State of Conspiracy | Conspirator in Chief

Crooked Minis

Crooked Media

Documentary, History, True Crime, Society & Culture

4.7 • 4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2019

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are lizard people real? Was 9/11 an inside job? Is the government really out to get you? We can't conclusively answer those questions, but we will be exploring these topics in September's series, State of Conspiracy. State of Conspiracy is hosted by Professor Kathryn Olmsted a professor of History at UC Davis and scholar of conspiracy theories. This week, Professor Olmsted sits down with author Anna Merlan to discuss how Donald Trump successfully used conspiracy theories to gain national attention and get elected and why the surge in government conspiracy theories today may less funny and more insidious than we think.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What if I told you that the United States was involved in a top secret project that tested
0:07.4	the effects of LSD on unwitting citizens?
0:10.6	What if that same government tried to harness the drug's mind-altering properties for mind-control
0:15.6	and psychological torture?
0:17.6	Would you trust that government?
0:19.3	I'm Catherine Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California Davis,
0:23.9	and a scholar of conspiracy theories.
0:26.0	The project I just described was called MK-Ultra.
0:29.4	And it was very much real.
0:31.6	This is state of conspiracy.
0:33.6	Over the course of the next four episodes, we'll explore the rise of government conspiracies
0:38.2	in anti-government conspiracy theories in the wake of the election of President Donald
0:42.6	Trump and look back on the events that got us here.
0:45.6	I'll be speaking with fellow historians and conspiracy experts to examine how and why
0:49.9	conspiracy theories have become normalized in today's politics.
0:54.1	In 1996, I published my first book called Challenging the Secret Government, which analyzed
0:59.0	the investigations of the CIA and FBI by Congress in the press right after Watergate.
1:04.2	These investigations had revealed many secret government projects that were illegal or ethically
1:08.6	questionable, including CIA drug testing programs, CIA plots with a mafia to kill Fidel Castro,
1:15.4	CIA domestic spying, and the FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.
1:20.0	This book was not a bestseller, I was not a high-profile author, I didn't even have
1:24.2	my own office as a part-time instructor at UC Davis.
	...

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