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Comment by bionoid | Hacker News Reader

Jan Irvin at GnosticMedia has done a lot of interesting research on MKULTRA. I learned that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent and basically the counterculture of the 60s was manufactured (see "manufacturing the deadhead" [0]). Personally I find his "unspun" show refreshing, if nothing else it seems like an attempt at honest reporting, which is rare.

edit: and please do read it before judging, the evidence is more convincing than you think.

[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-pr...

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I'm also familiar with Jan's work and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of mind control and psychedelics. He's uncovered a lot of interesting history. It has been interesting to see Jan's development from being pro-psychedelics (e.g. his film Pharmacratic Inquisition) to his stance today which place psychedelics and mysticism mostly in the realm of mind control tools. To say the least, there are some very bizarre connections between military intelligence and the formation of the "counter culture". And seemingly, this is nothing new, with these types of links going back to at least classical civilization with Eleusinian cult initiations.

Can you elaborate on those connections? My cursory googling surfaced some thread-bare conspiracy theories, but nothing of substance to follow-up on.

I recommend reading “Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond“

It covers MKUltra’s LSD experiments.

I suggest you look at Irvin's brain [0], which contains a lot of the connections. Red items are confirmed, documented CIA, yellow is "highly likely but not 100% confirmed".

[0] https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...

Confirmed by whom? Which source? I went to the entry about "Robert Anton Wilson" and I didn't see any quotes to references that he is linked to the CIA. It is also not mentioned on his Wikipedia page AFAICT.

That R. Gordon Wasson was part of the US government doesn't surprise me. That fellow thoroughly grilled John Marco Allegro with all kind of fallacies which are thoroughly debunked in Irvin's "The Holy Mushroom".

Does that mean he no longer agrees with his findings in "The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity" and "The Pharmacratic Inquisition"? Which later works are you referred to? Because I wouldn't even define him or Andrew Rutajit as necessarily "pro psychedelics" even if you can read between the lines that they used psychedelics that's never a major point in either of these works. Their works are not even remotely some kind of commercial for psychedelics. The documentary "The Pharmacratic Inquisition", of which one can find a LQ version on YouTube, is a complimentary work to the book which has a foreword by Jordan Maxwell (aka Russell Pine, a jehova witness), a fraud from whom Irvin has distanced himself [1].

[1] http://www.esotericonline.net/forum/topics/jordan-maxwell-ma...

His evidence seems ‘strained’, to be polite.

I mean, the CIA director ordered all the documents destroyed. Clearly any effort to uncover it is going to be speculative.

Who else is making FOIA requests, interviewing people, and systematically collecting evidence? [0] Nobody.

[0] https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...

I couldn't find any info on his Wikipedia page about him working for the CIA.

Haven't read the linked article, but for a tl;dr, how reliable are the accusations, and what are the sources?

Leary, you mean? He admitted that straight up himself, and you can just look at the 1979 MKULTRA reunion video if you have any doubt that he was involved with the CIA [0]. That it's not covered on wikipedia is hardly surprising.

Regarding reliability, Irvin promotes critical thinking through the trivium method [1], and the conclusions are drawn from primary documents. You really should look into it.

[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...

[1] http://www.triviumeducation.com/

Thank you very much for sharing this

>One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was "Deadhead," which is an equivocation for a "dead mind" or "a drugged, thoughtless person."

Sorry, this is just too much. "Deadhead" means a fan of the Grateful Dead. Is he just making stuff up?

Surprisingly, the same word can be used in two different instances over a decade apart to mean two different things.

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