The project by project breakdown is nice and it’s better than most pop-politics content on MKUltra just by virtue of not taking the magician shit seriously, but things get kind of obnoxiously lib when dealing with anything about the eastern bloc.
Like he quips “gotta learn from the best” or something with the subproject about studying Russia and China, but we literally have a handbook produced to teach agents about what the CIA knew about combloc “brainwashing”, and they literally just write that its extremely mundane “if you make every aspect of a prisoners life really fucking bad then their willpower will deplete.” Like just the most obvious cop tactics, and they remark on how unexceptional their findings are in that regard!
And I still maintain my hot take that I think it’s kind of genuinely unhelpful for most people to learn more about this stuff than the general gist, like at some point certain people begin to only think about MKUltra to the point where you literally can’t discuss a single thing about Ted K’s ideology and actions without half a dozen people jumping in to tell you ghost stories about how the CIA made him do it all.
Overall idk, I think the best way to introduce people to this would be to explain the sort of guiding philosophy of like, tossing out inherent mojo and weird tradecraft tricks in exchange for everything being hard science, so shit like “heh why’d you need a scientific test to figure out if people find other people more attractive when intoxicated” is easily explained with the fact that they want the hard numbers so the big nerds can crunch it instead of relying on gut feelings.
Also I think some of the quips are just misleading for no reason?
Like he quips about finding the zodiac killer when talking about handwriting analysis, but the reality is way funnier in that the handwriting analysis they were doing was the classical kind where you can tell if a guy is gay based on how he writes vowels and shit like that, and then force gay soviets to defect or go double agent.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
