Paranoid America podcast looks into bizarre government secrets
A Paranoid’s History of the United States might be the most intellectually honest conspiracy podcast out there, because host Joseph L. Flatley doesn’t pretend the line between documented government malfeasance and fever-dream speculation is always clear.
The show occupies a gray zone where MKULTRA meets Project Monarch, where Gary Webb’s CIA-crack exposé sits alongside claims of satanic ritual abuse. Flatley, an investigative journalist, treats the topics with appropriate rigor – neither dismissing fringe theories out of hand nor credulously amplifying them.
Recent episodes demonstrate the range. There’s the Bennewitz Affair, where Air Force intelligence deliberately drove a civilian physicist to madness by feeding him fake alien intelligence. There’s the death of journalist Danny Casolaro, ruled suicide while investigating something he called “The Octopus.” There’s the Phantom Patriot, a man in a homemade superhero costume who stormed Bohemian Grove to rescue children from Moloch worship.
What makes the podcast work is Flatley’s core insight: America’s actual covert operations have been so bizarre – the CIA funding abstract expressionists, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, decades of mind control experiments – that they’ve created fertile ground for paranoid thinking. When your government really did dose unwitting citizens with LSD, who’s to say what else they got up to?
Previously:
• Midnight Climax: CIA’s MK-ULTRA LSD experiments in San Francisco
• New documents released about the US government’s secret LSD mind-control program
• ‘CIA Secret Experiments’ on National Geographic Channel
• CIA releases new documents about Russian telepathy experiments in the 60s
• New Errol Morris documentary about CIA dosing an unwitting man with LSD, who committed suicide
• The creepy chemist behind CIA’s search for a mind control drug
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