FOUR HUNDRED JOURNALISTS ON THE CIA PAYROLL AND YOU STILL TRUST THE NEWS

THEY HAVE BEEN PLAYING US OUR ENTIRE LIVES AND I CAN PROVE IT

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an article in Rolling Stone magazine that should have burned the American media industry to ashes and salted the earth where it stood. Bernstein was not some fringe blogger screaming into an empty room. He was the reporter who helped bring down Richard Nixon. He had the credentials and the sources and the documentation to back up everything he wrote. And what he wrote was that four hundred American journalists were on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency, taking money and direction from Langley while pretending to report the news objectively to the American public.

Four hundred journalists at the New York Times and CBS and Newsweek and Time Magazine and the Washington Post, the most trusted names in American news, were feeding you whatever the intelligence community told them to feed you. They did it for decades. They did it while you trusted them. They did it while your parents trusted them. They did it while your grandparents sat in front of the television every night believing they were watching honest men and women report the facts.

Most of you have never heard the name Operation Mockingbird. And the fact that you have not heard of it tells you everything you need to know about how good they are at making things disappear.

The Church Committee Exposed Everything And Nothing Changed

Two years before Bernstein published his findings, a Senator from Idaho named Frank Church led an investigation into what the intelligence agencies had been doing behind closed doors while Americans were busy living their lives and trusting their institutions. The Church Committee spent two years dragging secrets into the light, and what they found should have resulted in mass arrests and the dismantling of every three-letter agency in Washington. Instead it got reported for a few news cycles, debated on television by the same compromised journalists who were part of the problem, and then memory-holed so effectively that I would bet every dollar I have that most of you reading this sentence have never heard of Frank Church or his committee or anything they discovered.

Senator Frank Church during the 1976 Senate Hearings that exposed the CIA for what any honest person would call high treason against the American people. You have never heard of these hearings because they spent fifty years making sure you wouldn’t.

What they discovered was that the CIA had been running an operation to infiltrate American journalism since 1948. A man named Frank Wisner built the network and he called it his mighty Wurlitzer because he could play any tune he wanted and the press would sing along like trained birds. The committee confirmed at least fifty journalists with secret relationships to the agency. Bernstein’s sources told him the real number was eight times higher. They found that the CIA had direct access to newspapers and periodicals and press services and news agencies and radio stations and television stations and book publishers and foreign media outlets across the globe. Senator Church estimated this propaganda operation cost American taxpayers two hundred sixty-five million dollars every year in 1976 money, which adjusts to well over a billion dollars annually in today’s currency.

After the Church Committee published its findings, the new CIA Director announced that the agency would stop maintaining paid relationships with American journalists.

And some of you actually believed that.

Some of you think the same intelligence agency that experimented on American citizens with LSD without their knowledge or consent, that proposed bombing American cities and killing American citizens to justify invading Cuba, that lied to Congress under oath about mass surveillance programs, suddenly developed a conscience about manipulating the press because a Senator from Idaho wrote an angry report that most Americans never read and have long since forgotten.

The Division You Feel Was Designed In A Laboratory

I need you to understand something that is going to be uncomfortable to hear because it implicates you personally in your own manipulation. The hatred you feel for people who vote differently than you did not grow organically out of honest disagreement about policy or values. The absolute certainty you carry that your neighbors are evil and dangerous and trying to destroy everything you love was planted in your head by people who profit from your rage. You were engineered to feel this way. You were programmed like a computer running software you did not write and cannot see, and the people who wrote that software have been perfecting the technique for over two thousand years.

I mentioned this in my last article but I need to repeat it because it is that important. The Romans called it divide et impera and most people translate that as divide and conquer but they are wrong. It means divide and rule. Conquering is what you do to enemies. Ruling is what you do to your own people. Keep the plebeians fighting each other over table scraps and cultural grievances. Keep them split into factions that hate each other more than they hate the patricians exploiting them. Keep them so busy with manufactured controversies that they never look up and notice who is actually running things. The Roman elite used this strategy for five hundred years and every empire since has used the same playbook because it works every single time on every population that refuses to read history.

Look at your television and really see it for the first time in your life. Watch how the outrage cycles work. Watch how every network, regardless of whether it claims to be liberal or conservative, lands on the same controversies at the same time with the same framing designed to make one tribe apoplectic with rage while the other tribe becomes defensive and entrenched. Watch how they keep you angry and scared twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year until you cannot remember what it felt like to not be furious at strangers you have never met.

Now ask yourself who benefits from this arrangement because it certainly is not you. Your life does not improve because you spent three hours doom-scrolling through whatever fresh outrage the algorithm decided to serve you this morning. The rage does not pay your mortgage or feed your children or give you back the years you have wasted hating people on the internet who are just as manipulated as you are.

The people who benefit are the people who rule a divided population. A nation at war with itself does not ask uncomfortable questions about where the money goes or who is really making the decisions. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy on the other side of the artificial divide.

They Have Exposed Themselves Over And Over And You Still Trust Them

I am going to show you the track record now and I want you to understand that nothing I am about to tell you is conspiracy theory or speculation or conjecture. These are programs that were exposed and investigated and officially acknowledged by the United States government. This is what your government admits to doing when they get caught.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson went on television and told America that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress authorized military force within seventy-two hours. The NSA’s own declassified history now admits the intelligence was manipulated and that the attack either did not happen or did not happen the way they claimed. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam. Millions of Vietnamese died. The war that tore this country apart and left scars that have never healed was launched on a lie told to your face by your own government. Nobody went to prison.

From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran a mind control program called MKUltra using American citizens as unwitting test subjects. They dosed people with LSD without their knowledge. They used sensory deprivation and psychological torture. Some of the victims never recovered. Some of them killed themselves. When investigators started getting too close, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the files destroyed. The program only came to light because some documents got misfiled and escaped the shredder by accident. Nobody went to prison.

I know none of us like to admit to this fact but the proof is out there. They lie and we just keep eating that slop right out of their hands like the good little sheep we are.

In 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drafted a proposal called Operation Northwoods that called for the CIA to bomb American cities, hijack American planes, and sink American ships, then blame Cuba to justify an invasion. False flag terrorism against American citizens proposed at the highest levels of the Pentagon and sent to the President’s desk for approval. Kennedy rejected it. The documents stayed classified for thirty-five years. Ask yourself what proposals were not rejected. Ask yourself what is still classified.

In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sat before Congress and was asked directly whether the NSA collects data on millions of Americans. He said no. Three months later Edward Snowden proved he was lying. Clapper committed perjury in front of the United States Senate on live television. He later called his answer the least untruthful thing he could say. He was not prosecuted. He kept his job. He continued to serve in government. Snowden, who exposed the lie, was charged under the Espionage Act and had to flee the country to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.

The message is clear. The crime is never the lie.

The crime is exposing the lie.

Your Team Is Owned By The Same People Who Own The Other Team

Every time I publish something critical of one side, I get called a leftist libtard. Every time I publish something critical of the other side, I get called a MAGA moron. I am neither because I refuse to let my brain be sorted into one of two pre-approved boxes by people who benefit from keeping me boxed and labeled and predictable.

The Democrats have become everything they claim to oppose. They lecture about justice while serving corporate interests that would make a robber baron blush. They scream about democracy while crushing any candidate who threatens the establishment. They pretend to care about working people while cashing checks from the same billionaires who fund the Republicans.

The Republicans have abandoned every principle they ever claimed to hold. They wrap themselves in the Constitution while shredding its protections. They scream about freedom while trying to control what people read and think and say. They worship politicians like golden calves and attack anyone who dares to question their chosen savior.

I say this as a lifelong Republican with libertarian leanings who has watched his own party lose its collective mind. There is no salvation coming from either side of the aisle. The parties exist to give you someone to blame. They exist to keep you fighting over table scraps while the people who own both teams laugh all the way to the bank. Both parties are funded by the same billionaires. Both parties vote for the same surveillance bills and defense budgets. Both parties serve the same machine. And six corporations own ninety percent of everything you watch and read and listen to. Six corporations owned by the same class of people who have been running divide and rule operations since before Christ walked the earth.

Turn Off The Screen And Pick Up A Book

I am not going to wrap this up with a nice bow and make you feel good about yourself. I am not going to tell you that everything will be fine if you just vote harder in the next election or share more articles on social media or click the angry emoji on whatever outrage bait Facebook served you this morning.

The ruling class has been running this game for longer than any of us have been alive. They have perfected the art of keeping the population divided and distracted and entertained into submission. They control what you see and hear through a media apparatus they built specifically to manufacture consent. They have lied to your face over and over and over and faced no consequences because the system protects its own.

And the only thing that has ever threatened them is a population that woke up and stopped fighting each other and started paying attention to what was actually being done to them.

That is what they are afraid of. That is why they spend billions of dollars keeping you angry at your neighbors. That is why every controversy is designed to split you into tribes. That is why the outrage machine never stops running and the algorithm never stops feeding you poison.

You want to know how to fight back? Turn off your television. Stop watching YouTube videos that manipulate you into parroting someone else’s opinions. Stop scrolling through social media feeds designed by engineers who studied casino slot machines to figure out how to keep you addicted. Pick up a book. Read history. Read primary sources. Read the Church Committee reports and the declassified documents and the congressional testimony that your own government published and then did everything in its power to make sure you would never find.

The mockingbird never stopped singing. The mighty Wurlitzer never stopped playing. The only question is whether you are going to keep dancing to their tune or whether you are finally going to think for yourself.

I cannot make that choice for you. I can only show you what I found when I started looking. The documents are there. The testimony is there. The exposed programs and the exposed lies and the exposed track record of institutions that ask for your trust while stabbing you in the back are all sitting in archives waiting for anyone curious enough to read them.

Stop being a fool.

Stop letting them divide you.

Stop worshipping politicians who would sell you out the second it became convenient.

Start using your brain again.

A Note From Lily and The Wise Wolf

The Wise Wolf has no corporate sponsors and no political donors and no advertisers telling us what we can and cannot say. If this article made you think, share it with someone who still believes the nice people on television are telling them the truth. If it made you angry, good. You should be angry. We all should be angry. The only thing more dangerous than anger is complacency.

Lily, our junior reporter and current journalism student up in Minnesota, keeps joking that she’s going to have to “start an OnlyFans” if I can’t figure out how to pay her more. She’s kidding, obviously. She’s a good kid with a sharp mind and actual talent, which is exactly why I refuse to let her end up like me, still paying off student loans in my thirties for degrees that were supposed to guarantee a better life.

In the last month, we have dropped from the number one ranked publication in Faith to a lower rank than a Russian lunatic cosplaying as the Second Coming of Christ. We are now outranked by a lesbian pastor who claims she connects with God through multiple orgasms. We are outranked by a woman who wrote a book called “Abortion Everyday.” These are the people dominating the Faith section of Substack. Literal heathens and blasphemers crushing the rankings of real Christian journalists who actually believe in Christ and do real investigative work.

Either the algorithm is burying us on purpose or the world has gone completely insane. Probably both.

The Wise Wolf is not rich. This Substack is my full-time job. I have bills to pay and I have Lily to pay and I am not telling you this because I am greedy but because I want to turn this ministry and this investigative newsletter into something real, something that can reach millions of people and actually make a difference. Every subscription helps us fight the algorithmic censorship that is burying real Christian voices beneath blasphemers and grifters.

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