons Ban also claim it had little to no effect on crime, but the hard data disputes this. According to a 2001 study of the impacts of the ban in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, not only did criminal use of assault weapons decline in the years after the passage of the Assault Weapons Ban, but gun murders generally declined around 10%. Critics contend there is no proof of causation, that this reduction in gun homicides may have been due to other factors or the cyclical nature of crime stats, but since the ban’s expiration, the share of crimes involving high-capacity semiautomatics has increased from 33% to 112%, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of Urban Health. Still, mass shootings continued to occur during the years of the ban, including one of the worst school shootings in our history, the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999, whose perpetrators used weapons that remained unbanned, including a variant of the banned semiautomatic TEC-9 pistol that because of its slightly different name, the TEC-DC9, remained legal. Rather than proving that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was pointless, though, this instead proves that it was, if flawed, still working, and rather than abandoning it, such a ban should be improved, and such loopholes closed. Looking closely at data on mass shootings collected by Mother Jones, we can see that 18 mass public shootings occurred during the decade before the ban, while 15 mass shootings occurred during the ban. The difference between these decades may not appear striking, but let’s look at the decades since the ban’s expiration. During the ten years after its expiration, mass public shootings more than doubled, to 36, including the devastating Viginia Tech and Sandy Hook Massacres. And in the following 8 years, up to today, 61 mass shootings have occurred, and actually more, since Mother Jones’s data ceases in mid-June and these horrific crimes seem to be perpetrated weekly at this point. (In fact, as I was editing this podcast episode, I was compelled to record this insert to acknowledge that on Independence Day, a shooter in Highland Park, IL, injured 47 and killed 7 by firing at parade-goers with a high-powered rifle from a nearby rooftop. During the aftermath, a Republican state senator urged everyone to “move on.”) It is certainly true that not all of these mass shootings were committed using assault weapons, but almost all are committed using semiautomatic weapons with removable high-capacity magazines. As of 2017, according to the aforementioned study published by the Journal of Urban Health, “Assault weapons and other high-capacity semiautomatics appear to be used in a higher share of firearm mass murders (up to 57% in total).” Furthermore, a 2019 comparative study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that during the decade of the federal ban on assault weapons, mass shootings were 70% less likely to occur. But even if we were to discover that banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines did not reduce the growing number of these mass shooting incidents, perhaps it would at least make a difference in the average number of victims, making such incidents far less deadly. There is no logical reason that I can see not to update, improve, and renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Only conservative ideology and an entrenched, uniquely American gun culture stand in the way.

What makes America different from other Western democracies, and other nations generally, that we have developed this deep-rooted gun culture? Make no mistake, we are different. Among the top 10 countries that tolerate civilian gun ownership, we simply own more, at an estimated 120 guns per 100 residents, more than twice that of the next highest country in gun ownership, Yemen, according to the 2018 Small Arms Survey. When we look at gun murders as a percentage of all homicides in 2020, as reported by the BBC, it appears one is far more likely to be shot to death in America than in any other democracy of comparable size. In the UK, gun homicides made up only 4% of gun-related killings, unsurprisingly, considering the UK’s ban on military style weapons and handguns. In Australia, which passed sweeping gun control legislation after a series of mass shootings in the ’80s and ’90s, gun murders stood at only 13% of 2020 murders. In Canada, which generally ensures gun accessibility but maintains stricter controls of the same kind as the US, 2020 saw gun murders comprise 37% of the total. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., a whopping 79% of murders were gun-related. And probably because of our spotty and lax laws and the sheer number of guns in hands here, 73% of all mass shootings worldwide between 1998 and 2019 occurred here in America, as determined by a study in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Our reluctance to address this problem with strong legislation is also pretty unique. Take New Zealand’s response to the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch as an example. Within a month, the government had passed legislation banning semiautomatics and magazines, and within a few more months, they created a national firearms register and tightened restrictions on gun licensing. Their quick action to address the problem should make Americans feel ashamed of our own government response. We may be tempted to blame the NRA for this gun culture entirely, but that would be inaccurate. The connection between Americans and guns stretches back a long time before the NRA was ever formed in 1871 as a marksmanship club. Some have suggested that gun culture originated in the Wild West, when it is thought that every man must go about armed, and good guys with guns stood down bad guys with guns on a daily basis, but much of the tales of the American West are exaggerated. In fact, an opposing argument could be made that the Wild West was actually the origin place of American gun control laws, as Western towns nearly universally decreed that no one within town could carry a firearm, according to gun policy scholar Adam Winkler, and these “blanket ordinances” resulted in actually very low crime rates in such notorious towns as Deadwood, Dodge City, and Tombstone. Others might see the origin of American gun culture being related to the carrying of pistols by gentlemen, replacing the rapier around 1750 as the symbols of their masculinity, which they wielded in duels over perceived slights, but this fashion originated in Europe rather than the Americas. Certainly guns remain the phallic symbol of many an American male’s sense of manhood today, but in France and Britain, for example, where the most recognizable pistol dueling methods were established, the masculinity of men is no longer dependent on their gun ownership. So what makes American gun culture different?

Image of al old frontier town with the gun control ordinance clearly posted: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.” Courtesy Saint Joseph’s University

Americans’ love affair with deadly weapons can be traced all the way back to our independence, and even earlier. Much can be attributed to the fact that early Americans were colonizers and frontiersmen. By frontiersmen, I don’t mean gunslingers. I mean settlers—farmers, hunters, trappers. Those who sought to tame the wilderness relied on firearms for survival and subsistence. Wild game was a major part of their diet, and occasionally they had need of a firearm for defense against not only some human aggressor, but a dangerous wild predator. Farmers too relied on varmint guns to dispatch vermin that threatened their crops and predators that threatened their livestock. During the many conflicts and skirmishes that can loosely be called part of the American Indian Wars, the average settler’s firearms were used to maintain possession of land they had taken in their encroachments on Native American territories, viewing themselves as acting in self-defense against marauding savages. Therefore, it was not uncommon for young boys to be given rifles as a symbol of their passage into manhood. The frontier and its dangers are long gone now, though, and have been for more than a hundred years, and other nations that began in recent history as a colonial settlement of wilderness, such as Australia, have proven better able to put down the wild gun culture that helped them tame their frontiers. No, America remains different, and this difference can be attributed to our Founding Fathers’ insistence that a right to bear arms is a God-given, inalienable human right—a right not recognized by any other Western democracy. How did gun ownership come to be viewed as a human right here and nowhere else? It all boils down to the politics of the American Revolution. In colonial America, English Whiggery was a popular political force, and the radical Whigs’ distaste for militarism contributed to revolutionary sentiment in America. According to this political position, “standing armies” represented the greatest threat and evil to man’s liberties. To American Whigs, George III’s stationing of troops in the American Colonies was an act of tyranny. After the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers shot five Americans in a crowd that was hurling insults, snowballs, and stones at them, John Adams called it “the strongest proof of the danger of standing armies.” This Whiggish aversion to standing armies, or to George III’s army in particular, is further reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which bemoans the fact that the King “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures,” and can be seen to have still been on the minds of legislators years after the ratification of our Constitution, when they amended the Constitution to prohibit the quartering of soldiers in civilian houses. To radical English Whigs and American Whigs, or Patriots as they’re sometimes called, the solution to the evils of standing armies was a well-armed citizen militia, members of which could be trusted to act according to civic virtue. George Washington himself saw the folly of this early on, as he found the citizen militiamen under his command “incapable of making or sustaining a serious attack.” A historical myth has been perpetuated that America’s independence was won by the heroism of armed civilians, but in truth, militia troops performed quite poorly compared to Washington’s Continental Army. And after the Revolution, in their effort to bolster their citizen militia, our Founding Fathers endorsed gun laws that today would probably chafe even the most dyed-in-wool gun rights advocates: a 1792 law required all eligible men to buy a gun, report for muster, and register their weapons with the federal government.

It would not be long before the inadequacy of militia forces became apparent to all. In the War of 1812, when undisciplined militiamen embarrassed the country in failed stands against British troops, it became clear we needed to expand our own standing armies and could not rely on a militia. But by that time, the Constitution had already been amended with the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” I think most people know the argument in favor of gun control pointing out that this amendment only protects the rights of “the people,” meaning the country generally, to bear arms as part of “a well-regulated militia.” That much is apparent in the text. This “right” appears intended only to ensure the existence of a militia, not a well-armed general populace. What I don’t think many citizens realize is that this amendment, like the third amendment about quartering troops, is an artifact of an obsolete political view that America should rely more on militia forces than on a standing army. The fact that the U.S. promptly course-corrected after the War of 1812 and now has one of the largest militaries, and arguably the best equipped military, in the world, means this amendment is logically obsolete and should be subject to repeal and replacement. But even if one refuses to acknowledge that this amendment is only focused on strengthening and safeguarding militia forces, it actually explicitly urges regulation and in no way suggests that such regulation would infringe on the right being described. And it should be emphasized that this is not only the interpretation of modern gun control advocates. Until the latter half of the 20th century, it was the interpretation of legislators and the Supreme Court. In 1886, in their landmark decision on Presser v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that “state legislatures may enact statutes to control and regulate all organizations, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations except those which are authorized by the militia laws of the United States [emphasis mine],” clearly finding that the Second Amendment only applied to official national militias. In 1934, when Congress worked to restrict gangster weapons, the Second Amendment was not raised once during congressional testimony, clearly indicating that it wasn’t seen as relevant to such legislation intended to restrict individual access to firearms, and in 1939, when the law was finally challenged under the Second Amendment in the case of the United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court again ruled that the Firearms Act’s restriction of certain guns was entirely Constitutional, in that its provisions did not have any “reasonable relationship to the prevention, preservation, or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” So there was strong judicial precedent here for the interpretation that the Second Amendment is not even about the individual rights of gunowners and therefore has no bearing on either state or federal gun control legislation. But just as today’s Supreme Court is bent on overturning established precedent based on ideology, conservative justices recently managed to overturn this decision as well. In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the interpretation that the amendment protects an individual’s gun ownership rights, independent of militia affiliation—but even that ideologically split opinion, misguided as it may have been, confirms that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited” and specifically seeks to preserve longstanding prohibitions on gun possession by felons and the mentally ill, and even suggests that the only firearms protected at those that were in common use at the time of the amendment’s ratification, leaving the door open for the banning of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

The focus of the Second Amendment on a “well regulated militia” specifically reflects Whig politics at the time and the distrust of “standing armies,” much of which goes back to the Boston Massacre, pictured.

Rather than really contend with this argument about the true intention and purpose of the Second Amendment, though, gun rights activists employ fallacious arguments to present gun control as itself an evil. They will claim, rather absurdly, that the problems of gun violence can only be resolved with more guns, using the “Good Guy with a Gun” argument that if only more people were packing in any given gun crime situation, then criminals could be better stopped before they commit their acts of violence. According to this logic, an increase in unregulated exchanges of gunfire between civilians is viewed as a best case scenario and a solution to violent crime, and a society in which firearms have become as common as cell phones is dreamed of as the safest of societies, despite the obvious additional increase in suicides and lethal gun accidents that such a society would inevitably see. Really clever sophists will even twist history to make gun control laws look evil. These “twistorians,” if you will, point out that the first gun control laws were racist, disarming slaves and free Blacks in order to enforce White Supremacy. There is truth to this argument, which makes it rather insidious. Think of my episodes on the Wilmington Insurrection, when White Supremacists acted to prevent Black citizens from arming themselves against the violence that they were openly planning. The South, and even some Northern states, had always disallowed gun ownership among slaves and free Blacks, for the obvious reason that they feared rebellion, and following the Civil War, many Southern states adopted Black Codes that continued denying firearms to Black citizens. Enforcing this disarmament were armed white posses, called Regulators, who ran roughshod through Black communities. Some of these went about their marauding masked and called themselves the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, in the 1860s, legislation like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the first Civil Rights Acts, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, were indeed intended, at least in part, to guarantee freedmen the same rights to bear arms in self-defense that their white oppressors enjoyed. Yet still, Southern states remained intent on disarming Black communities under Jim Crow. In the 1880s, faced with the growing scourge of lynching, Southern Blacks armed themselves and in several cases fought off bands of murderers. Through the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, Black communities continued their tradition of arming themselves to fight back during race massacres, like those in Colfax, Louisiana; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Even during the Civil Rights Movement, passive resisters were aided by armed community defense organizations. And the Black Panthers, as previously mentioned, were the OG gun rights absolutists. All of this is absolutely true, and yet entirely irrelevant to the self-evident fact that stronger background checks and laws prohibiting the ownership of high-capacity assault weapons are necessary to reduce mass public shootings.

While statistics on gun ownership are lacking without instituting a comprehensive national system of gun registration, according to Pew Research Center, as of 2017, white men are twice as likely to report owning a gun as non-white men. And I’m willing to go out on a limb and predict, in the absence of firm data on the subject, that it’s white men by far who possess high capacity assault rifles of the sort that most gun control advocates today want to ban in order to reduce mass public shootings. However, Black Americans far more commonly report having been shot or threatened with a gun compared to white Americans. The simple fact that, today, gun violence disproportionately affects Black Americans, making them 10 times more likely to die by gun homicide, and making their children 14 times more likely to be shot and killed according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, certainly highlights the fact that any reduction in gun violence achieved through stronger gun control legislation will logically save Black American lives. Let us not forget that many recent mass shootings, like the recent massacre in Buffalo, the 2021 shooting in Winthrop, MA, the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso as well as the Dayton, Ohio, Entertainment District shooting literally hours later, the 2015 shooting at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the 1999 Independence Day weekend spree killings across the Midwest, were committed by white supremacists as hate crimes against one race group or another. Times change. Gun rights used to be a racial justice issue, but now gun control is. Gun rights proponents who raise the issue of the racist origins of gun control either haven’t thought out their argument or are deflecting with a bad faith argument. No legislation to disarm some races and not others is proposed by advocates of stricter gun control, nor would any such legislation ever be passed as long as the 14th Amendment remains in place. So if these gun rights advocates are worried about inequality before the law and selective enforcement, about gun laws disarming minorities unfairly because of discriminatory implementation by authorities, then they are essentially acknowledging the existence of systemic racism, which, at the risk of stereotyping, a lot of these guys don’t really want to do, as fixing that would mean restructuring society, especially when it comes to the justice system and urban planning. We don’t fight systemic racism by refusing to pass necessary laws for fear they will be inequitably imposed; rather, we fight it by exposing and correcting the inequities themselves.

Howard Unruh, whose “Walk of Death” is widely regarded as the first mass public shooting of the modern sort.

The bare fact that mass public shootings have evolved since the time of our Founding Fathers, in ways they likely did not imagine, to become a unique societal evil today, stands as evidence that something must be done, and especially here, where it may not have begun, but where it is by far at its worst. The first mass shooting as we might define it today occurred in Hyderabad, in what is now Pakistan, in 1878, when an Iranian infantryman murdered his lover for her infidelity and then went on a shooting spree. However, the United States, shamefully, may be the origin of the mass school shooting. Some point to a massacre at a school during Pontiac’s War in 1764 as the first, but I would count that as a raid perpetrated by a band of Delaware during a time of war. Rather, the first genuine school shootings in U.S. history, according to our more modern understanding of such acts, occurred back to back in 1891, when one man attended a school exhibition in Liberty, Mississippi, and fired his shotgun into a crowd of students and teachers, and another man, only twelve days later, entered a parochial school in Newburgh, New York, and fired his shotgun at students on a playground. But it was not until the mid-20th century, 150 years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, that the true horror of mass public shootings began to reveal itself, when Howard Unruh, a disturbed veteran, took his “Walk of Death” in 1949, strolling through his neighborhood and shooting thirteen men, women, and children dead. The 1960s saw mass shootings evolve to sniper attacks, when a California teen injured ten and killed three by taking potshots at vehicles on the highway with his father’s rifle before killing himself, and when a Marine sharpshooter perched in the University of Texas clock tower managed to murder fifteen people and wound thirty-one others before being killed by authorities. After a spate of mass shootings by deranged postal workers in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as since, the narrative around mass shootings was focused for a time on workplace shootings, and the term “going postal” was coined, referring to being driven to violence by anger and frustration related to one’s occupation. But today, mass public shootings have become so common, and have evolved with the weapons being used to become so much deadlier, that the old terms spree killing, postal killing, workplace shooting, sniper attack, and even mass murder, seem inadequate, either too narrow or too vague to really describe the problem. Mass public shootings are a national dilemma that the Founding Fathers just could not have anticipated. To use a frequently raised but I think apt analogy, the problem can be likened to automobile deaths. Because of the unsafe and sometimes reckless use of a technology that was not around at the framing of our Constitution or the ratification of our Bill of Rights, annual deaths in motor vehicle accidents were exceedingly high for a long time. Just as the gun lobby today resists regulation, automobile manufacturers then resisted vehicle safety legislation, but it was passed regardless, increasing safety standards for automobile manufacturers and requiring the installation of seat belts. Legislators recognized a uniquely modern public safety hazard and took legislative action to remedy it, resulting in a significant reduction of road fatalities. I guess we are just fortunate that, in that case, there was not some outmoded constitutional amendment about the freedom of saddle makers to decide on what safety straps to manufacture, or the rights of stagecoach drivers and carriage passengers to sit on their benches unencumbered by restraints.

To clarify my position, I am not urging total civilian disarmament. I firmly believe that the populace should have access to well-regulated firearms for home protection and sport. And I even have some sympathy for the central conviction of most gun rights advocates that the right to bear arms is an important safeguard against tyranny. But the threat of tyranny was far more imminent in the wake of American Independence, whereas today it only seems to fuel the baseless conspiracy fantasies of paramilitary militia men and seditionists. These gun rights advocates have feared an oppressive government declaring martial law for decades, imagining that every mass shooting is actually a staged “false flag” operation to be used as justification for a clampdown and a total disarmament of the populace that never actually occurs. For 8 years, the gun-toting right was certain that Obama intended to disarm the populace so he could establish some kind of socialist dictatorship. What really happened was that he urged the passage of sane gun legislation, which was killed by the Republican Senate minority through the abuse of the filibuster. In fact, the closest we’ve come to a President actually declaring martial law was when Obama’s successor, a gun rights advocate who took a lot of money from the NRA, looked into imposing martial law, not to take guns but rather to overturn lawful election results in a coup d’état. The hypocrisy of gun rights advocates who fear an oppressive government turning around and supporting a literal attempt to overthrow our government is profound. As is the hypocrisy of our conservative-packed activist Supreme Court bench, who defend the authority of state governments to interfere with women’s bodily autonomy but deny the authority of a state government to regulate firearms. The fact is, gun control must be viewed as a pro-life issue, as the Catholic Church has long argued. Those who believe themselves the moral champions of life need to start advocating for the protection of it after birth. The fact that we, as a country, did not come together to protect our children from mass shootings after Sandy Hook, and that now, after the recurrent horror that occurred at Uvalde many continue to resist, is a national shame. And it will only get worse if we don’t wake up and smell the blood of our children.

Further Reading

“America’s Gun Culture – in Seven Charts.” BBC, 25 May 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081.

Briggs, William. How America Got Its Guns : A History of the Gun Violence Crisis. University of New Mexico Press, 2017. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1423319&site=ehost-live.

Christopher S. Koper, and Jeffrey A. Roth. “The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Ban on Gun Violence Outcomes: An Assessment of Multiple Outcome Measures and Some Lessons for Policy Evaluation.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–74, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007522431219.

Clarke, Kevin, and James Martin. “A History of Violence: Gun Control in America.(VANTAGES Ql NT: 1967-2013).” America (New York, N.Y. : 1909), vol. 215, no. 2, 2016, p. 31–.

Coleman, Arica L. “When the NRA Supported Gun Control.” TIME, 29 July 2016, time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/.

Depew, Briggs. “The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911.” The Economic Journal, vol. 132, no. 646, August 2022, pp. 2118–2140, doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac004.

DiMaggio, Charles et al. “Changes in US mass shooting deaths associated with the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban: Analysis of open-source data.” The journal of trauma and acute care surgery vol. 86,1 (2019): 11-19. doi:10.1097/TA.0000000000002060.
Duwe, Grant, et al. “Forecasting the Severity of Mass Public Shootings in the United States.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, pp. 385–423, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09499-5.
Eddlem, Thomas R. “The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control Laws.” The New American (Belmont, Mass.), vol. 30, no. 18, 2014, p. 35–.

Fortgang, Erika. “How They Got the Guns: A Look at How School Shooters Are Getting Weapons So Easily.” Rolling Stone, 10 June 1999, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-they-got-the-guns-175676/.

“Gun Violence Is a Racial Justice Issue.” Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 2019, www.bradyunited.org/issue/gun-violence-is-a-racial-justice-issue.

Hofstadter, Richard. “America as a Gun Culture.” American Heritage, vol. 21, no. 6, October 1970, www.americanheritage.com/america-gun-culture.  

Kopel, David, and Joseph Greenlee. “The Racist Origin of Gun Control Laws.” The Hill, 22 Aug. 2017, thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347324-the-racist-origin-of-gun-control-laws/.

Krajicek, David J. “How Author's Death Over 100 Years Ago Helped Shape New York's Gun Laws.” New York Daily News, 19 Jan. 2013, www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/1911-shooting-led-ny-gun-law-article-1.1240721.

Lopez, German. “How Gun Control Works in America, Compared with 4 Other Rich Countries.” Vox, 14 March 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9850572/gun-control-us-japan-switzerland-uk-canada.

Lacombe, Matthew J. “The Political Weaponization of Gun Owners: The National Rifle Association’s Cultivation, Dissemination, and Use of a Group Social Identity.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 81, no. 4, 2019, pp. 1342–56, https://doi.org/10.1086/704329.

Platt, Daniel. “New York Banned Handguns 100 Years Ago ... Will We Ever See that Kind of Gun Control Again?” History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/141708.

Silva, Jason R. “Global Mass Shootings: Comparing the United States Against Developed and Developing Countries.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 21 March 2022. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2022.2052126.

Spitzer, Robert. “How the NRA Evolved from Backing a 1934 Ban on Machine Guns to Blocking Nearly All Firearm Restrictions Today.” The Conversation, 25 May 2022, theconversation.com/how-the-nra-evolved-from-backing-a-1934-ban-on-machine-guns-to-blocking-nearly-all-firearm-restrictions-today-183880.

Winkler, Adam. “The Secret History of Guns.” The Atlantic, Sep. 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/.