The Mockingbird is Still Singing

Operation Mockingbird in 2025

In 1975, a Democrat from Idaho named Senator Frank Church headed the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities which, fortunately for us, was quickly shortened to the Church Committee. Along the lines of Seinfeld’s “Year of George,” 1975 quickly became the “Year of Intelligence” as Church (and a companion committee in the House known as the Pike Committee) sought to find out what was going on in the seamy, sketchy Spy vs. Spy world of American intelligence and how it was impacting ordinary Americans who deserve better.

The Church Committee found out a lot. They dug up

• MKULTRA data (mind control and drugging of unwitting participants)

• COINTELPRO (survelliance of American civil rights figures and adjacent politicians)

• Family Jewels (the wing of American intelligence that assassinated pesky internationals)

• Operation Mockingbird (government infiltration of the press and media and controlling the “narrative”)

While those in charge of Operation Mockingbird say that it has been shut down, no laws, regulations, executive orders, or other steps have been taken officially to shut Operation Mockingbird, so I am skeptical. I find the claim that the intelligence spooks suddenly got religion one day and abandoned Operation Mockingbird dubious. In fact, you can see Operation Mockingbird all around you. It’s one big bird.

And like a lot of spy stories, it all starts in Mother Russia.

Russia, We Hardly Knew You

During World War II, the Soviet Union was a staunch and valued ally of the United States and Western Europe in the fight against Nazi Germany. Americans like to think we won World War II single-handedly, shamefully minimizing the work of the Soviet Union, which did much of the heavy lifting in destroying Hitler’s Army. The Soviets bore the brunt of the suffering, deprivation, slaughter, and misery of that war, and we truthfully owe them a great debt for their enormous contribution to the Allied war effort. It was Soviet soldiers and citizenry who died in vast numbers to liberate the world from the evil antisemtic man with the mustache.

But in the 1950s and following decades, a cold war broke out between the Soviet Union and its former allies, including the United States. The Soviet Union—or what we would call Russia today (since the Soviet Union as a state collapsed)—abruptly transitioned from friend to foe.

In the cold war days, this transformation from best friend to worst enemy was due to the Soviets’ desire to advance communism throughout the world. So in the 1950s and 1960s, we had a new-found enemy who wasn’t fighting us with guns or missiles, but was aiming ideology right at our nation. Ideas were coming in, fast and furious. The world was hearing about the alleged splendors of communism. Workers of the world were going to unite. We were being told by Russia that we could join them in entering an age of prosperity and big red flags.

Americans are many fine things, but we were highly vulnerable to ideological warfare. We could fend off bullets easier than ideas. And the Soviets were not shy about telling us that they had big plans for us, all of which were based on dominating us politically.

They weren’t going to beat us in the snow like they did Hitler’s army. They were going to take over our country with communism.

This was a whole new way to go to war, and these battles had to be fought with intelligence. Most Americans are blissfully unaware of the fact that the United States has a whole honeycomb of overlapping intelligence agencies and spook factories. There are 18 known agencies in the so-called IC or “intelligence community,” of which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is best known. The cold war was the heyday for the IC.

Ironically, American intelligence thought the best way to fight Soviet propaganda was by cooking up our own homegrown American propaganda. The CIA launched a large multi-year program that may still be going on. Its goal was to “tell the story” that the CIA wanted told. To accomplish this objective, numerous members of the press were recruited. Some writers were fed stories or talking points; others sometimes received prewritten stories they were asked to publish verbatim. At first, it was rather clumsy and overt, with journalists and commentators getting actual cash payoffs. But what was originally a propaganda push soon became a big fat can of worms.

It did not take long before Operation Mockingbird got more sophisticated. Instead of just buying specific articles here and there or paying off on-air talking heads, they recruited editors and publishers and media outlet bosses. Instead of envelopes of cash, they offered their recruits choice jobs with major perks and fat paychecks. I would argue the whole notion of journalism got transformed from the gritty underpaid gumshoe of the 1940s, schlepping around town to chase down a story, to a cadre of overeducated elites who saw their role as purveyors of messages from on-high to the unwashed masses.

Operation Mockingbird became infused with the stench of elitism. It wasn’t just the government paying to place particular stories in the media, it was an ingroup of privileged individuals, who truly believed they were morally and intellectually superior to the unschooled rabble. It was their duty to guide and direct this unschooled rabble. Of course, elitists aren’t good at doing actual work, so they wouldn’t actually write or investigate stories, but they would share the stories which were brought to them on silver platters. In other words, Operation Mockingbird is the reason why Rachel Maddow feels like she’s a better human being than you are and why she’s richer than you are without working very hard at all.

The mainstream media became a little aristocratic bubble, populated by highly privileged and extremely wealthy but rather lazy do-gooders, trying to raise up the unwashed masses to a better life of docile and unquestioning obedience. It’s why Walter Cronkite always signed off the air by telling us emphatically, “That’s the way it was.” It’s why the smug New York Times assured us they published “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Or let’s look at Anderson Cooper who probably is on a recruiting poster somehwere for Operation Mockingbird. Silver-haired Cooper is a CNN mainstay and an American blueblood from the Vanderbilt dynasty. He’s been on 60 Minutes, CNN, and is a celebrity in his own right, who for some reason likes to do a live broadcast from Times Square every New Year’s Eve where he drinks himself stupid. I never understood why “Anderson Cooper gets drunk” was a viable show concept, but then again, I’m not part of the elitist ecosystem. Cooper graduated Yale but at some point in his academic journey he got recruited—and joined—the CIA. There are online stories about how he struggled to get his first big break in journalism, but I wonder about these tales of breaking through into the big leagues. A Vanderbilt can’t pick up the phone and get a big job? Chelsea Clinton got a mega-big high-six-figures job at The Today Show when her parents pulled some strings—and she was so terrible they had to fire her without ever airing even one of the segments she did. I don’t believe Anderson Cooper had to struggle, I think his name, his family, his loot, and Operation Mockingbird landed him the gig. Today, Cooper pulls in about $20M a year and that’s just for CNN.

In the 1940s, no self-respecting journalist expected or got anything like luxury wages. Writing for a newspaper was a job, like being a plumber or a baker or a police officer. Why is Anderson Cooper worth such an exorbitant salary today? The answer is that it’s not about reporting anymore. Truth has never paid as well as lies, and a journalist or commentator or even social media maven who purveys truth is not likely to make much money. The real money is in mendacity.

You could argue that these high salaries are being paid because the networks are big cash cows. But that’s not always true. Stephen Colbert was kept on his terminally unfunny Late Night with Stephen Colbert show, despite the fact that the show was hemorrhaging at least $40M a year. Colbert is reportedly earning $15M a year. Now what company on this earth would pay a guy $15M a year—that’s over a million a month—to lose money for them? If you follow the money, you’ll see the money doesn’t make sense unless the money is coming from somewhere outside the station or network itself.

Intelligence ties run throughout the media. Dick Carlson, the father of Tucker Carlson, ran Voice of America and allegedly had ties to the IC. Remember Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame? Bernstein came to his job at the previously reputable Washington Post just before they handed him the Watergate story. Bernstein had no college degree and only limited reporting experience, but he got a plum job from a prestigious news outlet. Hmm, maybe he was placed there? I’m not sure anybody gets that lucky.

Things have changed since Watergate. Today, the CIA is known to use reporters, writers, commentators, podcasters, and social media influencers, but these relationships are often kept quiet. These pay-to-influence arrangments might be so much on the down-low that some so-called “content creators” do not even realize what’s going on. They report what they’re told, that’s the way they think the news business works.

I once knew a guy who worked at CNN back in the glory days of the 1980s. CNN kept what he called “binders” or big notebooks with divider tabs for topics and then pages with long lists of various factoids. For instance, you could look up “Afghanistan” and you’d find pertinent facts, quotes, and information on that topic that you could use to work into your stories. Same thing with medicine, the economy, Congress, gun control, or other topics. The idea was that busy reporters who sometimes get deadlines measured out in minutes wouldn’t have to scramble to get some interesting numbers or facts or names or quotations into a story. This CNN guy said he had a set of those binders and he occasionally used them, but he said that he wasn’t sure that what was in them was even true. In other words, he was a bit skeptical that the data points he was being given were even real.

No matter. He used them anyway. That’s how the business worked. And he was so distinterested in truth and accuracy, he put his name to stories using these suspicious factoids without ever bothering to check any of them.

After the Church Committee hearings, the word got out about government intelligence ties to the news, but the public was never aghast at these revelations. For instance, Karl Bachmeier was working at Newsweek and was a CIA agent. A bureau chief for a major outlet based in London was on the CIA payroll throughout the Nixon years. And in 1977, Rolling Stone magazine reported that at least 400 American journalists had “ties” to the CIA. Nobody cared.

Talking Heads

The media today has been in bed with the spooks for so long, they forgot what it was to be journalists. Today, the media elitists are handed talking points. Their job is not to dig up facts or make powerful people uncomfortable, the idea is to influence people in ways that make powerful people feel virtuous and superior.

They parrot what they are told. You can’t blame them, actually, the old school model of TV newsman like Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley was based on overly respected and nearly idolized commentators who read from teleprompters rather than went out and hunted down stories. Even way back in the 1950s and 1960s, the news became a business of attractive people who could fluently read a teleprompter and were not particularly fussy about letting people put words in their mouths. They had to be willing to read any old script, and most of them were. In fact, the less interested they were in the actual news, the better.

Going into journalism today requires good looks, a willingness to dye your hair or change your looks as the station directs, and the ability to look poised while reading somebody else’s words. If you’re on TV, they even have hair, make-up, and wardrobe for you. Have you ever noticed that women reporters all seem to wear tight sleeveless dresses? And why are all Caucasian female reporters blonde?

Stories are whatever is handed to them. The news is what they say it is. As long as they get paid big bucks, there is very little investigation going on even at media outlets that describe themselves as doing investigative journalism.

Over the years, various wealthy organizations have been buying up multiple media outlets. There are large, diversified companies that own many TV stations in different markets. (Even while in the White House, then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his First Lady owned multiple TV stations, even bending if not breaking the laws to have such a stranglehold on Texan TV.) Same with radio. Podcasts are still more of the Wild West and run by rogues, independents, crackpots, and intellectuals, but that will consolidate eventually into a series of lucrative businesses owned by the same three or four major firms. (Selected podcasters will get rich in this model and may forget to complain about losing their independence; the ones who do complain will be too poor to do much about it.)

But for now, podcasts and independent outlets like Substack are where the fun is. Nobody ever planted a story in Ricochet Cafe.

Just as you’ve no doubt noticed your phone is listening in on your conversations (to serve up the right ads), you’ve probably noticed media folks all say the same thing. Remember the phrase, “climate change is an existential threat”? Everyone in the news was saying it. When is the last time anyone in a normal conversation used the word “existential”? It was so stilted that the drone-like repetitions were very obvious.

But strangely effective. How many people believe climate change is the most serious threat facing the planet but cannot name one scientist involved in climate change?

We see this a lot. Any allegations (or even outright accusations) that the overlords do not like are “baseless.” Saying anything about election shenanigans preceding a Trump election is fueling “the big lie.” January 6 was an “insurrection,” the first insurrection in history where the insurrectionists forgot to bring guns. If you ever ask about climate change support, you will hear “a unanimous consensus of scientists” supports the climate change narrative, sometimes downgraded to “an overwhelming consensus of scientists.” There’s not a unanimous consensus or even an overwhelming consensus of scientists about anything, not even gravity, let alone climate change.

At first, it seems like they’re all plagiarizing each other. But what is really happening?

Talking Points

So who writes the first draft of the script? Who is the first person to ever declare that “transwomen are women” or whatever the slogan du jour is for the first time?

• One theory is that while it appears there are lots of media outlets, if you trace ownership up to the top, there are only one or two big outfits and they draft the talking points which trickle down to the various outlets

• There may also be plagiarism and copying as some outlets just mimic what other outlets say. If you read in The New York Times that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a brilliant jurist, you know that you can say the same thing or something similar in your magazine and not jeopardize your very big paycheck

• In addition to bots, social media is thick with paid influencers. If you have a large social media following and are pretty savvy about posting often and posting things that get engagement (meaning people react, whether for good or ill), you can earn big money. There are companies that will hire you to post specific messages on behalf of their clients. I’m not sure if the influencers have any creative input or leeway in what they say, but they are paid to post specific messages, such as Kamala is awesome, Trump is a nazi, billionaires don’t pay enough taxes, you’re living on stolen land, guns must be confiscated, and abortion is women’s healthcare. From a purely money-making perspective, it is not a bad racket. I heard that over on X, Harry Sisson (who, ironically, is Irish and not American) gets six figures a year to post a bunch of hateful stuff about MAGA while extoling the numerous virtues of Biden, Harris, and whoever else is the Democrat flavor of the month. And his hostile missives on X are probably prewritten for him, so all he has to do is post

• I do believe that some journalists and influencers get talking points distributed to them electronically each day, stories they need to cover and the words to use. Ever notice how all mainstream outlets seem to focus on the same stories and ignore others? They’re more in synch than synchronized swimmers. I have never found the magic source of these talking points, although I have looked! The closest I can get is Politico Playbook, a daily list of key news items complete with quotable quotes that often find their way into the nws

Alarmingly, I just learned that Politico Playbook has now partnered with AI in some sort of unholy union.

Mind Control

Now let’s come back to the Church Committee and the various CIA and IC programs being foisted on decent, God-fearing Americans everywhere. One of the things the Church Committee looked into was MKULTRA, an ugly behemoth that incorporated a multitude of horrible programs all aimed at seeing if and how the government could hijack the human mind. These programs used coercion, drugs, torture, and brainwashing techniques to try to control people. Charles Manson was one of their projects, according to the book Chaos.

Then-CIA Director Richard Helms said that MKULTRA totally stopped in 1973, at which time all files and records of the program were destroyed. However, no laws were ever enacted to ban MKULTRA; there are no executive orders or regulations that would stop it. Helms said they just one day up and quit doing MKULTRA. As my mother used to say in a different context: “I no believe.”

However, some records have survived, and so have some of the MKULTRA survivors. Some of them, like Cathy O’Brien, are telling their stories. (If you look on Wikipedia, Cathy O’Brien is listed as a “conspiracy theorist,” yet she testified before Congress on the MKULTRA program so in my mind, she has credibility.) More and more MKULTRA survivors are stepping out of the shadows and they all say the program is still ongoing.

One of the key techniques in mind control—according to those subjected to everything from drugs to torture to “psychic driving”—is repetition. It’s the same way you learned the alphabet as a kid. You learned your ABCs young by repeating the alphabet over and over. You heard it, you practiced it, you sang it, you recited it. Once you got it, you never forgot it. Chances are you don’t need to recall the alphabet much anymore, but you march from A to Z without a pause or a mix-up. That’s because you learned it from sheer repetition. There is a point where a message repeated often enough soaks into the brain and becomes embedded. The alphabet is just the alphabet, it’s good to know it. But “climate change is an existential threat” is being repeated into a fundamental life principle. It’s one of those things like drinking eight glasses of water a day. You heard it so often it became a fact.

What if Operation Mockingbird, which is often triviliazed as an old propaganda campaign and not a very good one at that, and MKULTRA mind control were merged? A blend of Mockingbird and MKULTRA would share tools so that the public was brainwashed to believe certain things by force of constant repetition? MKULTRA found the repetition worked best when it was exact, you can’t keep rephrasing things and have the same rapid and powerful effect.

• My body, my choice

• The border is secure

• Sanctuary city

• Defund the police

• Black lives matter

• Tax the rich

• Billionaires don’t pay their fair share

• Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?

• From the river to the sea

There are lots of these and you don’t have to understand them to have them sink into your permanent memory. For instance, lots of folks running around with Palestinian flags and shouting “from the river to the sea” don’t know which river they’re talking about. Or which sea. Or where Palestine is on a map. (That’s a trick question, because it’s not on a map.)

The Apostle Paul’s Answer to Mind Control

In quite a different context, the Apostle Paul, also known as St. Paul to our Catholic friends, wrote extensively in the New Testatment about false teaching. In other words, he wrote that some people were telling lies. He was talking about people in the church, but his teaching applies to lies we are told by our culture or our media organizations as well. People lie to us. So how do we protect ourselves?

In his letter to the Colossian church, Paul recommended a good defense against heresy and other forms of false teaching. He warned his readers to be stable (not giving in to emotions), to be steadfast (doing the work of learning truth), and to lean on the truth. In fact, Paul did not really try to refute heresies as much as he tried to state true things. If you can fill your head with actual facts and figures and data and truth, you are protected against false teaching, heresies, and media lies. The bulletproof vest of Paul’s time as well as our own is finding out the truth and sticking to it, not being swayed by the latest stories or rage-bait.

For us diligent souls who are digging into politics and culture, we have to do our own research. Sometimes we find truth and sometimes we just find divergent opinions, but both are helpful. Truth is good, but divergent opinions at least shake up the efforts at mind control. If you hear “January 6 was an insurrection” all of the time, that’s what you’ll believe, even if you don’t know exactly what an insurrection is. But if you hear that January 6 was a riot or a demonstration, if you hear about peacefully and patriotically protesting, if you hear it was a planned coup by the FBI, if you hear sus out the facts about Ashli Babbitt’s death at the hands of a Capitol police officer, and if you learn about the time the Senate was literally bombed (and the current mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass was involved peripherally), you get a fuller picture. The droning repetitions can no longer work on you.

Don’t listen to the Mockingbird.