LIMITED HANGOUT (1967-77): The education/media system test [Part 2]

An MOR series

Image credit: Videodrome (by David Cronenberg).

If you didn’t read PART 1 yet, you may do so here:

LIMITED HANGOUT (1967-77): How to fool the citizens into thinking that government has been reformed

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• A limited hangout is CIA jargon for a trick the spies often play on us.

• When their criminal and undemocratic activities are discovered, they pretend to come clean and volunteer information to make us think that that’s all there is to see.

• What they ‘hang out to dry,’ the exposures they make, the things they confess, make people think the institutional problem is somehow getting fixed.

• Citizens then go distractedly back to their lives, somewhat reassured.

• The clandestine criminal system is preserved intact.

• This piece examines the performance of the education/media system to test whether the exposures of the scandals in the period 1967-77 should be considered evidence of a democratic system righting itself, or else evidence of a limited hangout.

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In a limited hangout, the spies give us “some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case,” explains Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the CIA. “The public … is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

I am claiming that the string of damaging revelations which became public in the period 1967-77 were a limited hangout.

This began when tiny Ramparts Magazine exposed in 1967 that the National Student Association, biggest in the country, was a CIA front. Subsequently, an avalanche of investigations revealed that a staggering variety and number of seemingly innocent citizen organizations had been taken over or created from scratch by the CIA.

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The National Student Association, the CIA, and the structure of a captured organization

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In the US Senate, the Church Committee found that US Intelligence—prominently, the CIA and the FBI, though not them alone—had been 1) spying on US citizens with illicit surveillance, informants, etc. (Operation CHAOS); 2) using wiretaps, false identity operations, smear campaigns, infiltration of civil rights and other politically inconvenient groups (COINTELPRO); and 3 ) intercepting, opening, and photographing the correspondence of US citizens (HTLINGUAL).

In addition, US Intelligence had been treating US citizens—including many unwitting citizens who never consented—like medical lab rats in a ‘mind control’ program that used drugs, electroshock, torture, and other techniques to try and break down human minds and control them in the manner of robots (MKUltra).

The point of that was, among other goals, to create ‘perfect assassins’ (‘Manchurian candidates’) who could be triggered remotely and would not remember who sent them. Many subjects of these psychopathic experiments were severely harmed, and some were killed. Some have speculated that the per-capita incidence of serial killers in the US—which is much, much higher than anywhere else—is related to this program.

In the same period, the US Army was conducting biowarfare ‘tests’ on US citizens—millions of them—by spraying entire cities and regions with experimental biological agents. I have found that many people cannot even process this latter item even when I show them the documentation; they seem to disconnect. (I almost don’t blame them.)

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Did the US Army spray bioweapons on your family?

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In this series we are asking the following:

• Was the string of official revelations in the period 1967-77 evidence of a democratic system righting itself after a criminal perturbation?

• Or was this a limited hangout to pull wool over our eyes and restore the criminal system to its clandestine business as usual?

In Part 1 we’ve seen that, for all of these spectacular crimes, not one person saw the inside of a jail. No prosecutions were even initiated. This is diagnostic of a limited hangout, and it means that the justice system, at least, had been thoroughly corrupted already.

But what about the education/media system that creates meaning and manages our reality? Had that been corrupted too?

If Maurice Joly—the world’s first great theorist of reality management—could be brought back from the grave he would say: well, of course education/media was corrupted. In his view, the very first thing that a clandestine service will corrupt is the education/media system because once you manage the citizen’s reality you can get away with anything. That’s the linchpin.

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Maurice Joly and the Theory of Counterfeit Democracy

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But we need a test.

If the education/media system is independent of the clandestine services, then it can perform democratic self-correction within its own orbit; if not, if it has been corrupted, then we should find the education/media system collaborating with the limited-hangout strategy of the clandestine services.

The predictions, here, are as follows:

• Self-correction hypothesis → Predicts that, going forward, lest something like this happen again, the education/media system would give the scandals of 1967-77 saturation coverage, referencing them often and turning them into a standard component of a basic US education in order to make US citizens aware and wary. Result: the scandals of 1967-77 become common knowledge: ordinary cultural literacy.

• Limited hangout hypothesis → Predicts that the educational and media systems will submerge the scandals of 1967-77, either skipping over them or mentioning them only in passing—and never putting them together, connecting the dots to build a model of the US bosses that is consistent with their behaviors. Result: near-total ignorance of US citizens about the scandals of 1967-77.

So what happened?

I discussed with GPT (4.0) the scandals of 1967-77 and I asked it the following question:

• “Are you aware yourself of the extent to which ordinary US citizens today have a consciousness of all this? If so, give me your assessment of that.”

I already knew the answer, but I wanted to see what GPT would say. GPT did very well. (Remember, you can just copy-paste my question into your own GPT to perform a check on what I did, but don’t forget to first make GPT give you a summary of the Church Committee revelations that followed the Ramparts exposé so that the relevant context is ‘primed.’)

GPT replied:

Yes, I can give you a high-confidence assessment. Most Americans today have little to no real consciousness of the full scope of the U.S. government’s clandestine abuses revealed between 1967 and 1977.

1. Fragmentary awareness at best

• Many Americans have heard of terms like “MKULTRA,” “COINTELPRO,” or “the Church Committee” in passing—especially from pop culture (e.g., Stranger Things for MKULTRA, or online conspiracy culture).

• But this knowledge is typically fragmented, decontextualized, and depoliticized. For example:

  • MKULTRA becomes a spooky CIA LSD experiment, not a vast network of state-sponsored psychological torture and murder.

  • COINTELPRO is vaguely understood as surveillance of radicals, not as a full-scale, criminal program to destroy civil rights leaders and movements.

  • Biowarfare testing on civilians is virtually unknown.

2. Narrative isolation

• Even when individuals are aware of one scandal, they rarely connect it to others.

• There’s little sense of the structural pattern—that a unified security state apparatus ran multiple overlapping, criminal programs with zero accountability.

• This historical memory has been deliberately fragmented, so that no consolidated public narrative exists.

3. Suppression by omission

• These revelations are not taught in most U.S. high schools or colleges, even in history or civics courses.

• The official response—limited reforms, no prosecutions, and eventual re-escalation of surveillance post-9/11—means there was never a moral reckoning.

• Even the Church Committee is referenced primarily by journalists or watchdogs trying to analogize modern abuses—not as a central civic moment.

4. Effect of media and political tribalism

• Conservatives tend to dismiss these abuses because they’re tied to criticisms of the military or intelligence community.

• Liberals tend to dismiss them as “in the past,” or explain them away as Cold War excesses that were corrected.

• Few on either side are taught to see them as part of a longstanding structure of elite impunity, with ongoing implications.

5. Result: structural amnesia

• Most Americans, even educated ones, would be shocked to learn:

  • That millions were exposed to biowarfare agents without consent.

  • That the CIA tried to drive MLK to suicide.

  • That there was zero jail time for these.

• And even those who know these facts rarely integrate them into their current view of government, democracy, or national mythology.

Bottom line:

The consciousness exists in fragments—but the synthesis has been erased.
What Americans know is episodic, disconnected, and often stripped of moral meaning. There is no mainstream collective memory of how close the U.S. came to overt authoritarianism through intelligence abuse—and how little has been done to prevent a recurrence.

GPT is absolutely right.

And GPT is also right to stress that one scandal, in particular, has entirely disappeared from public view: “biowarfare testing on civilians is virtually unknown.” In other words, the biggest crime, the one that affected the largest number of US citizens (millions…), and a crime that in fact is ongoing (yes, they are still doing it), is precisely the one that no US citizen (to a close approximation) has ever heard anything about.

We have an article on MOR on this:

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After WWII, US Army sprayed bioweapons on US citizens (millions). But why didn't you know?

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But what the education/media system did here goes far beyond simple omission. There was an active effort to transform the culture of university-educated people in order to hide from view any criminal activity of government bureaucrats.

I turn to this next.