The Playbook for Defeating MAGA: The Church Committee Report
In the 1970s, Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, stuck his neck out–unlike members of Congress today–to take on the real deep state–the FBI and CIA carrying out LSD mind-control experiments on Americans, terrorizing activists, and committing assassinations with the mafia, including against witnesses. The Church Committee Report, based on real Congressional investigations, not just performative show trials, shows us how to confront and dismantle the lawless, mass-murdering MAGA regime.
Historians Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Brian Hochman, the Hubert J. Cloke Endowed Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, are out with the definitive account, The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State. They walk us through the decades of U.S. presidents of both major parties allowing a surveillance state to expand, running dangerous operations against the American people. The most chilling legacy is not the cartoonish villainy of poison darts and imperial assassinations, but the insidious cruelty of undermining activists. So pay attention. Don’t let anyone–even a well-meaning ally–weaponize purity tests to gatekeep the Fourth American Revolution. Stopping the MAGA threat requires all of us building together in coalition.
Based on the Church Committee’s own findings, we know exactly what tools the FBI and CIA use to dismantle movements. They have very specific, terrifyingly effective strategies to divide and conquer We the People.
Here is what they do when they want to destroy a movement from the inside out:
Snitch Jacketing: This is psychological warfare. They plant false information–maybe they leave a map or a weapon in an activist’s car–specifically to make you think your friend is a police informant. They leverage paranoia to make us eat our own.
Fabricated Dissent: They create fake zines, fake newsletters, and fake correspondence to manufacture feuds between groups. They want the anti-war movement fighting the labor movement so neither fights the state.
The "Friendly" Infiltrator: Watch out for the guy who shows up out of nowhere with coffee and too many questions. They send plainclothes agents into our resilience communities to map our networks and identify leaders and how they operate.
Entrapment: They find an “easy mark” in a group, push them toward violence, then arrest everyone for a plot the FBI invented. They manufacture terrorism.
The "Suicide" Strategy: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his private life and pressuring him to kill himself. They try to break you psychologically so that you back down and disappear.
According to historians Guariglia and Hochman, activists under siege were aware of the threats long before the Church Committee exposed them, and developed resilience strategies we can learn from today:
Reject the "All-Powerful" Myth: Don’t give a lawless regime a bigger shadow than it actually has–that is what they want: to live inside your head. When you start believing the government is an all-knowing, all-powerful shadow monster, you are doing their work for them. Paranoia is a tool of the oppressor.
Build a Culture of Care: The only way snitch-jacketing works is if we don't know each other. Build deep, resilient relationships. When we take care of each other, their wedges don't work.
Sousveillance (Watch from Below): Do not rely on police body cams; those tapes have a magical habit of being turned off when they’re needed. Film everything. Control the narrative with your own evidence, eyes, and ears.
Divest from Big Tech: Google, Amazon, and Apple are regime collaborators. We need to build our own infrastructure from high-tech mesh networks to low-tech zines. If you rely on the master’s tools, they will shut you down, as we’re seeing now with TikTok’s mass-censorship under the new owners–MAGA donors, the Ellisons.
Get Educated: Practice tech hygiene. Go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and use their Surveillance Self-Defense guide. Learn how to encrypt, what to carry, and how to stay safe.
We’re fighting a generational struggle, but we outnumber them. As Andrea’s film Mr. Jones reminds us: The truth cannot be killed. Stay safe, vigilant, and united–that is how we win.
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Carl Rowan (00:00:00):
Senator, let me follow up by asking do you think that the CIA and military intelligence agencies and the FBI have used the emergency provisions both in law and by emergency agency, the Federal Preparedness Agency, it's called now to have contingency plans which threaten the liberty of American citizens.
Senator Frank Church (Idaho) (00:00:19):
Mr. Rowan? In due course, the committee will pass judgment on those questions. I'm not going to gues the committee or prematurely attempt to pass judgment on this program, but lemme tell you this, in the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. These messages are between ships at sea, they could be between units, military units in the field. We have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the airwaves.
(00:01:14):
Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies, we must know at the same time that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such as the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny. If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know such is the capability of this technology. Now, why is this investigation important? I'll tell you why. Because I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That's the abyss from which there is no return.
Andrea Chalupa (00:02:57):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the historical thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine -- the film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it.
(00:03:12):
And this is Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. Now we are joined today by two amazing historians. Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Brian Hochman, the Hubert J Cloke endowed director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University. And they are out with the definitive guide, the Church Report committee revelations from the bombshell 1970s investigation into the national security state. Now, if you think the times we're living in today are terrifying, it is just the latest chapter of America's long terrifying history. During the era of the Church Committee, you had an actual deep state that was lawless operating these dark corners of working with the mafia to kill witnesses, to carry out assassination plots, to lure American citizens into mind control experiments using LSD and prostitutes and on and on the list goes. So we're going to go back in time to this extremely dark creepy chapter of American history to identify who were the heroes, if any, who stood up to the actual deep state, the lawlessness of government corruption, and what can we learn about this weird, surreal, troubling, dangerous era to come out of the one we are currently in. Now, my first question to you, out of all of the research that you've done into the Church Committee report and all that, it uncovered what to you was still gives you nightmares?
Matthew Guariglia (00:05:04):
That's a good question. I mean, I think what about the Church Committee report still gives me nightmares is just how widespread it was, right? It was a conspiracy of sorts in the sense that it required coordination between multiple agencies and hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats who not just spied on people and did the actual spying and broke into people's homes, but also did the kind of mundane bureaucratic stuff as well. They maintained the files, they did the filing cabinets, they transcribed recordings of people's phone calls, and all of this was spread across multiple countries. It happened in the United States. And so I think just how widespread was, Brian and I have a line in our introduction and we talk about a lot that until the Church Committee comes out in 1976 until the Church Committee starts investigating these and things in 1975, a lot of this was incredibly secret.
(00:06:11):
Now people knew it was happening. It was kind of an open secret. People would lift up their phone and thought they heard it clicking on the line or they thought their mail was being opened or people they didn't know would come to their parties and they thought maybe they were undercover agents. But until the Church Committee, it was kind of like a bigfoot. It was kind of a folk monster that you could say was happening but you didn't really know for sure. And I think what was so compelling about the Church Committee and what kind of gives me nightmares about it is that for so many people across not just the country but the world, when this investigation happened, they realized that a lot of the paranoia they had had for years, a lot of their biggest conspiracy theories about who was involved and who is complicit really turned out to be quite true.
Andrea Chalupa (00:07:01):
And what a terror to live under that paranoia for so long. What about you, Brian? What still stays with you?
Brian Hochman (00:07:12):
I too like Matt, try to think a little more holistically about it and not focus in on individual episodes of wrongdoing because all of these episodes were a product of a monolithic bureaucratic system working together and also a set of ideologies, an idea about power and about the need to protect the political status quo at home and exercise a sort of neo imperial dominance abroad. That said, and here I'm going to out my employer a little bit. There were outfits of the Notorious CIA MK Ultra Project. This is a project over 15, 20 years that essentially conducted scientific experiments on non volunteer human subjects. There was an outfit of MK Ultra that was set up at Georgetown.
Andrea Chalupa (00:08:30):
Georgetown University, the heart of Washington DC.
Brian Hochman (00:08:33):
And this is a building, the Gorman building that I walk by every day on my way to work. And that is something that certainly stays with me.
Andrea Chalupa (00:08:43):
I want to just open up with the historical context of these times. The Americans, after dragging their feet with the America First movement finally get forced into World War II, into the European situation because of Pearl Harbor, and they become the great liberators. We have FDR who had a long time, long time in government to transform government with Francis Perkins in the labor department. And he was seen as terrifying to the ruling establishment. He was seen as extreme trying to expand the core. A socialist gave a lot of government money to the artists who created all these communist looking like eat the rich sort of art. The Met just did an extraordinary exhibit on this. And so the US was very much the good guys, but there was of course this heightened red scare, anti-communist paranoia of the ruling establishment. And so with FDR dying at the end of World War II in the World War II, coming to a close, we then begin the Cold War and that is the rise of the CIA A and battling the Communists, most notably off the heels of World War II.
(00:09:51):
We have the Civil War in Greece, which is a proxy war between Western hyper capitalism and the communist of the Soviets. I love this stuff, as you can tell. That's why I'm giving everybody but in the rise of the CIA in very much justifying its existence, saying we can't allow spread this international revolution of communism to come after our profits, our property ownership in the West, our very government. And they had reason to be hyper paranoid about this given how beloved FDR was and all the transformations, the socialist transformations, he brought the New Deal, all of that that we've benefited from for generations, this shining moment in American history. But the CIA grew and was in the shadows for so long and there's absolute zero oversight. And so they saw the world as their chess board where they could do these secret experiments where they could work with the mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro and so on. So that's ultimately what we're talking about, putting people in the context of this moment. Could you comment on that, Brian?
Brian Hochman (00:10:58):
I think you're right to frame some of the abuses that the Church Committee uncovered in 1975, 1976 in the Cold War anti-Communist framework. That's the beginning, but it doesn't explain all of it. Certainly the effort to surveil or disrupt the labor movements on the left, the anti-war movement later in the 1960s, this emerged out of a fear in both agencies, the FBI and the CIA of Communist infiltration and influence. They essentially up from Hoover on down. The belief was that any form of political protest, any form of post-colonial political activism abroad, these were all a product of the Soviet Union and its tentacles both at home and also abroad.
(00:12:16):
That's the beginning. But very quickly, the effort to surveil the left, the effort to disrupt the anti-war movement, this bleeds into other areas of American life that can't necessarily be ascribed to communist infiltration. So the civil rights movement is the great case. In point, one of the most dramatic revelations of the church community reports surrounded some many efforts over a period of many years that the FBI undertook to basically ruin Martin Luther King's life. The campaign against Martin Luther King was a product of, at least in its nascent, an effort to root out communist infiltration in the civil rights movement. But by 1963, 1964, when things really get ugly, it was really about king himself, about king's persona, about Hoover's own, let's just call it what it is, racism. And this is an ideology, an attitude, a set of practices that can't necessarily be ascribed to merely Cold War, anti-communist fears. There's a lot more, there are many more ingredients in short baked into this really ugly cake. And so we have to think about, in addition to anti-communism, we have to think about racism. We have to think about sexism, we have to think about anti-gay politics. It's all there. We have to think about empire. And this is part of what Senator Church and his committee sought to narrate, and I think we are better for it.
Andrea Chalupa (00:14:23):
Yeah, without question. And I think one of Martin Luther King Jr's last speeches that he gave before he was assassinated was calling out subsidies, government subsidies for the rich and the big threat of the civil rights movement, of course, against the authoritarianism of the Jim Crow South, but also uniting with white unions, white led unions to build and expand their power and trying to make things more equal and try to not only just create civil rights, but also to go after their fair share, making corporations pay their fair share in taxes and invest in communities and so on. So that itself was an extension of what FDR stood for and that fear of that socialist program being expanded and normalized. And so you had this police brutality from the government. What we're talking about is this deep state was carrying out basically police brutality to try to protect profits and landowners. And this gives rise to some of the most rich pro oligarchy governments like Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, George W, you know what I mean? So it feels very much like it's part of the larger story of ushering an age of oligarchy in America of where we are today. What are your thoughts on that, Matthew?
Matthew Guariglia (00:15:49):
Yeah, I think one of the initial things mean, so Frank Church by the middle of the 1960s is starting to become in the Senate one of the most outspoken opponents of American Empire. And one of the things which brings him there is seeing the collaboration between American corporate entities and the national security state. So really looking at the United States War on a socialist Chile, a democratic socialist Chile, and seeing how the US national security apparatus teamed up with telecommunications companies there to start to look at people's telegrams and phone calls was I think one of the big things that motivated him going into the 1970s and eventually the Church Committee report, which found with Operation Shamrock and Operation Mette massive operations by way of the National Security Agency, which was relatively new and very secretive by which the government was getting copies of all the telegrams moving across wires essentially globally. And this is a kind of origins of what the system we've inherited today in which the national security apparatus by legal statute or by active political collaboration is teaming up with giant internet and telecom communications companies to start to collect a lot, a tremendous amount of data.
Brian Hochman (00:17:37):
If I can add something really quick, just in response to your last couple of questions. You've pointed to FDR as a beginning point for some of this, and I think oftentimes we see, say the rise of the American National Security state as a product of the post-war period and a product of the Cold War especially. But in legal terms, FDR had a real hand in creating the legal logic and even the bureaucratic infrastructure for some of the programs that Matt is pointing to. And I've written about this previously in my last book, but by the time of Frank Church, the FBI had conducted some 9200, 9800, I always get the numbers confused, but more than 9,000 warrantless wiretaps in the United States under the guise of national security within a kind of exception to the rules, what were then the rules of wiretapping that he himself had created in response to a series of Supreme Court decisions in the late 1930s. So this goes way back, and I don't think that we can entirely the caste blame, so to speak, in political terms merely on the anti-communist, right? It's also the New deal bureaucracy and the expansion of the federal apparatus that creates this. And FDR has a direct hand in that story as well.
Andrea Chalupa (00:19:24):
That is fascinating. Go on Matthew.
Matthew Guariglia (00:19:26):
I mean, during World War II, the FBI, which is tasked with ensuring the protection of the home front, which at this moment during World War II, includes not just all of the United States, but all of the Western Hemisphere, the FBI's, their jurisdiction during World War II is also Latin America and overseeing this, the FBI grows by I think 200% during the days of World War II. And not to mention if we're looking at the national security apparatus and the expansion of federal capacity to spy on and harass and lock people up, it would be a myth if we also did not mention Japanese incarceration, which happened without due process across the entire Western half of it. So I mean, a lot of the things that we credit to anti-communism predated it by quite some time, actually, if we go back to Empire and the 1898 even, and we have to look back and see that through the 1940s and to today the rise of the national security state, the rise of government capacity to spy on and intimidate people is largely bipartisan.
Andrea Chalupa (00:20:47):
Oh, a hundred percent. And so the FBI comes out of the, what year decade was that like the 1920s or so?
Matthew Guariglia (00:20:58):
So the Bureau of Investigation has its origins in the first decade of the 20th century, and a lot of what it is tasked with investigating at that time is so-called immigrant crime, is the rise of a kind of nationwide fear over immigrant conspiracies to commit crime. So this includes both kind of the Italian mafia, but it includes Chinese crime, but it also includes violations of what will eventually in 1911 become the MAN Act, which is fear of non-white and immigrant men who are sexually trafficking white women. And the FBI is tasked with doing this. And then this all kind of culminates around national security before and after World War I, and then also after the 1917 Russian Revolution finding and eventually deporting left-wing immigrant radicals.
Andrea Chalupa (00:21:57):
So when DW Griffin's Birth of the Nation, the first film to be screened in the White House under President Woodrow Wilson, it's of course a film glorifying the Confederacy as well as showing the danger of black men coming to rape our white women. So this film is the hottest film endorsement from the President of the United States and the FBI is being born out of this whole racial lynching attitude of going after immigrants, black people, especially for trafficking white women or women, right?
Matthew Guariglia (00:22:34):
Yeah, yeah. I mean they, they're infiltrating all sorts of immigrant and civil rights groups. The UNIA and Marcus Garvey have their share of early black FBI special agents infiltrating the movement and eventually leading to the deportation of Marcus Garvey. So yeah, I mean there is a collation of race, politics, sexuality. All of these things are colliding into this very toxic milieu that the FBI has put itself in charge of and one of the major players up through the period that we're talking about in 1960s and 1970s, J Edgar Hoover is already at the FBI, he's already at the Bureau of Investigation. He joins the Justice Department right around the World War I period where they're getting ready to spy on and deport immigrant radicals. And he stays there for the entirety of his life.
Andrea Chalupa (00:23:38):
And so that's the birth of the FBI. And then the CIA came out of the birth of the start of the Cold War following the end of World War II. And so these two intelligence agencies didn't have any oversight. It was just sort of martini lunches with their buddies on Congress and that was it. And now emerges our hero in this story. Could you walk us through Senator Church and who he was, why he did what he did, and could we find him today, someone like him today?
Brian Hochman (00:24:13):
So by contemporary standards, Church is very much an anomaly. He is an anti imperial, anti-war pro civil rights Democrat from
Andrea Chalupa (00:24:28):
In Idaho.
Brian Hochman (00:24:28):
Yeah, Idaho, one of the deepest red states, even at the time, if not certainly today. And Church in the 1960s made his name as something of a celebrity, almost countercultural Democrat, mostly making his name off of his early and very strident opposition to the Vietnam War by the early 1970s. In addition to his anti-war stance, church begins to put together the pieces, so to speak, and starts to think of the war in Vietnam as part of a much larger problem, a problem of coincidence of interest between military interests abroad and also corporate interests abroad. What Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, he is tasked with investigating as part of a Senate subcommittee in 1972. The relationship between, and Matt alluded to this earlier, one of America's largest telecommunications companies, ITT and the CIA's operations in Chile. And after a series of articles written in the New York Times by the legendary Cy Hirsch investigative reports from the CIA operating on American soil in December of 1974, church eventually takes the reins of a senate committee that is tasked with kind of finding out what was true and what wasn't about
Andrea Chalupa (00:26:18):
So Democrats controlled the Senate?
Brian Hochman (00:26:20):
what the bureaucracy was doing,
Andrea Chalupa (00:26:20):
Sorry to interrupt. So obviously he could only do that because I'm trying to be like, how do we recreate this guy? So obviously Democrats controlled the Senate at the time, so that gave him the right to take the reins.
Brian Hochman (00:26:31):
Yes, but also we have to see this in a much broader context. The Church Committee happens for a variety of reasons, and it's successful for a variety of reasons. I think first and most importantly, the executive branch is at an absolute nadier of its power in the post-war period, Nixon has just resigned. And also importantly, the most powerful players in the formation of executive authority, the imperial presidency, so to speak, had all passed away. Hoover passed away in 1972, I believe Eisenhower and Johnson passed away a couple months later in 1973, maybe getting my dates mixed up a little bit. But everyone's gone so to speak. So at the same time that the executive is at its nadier, the Senate has been empowered, the House has been empowered as a result of the Watergate scandal. So it's not just the fact that the Democrats hold a new majority and the so-called Watergate Babies are in Congress all looking to stir things up and right the ship, so to speak.
(00:27:59):
But it also has to do with a much broader set of transformations. And of course, I'm sure this is what you're thinking and maybe what your audience is thinking. This is an exact inverse of the world that we're living in today. We now exist in a moment where Congress is essentially supine. It doesn't exist as a check on the presidency. And as a result of the Supreme Court's decisions recently, and as a result of many decades of history, the executive branch has it accumulated an extraordinary degree of power and authority and control over the workings of American governance. So if we are to imagine Frank Church today, we're going to have to imagine some dramatic flip in the relationship between branches of government.
Matthew Guariglia (00:28:55):
And part of the Republican buy-in was that they did not want it to be one-sided. They did not want it to be partisan. The Church Committee wanted from the start to be a bipartisan effort. And if you look at the conservative calmness at the time, they would say, oh, it's too much about the Republicans. They're going to look in and they're going to find all these civil liberties violations by Nixon administration and they're going to ignore all the bad stuff that Lyndon b Johnson and John F. Kennedy did. And I think part of the buy-in of the Republicans on the committee was exactly to balance that out is to say that the so-called deep state and its infringements on people's civil liberties and the rise of national security, executive power is a bipartisan effort. And that all the presidents and all the administrations, no matter what parties share equal blame for it. And so there was a desire to show that across party lines, this was a big collective effort.
Andrea Chalupa (00:29:55):
And so the big question we have today is how do we not just get our democracy back? How do we get our system of checks and balances back? But there is a feeling that even if by some miracle we have free and fair elections in 2028 and a Democrat, a big D Democrat becomes president, I think we have reached a point, we've crossed some sort of threshold in this country where there is this realization that there's such a massive, dare I say swamp in Washington DC that is going to continue to do what you're describing. The culture of rot and impunity goes so deep. Like you said, they're just bureaucrats pulling the levers of allowing this government to go to basically, because as Brian's point was saying, FDR FDR kicked this off too. JFK Johnson, Mr. Civil Rights Johnson, they did this too. And so what would you say to that Americans going both parties are the same. What difference does it make and how do we entangle, how do we go to the heart of the issue, which is transparency in government and protecting our civil liberties down to the very core of the US government?
Matthew Guariglia (00:31:18):
Yeah, I mean, I think we have to think about the ways in which our civil liberties are being infringed right now, not being done and ordered by particular people who should have consequences. But also
Andrea Chalupa (00:31:33):
Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem.
Matthew Guariglia (00:31:36):
They are using existing infrastructure, right? When the tanks come to your town, the government has to have tanks and they have to ride on roads, the legal structures, the equipment, the person power, the funding, the surveillance, the technology, all of these things are infrastructure that Trump did not pull out of thin air. They have been approved by a lot of subsequent congresses. They have been increased their funding and they're hiring by Democrats and Republicans alike. You have even people who are self-proclaimed progressives who are not fighting when there are reauthorizations of major national security surveillance bills. All of these things has to be seen as infrastructure. And we really need to change. People who are hoping to create change in a post-Trump world need to understand that they have to tear up the infrastructure that allowed Trump to do these things. They can't just say, well, in the hands of a more responsible person, this infrastructure wouldn't be a problem because you can't ensure who's going to win the next election.
(00:32:52):
And we've been warning people of this. I've been on the Hill warning people for many, many years now, Hey, listen, you are willing to vote these powers into existence because Biden's in office, but there's an election in two years, so what's going to happen then? And so I think moving forward, we have to think about these things as infrastructure and what that infrastructure can enable when it comes to sending troops to American cities or spying on people because of their First Amendment protected rights. And I think that's something like we cannot go back to business as usual. We cannot go back to like, oh, good, the national security state is the good guy now because somebody we like is in the Oval Office. Just change needs to happen and it needs to start at the level of funding of policy of the law.
Andrea Chalupa (00:33:43):
What are your thoughts on that, Brian?
Brian Hochman (00:33:46):
I co-sign, and this is maybe a plug for the work that Matt does with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other comrades and arms call them, do what the ACLU and other organizations. This is a product of decades of accumulating power and capital and it's also a product, and this is I think maybe something that Frank Church himself would've been alive to. It's a product of a kind of corporate capture of the workings of the state eight, that corporate capture obviously has been around from time immemorial, but in the 21st century we've seen the lines between private industry and the workings of the public sector blurred. And this is I think another area of I think, intense concern on my own part and on the part of many others. And it's interesting. I mean this comes back to our hero, Frank Church. And of course he wasn't working alone yet, a whole team working with him, but he was alive to this issue and this was one of his motivating principles. And reading the report today, I think you do at least in between the lines, get the sense that there's some real resonances there.
Matthew Guariglia (00:35:28):
And I think why we wanted to do this project now is first of all, it's the 50th anniversary. The Church Committee has never been released by a major press in a single volume. The way we've done it, we've edited down thousands and thousands of pages into one kind of slim volume of its most essential findings. And I think if we see this as a of service that we wanted to do because we think it's important and if we see ourselves as kind of stewards of this document, the reason why I think it's important now is because I think the Church Committee, if it did anything, it provides a really valuable template for how to do a hard hitting congressional investigation into a very secretive and touchy topic. They held public hearings, they got the biggest people in the national security state to sit before Congress and answer very, very difficult questions.
(00:36:32):
They put out a massive report, and the findings and the recommendations at the end obviously created a system whereby the checks and balances that they were very proud of at the time, 50 years later and after a global war on terror don't seem adequate anymore. I think if we were to learn anything from the church community report, it's that we need to have this kind of very deep and aggressive investigation into who ordered what, when, and exactly what happened. But then there needs to be more substantial policy overhaul than the Church Committee report recommended and that Congress was able to act on after the report came out.
Andrea Chalupa (00:37:24):
And from the report, could you speak about specifically the tactics they use to infiltrate activists? We're seeing on social media organizers on the ground in St. Paul in Minneapolis, Minnesota saying that plain clothed agents, suspected agents would come around with coffee, very friendly, very chatty, and trying to understand how that group was operating. And it was a red flag, sort of like, who are you? Why are you asking so many questions? And this is a person who's just posing as a guy off the street. And I remember hosting an event around the time of Euromaidan, Ukraine's Revolution in New York City, and we had somebody coming around asking all these Ukrainian activists and journalists the same thing, someone very suspicious. And when you pushed back against them, sort of like, where do you get your news from? They would just sort of blank, they're just red flags with these people. And we would have members from the Russian consulate, the Russian Embassy and Washington DC show about our events. So this whole tradition of these sort of authoritarian leaning movements, sending their people to map and infiltrate groups is obviously a very long dangerous tradition from the church report, from your work, could you just list for the organizers listening what they should look out for? What are the red flags if somebody's coming around and you're like, that doesn't feel right.
Matthew Guariglia (00:39:06):
Well, I think certainly we've seen that the Church Committee report is useful for understanding what the government's playbook has been and continues to be for infiltrating movements. And what we see are tried and true tactics like trying to use fake zines or newsletters to try to sow dissent between different movements or different groups within a protest movement. So turning groups against each other by exploiting political rifts or something called snitch jacketing, which was you try to plant information on a person or in their car to make it look like they were an informant. So they movement disowns like a very dedicated person who has been all there from the beginning. So there are a lot of tried and true sabotage tactics that are in the report that they used against the civil rights movement, against the anti-war movement against the new left. And we continue to see up through the eighties, nineties, occupy Wall Street, black Lives Matter, that sort of thing.
(00:40:15):
So there are a lot of tactics of trying to get in there. Another one is entrapment, and I should shout out Josh Clark Davis's great new book Policing the Movement about what local police rather than federal police were doing against the civil rights movement. But this is something we also saw the FBI do a lot of post 9/11, which is trying to get people to agree to do more violence in the street or to plan some sort of a violent attack. And before that even is really kind of manifest arresting everybody and saying they've thwarted a terrorist attack. So these are the kind of tactics that we've seen time and time again for decades going back to long before the era of Frank Church.
Andrea Chalupa (00:41:02):
And one of the most important foundations of a successful movement is of course trust building that culture of care. In your research, how did you see these activist communities responding and building resiliency against these tactics?
Brian Hochman (00:41:18):
This was very much outside of the Church Committee's interest.
Andrea Chalupa (00:41:24):
Of course.
Brian Hochman (00:41:26):
But no, I'm going to answer the question, but I should just say one of the things that's remarkable about this document that we've curated for a new generation of readers is the fact that it does name names and gives names and faces to the basic questions that motivated the investigation. The questions that Matt alluded to earlier, who knew what, when, and who authorized what and what did they do? That was I think, an important move. But at the same time, there was much less attention in the investigation to people on the ground. And what they experienced, and I'm not sure if this is the best way of answering the question, but the movements themselves were aware of these tactics. There was a kind of local knowledge of a set of folk beliefs that forced say the civil rights movement of the early 1960s to adopt different ways of communicating through what was known as the W area telephone service, basically using the phone, but not on the bell systems lines.
(00:42:49):
So there was all along a set of strategies, a way to negotiate the state's gaze that movements had adopted. And I think their success is a result of that local knowledge. It's not until the era of Frank Church that local knowledge, that set of folk beliefs becomes the official record. And I think that's really what's remarkable about this document is it authenticates. It authorizes a set of stories that activists on the ground were telling themselves and navigating on a daily basis. And for that reason, it's a really fantastic read. Back to your earlier question, I just wanted to add there, and here I'm drawing on my colleague Matt's work, his great book Police in the Empire City. But one of the formulations that Matt offers us in that book is that the state, in order to exercise power, usually it has a very small toolbox and it reuses these tools again and again over time in different ways and in different context.
(00:44:09):
And you see this in the Church Committee report and its resonances to what we see on the streets today, infiltration using the arms of investigative arms of the federal bureaucracy from the IRS, the FBI to dismantle organizations, false information, false flags, snitch, jacketing, all this stuff is as old as government itself. And I think we see that today. The thing that we don't see, I think this is something of a new tool in the toolbox. The thing that we don't see in the era of the sixties and seventies, the era of Frank Church, is the weapon that spectacle provides. I think, and I'm not the first to say this, that much of what we see in Minnesota today and elsewhere in American cities is as much about sowing fear in individual communities through the spectacle of chaos and the spectacle of violence as it is through chaos and violence itself. And a difference between 2026 and 1966 is that many of the things that the government was doing to dismantle social movements were happening in the dark behind closed doors. They were happening in secret. And today they're happening out in the open. And this I think, is a new tool in the toolbox that we will have to contend with.
Andrea Chalupa (00:45:45):
And from your research, what is the best way to contend with that? Brian?
Brian Hochman (00:45:52):
I wish I had an answer. They'd pay me a lot more money if I did. I don't know, Matt, this maybe EFF is thinking about these kinds of things.
Matthew Guariglia (00:46:03):
Yeah, I mean, I think, so on the one hand, surveillance, the words is being watched from above, and there's this great term su-vaillance, which is watching from below. And I think the interesting thing, and this goes back to long before cellphone cameras being shoved in the face of ice, and you think about all the way back to Rodney King is people's own video recording becoming a way of countering the narrative of the state, especially because we know that body cams on officers has become a complete failure in many ways because police control, when they turn on and off because they control their own footage, they can strategically lose it because of system failures when they want to, or they can edit it before they put it out. That these tools, which were supposed to be a tool of accountability, have become kind of a tool of public of government propaganda because they help the government create and perpetuate its narrative.
(00:47:07):
And this is being added to by glossy professional film crews and social media experts that are following ice around that the Secretary of Defense is putting in the Pentagon that the Secretary of Homeland Security is traveling around with. They understand spectacle and they understand narrative. There was that reporting in the New York Times that the head of the FBI and the head of the FBI's counter-terrorism program were constantly just debating about what they should tweet and who should tweet what when. And so this is a group that maybe only understands two things, which is violence and spectacle and the relationship those two things have. And so I think having our own body of knowledge to counter their narratives is very important. And I think also we talk a lot about community resilience, whether it's from climate change or whether it's from food insecurity or housing insecurity or public health measures, or indeed what we're seeing in Minnesota taking care of people with an ice occupation is how to make communities more hardened and more resilient. And I think that also has to apply to technology as well, is thinking about how movement capacity and how community capacity can be built out beyond Apple and Google and Amazon.
Andrea Chalupa (00:48:35):
And TikTok is right now being taken over by Ellison, a Trump supporter, and that's part of the Ellison's larger consolidation of media. So how do we fight these government overreaches? How do we defend our civil liberties when they own the airwaves? Increasingly, especially with social media.
Matthew Guariglia (00:48:58):
I mean, this is where it's amazing. There are so many credible movement technologists, amateur or otherwise, who are exactly thinking about how to do this. And this has been something we've seen with the advent of mobile and internet technology in Tunisia, in Iran and Russia, wherever, that there are people who are figuring out how to communicate in amassed way, how to distribute information in our own narratives through things as low techs and things as high tech, as Bluetooth mesh networks or whatever, that there are a lot of ways that people have figured out how to do this. And I think we have to switch our mindset a little bit to rely on giant corporate infrastructure is a comfortable American mindset when you trust those institutions and you trust that they're not collaborating with the government because they have to some extent their customer's interests at heart, but when it doesn't mean anything that you're a paying customer anymore and instead you're seeing the capture of industry by government or vice versa, the capture of government by industry. We have to start to think we are in other people have had to in repressive regimes all over the country, and we have to shift our technology use as well.
Andrea Chalupa (00:50:22):
Does EFF offer a guide on where alternatives to the big social media giants or ways to sort of be active, be impactful across the internet but without sort of compromising yourself, protecting?
Matthew Guariglia (00:50:35):
Well, you better believe it. Yeah,
Andrea Chalupa (00:50:37):
Right.
Matthew Guariglia (00:50:38):
EFF has a large longstanding program called surveillance self-defense, SDS, which has not just guides for how to use your technology at protests or when you're crossing a border or when you're seeking reproductive healthcare or if you're an LGBT youth trying to seek information. We have a lot of specialized guides tailored towards specific people and specific uses, which include technology you should be using, technology you shouldn't be using, and how to just generally operate in a more conscientious and safer way.
Andrea Chalupa (00:51:12):
We'll link to that in the show notes, and we also already have it on our website on gaslitnationpod.com. We link out to your surveillance self defense. So thank you so much. And so final two questions. And I know this is a massive topic and we could have gone in so many different directions that I would've loved to have done that, and we'll save it, Nick for next time. But I'm just so fascinated by MK Ultra. Why LSD? Could you just give us the very stony passing a joint around explanation of what was this LSD obsession? What were they looking to accomplish through, I know mind control and all that, but why LSD? And could you just give us a bit of a juicy sendoff on that?
Brian Hochman (00:51:55):
The Church Committee report doesn't go into much detail as to why. The report itself has a lot of really fantastic and haunting sections about the costs of MK Ultra, the human costs, for instance. It goes into extensive detail, and we include this in the book, the Death of Army Scientist, Frank Olson, who was himself an unwitting participant in an MK Ultra experiment. So that's part of the Church Committee. I can recommend a couple other books that deal with this subject, particularly Steven Kinzer's book, poisoner in Chief, which is a biography of the architect of the MK Ultra Program, Sidney Gottlieb, A CIA scientist. And it's both about Gottlieb and also about the programs that he pioneered, to use a strange word. But as far as I know, and as kids are reports that there was some real enthusiasm in the secret corners of the American state, both in the Army and at the CIA.
(00:53:26):
There was enthusiasm for LSD as a kind of panacea for a variety of operational problems. So mind control was one side of the LSD experiments and the other side, there was an idea that it could be used as a kind of truth serum that you could give people LSD and they would tell you things that they wouldn't otherwise tell you when sober. So it had a variety of, uses, a variety of at least promising possibilities as they thought in the period. And they used it along with a number of other biop, pharmacological, excuse me, substances, in order to test out various outcomes. All of these programs emerge out of a Cold War mindset. There was a belief, particularly after the Korean War, that the Soviets, the Communists, were engaged in these same sort of experiments. And there was a kind of arms race to find the holy grail of substances to brainwash, to control. And this led some very dark corners of a very dark bureaucracy down some extremely questionable paths, to say the least.
Andrea Chalupa (00:54:57):
Yeah, luring people off the street recruiting unwitting subjects off of college campuses to then take LSD and then observe them behind the double way mirror. Such a strange, strange thing and strange era that we're still in many ways stuck in. I also, final question to you, the Martin Luther King Jr. Harassment by what you're describing, the spying on him, sending him recordings of his affairs, trying to drive Martin Luther King to commit suicide even going so far to provide a suicide letter and then he's ultimately murdered. Do you think that Martin Luther King's junior's murder was linked to what you're describing? Because assassinations having these sort of cutouts, these government cutouts like the Mafia and other people carrying out assassinations, was very much part of what the Church Committee uncovered. Were there any smoking guns showing that it was a government hit.
Brian Hochman (00:56:09):
There weren't. I mean, I think historians, even the most sober historians have asked questions about how it is that King could have been assassinated when he was under intense surveillance at the time. But there have been no links that have been documented. And while the Trump administration has trumpeted its transparency surrounding the whatever classified files surround King's assassination remain really, I don't think much is going to come of it, but this remains probably the darkest and probably best known chapter of the FBI's outrageous under J Edgar Hoover. And you've outlined pretty well already where the FBI went, they crisscrossed the nation with king bugging his hotel rooms. They also engaged in a letter writing campaign, a snitch jacketing campaign with a number of his associates. They tried to bring down the SCLC and other organizations. And ultimately, this culminates in the famous suicide note in which the FBI sent two packages, actually a package of recordings to King's headquarters in Atlanta and also to his home as well, with a letter attached that basically said, we know what you've done, King.
(00:58:02):
We know who you are. You have, I think it's something like 34 days in which to do something about it. And you know what that is. And this was a document that the Church Committee really, really made hay out of. While the surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King was already well known by the late 1960s, the depths of the FBI's campaign wasn't, and the suicide note was one of the most shocking details of the Church Committee hearings. And it helped propel the Church Committee towards its kind of political conclusion later in what was called the Year of Intelligence. So that was a new detail, the suicide note, but the other stuff was pretty well known by Church today.
Matthew Guariglia (00:59:01):
And I think though the fact that we have to even ask the question, right, like was the FBI involved in that assassination really speaks to the kind of dark magic of the era and of the era we live in now, which is that if you even have to ask the question that you've lost a fundamental trust in the very nature of governance, the fact that it is plausible that the government could have carried out something like that means that we've gone quite far down the rabbit hole. And there is an odd calculus that happens because on the one hand, the more you know about what their intentions were, their willingness to break the law, that they had tried to assassinate people overseas elsewhere, that they had teamed up with unsavory people makes you want to say it's definitely plausible. But on the other hand, you don't want to give the government credit for something that they didn't do to give them an outsized imaginary power is to some sense, enable them, is to make it seem like they are more powerful or were more powerful than they actually were to ascribe every bad thing that ever happened to every activist, to shadowy government agents actually is to their benefit.
(01:00:29):
And there were a lot of times, and there's an incident that I found in my kind of deep FBI file reading of it's a little kind of not important, insignificant moment where a couple of reporters for the Daily Worker, the communist newspaper in New York get beat up on the street and they send a very nasty letter to the editor in their own newspaper to the FBI saying, thanks for beating us up. And there's a note from the New York Field office to the DC office of the FBI saying, did we do this? Was this us and the FBI is be like, no, but there's no use in us rebutting. It kind of helps them in a way. So on the one hand, it's good to be aware, to understand, to read the history, to get our hands on every classified document we can, and to see what the government's playbook is, to understand how it operates. But on the other hand, I think that we as a movement are not well served by building the government in our head to be this all-knowing, all powerful masterfully secret conspiracy who could kill anyone at any time and who knows our very thoughts.
Andrea Chalupa (01:01:41):
We'll end it there. Thank you so much. Matthew Guariglia and Brian Hochman get the playbook of the actual real deep state the Church Committee report revelations from the bombshell 1970s investigation into the National Security State. Thank you both so much.
(01:01:57):
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