Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,
“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power.”
- James Madison
This is a year of strange anniversaries.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a band of revolutionaries declared their independence from a king.
America’s founders rejected concentrated power. They denounced standing armies. They distrusted government secrecy. They risked their lives to escape a ruler who could tax without consent, wage war without accountability, and govern without meaningful restraint.
Twenty-five years ago, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America embarked on a very different journey.
The federal government claimed extraordinary emergency powers. Surveillance expanded. Wars multiplied. Executive authority grew. Constitutional safeguards were weakened in the name of security.
One anniversary marked a revolt against empire. The other marked the normalization of it.
Now, as America prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, we are confronted with a bitter irony: the republic born in rebellion against empire has become an empire in everything but name.
Worse, the U.S. government is violating the very principles that justified the American Revolution.
Graft, grift and corruption. Endless wars. Profiteering. Trillions squandered abroad while the nation sinks deeper into debt at home.
A government that governs increasingly by executive order and emergency decree. A government that wastes taxpayer money with impunity, rewards political loyalty over constitutional fidelity, installs loyalists in positions meant to serve the public, dismantles safeguards against corruption, shields insiders from scrutiny, and treats accountability as an inconvenience.
National states of emergency that never seem to end. Efforts to nullify constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship. Expanded death penalty powers. A growing willingness to bypass Congress, sidestep constitutional restraints and rule by fiat.
Surveillance programs that track where we go, what we buy, who we know, what we say and what we believe. Fusion centers, facial recognition, license plate readers, AI-assisted monitoring, financial tracking, intelligence-sharing agreements and a sprawling security apparatus that treats privacy as a loophole and dissent as a threat.
Military action undertaken without congressional authorization. National Guard deployments that blur the line between civilian government and military authority. The militarization of policing. Federal agents arresting people at courthouses. Protesters treated as security threats. Legal residents threatened with deportation because of their political speech and associations. Immigrants and asylum seekers swept up in raids, detained, deported or disappeared into a bureaucratic maze before courts can fully review the legality of what has been done.
Whistleblowers, journalists, activists and critics targeted for speaking truth to power. Expanding “extremist” classifications that increasingly encompass lawful speech, political dissent and ideological opposition rather than criminal conduct.
This is not freedom.
This is the architecture of a police state.
Nor is this merely the accumulated rot of past administrations.
Republican and Democratic presidents alike helped build the machinery of permanent emergency. They expanded the surveillance state, normalized undeclared wars, empowered the military-industrial complex, deferred to intelligence agencies, and taught Americans to accept secrecy, suspicion and fear as the price of safety.
Donald Trump inherited that machinery.
Then he weaponized it.
No modern president has done more to expose the danger of allowing so much power to accumulate in one office.
Trump did not invent the imperial presidency, but he has shown what happens when a president treats constitutional limits as obstacles, dissent as disloyalty, the courts as irritants, Congress as irrelevant and federal power as a personal weapon.
Nor has he hidden his intentions. From efforts to consolidate authority within the executive branch to the installation of loyalists whose allegiance appears directed more toward a president than the Constitution, the Trump Administration has tested the limits of executive power in ways that would have alarmed the generation that fought the Revolution.
We have also witnessed growing efforts to sideline due process protections, weaken the ancient safeguard of habeas corpus, expand detention powers, and normalize the notion that constitutional rights can be suspended whenever government officials invoke national security, immigration enforcement or emergency necessity.
This is what happens when a government built for emergencies never leaves emergency mode.
The danger is no longer hypothetical.
The tools of authoritarianism exist.
The police state machinery exists.
The surveillance apparatus exists.
The permanent war powers exist.
The question is who controls them—and what remains to stop them.
The American Revolution was not fought over minor policy disagreements. It was fought over the danger of unaccountable power. The colonists objected to a king who could deploy troops, impose taxes, conduct searches, punish dissent and wage war without meaningful consent of the governed.
The Declaration of Independence was not merely a list of grievances.
It was an indictment.
King George III had made the military superior to civilian authority. He had maintained standing armies without consent. He had cut off trade, imposed taxes, obstructed justice and transported colonists overseas for trial.
Time and again, the Declaration returned to the same central complaint: concentrated power had become a threat to liberty.
The Revolution was not fought over a tax on tea.
It was fought over the danger of a government that had placed itself above the people.
When the framers later gathered to draft the Constitution, they did so with those lessons fresh in mind.
The founders understood that power is inherently expansive. Given enough time, every government seeks more authority, more secrecy and more control.
That is why they created a constitutional system in which power was divided. The branches were intended to restrain one another. No person was to be trusted with too much authority.
Yet history shows how quickly constitutional restraints weaken in times of fear.
John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts and criminalized political dissent.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
Woodrow Wilson prosecuted anti-war activists.
Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans.
Richard Nixon weaponized federal agencies against political opponents.
Each expansion of executive power was justified as necessary.
Each left constitutional scars.
Then came September 11, 2001.
In the months and years that followed, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, vastly expanding government surveillance powers. The Department of Homeland Security was created. Military tribunals were revived. Warrantless surveillance became commonplace. Watchlists multiplied. Fusion centers spread across the country. Indefinite detention became normalized.
War abroad justified surveillance at home.
Terror threats justified government secrecy.
National crises justified executive emergency powers.
What began as a response to a terrorist attack gradually became a governing philosophy.
Twenty-five years later, the emergency state has become embedded in the architecture of government.
Every crisis expands executive power.
Every war contracts liberty.
Every emergency leaves behind powers that rarely disappear.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
Presidents of both parties have inherited extraordinary powers and expanded them further. Congress has repeatedly surrendered responsibilities it was meant to exercise. Courts have increasingly deferred to executive claims involving national security, immigration and emergency authority.
The result is a government that often functions by executive decree rather than representative self-government.
Executive orders increasingly substitute for legislation. National emergencies become permanent governing authorities. Constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship are challenged by presidential decree rather than constitutional amendment. Congress is bypassed. Courts are treated as obstacles. Separation of powers becomes a formality rather than a safeguard.
The presidency has evolved into something the framers would scarcely recognize.
What Donald Trump has done is expose the fatal flaw in the system Americans allowed to be built after 9/11: once government is handed the machinery of permanent emergency, all that remains is for the wrong person to seize the controls.
For decades, Americans were told not to worry.
We were told surveillance powers would only be used against terrorists.
We were told emergency powers would only be invoked during genuine crises.
We were told national security authorities would remain subject to constitutional limits.
We were told the Constitution’s checks and balances would hold.
We were told no president would ever be allowed to exercise such powers without meaningful restraint.
They were wrong.
And we were wrong to trust power to restrain itself.
The lesson is the same one the founders learned from bitter experience: power granted in the name of necessity rarely remains confined to necessity.
Every emergency becomes a precedent.
Every precedent becomes a power.
Every power becomes permanent.
The founders also warned against standing armies and perpetual war.
Having lived under military occupation, they understood that governments organized around war inevitably become organized around power.
What they feared was not merely the presence of soldiers but the rise of a permanent warfare state—a government that uses conflict, fear and national security as justification for expanding its authority.
Today, those dangers extend beyond foreign battlefields. National Guard units are increasingly federalized and deployed domestically. Military tactics, equipment and personnel continue to flow into civilian law enforcement. The line separating the soldier from the police officer grows fainter with each passing crisis.
Look around.
The United States has spent much of the last quarter century engaged in military operations somewhere in the world. Wars are launched without formal declarations. Emergency powers become permanent. Defense budgets swell while domestic needs go unmet. Intelligence agencies operate with extraordinary secrecy. Technologies developed for foreign battlefields migrate into local police departments and domestic surveillance programs.
Today, even as the Trump Administration and its so-called War Department continue to pound the war drums, Americans are once again being told to trust government officials operating behind closed doors, often with little public debate and even less accountability.
The founders understood a simple truth: governments that prepare constantly for war eventually begin treating their own citizens as potential enemies.
That is the logic of empire.
Enemies abroad justify surveillance at home. War powers abroad justify police powers at home. National security becomes the excuse for secrecy, militarization, censorship, detention and control.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of the surveillance state.
Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, colonists were outraged by writs of assistance—general warrants that allowed British agents to search homes, businesses and personal property without meaningful justification.
Those abuses helped inspire the Fourth Amendment.
Today, government agents no longer need to kick down your door to invade your privacy.
Your cell phone tracks your movements. Your vehicle reports your location. Your purchases reveal your habits. Your social media activity exposes your associations. Your digital footprint creates a detailed record of your life.
Government agencies can access location data, financial records, license plate readers, facial recognition databases and vast stores of personal information, often with little transparency and even less oversight.
Meanwhile, Congress continues to renew and expand surveillance authorities while intelligence agencies deepen information-sharing arrangements with domestic and foreign partners. Americans are increasingly monitored not because they are suspected of wrongdoing, but because technology has made mass surveillance possible and government has found it useful.
The surveillance state has no borders. Nor does it have clear limits.
Government agencies increasingly rely on broad and elastic “extremist” classifications that often extend beyond violence or criminal conduct to encompass lawful speech, political dissent and ideological opposition.
What begins as a tool to identify dangerous actors inevitably expands into a mechanism for monitoring unpopular viewpoints. Information collected for one purpose is shared for another. Data gathered abroad finds its way home. Intelligence systems built to monitor foreign threats are repurposed to watch domestic populations.
King George’s agents needed boots and battering rams to search your home.
Today’s government can search your life without ever leaving its desk.
And then there is the matter of accountability—or rather, the lack of it.
The Declaration of Independence repeatedly condemned a government that had placed itself above the law.
That grievance remains painfully relevant.
Government officials who violate constitutional rights are frequently shielded from accountability by doctrines such as qualified immunity. Secret courts authorize secret programs. Bureaucrats operate behind layers of classification and administrative complexity. Government agencies routinely fail audits, lose records, misuse surveillance powers and exceed their authority, yet meaningful consequences remain rare.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans face an entirely different standard.
When government officials make costly mistakes, taxpayers foot the bill.
When unconstitutional policies trigger lawsuits, taxpayers foot the bill.
When unlawful detentions result in settlements, taxpayers foot the bill.
When militarized raids, wrongful arrests, surveillance abuses and civil-rights violations generate years of litigation, taxpayers foot the bill.
Even now, Americans are being asked to absorb the financial costs of government misconduct on a staggering scale—from unlawful enforcement actions and unconstitutional executive orders to politically motivated spending schemes and settlements designed to shield those in power from scrutiny.
The public pays for the government’s mistakes while those responsible often walk away untouched. In some cases, public office itself has become a vehicle for private gain, with self-enrichment schemes, conflicts of interest and insider favoritism blurring the line between public service and personal profit.
The pattern is impossible to ignore.
Profits are privatized. Power is centralized. Accountability is deferred.
The bill is sent to the American people.
Whether it involves unlawful surveillance, unconstitutional arrests, retaliatory investigations, speech-based censorship, ICE raids that terrorize communities, warrantless tracking, civil asset forfeiture, the targeting of whistleblowers, journalists and activists, endless wars or political corruption, the pattern is the same: power protects itself.
The founders did not risk their lives because taxes were too high.
They risked their lives because government had become detached from the people, insulated from accountability and convinced that power justified itself.
Sound familiar?
The uncomfortable truth is that many of the abuses that sparked the American Revolution have returned, only this time they arrive wrapped in the language of national security, public safety, emergency management and administrative necessity.
The faces have changed. The technology has changed. The rhetoric has changed.
The danger remains the same.
Which brings us back to this strange anniversary year.
The 250th anniversary of American independence should have been an opportunity to renew our commitment to limited government, constitutional accountability and the principle that no one is above the law.
Instead, the lesson of 9/11 is being repeated in a different form.
Twenty-five years ago, fear became the pretext for permanent emergency.
Today, patriotism is becoming the backdrop for presidential spectacle, military pageantry and the celebration of the very concentration of power the American Revolution was fought to resist.
Much of the celebration has been transformed into a spectacle of power: military displays, patriotic pageantry, strongman politics and the elevation of political leaders into larger-than-life figures whose authority is expected to be admired rather than questioned.
Yet the founders did not launch a revolution so Americans could celebrate authoritarian power.
They launched a revolution to remind future generations that power is dangerous, liberty is fragile and no ruler should ever be elevated above the Constitution.
For 250 years, Americans have treated the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s birth certificate.
What we have failed to recognize is that the Declaration of Independence was also a warning: freedom is fragile, power is relentless, and no generation remains free simply because a previous generation fought for liberty.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the most important question is not whether the nation survived. Nations survive. Empires survive. Governments survive.
The real question, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is whether the principles that inspired the American Revolution survived as well.
Thus, the question is not whether America survived 250 years.
The question is whether the principles of 1776 can survive the American police state.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 23:25President Trump earned more than $1.4 billion from his family's crypto-related ventures alone last year, according to a financial disclosure released Tuesday, including from his meme coin business and his family's cryptocurrency firm.
The 927-page filing, his annual disclosure for 2025 with the US Office of Government Ethics, disclosed that Trump made $636 million in royalties from CIC Digital, LLC, a company that issues $TRUMP, a crypto token that he launched three days before taking office for his second term. Almost all of the come came in the form of royalties from a license agreement with Celebration Coins. Trump's meme coin reached its peak value of $74.24 within a day of launching. On Tuesday evening, its price was $1.67, down 98% since inception.
The president also reported almost $600 million in income from token sales by World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company backed by the president and his family, and around $65 million from equity sales in the firm that controls World Liberty Financial. Another $196 million in equity sales of Stablecoin Holdco LLC are also listed. A crypto firm and issuer of tokens, World Liberty Financial was launched during the 2024 presidential campaign. It was co-founded by the president, his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and Zack and Alex Witkoff, the sons of U.S. special envoy and longtime Trump friend Steve Witkoff.
World Liberty Financial's ventures include USD1, a "stablecoin" pegged at $1 per coin that's designed to serve as a store of value. It also sells another crypto product, $WLF tokens, and takes 75% in net revenue from those token sales, according to the company's public reports.
The company drew scrutiny last year, after an Abu Dhabi government-owned wealth fund used the USD1 stablecoin to facilitate a multibillion-dollar investment in the massive crypto exchange Binance. The co-founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, received a pardon from Trump for financial crimes. The president has denied any connection between the pardon and the World Liberty Financial transaction, telling CBS News last year: "I don't know who he is."
In response to questions about the financial disclosure, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CBS News "there are no conflicts of interest."
I analysed the 900+ pages of the Trump financial disclosure report.
He extracted 1.1 BILLION from crypto, divided like this:
> $635.1M → TRUMP memecoin
> $236.3M → WLFI token sales
> $196.9M → Sale of ownership interests in the USD1 stablecoin venture
> $65.6M → Sale of… pic.twitter.com/F9Uaf1HbCV
"This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade," Kelly said. "President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media."
The 927-page filing, released Tuesday by the US Office of Government Ethics, provides a view into his sprawling empire, including income from his hotels, golf resorts and cryptocurrency ventures.
Trump's crypto-related income vastly eclipsed his earnings from many of the real estate businesses that helped make him famous. Those included around $77 million in income from his Mar-a-Lago club, $122 million from his golf club in Doral, Florida, and upwards of $30 million apiece from golf clubs in Jupiter, Florida, Bedminster, New Jersey, and Turnberry, Scotland.
The filing offers a detailed accounting of the various other ways the president's name generates money. An ethics official noted that Mr. Trump received a 45-day extension to file the report and "paid late filing fees related to transactions not previously reported" on earlier disclosures.
Trump, who’s worth an estimated $7.6 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, valued more than two dozen assets at more than $50 million, including Mar-a-Lago; his Turnberry, Scotland, golf resort; and his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which owns his Truth Social platform.
The president reported $4.7 million in royalties from "Trump Watches," along with payments from Trump-branded sneakers, fragrances and guitars. Trump Restaurants LLC, a New York-based entity wholly owned by one of the president's holding companies, reported nearly $2.9 million in food and beverage sales, according to the filing.
And his books continued to pay out - including roughly $1.9 million from "Save America" and smaller sums from "The Art of the Deal," "Letters to Trump," "A MAGA Journey" and an edition of the Bible in collaboration with singer Lee Greenwood.
First lady Melania Trump's ventures also appear. The filing lists more than $10.7 million in net proceeds from a license agreement tied to the film "Melania," about $6 million from the sale of NFTs and other collectibles and additional proceeds from her memoir.
The president also listed several of his legal settlements with tech and media companies, including $16 million from a lawsuit against ABC, $16 million from CBS Broadcasting and CBS Interactive, $24.5 million from Meta, $22 million from YouTube and $8 million from X. Most of that money was paid to his future presidential library or the Trust for the National Mall, not to the president personally.
As with last year's financial disclosure, Trump listed several court judgments against him as liabilities, including a penalty in a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and two multimillion-dollar judgements owed to E. Jean Carroll, who accused the president of sexual abuse and defamation. (Trump has denied those allegations.)
The civil fraud judgment was tossed out last year by a panel of appellate judges who found the requirement for him to pay nearly $527 million in fines plus interest was "excessive," though they left non-financial penalties intact. The Supreme Court this week declined to hear Trump's appeal of the jury verdict in the Carroll cases.
Officials disclose the values of their holdings in broad ranges with “over $50 million” the highest, which means that they can’t be used to calculate an individual’s net worth.
The Trump Organization has said that the president’s holdings are independently managed by third-party financial institutions who have control over all investment decisions, with trades executed through automated processes. Trump, his family members and his company play no role in making transactions, according to a spokeswoman.
Trump’s disclosure also showed that he has a new pledged-asset line with Charles Schwab Corp.’s banking business that totals more than $50 million. The line of credit has an interest rate of 3.9%, according to the filing. A spokesperson for the financial firm had no immediate comment.
Last but not least, the document also show Trump reported receiving 10 tickets to the soccer World Cup finals in July from FIFA head Gianni Infantino valued at $15,000, 10 tickets to the US Open tennis tournament from sponsor Rolex worth $25,000, as well as 10 tickets to Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans estimated at $50,000.
Vice President JD Vance also disclosed assets for him and his wife, Usha Vance, worth more than $7 million.
The full filing is below (pdf link)
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 23:06Israel's famed Iron Dome air defense system has undergone a significant upgrade, and the country's defense ministry is hailing new successful advanced tests, touting that it is now immensely better at countering aerial threats such as cruise missiles and drones.
Israeli officials are tacitly admitting that a major overhaul was needed based on lessons learned both in the June 2025 aerial war with Iran and the Iranian retaliatory attacks in the opening month of Operation Epic Fury.
By pretty much all accounts both within and outside Israel, Iran's missiles - some of them reportedly hypersonic - inflicted severe damage on Israeli cities, bases, and infrastructure. A key Tel Aviv military-intelligence headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv was also struck, possibly on several occasions.
Getty ImagesIsrael's censorship regimen worked in overdrive both during the June war and Operation Epic Fury, with critics charging that the true extent of Iranian projectiles evading Israel's anti-missile defenses will never ultimately be known.
But open-source videos and live-action info alone confirmed the failures on many levels of the country's multi-layered defense, including of the Iron Dome.
This is why Israel has a deep political incentive to signal both its domestic population and the world that "all is well" and that the Iron Dome has been "upgraded". According to Israeli media:
The trials were led by the Ministry of Defense's "Wall" Directorate, part of the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D), in partnership with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The testing incorporated operational lessons learned during the ongoing war and recent operations against Iran.
According to the Ministry of Defense, the upgraded Iron Dome demonstrated enhanced capabilities against complex attack scenarios while introducing technological improvements aimed at handling higher volumes of incoming fire and longer-range threats.
This included the testing of the new high-power Or Eitan laser weapon system into system's command-and-control network. The laser is meant to assist as an additional layer of defense in pinpointing inbound threats.
WATCH: Israel touts successful tests of the upgraded Iron Dome, which integrates high-power laser in advanced air defense trials:
🔴 WATCH: Israel successfully tests upgraded Iron Dome, integrates high-power laser in advanced air defense trials pic.twitter.com/8d3AvFHRS4
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) June 30, 2026Moshe Fattal, head of the Ministry of Defense's "Wall" Directorate, stated "The Iron Dome remains a central pillar of Israel's multi-layered defense concept. During the test, we also practiced integrating the laser system into Iron Dome's command-and-control network, taking the system's defensive capabilities to new heights."
So far Iran's ballistic missile and drone arsenal has proven quite capable at evading Israeli defenses, but perhaps in a future round of fighting Israel's upgrade will prove its worth. In the meantime Iran has already reconstituted much of its missile production capability. The Trump administration seems to have dropped its demand that Iran drop its missile program, which was obviously a non-starter in negotiations, given no country would just willingly give up its main method of defense from external attack.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 23:00Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
The deep state's favorite tools of control just got dragged back into the light. Today, the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held the first congressional hearing on the CIA's MKULTRA program since 1977.
What could have been a dusty historical review turned into a direct warning that the same machinery of mind control, memory manipulation, and behavioral experimentation may never have shut down - and could now run on far more powerful modern engines.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and her colleagues are doing what previous Congresses largely refused to do: forcing sunlight on one of the intelligence community's darkest chapters.
A task force investigating long-classified federal secrets will hold a hearing Tuesday focused on the CIA's controversial MK-Ultra program, a Cold War-era project that explored mind control and behavior modification. @xmanwalton
More: https://t.co/YWKKPgxuoI pic.twitter.com/Bf6r546P3N
The testimony made one thing unmistakable. The CIA lied to lawmakers decades ago about the program's success. Advances in neuroscience, cyber tools, and artificial intelligence have handed covert operators capabilities Sidney Gottlieb could only dream of. And American citizens remain potential targets.
Watch the first Congressional hearing on MK Ultra since 1977 https://t.co/xYTdan4aL2
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026MKULTRA ran from the early 1950s into the 1970s. The CIA conducted roughly 149 subprojects involving LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture on unwitting Americans - prisoners, mental patients, soldiers, and ordinary citizens.
Most records were deliberately destroyed in 1973. When the program finally surfaced through the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission in 1975, the agency downplayed its scope and results.
The public was told it was a failure. New testimony says that was never true.
Investigative journalist Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos, told the committee the agency actively misled Congress in 1977. He submitted documents showing the CIA's own earlier claims about LSD experiments contradicted what it later told lawmakers. O'Neill stated flatly: "I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK-Ultra as a failure."
He connected dots to figures like psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and his ties to Charles Manson and Jack Ruby, underscoring how deeply the program reached into real-world events. The message was clear: the full story was buried on purpose.
"Congress Was Never Told The Truth" About Results Of CIA Mind-Control Experiments.https://t.co/afxqoiA51x
"Chaos" Author Tom O'Neill told a House Oversight hearing on Tuesday: "I believe the agency misled Congress in 1977 when it characterized MK-Ultra as a failure." https://t.co/M6DaZHTiCt pic.twitter.com/cbKAKYgZq3
One of the most disturbing revelations came from historical documents referenced during the hearing. A participant in the original program documented the ability to replace true memories with false ones without the subject's knowledge.
The exact description: "It's feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual, and through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place. But that a different fictional event actually did occur."
If the U.S. government could do this in the 1950s, the question hanging over the room was obvious. What can they do now with AI, brain-computer interfaces, and directed energy tools?
? MK Ultra hearing:
Participant documented he was "able to replace true memories with false memories in people without their knowledge"
He clarified:
It's "feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual, and through hypnotic suggestion, bring... pic.twitter.com/LXd3bQD27r
Author and journalist Stephen Kinzer, who has extensively studied the program and its leader Sidney Gottlieb, warned that Gottlieb effectively held "a license to kill" issued by the U.S. government. Kinzer described how the CIA used "cut-outs" - universities and institutions - to conduct research while keeping its own involvement hidden.
He then delivered the core warning for today: "There have been enormous advances in cyber technology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Covert agencies may have access to tools for mind control that Sidney Gottlieb could not have imagined."
O'Neill agreed. The massive investment in time, money, and research made it unlikely the capabilities were simply abandoned. The technology they built was too valuable.
WATCH journalist and author Dr. @stephenkinzer's opening statement at today's explosive MK Ultra hearing regarding the over classification of secret government programs and the CIA's quest to weaponize mind control against Americans. pic.twitter.com/UwsSJXWBce
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 30, 2026Public suspicion about whether MKULTRA-style techniques ever truly ended is not abstract. In 2024, widespread speculation erupted around the Trump assassination attempt and whether the shooter could have been influenced or programmed through evolved versions of these programs.
The CIA issued a flat denial, calling the claims "utterly false, absurd, and damaging" and insisting MKULTRA ended decades ago.
That denial landed exactly as past CIA statements have landed - with heavy skepticism from those who remember the record destruction, the lies to Congress, and the pattern of "nothing to see here" followed by later revelations.
Rep. Luna has been clear: Americans have been misdirected repeatedly and deserve transparency and accountability from the CIA. Additional MKULTRA documents are being declassified. The task force is pushing for real answers, not another round of limited hangouts.
Critics on both sides have already begun dismissing the effort. Some call it performative. Others worry it will be used as a distraction. The record shows why skepticism exists. Previous investigations produced headlines, limited document releases, and then business as usual inside the intelligence community.
This time the stakes feel different. The technology has advanced. The surveillance state has grown. The same agencies that once ran MKULTRA still operate with massive secrecy and minimal real oversight.
The hearing was never just about history. It is about whether the American people will finally demand an end to secret programs that treat citizens as expendable test subjects or potential assets.
Memory manipulation, behavioral modification, and technological mind control are not science fiction. They were government policy for decades.
The question is no longer whether the CIA once crossed every ethical and constitutional line. The question is whether those lines were ever truly redrawn - or simply moved into newer, harder-to-detect territory.
Rep. Luna and the task force have opened the door. The only acceptable outcome is full declassification, genuine accountability, and a public reckoning that makes clear no agency of the United States government has the right to experiment on its own people in secret.
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/30/2026 - 22:35